Midian raised his eyebrows. “Refreshing honesty. I appreciate that. Would the Rat’s Tail still be open tonight? No? How are your rooms, then?”
“Leaky and wet,” Lanudo said bluntly, “but I’ll give you the same rooms your colleagues stayed in if you want to search them.”
“Splendid,” said Midian. “How much?”
Lanudo charged him the same he would have on a dry night and, as the pair of them went upstairs, resolved to sleep in the bed of the handcart that the cooper three doors down kept behind his shop. Just to be safe.
12 Vult
A week after they left Arthuun, they heard the first shrieks in the night. Ekhaas sat beside their small fire and listened to the screams and wails as they rolled back and forth in the darkness. The jungle played tricks with distance. With rare exceptions, when a ridge or outcropping rose above the canopy and gave them a view of the green horizon, their world was limited to a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty paces in any direction. The shrieks had the same thin quality as distant thunder, but they could have been much closer.
“Suud Anshaar?” said Tenquis.
“Varags,” answered Tooth. “We’re on the edge of their territory now. Another day, then we’ll hear the Wailing Hill.”
“Is it possible the howls that are supposed to be Suud Anshaar are really just the howls of varags?” Geth asked.
“All of the hunter legends say there’s no mistaking the wails of Suud Anshaar for the cries of anything alive.” Tooth stirred the fire, then sat back. “Gives us another story, Ekhaas. Something to listen to besides varags.”
Though they’d tried to use false names at first, Tooth had figured out who they were within a day of leaving Arthuun. Word of events in Rhukaan Draal had filtered down to the south of Darguun after all. Tooth didn’t ask them for their version of the story, though-some sort of unspoken hunter’s courtesy, Ekhaas suspected. Maybe the bugbear had his own secrets.
And Tariic hadn’t, as they’d feared, put a bounty on them. Without a reward, Tooth didn’t have any incentive to turn on them. Rhukaan Draal was a long way away and the people of Arthuun had other things to worry about besides who ruled in Rhukaan Draal. As Tooth had put it, “Haruuc was a good chib. He traveled south sometimes. He paid attention to us. They say he hunted in the Khraal when he was a young warrior. This Tariic-what do we know about him? What’s he done? We hear stories of a victory in battle against the Valenar, but the stories don’t say that Tariic fought personally.”
With varags howling in the distance and Suud Anshaar only a couple of days’ travel away, Ekhaas felt emboldened. “Tooth,” she said, “how would you like to hear the real story of the Battle of Zarrthec from someone who was there?”
The bugbear cupped his big ears in interest. Ekhaas sat a little closer to the fire, closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, then opened her eyes again. “Raat shi anaa-the story continues. The sun rose on a battlefield covered with tattered fog, where an army of Darguun waited for an ancient foe…”
As the story of the battle, of Dagii’s cunning and his warriors’ bravery unfolded, Tooth sat up straighter and leaned forward until he might have fallen in the fire if he had lost his balance. Tenquis and Geth, who already knew the story, and Chetiin, who’d also been there, sat forward too. Even Marrow raised her head to listen, especially at the point where she and Chetiin arrived leading reinforcements of taarka’khesh, the wolf-riding cousin clan of the shaarat’khesh. Ekhaas downplayed her own part in the battle-how she’d rallied Dagii’s troops with her songs-but she couldn’t in all modesty leave it out entirely.
By the time she finished, eight of the twelve moons had risen, and the shrieks of the varags had moved even farther away. “… and with the last of the elves fleeing back to their hiding place in the Mournland, Dagii mounted the command hill and took up the Riis Shaari’mal, the ancient battle standard of Dhakaan under which he’d fought, waved it for his surviving warriors to see, and proclaimed the battle a victory. Raat shan gath’kal dor-the story stops but never ends.”
Tooth sat back, his breathing as quick as if he’d just fought the battle himself. His open hand slapped his chest in appreciation. “Paatcha, Ekhaas! Now that’s a story-and your Dagii sounds more worthy of respect than Tariic could ever be. I’d like to meet him.”
Ekhaas leaned back as well. Her blood sang with the euphoria of a story well told, and her heart ached-in a pleasant way-for Dagii’s absence. “If we’re successful in Suud Anshaar, maybe you will some day,” she said.
Tooth’s eyes flashed in the firelight. “I haven’t asked why you’re going there,” he said after a moment. “You hired me to get you there, not to take you inside, so I’ve held my tongue. But I’m curious. The stories say that the ruins have been untouched since before the fall of Dhakaan and that they hide a fabulous treasure. Emeralds as big as a goblin’s fist. Pearls as big as mine. Gold coins the size of dinner plates-”
“Nothing like that,” said Ekhaas. “I think the hunters of the Khraal have been making stories up. I suppose there could be a treasure in Suud Anshaar, but I haven’t heard of one. What we’re looking for is different, the remains of something that was broken long ago.”
“All this way for something broken?” Tooth snorted. “Are you even sure it’s there?”
The question brought back doubts that had plagued them all the way from Volaar Draal. Was one cryptic reference on a stela really enough evidence to venture into jungle ruins? They’d had less evidence when they had gone searching for the Rod of Kings for Haruuc, but they’d also had Geth and Wrath. Duur’kala songs had woken the connection the rod and the sword shared through their origin, allowing Geth to find the way. The shifter still felt that connection-he could draw Wrath and point the way to the rod in Rhukaan Draal without hesitation. He had no sense of the shield or its shattered fragments, though. Maybe because it was broken. Maybe because new songs were needed. Maybe because the fragments of the shield no longer existed in Suud Anshaar or anywhere else.
Ekhaas pushed back the doubt. After Volaar Draal, if they didn’t have hope of finding something in Suud Anshaar, they had nothing. She had nothing. “Absolutely certain,” she said.
Tooth shook his head, but then looked at Ekhaas hopefully. “If do you see any treasure, could you bring some back to me? Just to prove that I was here, of course.”
“Of course,” said Ekhaas.
The sun rose the next day to the kind of sticky, mist-shrouded morning they’d come to expect in the Khraal. They set off early, Tooth leading them with even more care than he normally did. About mid-morning, with the mist burned away, he paused to sniff the air, then cautiously pulled aside a big fern. Behind it were the gnawed and broken bones of a jungle boar-several boars, Ekhaas realized-all heaped up together. The bones were several days old, but there was a foul tang in the air that had nothing to do with rot.
“Varags,” said Tooth. “They piss on the remains of their kills.”
“There’s not much left for a scavenger to pick over,” observed Geth.
“They don’t piss on the remains to spoil them. They do it to mark their pack’s territory.”
Geth bared his teeth. “They sound more like animals than goblins.”
“They are more animal than dar,” Tooth said. He glanced sideways at Ekhaas. “There’s an old legend that the Dhakaani used magic to breed them out of hobgoblins and dire wolves.”
“That’s just a legend,” said Ekhaas stiffly. “Legends also say that before the rise of Dhakaan, hobgoblins bred bugbears as warriors and goblins as slaves.”
“Didn’t they?” asked Tenquis. “I’d heard that they did.”
Ekhaas gave the tiefling a dark look. So did Chetiin.
Marrow, sniffing around the bones, squatted beside it and sprayed her urine onto the stinking heap. Tooth noticed what she was doing too late to stop her. “No!” he snarled. “Balinor’s blood, if they come this way now, they’ll know we were here.”