The Hidden City (56 page)

‘I'm a-workin' on that port, Sporhawk,' the boy replied. He dropped to his knees and scrutinized the underside of the cart. ‘No problem,' he said confidently, rising and brushing off his bare knees. They had modified the Cynesgan robes they had bought in Vigayo by removing the sleeves and hoods and cutting the tails off just above the knees. The resulting garments now resembled the smocks worn by the slaves who labored in the fields and woods surrounding Cyrga.

While the rest of them fanned out through the woods to pilfer firewood from the stacks cut by the slaves, Talen remained behind, working at something on the underside of the cart. They had amassed a sizeable pile by the time he had finished. Sparhawk returned once more with an armload of wood to find the boy just finishing up. ‘Do you want to take a look at this, Sparhawk?' he asked from under the cart.

Sparhawk knelt to examine the young thief's handiwork. Talen had wedged the ends of slender tree-limbs between the floorboards of the cart and then had woven them into a shallow basket that fit snugly under the bottom of the stolen conveyance. ‘Are you sure it won't come apart if we hit a bump?' he asked dubiously. ‘It might be a little embarrassing to have all our weapons and our mail-shirts come spilling out just as we're passing through the gate.'

‘I'll ride in it myself, if you want,' Talen replied.

Sparhawk grunted. ‘Tie the swords together so that they won't rattle, and stuff grass in around the mail-shirts to muffle the clinking.'

‘Yes, oh glorious leader. And how many other things that I already know did you want to tell me?'

‘Just do it, Talen. Don't make clever speeches.'

‘I'm not trying to be offensive, Mirtai,' Kalten was saying. ‘It's just that your legs are prettier than mine.'

Mirtai lifted the bottom of her smock a little and
looked critically at her long, golden legs. Then she squinted at Kalten's. ‘They are rather, aren't they?'

‘What I'm getting at is that they won't be quite as noticeable if you smear some mud on them. I don't think the gate guards are blind, and if one of them sees the dimples on your knees, he'll probably realize that you aren't a man, and he might decide to investigate further.'

‘He'd better not,' she replied in a chill tone.

‘There are not so many of the dens of the man-things in this place as there were in the place Sopal or the place Arjun,' Bhlokw noted as he and Ulath looked down at the village of Zhubay. It had
seemed
that they had been travelling for several days, but they all knew better.

‘No,' Ulath agreed. ‘It is a smaller place with fewer of the man-things.'

‘But there are many of the dens-of-cloth on the other side of the water hole,' the Troll added, pointing at the large tent city on the far side of the oasis.

‘Those are the ones we hunt,' Ulath told him.

‘Are you certain that we are permitted to kill and eat those?' Bhlokw asked. ‘You and Tin-in would not let me do that in the place Sopal or the place Arjun or even in the place Nat-os.'

‘It is permitted here. We have put bait out to bring them to this place so that we can hunt them for food.'

‘What bait do you use to lure the man-things?' Bhlokw asked curiously. ‘If the minds of the Gods ever get well again and they let us go back to hunting the man-things, it would be good to know this.'

The bait is thought, Bhlokw. The man-things in the dens-of-cloth have come to this place because certain of our pack-mates put it in their thought that the tall man-things with the yellow skin will be here. The ones
in the dens-of-cloth have come here to fight the tall ones with yellow skin.'

Bhlokw's face contorted into a hideous approximation of a grin. ‘That is good bait, U-lat,' he said. ‘I will summon Ghworg and Ghnomb and tell them that we will go to the hunt now. How many of them may we kill and eat?'

‘All, Bhlokw. All.'

‘That is not a good thought, U-lat. If we kill and eat them all, they will not breed, and there will not be new ones to hunt in the next season. The good thought is to always let enough run away so that they can breed to keep the numbers of their herd the same. If we eat them all now, there will be none to eat by-and-by.'

Ulath considered that as Bhlokw cast the brief Troll-spell that summoned Ghworg and the others. He decided not to make an issue of it. The Trolls were hunters, not warriors, and it would take far too long to explain the concept of total war to them.

Bhlokw conferred at some length with the enormous presences of his Gods in the grey light of No-Time, and then he raised his brutish face and bellowed his summons to the rest of the herd.

The great shaggy mass flowed down the hill toward the village and the forest of tents beyond the oasis in the steely light of frozen time as Ulath and Tynian watched from the hilltop. The Trolls divided, went around the village, and moved in among the Cynesgan tents, fanning out as each of the great beasts selected its prey. Then, evidently at a signal from Bhlokw, the chill light flickered and the sunlight returned.

There were screams, of course, but that was to be expected. Very few men in the entire world will
not
scream when a full-grown Troll suddenly steps out of nowhere immediately in front of them.

The carnage in that vast slaughtering-ground beyond
the oasis was ghastly, since the Trolls were bent not on fighting the Cynesgans but on tearing them to pieces in preparation for the feast to follow.

‘Some of them are getting away,' Tynian observed, pointing at a sizeable number of panic-stricken Cynesgans desperately flogging their horses southward.

Ulath shrugged. ‘Breeding stock,' he said.

‘What?'

‘It's a Trollish concept, Tynian. It's a way to guarantee a continuing food-supply. If the Trolls eat them all today, there won't be any left when supper-time rolls around tomorrow.'

Tynian shuddered with revulsion. ‘That's a
horrible
thought, Ulath!' he exclaimed.

‘Yes,' Ulath agreed, ‘moderately horrible, but one should always respect the customs and traditions of one's allies, wouldn't you say?'

At the end of a half-hour, the tents were all flattened, the breeding stock had been permitted to escape, and the Trolls settled down to eat. The Cynesgan threat in the north had been effectively eliminated, and now the Trolls were free to join the march on Cyrga.

Khalad sat up suddenly, throwing off his blankets. ‘Berit,' he said sharply.

Berit came awake instantly, reaching for his sword.

‘No,' Khalad told him. ‘It's nothing like that. Do you know what firedamp is?'

‘I've never heard of it.' Berit yawned and rubbed at his eyes.

‘I'm going to have to talk with Aphrael then – personally. How long will it take you to teach me the spell?'

‘That depends, I guess. Can't you pass what you have to tell her through me?'

‘No. I need to ask her some questions, and you wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. I've got to
talk with her myself. It's very important, Berit. I don't have to understand the language to just repeat the words, do I?'

Berit frowned. ‘I'm not sure. Sephrenia and the Styric who replaced her at Demos wouldn't let us do it that way, because they said we had to think in Styric'

‘That could just be
their
peculiarity, not Aphrael's. Let's try it and find out if I can reach her.'

It took them almost two hours, and Berit, sandy-eyed and definitely in need of more sleep, began to grow grouchy toward the end.

‘I'm going to be mispronouncing words,' Khalad said finally. There's no way I'll ever be able to twist my mouth around to make some of those sounds. Let's try it and see what happens.'

‘You'll make her angry,' Berit warned.

‘She'll get over it. Here goes.' Khalad began to haltingly pronounce the spell, and his fingers faltered as he moved them in the accompanying gestures.

‘What on
earth
are you doing, Khalad?' Her voice almost crackled in his ears.

‘I'm sorry, Flute,' he apologized, ‘but this is urgent.'

‘Berit's not hurt, is he?' she demanded with a note of concern.

‘No. He's fine. It's just that I need to talk with you personally. Do you know what firedamp is?'

‘Yes. It sometimes kills coal-miners.'

‘You said that Klæl's soldiers breathe something like marsh-gas.'

‘Yes. Where are we going with this? I'm sort of busy just now.'

‘Please be patient, Divine One. I'm still groping my way toward this. Berit told you that we saw some of those aliens run into a cave, didn't he?'

‘Yes, but I still don't –'

‘I thought that Klæl might have filled the cave with
marsh-gas so that his soldiers could go there to breathe, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe the gas was already there.'

‘Would you
please
get to the point?'

‘Is it possible that firedamp and marsh-gas are anything at all alike?'

She sighed one of those infuriating long-suffering sighs. ‘Very much alike, Khalad – which sort of stands to reason, since they're the same thing.'

‘I
do
love you, Aphrael,' he said with a delighted laugh.

‘What brought that on?'

‘I
knew
there had to be a connection of some kind. This is a desert, and there aren't any swamps here. I couldn't for the life of me figure out where Klæl might be getting marsh-gas to fill that cave. But he didn't have to, did he? If marsh-gas is the same thing as firedamp, all he had to do was find a cave with a seam of coal in it.'

‘All right, now that I've answered your question and satisfied your scientific curiosity, can I go?'

‘In a minute, Divine Aphrael,' he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. ‘Is there some way that you can blow some of
our
air into that cave so that it'll mix with the firedamp those soldiers are breathing?'

There was another of those long pauses. ‘That's
dreadful,
Khalad!' she exclaimed.

‘And what happened to Lord Abriel and Lord Vanion's knights
wasn't?'
he demanded. ‘This is war, Aphrael, and it's a war we absolutely
have
to win. If Klæl's soldiers can run into those caves to catch their breath, they'll be coming out and attacking our friends every time we turn around. We have to come up with a way to neutralize them, and I think this is it. Can you take us back to that cave where we saw those soldiers?'

‘All right.' Her tone was a little sulky.

‘What were you talking with her about?' Berit asked.

‘A way to win the war, Berit. Let's gather up our things. Aphrael's going to take us back to that cave.'

‘Are they still coming?' Vanion called back to Sir Endrik, who was trailing behind the other knights.

‘Yes, my Lord,' Endrik shouted. ‘Some of them are starting to fall behind, though.'

‘Good. They're beginning to weaken.' Vanion looked out across the rocky barrens lying ahead. ‘We've got plenty of room,' he told Sephrenia. ‘We'll lead them out onto those flats and run them around for a while.'

‘This is cruel, Vanion,' she reproved him.

‘They don't
have
to follow us, love.' He rose up in his stirrups. ‘Let's pick up the pace, gentlemen,' he called to his knights. ‘I want those monsters to really run.'

The knights pushed their horses into a gallop and moved out onto the barren flats with a vast, steely jingling sound.

‘They're breaking off!' Endrik called from behind after about half an hour.

Vanion raised his steel-clad arm to call a halt. Then he reined in and looked back.

The masked giants had given up their pursuit and were running due west now, staggering toward an outcropping of rocky hills several miles away.

‘That's
the part that has everybody baffled,' he told Sephrenia. ‘From what Aphrael told me, the others have encountered the same thing. Klæl's soldiers chase after us for a while, and then they break off and run toward the nearest cluster of hills. What can they possibly hope to find that's going to do them any good?'

‘I have no idea, dear one,' she replied.

‘This is all very fine, I suppose,' Vanion said with a worried frown, ‘but when we begin our final advance on Cyrga, we won't have time to run those brutes into
exhaustion. Not only that, Klæl will probably start massing them in units larger than these regiments we've been coming across out here in the open. If we don't come up with some way to neutralize them permanently, our chances of getting to Cyrga alive aren't very good.'

‘Lord Vanion!' one of the knights cried out in alarm. ‘There are more of them coming!'

‘Where?' Vanion looked around.

‘From the west!'

Vanion peered after the fleeing monsters. And then he saw them. There were
two
regiments of Klæl's soldiers out there on the flats. The one they had encountered earlier was reeling and staggering toward the hills jutting up from the horizon. The other was coming toward them
from
the hills, and the second regiment showed no signs of the exhaustion which had incapacitated their fellows.

‘This is ridiculous,' Talen muttered, examining the lock on his chain with sensitive fingertips.

‘You said you could unlock them,' Kalten accused in a hoarse whisper.

‘Kalten,
you
could unlock these. They're the worst locks I've ever seen.'

‘Just open them, Talen,' Sparhawk told him quietly. ‘Don't give lectures. We still have to get out of this pen.'

They had merged with the other woodcutters and had passed unchallenged through the gates of Cyrga just as the sun was setting. Then they had followed the slaves to an open square near the gate, unloaded their cart onto one of the stacks of wood piled there, and leaned the cart against a rough stone wall with the others. Then, like docile cattle, they had gone into the large slave-pen and allowed the Cynesgan overseers to chain them to rusty iron rings protruding from the rear wall of the pen.