Shadow Blizzard (42 page)

While the goblin and I wandered round the tables, the elves each chose themselves a s’kash, and the two men settled for a sword and a single-handed ax. Of course, I would have taken something like a spear or a pike—with a weapon like that you can keep any enemy at a distance, or almost any. But for that you had to have both hands free. And you couldn’t do much running with a spear. So after hesitating briefly, I chose a short sword with a broad blade, the kind that armored infantry use. It was about the same length as my knife, although it was wider and heavier. And it had a scabbard, so I didn’t have to carry the weapon in my hands.

The goblin inspected the hardware and snorted in disappointment, but then he rummaged for a while in the very last heap and pulled out a Sultanate dagger with a blade shaped like a flame. He tried waving the weapon through the air a few times and then stuck it behind his belt.

“That’s it, out you go!” Leather Apron ordered, and on his sign the orcs started raising the heavy grille.

Without waiting until the grille was raised, the dark elves leapt forward into the Labyrinth and then ran off as fast as they could go. The lads obviously also had some kind of plan. At least they certainly weren’t planning to face the Labyrinth together with us.

Then it was the men’s turn. Glo-Glo didn’t waste any time, either; he dragged me forward and jumped out into the Labyrinth. The grille started slowly descending behind us, creaking so terribly that I barely heard Leather Apron shout, “Hey, runner!”

We all turned at the same time, and one of the orc bowmen put an arrow into the leg of the man who’d said he could run very fast.

“Now try running fast, little monkey!”

The orcs roared with laughter.

“And you told me they cut the tendons,” I muttered, setting off toward the fallen man.

“Times have cha— Look out!”

Glo-Glo leapt aside and dragged me after him. The goblin might have been small, but he had plenty of strength, and I had to struggle to keep my balance. Two creatures came darting out of the passage the two elves had just run into. They looked pretty much like ordinary human skeletons, but they were a bit taller and had four arms instead of two. And the creatures were exactly the same dark green color as the walls of the Labyrinth—they seemed to be made out of plants, not meat or bones. The orcs’ roar of delight thundered along the cliffs. The show had begun.

“Run!” the goblin yelled. “There’s nothing you can do to help them!”

Cursing all the gods and the damned goblin into the bargain, I dashed after him, forgetting about the creatures advancing on the two warriors. Following my companion, I dived into a narrow passage with high walls. The little shaman was incredibly agile, and I could hardly keep up with him.

“Left … past three corridors on the left … right … straight on … left again…,” the goblin muttered, leading me along the route that only he knew.

I glanced back anxiously, but the green creatures apparently weren’t following us.

“Who were they?” I asked Glo-Glo.

“Creations of orcish shamanism, not really dangerous, unless you get under their feet. A petty nuisance.”

“They why did you beat it so promptly?”

“Don’t distract me! I think we go right now.… Yes! This way!”

And the goblin set off again at a run, dragging me behind him. In the last three minutes I’d completely lost my bearings in the green labyrinth and I ran after the goblin like an obedient dog. Eventually Glo-Glo turned sharp left and we found ourselves at a dead end.

“That does it!” I panted, and the hills replied with a rumble of joy.

Tell me, if you please. How could the orcs see us? But they could, may the demons of darkness take them!

“Now where have you brought me, Glo-Glo?”

“Keep quiet for a moment and let me think! It’s thirty years since the last time I was here, and my memory’s not what it used to be. Ri-i-ight now, where could I have gone wrong?”

“Maybe…”

“Shut up!”

I had to do as the goblin said and wait for him to be struck by another brilliant idea. I really regretted ever having anything to do with goblins. Scatterbrains, every one of them; they always did everything back to front.

While the goblin was thinking, I shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, casting anxious glances along the green corridor. Sagot be praised, everything was quiet (that is, if you didn’t count the yelling of the orcs and the goblin’s furious argument with himself).

Now I could take a proper look at the Labyrinth. The thickets of green towered up ten yards into the air, and it was pointless even to think of trying to climb over the wall. Apart from being so appallingly high, all these bushes were so dense and thorny that it was frightening just to look at them. I was very surprised by the floor of the Labyrinth—it was completely paved with small gray tiles, set tightly against each other. And there wasn’t a spot of dirt anywhere, as if the place was cleaned every day.

“I didn’t spot a single trap.”

“No, you won’t,” the goblin growled. “They’re all on the central pathways, and usually nobody’s stupid enough to run that way.”

“Apart from us, perhaps,” I sniped.

“Uh-huh. Let’s go, know-it-all, I have a short cut!”

Glo-Glo led me back the way we’d come. When he was sure he was going in the right direction, the goblin started running. We plunged back into the green abyss of the Labyrinth and dashed along between the walls until a creature that looked like the twin brother of the ones that had attacked us near the entrance appeared ahead of us. But some zealous individual had hacked off one of its four arms. Spying outsiders, the green skeleton started trotting briskly toward us.

“Ah, darkness!” I swore, and took out my sword.

Glo-Glo had obviously lost it completely, because he went running straight toward our death—he even growled in outrage when I tried to stop him. There was nothing I could do but run after him and hope he knew the right thing to do. The goblin suddenly stopped, held out his hand, swung round on his axis, swinging me round with him, said something in a rapid whisper, and wiggled the fingers in his mitten. At first nothing happened, and then the creature hurrying toward us stopped and lots of little yellow flowers started sprouting all over it. The same thing was happening to the nearest section of the wall, too.

“Let’s get as far away as possible,” Glo-Glo said in a perfectly calm voice. “Just in case it hasn’t worked properly.”

We retreated.

“It won’t work a second time; I had that spell ready since before they put the mittens on me,” Glo-Glo declared smugly.

Meanwhile the little yellow flowers completely covered the wall and the creature that had attacked us. Then they burst, and the creature fell apart into something that looked very much like dry hay. The same thing happened to the section of the wall. It simply collapsed, opening up a way through into the next corridor.

As bad luck would have it, an astounded orc walked out through the gap. The Firstborn was armed with a long spear with a broad head, which I was not glad to see. The orc spotted us and promptly got down to work.

Neither I nor Glo-Glo had any intention of letting some Hunter have our heads just like that. So we went dashing off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately for us, the orc was rather quick on the uptake, and he came dashing after us, shaking his spear. The orc spectators started baying.

I took my lead from Glo-Glo again and simply followed him. The goblin ran to an intersection and took a couple of turns, and we found ourselves in a corridor running parallel to the one where we met the orc.

“That Firstborn thinks he’s smarter than I am,” the old shaman suddenly said with a giggle.

He’d definitely flipped! What kind of time was this to gloat!

The secret of the goblin’s happy mood was revealed a few seconds later. There was the huge hole that had appeared in the wall thanks to the goblin’s shamanism; we dived through it, and were back in the corridor we’d just been forced to run out of.

“Now straight … right … straight, past four intersections … that’s it … three … four … fifth on the left…”

I was amazed that the goblin, who had only been here once, could be carrying such a precise route in his head. We came out into a fairly large round space with six passages leading off it and started dashing across.

“Third on the right!”

But we stopped short of the passage we needed, because Glo-Glo hissed: “Freeze and don’t move a muscle!”

I squinted sideways at the shaman, who had turned into a very convincing statue. What was wrong with him? Then my eyes moved from the goblin to the center of the open space, where something green had appeared out of nowhere. It looked like a cross between an immense soap bubble and a spider, except that instead of legs it had human arms—either six or eight of them. I couldn’t see any head, or eyes, or mouth. The creature just sat there with its arm-legs folded up under it, gurgling quietly.

“Harold, don’t move, and keep quiet,” said the goblin, keeping his eyes fixed on the spider. “It won’t touch us as long as we don’t move.”

“What is it?” I whispered anxiously.

The goblin decided not to favor me with an answer. Then a very smug-looking orc came dashing out into the space with his spear held at the ready. When he spotted the spider, the Hunter’s face suddenly fell and he stopped dead, too. The spider jumped to its feet (or rather, its hands), gurgled a couple of yards toward the orc, and then sat back down on the ground—it had clearly lost view of its motionless quarry.

The Firstborn glared at us furiously with his yellow eyes, and even though the situation was so dire (at least, judging from the way the orc and the goblin looked), I couldn’t resist winking at the Hunter. The orc seemed to find this gesture quite unbearably annoying, and he started growling. The spider promptly moved another two yards closer to the orc, who was forced to shut up.

Glo-Glo started muttering to himself again and then he made a sound as if he’d snapped his fingers, even though he was still wearing those idiotic mittens. The orc howled in surprise and jumped a yard into the air, as if someone had stuck a red-hot needle in his backside.

The spider leapt forward nimbly and grabbed the howling Firstborn with all eight of its arms. I didn’t see what happened after that, because I was dashing like grim death after Glo-Glo. But I don’t think the orc was to be envied. Well then, we’d got rid of one of the Hunters; that just left the other three. Eventually Glo-Glo decided that after such a long run it would be a good idea to get our breath back, and we stopped at an intersection.

“What … was … that?” I wheezed, gasping for air.

“That? It’s a monster that appeared … in the thickets of the forest after the elves and the orcs experimented with battle shamanism. That’s what the experiments produced. In principle, it’s perfectly harmless.”

“I thought you said the same about those things with four arms?”

“No, it really is harmless. The important thing is not to disturb it. A bubblebelly is just very protective of its territory and thinks everyone who enters it is an enemy. You just have to stay still and wait for it to crawl away. It doesn’t even eat anybody, just chews them up into mush and spits them out again.”

“That’s a very encouraging thought—being chewed into mush. By the way, that was a clever trick with the orc.”

For some reason Glo-Glo seemed a bit flustered by that and he muttered, “Actually, my magic was supposed to strike the bubblebelly with lightning, but thanks to the mittens, it made the orc jump.”

Mmm, yes. The gods be praised it wasn’t us who jumped!

“And by the way, what are you doing with lightning? I didn’t know goblins had any battle magic. You only have defensive shamanism.”

“Who says so?”

“Well, I thought you said—”

“We told you men that so we wouldn’t have these Orders of yours wandering around in our forest! Why should we want to share our secrets with your magicians? Shall we go?”

“Is it far now?”

“About the same distance again,” the goblin told me after a moment’s thought.

I groaned.

Left, left, right, right, straight on, left again, then right, then straight on, then back at full speed to get away from another of those skeletons with four arms. Those beasts were agile, all right, but they turned out to be pretty stupid. We ran into a dead end, waited until the creature made its final leap, and simply dropped to the ground. The creature went flying over our heads like a huge grasshopper and smashed into the wall. The wall immediately came to life, wound its branches round the green creature, and sucked it in.

“Ugh!” was all I could say at the sight of this wonder.

“Nothing surprising about that,” said Glo-Glo, dusting off his cloak. “Those things were created by the same spell as the wall, so if they touch each other, they just merge together.”

“The things you know!”

“I’m a shaman, my boy, not some marketplace charlatan! And a shaman has to know all sorts of things, otherwise his tribe won’t last very long. Come on, get those hooves moving, there’s not far left to go now.”

And we didn’t go very far, because at the next intersection we came across another Hunter. Fortunately, he was standing with his back to us and gazing off into the distance, holding an arrow ready on his bowstring. Was he lying in ambush for someone?

The Hunter was no more than seven yards away from us. No distance at all but, speaking for myself, I wasn’t too sure that if I tried to attack him, I wouldn’t end up with an arrow in me. Glo-Glo and I looked at each other, and he pointed to my sword with his eyes. I sighed and started slowly pulling the sword out of its scabbard. Fortunately for me, the orc never turned round. But then, as bad luck would have it, our chain clanked.

There was no time to think, and I flung the short, heavy weapon at the orc with all my might. And something impossible happened. Luck must have been on my side that day, because the sword turned a few somersaults in the air and buried itself in the Firstborn’s chest before he had time to shoot. It hit him so hard that he went flying backward and smashed into the wall.