Darkwell - Douglas Niles [91]
Robyn, directly behind him, looked around at the bleak forest, Tavish, meanwhile, pulled out the broken spectacles, perched them on her nose, and looked at the sky. "Just as I thought! These glasses let me see things as they really are! It's really quite remarkable. For example, I can tell you that the sun is over there. That must be east, so north is that way!"
"Seems as good a guess as any," grunted the king. "To the north, then."
For several hours, they pushed across the snowy ground. Tristan led for a while before turning the lead over to Robyn. It proved much easier, in the snow, to follow in the exact steps of the leader, so after this they changed the order of march frequently and took turns breaking the deep snow.
The warmth of their evening camp had revitalized all of them. Though they talked little, they made steady progress, and the firbolg lair fell quickly behind them. They saw no sign of the ghastly birds and began to hope that the predators had also been left behind.
For Tristan, Daryth's death still burned like a deep wound. His own part in it seemed an act of tremendous evil. But he was now convinced that the challenge before them offered him a way to absolve himself of that guilt.
In most places, they walked among the gaunt trunks and tangled branches of the forested fen. The patches of land they encountered now seemed larger than those of the previous day.
An unlikely benefit of the cold temperature became apparent the first time their path took them from one of the hummocks of land back into the wetlands of the fens. The cold temperatures had frozen the water, in most places creating a layer of ice thick enough to walk on. In these cases, they put Yak in the rear of the party, since the firbolg's weight always caused the ice to give way. The rest of them made it across several such icy patches with little worse than an occasional wet foot.
Tristan took over the lead after one such stretch, looking behind at the plainly visible path they left in the snow. "I hope those birds are too stupid to follow a trail," he said to Robyn as she stood aside to let him pass.
"I'm afraid not." She pointed to the sky, and his heart sank as he saw a soaring shape wheeling just below the level of the low clouds. It was soon joined by another, then several more.
"They're pretty far away," he said hopefully.
"But I think they're coming this way."
The king started breaking trail with a vengeance, as if he hoped they could outdistance the awful creatures, but more and more of the flock appeared in the sky. Though they did not chase the companions with any apparent urgency, it was clear to the companions that the deathbirds were getting closer.
"What will we do once we're past the fens?" asked Robyn, bringing up a question Tristan had avoided thinking about. "Can we stick to the forests and keep them off our heads there?"
"I doubt it. The woods are too open to provide much of an obstacle. "We might be forced to fight them," said the king, without much hope. They all knew the odds of such a fight were grim.
Right now he faced a more immediate problem, as he hacked a network of dead vines out of the way and pushed himself through a tangle of trees, only to stop short.
"What do we do now?" he groaned, gesturing to the obstacle he had discovered.
Before them, neatly bisecting their path, stretched a steep-sided gorge that had once been a riverbed. The bottom was only about twenty feet below them, but the smooth, rocky sides offered few promising handholds. Snow lined the bed of the gorge, revealing the tops of huge boulders. On the far side, they could see well beyond the fens, for the ground rolled away uninterrupted by trees or any other cover, descending gradually to the north. In the distance, unfrozen and dark, sprawled the polluted expanse of Myrloch.
* * * * *
Yazilliclick squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the grip of massive claws on his shoulder and waited to be killed. And waited some more.