‘Maybe you should show your skill as a tracker, Kalysar,’ said the second of the speakers, whom Tyrion was starting to believe was an officer. ‘Maybe you can help us all get our hands on the general’s gold.’
‘I’ll do just that if you give me some space and stop yakking. I need to concentrate.’
Tyrion tapped the Everqueen on the shoulder and gestured for her to move. Every wriggle, every furtive movement that they made sounded as loud as the blare of trumpets in his ear. It seemed impossible that the dark elf soldiers could not hear them as they moved. Behind him he could hear the faint ring of metal on metal as armoured soldiers moved around.
‘Idiot!’ Kalysar said. ‘You’ve obscured the tracks with your booted feet.’
‘At least we know someone passed this way,’ said the officer. ‘We should report that.’
Tyrion felt some relief. He felt his muscles begin to loosen and only then did he realise how tense he had been. He and Alarielle kept moving through the undergrowth and eventually emerged from the bushes, onto another game trail.
‘That was a little too close for comfort,’ Alarielle said with a tentative smile. She was trying to conceal her fear and doing it better than most.
‘Best keep moving,’ Tyrion said. ‘There will be plenty more of the sons of Naggaroth about. We may not be so lucky next time.’
Alarielle nodded and started to lope along the trail, moving as quickly as was compatible with being quiet. She was definitely better at this than he was, Tyrion thought. It was an unusual sensation, meeting anybody who was better at anything. He was glad of it at that moment.
Tyrion crouched in the bush, watching another company of dark elves pass. There were dozens of the tall warriors, garbed in mail, clutching crossbows and longswords. They moved through the woods with the swaggering ease of conquerors.
Over the past few days, as they had followed the trail eastwards, it became obvious how lucky they were. They had to move very carefully, keeping always to the undergrowth for fear of daemonic birds. The woods were full of dark elves. They were thrown around the Winterwood Palace in a wide net. There were scores of companies amounting to thousands of elves. There seemed to be no doubt that the druchii had well and truly found their trail. A whole army had been deployed in pursuit of them.
He felt oddly vulnerable crouched down here in a hollow between the trees, with only a thin shield of leaves between him and detection. It seemed impossible that one of the druchii would not sense the pressure of Tyrion’s gaze upon him and look round and give the signal that would result in his death and Alarielle’s capture.
Several times they had turned at bay and attempted to double back through enemy lines, but each time the enemy had swept forwards and they had been forced back onto the eastward path. If this kept up they would eventually be forced out of Avelorn entirely. With no trees in which to hide, it would not take long for the dark elves to find them.
In the distance he heard the roar of a Cold One. They needed to get moving again soon, before the great lizard got close enough to catch their scent. Alarielle gestured for him to remain in place. It would not do to move now and attract the attention of the passing soldiers.
Tyrion’s side ached. He was petrified that he would fall into another feverish faint while there were enemies close. There were times when he was barely strong enough to draw Sunfang, and the intervals of strength and ease of movement came and went with worrying rapidity.
He felt his fingers drumming against the hilt of the blade. It was a nervous tic that had emerged more and more often recently. Cold sweat ran down his forehead. He fought down the almost irresistible urge to cough. His throat felt dry. He wanted to unscrew the top from the flask of brackish water on his belt and drink it all down. Perhaps that would relieve the irritation in his desert-dry throat.
The Cold One’s roar sounded again and was answered from a spot to the south of them. They had best not go that way then, he thought. A few moments later, he felt a hand shaking him.
‘Tyrion! Tyrion!’ Alarielle’s voice held a hint of fear. ‘Wake up. Move! They’ve gone and we need to do the same.’
Tyrion realised that he had been lost in a reverie of thoughts and plans for their escape. He had lost contact with his surroundings and he had no idea for how long. It was only going to get worse.
‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘You will have a better chance on your own.’
It came to him then that this had been true for a long time. He was nothing but a liability to her. She might even have been able to escape by now if it were not for him. She was surely much better at woodcraft than any dark elf they had met.
‘We will both get out of this together,’ she said. ‘We started it together and we will finish it together.’
He wanted to tell her to move, that she was not being sensible, but he could not find the energy. He understood why she was doing this as well. He would not have abandoned a comrade either. He forced himself to rise to his feet. The ground rocked. It felt like an earthquake.
‘It’s like being on the deck of a ship in a storm,’ he said, then realised that she was not having the same difficulty. It was the fever, the wound and the fever.
Just put one foot in front of the other, he told himself. Ignore the movements of the earth. This will pass.
‘There is a strange stink in the air,’ Tyrion said. It was true too. It was the sort of smell he associated with old, damp houses in Lothern, with sickness and plague among humans, with rot. It was like the scent of waste composting in rubbish heaps in a human town mingled with the rotting jungle smell of a Lustrian swamp. He wondered for a moment whether it was the fever. The air seemed to be getting hotter, and there were more biting insects present. There was something else too, something that made his skin tingle in an unwholesome way.
A frown crossed Alarielle’s face. ‘We don’t have much choice,’ she said.
‘Much choice about what?’
‘We need to go on. The druchii are too close for us to go any other way.’
‘I know. What has that got to do with the smell, or the bugs in the air for that matter?’
‘If we follow this path we will come to the Darkwood.’
‘I am guessing it is not called that because it is a place where flowers grow and baby deer frolic through sweet-scented glades.’
‘Perceptive as ever, Prince Tyrion. It is a place where the taint of Chaos and the old dark magics is still strong. There are parts of Avelorn that have been that way since the Great Chaos Incursion in the time of Aenarion.’
‘It sounds… interesting,’ he said.
‘Most people would say fearsome.’
‘We are heroes, you and I, your serenity. We shall dare these dark lands.’
She smiled wanly. ‘As you say.’
‘What is this?’ Tyrion asked. He glanced around at the forest with dazed eyes. The pain in his side was getting worse again. The poisoned wound that the witch elf had given him was getting far worse. He felt as if soon it would be impossible for him to go on. He gritted his teeth and forced one foot in front of the other. He was not going to give up. Not now. Not ever.
There was something about this part of the forest that daunted him, though. The trees were older and larger. Some of them were as thick around the bole as the tower of an ancient castle. Many of them were taller than any trees he had seen since he left the jungles of Lustria. Moss covered all of them like a thick fur. Thick vines dangled from the branches. Enormous mushrooms crowded the shadows beneath the ancient leaves. Some of them even clung to the sides of the trees parasitically. Over everything hung an aura of vast age. The air seemed thick and close. It felt damp and fusty. In the distance, the leaves and branches seemed to sway even though there was no wind. It was as if some vast invisible monster was making its way through the ancient forest.
‘This is the oldest part of the forest of Avelorn,’ Alarielle said. She looked thoughtful. ‘There are many strange stories about this part of the w
ood. Even my people shun it. Not much has changed in there since ancient times. Since the first wars with Chaos.’
‘Is it haunted?’
‘Who knows. Powerful magic scorched these woods once. In some parts, ancient evil clings even to this day. The taint of Chaos causes mutation. Monsters are often born in these parts. They come out and hunt sometimes and it often takes a great effort to drive them back.’
‘I have heard much of the great hunts of Avelorn. I was wondering what you used for prey.’
‘Manticores, hippogriffs, half-dragons and other strange things.’
‘It does not seem as if we have much choice though. We’re going to have to enter these woods if we are to escape our pursuers.’
‘Unfortunately, Prince Tyrion, you are correct. I would have preferred to avoid this part of the woods if we could, but we have no choice.’
‘Then we had better hope that the monsters are all asleep or hunting for dark elves in other parts of the woods.’
‘I suspect that we could not be that lucky,’ Alarielle said. Tyrion did not doubt that she was correct in this.
They followed the path deeper into the woods and the taint of old, wild magic became even stronger and more obvious. Even Tyrion could sense it in the air. It went a long way towards explaining the feeling of closeness. He found that he had difficulty in breathing. When he listened closely he could hear a sound that was like the distant buzzing of a huge cloud of flies. Sometimes, he could have sworn that he was surrounded by them. He felt as if their tiny wings were tickling his face, but there were no flies or any other insects that he could see.
Alarielle looked as if the weight of the world was pressing down on her shoulders. There was something in the air that made her look as nauseated as Tyrion felt. He did not doubt that it was the aura of corrupt magic that surrounded them. If it could affect someone even as normally insensitive as he was, what must it be like for she who was a natural sorcerer?
He reached out and touched her shoulder and she flinched a little but did not draw away. ‘What is wrong?’
‘This part of the land is very sick,’ she said. ‘And it affects me.’
‘Perhaps we should not have come here. Perhaps we should go back.’
‘If we did that, we would merely be running into the arms of Malekith and his followers. There would be no escape for either of us then.’ Tyrion knew that she was correct and that there was nothing he could say that she had not already thought about.
As they pushed on deep into the forest, the pain in his side intensified. It was as if something in the wound was drawing strength from the corruption of their surroundings. He mentioned his suspicions to Alarielle.
‘It is possible,’ she said. ‘It is not mere poison that is in that wound. There is ancient dark magic. I curse the person that made that blade. What sort of smith would forge such a weapon?’
‘A druchii one,’ Tyrion said.
‘It was a rhetorical question, Prince Tyrion,’ Alarielle said.
‘It deserved an answer. I have seen Naggaroth. I have fought against its people. I don’t think they are sane as we measure sanity.’
‘You’re not the first to say this.’
‘Nonetheless, it is the truth. Think about those witch elves that we met. They were mad.’
‘They are the worst of their kind,’ Alarielle said.
‘Far from it. In them the madness is merely more obvious. In the others, it runs deep and strong.’
‘Perhaps they shall find these woods more to their liking than I do,’ she said. She meant it as a joke, but her glance flickered around nervously.
‘We can’t go back,’ said Tyrion, glancing over his shoulder. Perhaps it was a trick of the shadows or his own feverishness, but he thought he saw someone moving there. ‘We need to move on.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She raised the Moonstaff of Lileath. A faint aura of light played around it. ‘I wish I could use this properly.’
‘If I get to feeling much worse, I can use it to lean on.’
Something padded along softly in the shadows behind them.
Chapter Eighteen
Slime oozed from the bark of the trees. In places it formed bubbles inside of which huge mutated woodlice twisted and fretted. Large, segmented, multi-legged creatures scuttled through the branches above them. The shape of their bodies flowed to conform to the surface they moved over. They were eyeless, with long twitching feelers. So far they had not attacked, but their presence made Tyrion feel uncomfortable. It was like turning over a huge log and having elf-sized monsters scuttle out.
Alarielle followed a path that was invisible to him. ‘How do you know where we are going?’ Tyrion asked.
‘The rangers have left signs.’ She pointed to a small mark chipped in the trees. ‘These paths are safe, or at least they were when my people last passed this way.’
‘That could have changed then?’
‘Almost certainly. Not many people come here.’
Tyrion looked at what seemed like a huge spider web, draped between branches. Something large twitched inside a cocoon of silk. It was trapped up there. ‘Why would anybody come here?’
‘There are certain herbs that can be sold to Lothern merchants for great sums of money. I understand they have alchemical uses.’
‘I can’t imagine any medicine made from this stuff would have a beneficial effect.’
‘I don’t think they make medicine from it. I think it is used for sorcery and certain unclean rituals. The rangers try and stop people taking it. That is why they come here, and to hunt the monsters that emerge from the place.’
Tyrion glanced around again. ‘That sounds exciting.’
‘Perhaps too exciting for me,’ she said. A growl sounded somewhere in the distance. It bore some resemblance to the sound made by the big cats Tyrion had heard in the jungles of Lustria.
‘As I was saying,’ she said. She stowed the staff on her back and took up her bow.
‘It sounds like a jaguar,’ Tyrion said.
‘We never see those in Avelorn,’ she said. ‘If we are lucky it will be a ghost panther or a sabretooth. If we are not…’
‘What?’
‘Some mutant monster tainted by old magic.’
They advanced. The trees closed in overhead. The fungi grew taller than Tyrion’s head and began to emit an eldritch, spectral glow like the ghostly lights that lead travellers astray in marshes.
‘I always pictured Avelorn as a land of beauty and glory and brilliant sunshine,’ Tyrion said. ‘That’s how the legends always portray it.’
‘The legends usually miss out the darker parts,’ she said. ‘But they have always been here, for as long as I can remember, and those memories go very deep.’
The growling sound came again, but this time the note had changed. There was a yammering quality to it and what might even have been words chanted by a madman, as if some odd hybrid of maniac and predatory beast was giving vent to its hunger.
‘I don’t think that’s a cat,’ Tyrion said.
‘We shall make a woods ranger out of you yet,’ the Everqueen replied.
‘It’s following us,’ Tyrion said.
‘Yes,’ Alarielle said. ‘And it is not making any effort to cover up the fact.’
She was right. They could hear the massive creature passing through the woods behind them, grunting and grumbling and growling to itself. Occasionally when Tyrion turned, he could see a monstrous form pushing through the undergrowth. There were times when he thought he caught sight of a leonine head with human features and hair like a mane. Its eyes caught the light like those of a cat. It might have been a giant crawling very quickly, or a massive beast, or a creature that was some combination of both.
‘What is it waiting for? If it is going to attack, why does it not do so?’
‘I would imagine that our rangers have taught it to be wary of armed elves.’
‘Not too wary. Otherwise it would not be on our trail.’
> ‘Perhaps it is waiting for us to make camp, to fall asleep.’
‘It would have been cleverer for it not to show itself then.’
‘No one ever said manticores were very bright.’
‘That is what you think it is then?’ Tyrion said.
‘Yes. With that body and that face I don’t think it could be anything else.’
‘Will it have poisoned spikes on its tail that it can fire like a mangonel?’
‘It might. It’s a mutant, a creature of Chaos. For all we know it might squirt intoxicating wine from its tail.’
‘That seems a tad unlikely.’
‘My basic point stands.’
‘We shall soon know if it plans on attacking us when we make camp. It is getting dark.’
‘Yes, and none of these trees look particularly homely.’
Tyrion looked at the twisted and mutated plants surrounding them. Slime coated many of them and dripped in webs from their branches. From some of them depended globes of mucus within which things wriggled. All of the undergrowth had a blotched unhealthy look.
‘This looks like something you would expect to find in the Chaos Wastes,’ Alarielle said.
‘The Wastes are not so fertile.’
‘You have been there?’
Tyrion nodded, distractedly. He was looking for a place to make camp that was not too close to the loathsome trees. He did not fancy sleeping anywhere near them.
‘You have travelled far, Prince Tyrion.’
‘My home is Lothern,’ he said. ‘From there fleets sail to every corner of the world.’
‘I have never left Avelorn.’
‘You are young. More so than I.’
‘The Everqueen leaves Avelorn only under the most desperate of circumstances.’
‘Is there any reason for that?’
‘Her power is tied to the place. The farther from it she goes… I go… the less it becomes. And at the moment, the power is not too great anyway.’