“I can imagine the kind of persuasion,” Grogan said. He did not sound approving.
“Bloodroot is bad enough but the stuff that grows only in Shadowblights is worse, far worse. I came west into the Settlements. Sure enough, I find a Blight.”
“I sent a message to Master Graydon at your Order’s house in Westergate months ago. No one came…till now. I thought they had forgotten all about the matter. Seems I was wrong.”
“No one told me that,” said Kormak. Sudden silence filled the room.
“Maybe the message went astray. Runners are not always reliable.” Kormak nodded slowly. Grogan tilted his head to one side.
“You thinking something else?”
Kormak shook his head. Even if he was wondering if someone had been bribed to look the other way, he was not going to say so. That was Order business and not to be discussed with outsiders.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“The Shadowblight?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to see for myself how bad it is and decide what needs to be done.”
“On your own?”
Kormak shrugged.
“You picked a bad time for it. The woods are crawling with elves, and they are not friendly. Never seen anything like it in my lifetime. Folks are saying there will be war along the border before this business is done, and they are most likely right.”
“Is that why you have a naked elf hanging outside the gate?”
Grogan looked embarrassed. “Not my idea but the Council wanted it done and it did not seem worth fighting them about. The elf was dead anyway so he raised no objections.”
“They won’t like it, will they, the elves? I always heard they wanted their bodies returned to the Earth.”
“They do, Kormak. But maybe not these ones, these days. There’s something different about the Mayasha now, has been since the Weaver came.”
“Weaver?”
“A priestess, a shaman, a prophet, whatever. Since she showed up the elves have taken to getting themselves spider tattooed and taking pot shots at the locals. They make off with local kids, sometimes adults as well. It’s a bad business, slaving. They’ve got themselves some nasty pets as well.”
“Pets?”
“Spiders, big ones, use them like hunting dogs. I’ve heard tales they use the venom for rituals. Low dosage is hallucinogenic. Some of the local boys have tried it.” Kormak just looked at him.
“They get bored and they’ll try anything once. They are wild lads. You remember what we were like when we were young.”
“I did not go trying spider venom just on the off-chance it might get me high.”
“Maybe not. But they knew the elves were doing it though so they tried it.”
“How did they know?”
“Don’t know for sure but I can guess. Men meet elves in the woods or they did until recently. It does not always end with bows drawn.”
“This change that came over the elves, did it happen at the same time as the Shadowblight started to spread?”
“That thought has struck me as well but I can’t make it fit. The elves started going strange a ways before the woods started to rot, on this side of the river at least. Of course, you never saw too many on this side of the river anyway. The settlers drove them out.”
“It could have started earlier deeper in the forest, blights take time to spread.”
“Some of the locals claim that the Weaver was responsible for the Blight, with her magic and her evil god.”
“I am not saying they are wrong. I am just trying to understand what happened here. When your neighbours go bad and a Blight appears at the same time, it’s usually safe to assume it’s not a coincidence.”
“What will happen if it keeps spreading?”
“Things will change. People will go to the bad. There will be physical changes: in the woods, in the beasts, in the people. It won’t be pretty. In the worst places, the dead won’t stay down unless they are burned.”
“The Settlements will have to be abandoned, won’t they?”
“Most likely, at the very least.”
“Lot of people round here won’t like that. They’ve poured their sweat and their blood into this land. Their fathers and mothers before them, too.”
“It’s better than death and worse than death.”
“You are not cheering me up, Kormak. We’ve got the Weaver stirring up the elves to bad craziness and now you’re telling me the Blight is going to drive us all out anyway.”
“I did not make the world, Grogan. I am sorry to be the bringer of bad news though.”
“Anything we can do to stop it?”
“Usually when things have gone this far, the only thing that can be done with a Shadowblight is to burn it out, cleanse the land with fire and salt and the sword.”
“A Burning? Your Order can call those, can’t it?”
“If anyone listens, yes. We don’t have the influence we once had but I think in this case, if it’s as bad as it seems, the nobility will listen. The ones on the border, at least.”
“Not the ones fighting in the civil war though.”
“Times of turmoil are always bad. When men are disunited the Shadow grows in strength.”
For the first time Grogan looked scared. “You think it’s out there in the forest, the Shadow or its minions.”
“Yes. It is making its presence felt in the world. That’s what blights are, or so the scholars say, a manifestation of the Shadow in our world.”
“They draw the bad ones, don’t they? I heard there’s something in them that whispers in men’s sleep.”
“Any whispers in yours? You are close enough.”
“Sleep like a baby. At least when I take enough whiskey. Speaking of which…” He raised the flask, offered it to Kormak. The Guardian put his hand over the beaker. One drink was normally his limit. He needed to keep his wits about him.
“I am wondering about the bloodroot,” said Kormak.
“We get a few who go out into the woods to harvest herbs. I would not put it past some of them to take bloodroot, black lotus and the nastier spectral mushrooms. You can make a small fortune selling that stuff to the right people. Or rather the wrong ones. I would have thought this civil war would have put a dent in the trade but no.”
“Mages use the stuff,” said Kormak, “and every ambitious noble in Taurea is doing his best to get a mage as a bannerman.”
“And bloodroot is a perk of the job?”
“It makes a sorcerer very powerful… among other things. In the long run it twists the mind, drives them mad. It’s why no few of them fall to the Shadow. They get addicted to the stuff and it changes something in them.”
Kormak produced the green-fletched arrow he has been carrying in his kit since his encounter with the walking dead man. He put it on the table. “Ever seen anything like this?”
Grogan picked it up and turned it over in his hands, inspecting the markings closely. “It’s a Shadow-killer. The runes show the maker was Kayoga Nation. The light-green fletching say the owner is Speardancer sept. Where did you get this? The Kayoga hunting grounds are about a score of leagues northwest of here. It’s all Mayasha land round here, starts on the far side of the river.”
“I pulled it from a corpse that was getting ready to rise on the edge of the Blight. I met an elf-woman who was carrying its siblings in her quiver. She pointed one at me.”
Grogan’s eyes widened. “You’ve met our ghost then…”
“Ghost?”
“Green-haired elf woman, face tattoos in camouflage pattern. She’s been coming and going through the Settlements for months. Some of the woods runners claimed to have seen her. Most of them think she’s got something to do with raids and the slavers. They’ve made a few attempts to catch her but she always slips away.”
“You always told me it was folly trying to catch an elf in a forest.”
“It can be done, Guardian, but it takes skill rare among
men.”
“You could do it if you had to.”
“Maybe but I’ve had better things to do these last few months, keeping the peace in town, calming the Council, trying to organise a defence against these raids, looking for the lost in the woods. I’ve bigger things to worry about than some elf girl who may or may not exist.”
“She exists.”
“If you say so I don’t doubt it. But most of the reports have come from people I would not believe if their trouser fronts were wet and they told me they had pissed themselves. You think she may have something to do with the Blight?”
Kormak shook his head. “I think she was just warning me to leave the dead man alone. She had already pinned him to a tree and her arrows would probably have kept him there.”
Grogan’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder what she’s up to then.”
He tilted his head to one side. “What’s wrong?” Kormak asked. He felt something himself. It was too still, and a small voice was niggling at his consciousness, warning him to be ready. Listening to that voice had saved his life many times in the past.
“I don’t know. Thought I heard something. I think I am going to make a round of the walls. Care to come with me?”
Before Kormak could reply the temple gongs started an irregular peal of alarm. Screams split the night. Grogan calmly walked over to the wall, took down the huge long bow and started stringing it. When he finished he strapped on the sword and took up a couple of quivers of arrows. All his movements were methodical, unhurried but swift. Kormak remembered him behaving exactly the same way during the darkest moments of the Orc War.
“We’d best make that sweep now,” he said. “The village is under attack.”
Kormak glanced out through the doorway. He peered round it, not wanting to be silhouetted against the opening by the lantern light.
Shadowy figures moved through the night. They were taller and thinner than human and they carried long spears whose points, deliberately dulled, did not glitter in the moonlight. Around them, at their feet, dog-sized things with glittering eyes scuttled. Spiders, he thought, very big ones.
Kormak went out through the door and onto the porch. He rolled over the verandah fence and dropped into the street. Movement on the roof overhead made him look up and he saw that there were figures, elf and spider, there as well. One of them raised a bow and aimed at him. He sprang aside. An arrow thunked into the ground beside him and stood there in the mud, quivering.
Grogan sprang through the door, turned and fired three shots in quick succession. Each was rewarded with a scream or a curse from the roof. Kormak glanced around, trying to assess the situation.
It was bad. The elves had got a long way into the village before someone had managed to raise the alarm. They were moving through the main square, dragging women and children and some of the merchants with them. The captives were penned in by the massive spiders. It reminded Kormak of the way dogs had been used to herd sheep in the Aquilean Mountains in the days of his youth.
Swiftly he ran to the corner of the building and used the carved wooden projections to pull himself up onto the roof. He counted five elves there, two wounded, one possibly dead and a pack of three large spiders. He sprang forward, blade lashing out. The dwarf-forged steel cut through leather armour as easily as it cut through flesh. Two of the elves fell before they realised what was happening. One had lost an arm, another was beheaded.
One of the remaining elves cursed and turned to face Kormak raising his short bow. Kormak lashed out with his blade, cutting the bow in two and slicing open the elf’s stomach at the same time. The last wounded elf, seeing the way things were going sprang from the roof. An arrow took him in the throat even as he fell, and Kormak was left alone with the spiders.
Their bodies were large as a hound’s and their armoured, chitinous legs seemed much more robust than those of a smaller spider, reminding him of jointed metal devices he had seen in alchemical labs. A closer look showed him that their bodies were similarly armoured. Groups of glowing greenish eyes gazed at him with an intelligence he had not been expecting, and a hunger he had. Mandibles the size of daggers clicked against each other. Greenish venom dripped from them.
Perhaps it was his imagination but there seemed to be a pattern in the clicking and chittering of the nearest creature. It was echoed by its companions. Were they communicating with each other?
They spread out so that one of them was coming at him head on and the others angling in from a side. They moved better than he on the uncertain footing of the sloping roof. There was soft thunking noise as they moved as if a dagger were being driven into a cork tabletop.
Something hit the spider on his right, and he realised that it must have gotten into Grogan’s line of sight. It let out a long hissing shriek, and collapsed. The remaining two came on with a sudden fantastic burst of scuttling speed.
Kormak swept his blade through a great arc. Chitin proved no more resistant than elvish armour. He took the head of one spider and carved a leg off another, stepping aside to let its momentum carry it from the roof. The head rolled down the roof, jaws still clicking together. The decapitated body performed a weird, spasmodic dance before collapsing in on itself.
“Grogan, I am coming down,” Kormak shouted, not wanting to take an arrow when he leapt off the roof. He took a quick glance around from his elevated position and saw that pockets of fighting had erupted in the streets, groups of elves and spiders fighting against humans, and the humans getting the worst of it.
“Right you are, Guardian.” Kormak leapt and landed in the soft mud.
Grogan grinned at him. “You picked the wrong day to show up in Green Oaks,” he said.
“Maybe I picked the right one for your folk,” Kormak said. They moved down the street, Grogan pausing occasionally to let off a shot from the great long bow. Kormak raced ahead, charged into a large group of elves, surrounding a small knot of struggling men. His blade took down two of the elves before they realised they were being attacked from behind. He moved through the others with the speed of a striking tiger, killing as he went. With half a dozen blows, he had slain all the elves. The men looked at him gratefully.
“Follow me,” Kormak said. “We can still turn this fight.”
He was not sure they could. In the darkness and chaos it was hard to judge exactly how things were going. For all he knew there could be an army out there. He could only pray to the Holy Sun that such was not the case and do the best he could under the circumstances.
The folk looked only too happy to be given some leadership. They were a motley group of woodsmen, merchants and housewives who had grabbed up whatever weapons were at hand when the alarm had been given. They looked relieved when Grogan came up and told them to head for the inn.
The sight of the first pack of spiders daunted them but they gained heart as Kormak chopped the arachnids down, and Grogan put deadly arrows through their glowing eyes.
They raced on through the streets, smashing into the swirl of melees, turning the tide wherever they went and gathering more fighters to them like an avalanche gaining power as it rolled down a mountainside.
They emerged in front of the Royal Oak and, as Kormak had suspected, found that it still stood. The collection of woods rangers inside had put up a better fight than most of the villagers. They emerged from the building led by Bertram and the men Kormak had almost got into a fight with earlier. A smaller group of elves appeared on the street around them, making strange mocking calls in their liquid tongue, saw the size of the group and turned to flee.
Somewhere off in the distance a horn sounded. It was high-pitched and the notes were haunting and inhuman, rising in pitch until they were inaudible to the human ear although hounds still howled.
The company started to pursue but Grogan shouted, “Careful now, it may be a trap.”
That curbed the enthusiasm for hot pursuit. “I want all the men who have bows to stay with me,” said Grogan. “Those of you who have axes, swords or
knives go with Kormak. We’ll fight better that way.”
It took some time to organise things but once it was done, they moved through the streets. The elves had gone. It looked like they had taken a large number of the villagers with them. The streets were empty. Many of the house doors had been smashed in and there was no one visible within.
Kormak led his band to the gate. The watchman was still there, a black fletched arrow through one eye. His warning horn still hung unsounded from his neck. Another was in the gate-tower tower, throat cut. His crossbow was unfired. The body of the elf that had been hanging there had been cut down. A few human bodies lay on the ground between the village and the forest. Prisoners who could not keep up or who had tried to escape, Kormak reckoned. He moved over to one. The body had an odd smell and he could see that one of its legs was bloated. The boy’s trousers had been pierced by mandibles beneath the knee. The venom must have gone in there. Kormak hoped his death had been quick.
Grogan emerged from the gate behind him. “Bastards have all gone,” he said. “Looks like we drove them off.”
“Or they got what they came for,” said Kormak.
“Or maybe that,” said Grogan. He did not sound happy. “Let’s go count the cost.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE SUN ROSE over a very different village from the one Kormak had rode into the previous day. The streets were a lot emptier. Scared and angry men, all armed, moved around in groups.
The corpses of dead spiders lay on the ground. No one wanted to touch them. In the sunlight their armoured carapaces were an oily black. They sprawled in pools of dark fluid with puddles of green venom around their heads. Occasionally a limb twitched, and folk moved away. A few put arrows into the stirring bodies but the spiders just lay there.
The elves were all carried outside the village. This time folk were not going to hang these corpses; they were going to burn them. Kormak inspected a few of the bodies. Most wore leather jerkins and britches, their shirts and headbands were made of a grey silk-like material that he guessed had come from their pets. The arrows for their short bows and their spear tips were all tipped with a poisonous blackish-green paste. All of the elves had tattoos, patterns of webs and spiders and complex symbols that offended Kormak’s eyes, labyrinthine runes sacred to the Shadow.