Bearers of the Black Staff - Terry Brooks [166]
When he had left Arborlon in pursuit of the deceiver, he had begun tracking him under the assumption that he was escaping the city with the intention of going back through Aphalion Pass. If his purpose in coming into the valley in the first place was to gather information that would aid the Drouj in their planned invasion, he would be anxious to impart to his father what he had learned before his duplicity was discovered. In order to do that in the fastest way possible, he would take the shortest route out of the valley, and that meant going through Aphalion.
So Sider had set out in that direction, not bothering with trying to pick up the Troll’s footprints, choosing instead to sacrifice caution for speed in order to reach the pass quickly. He did so, only to learn from the Elves on watch that no Trolls had passed that way in the past week. The Orullian brothers, in particular, were adamant that no one could have gotten past the watch they had set at both ends of the pass without someone finding out. Since no sightings or incidents had been reported, Arik Siq must have gone another way.
It was a disturbing discovery, and after doing his own reconnaissance of the terrain surrounding the pass, the Gray Man went back down the interior slopes of the mountains toward Arborlon, this time checking carefully for some indication of where the elusive Troll had gone.
He found it when he was almost all the way back to the Elven city and scouring the terrain above the forest where the boy Xac Wen had last seen the Troll going down the Carolan. The tracks he found were clearly made by a Troll, so the Gray Man was able to follow them easily enough. To his surprise, they led northwest upslope into the foothills for only several miles before turning directly west.
Shortly after that, in a dense forest formed by a mix of hardwoods and conifers grown so thick it was impossible to see much of anything once you were in their midst, he found something that caused him both confusion and concern. In a clearing ringed by spruce, he discovered tracks made by dozens of Trolls and a handful of four-footed beasts that had come down out of the high country west of Aphalion. Having joined up with Arik Siq, the entire bunch had set out west along the high slopes, carefully keeping to the shelter of the ridges and forests below the snow line.
At first, Sider couldn’t figure out what all the Trolls and their beasts were doing. The pattern of the tracks seemed to indicate that they knew Arik Siq was coming and had waited for him. There were no indications of a disturbance, nothing to show that his arrival was unexpected. But if the Trolls were Drouj, how had they managed to get into the valley without being seen? How had they managed to communicate the details of this meeting with Arik Siq without speaking to him directly?
Sider couldn’t be sure of the answer to the latter question, but he deduced an answer to the former pretty quickly. The beasts accompanying the Drouj were Skaith Hounds, which explained almost everything. When he had brought Arik Siq into the valley, there were no defenses in the pass, nothing to prevent anyone living outside from entering. The assumption was that no one could find a way in because no one knew where the passes were. But they had all overlooked the obvious. Simply by returning, they had left a trail. Skaith Hounds could track a quarry anywhere, as Deladion Inch had told him earlier, and since Arik Siq was already planning to betray the valley’s secrets, he had simply arranged before leaving camp to have the hounds set on their trail as soon as they were safely out of sight.
Which meant that the Trolls who had gathered to meet with Taureq’s duplicitous son could have found Aphalion Pass easily and gotten safely inside the valley long