Silver Shadows - Elaine Cunningham [67]
Her two-legged tormenter was well out of sight now, but Eileen easily followed the scent of mint. Although her wit was about as sharp as a spoon, she possessed a keen sense of smell-not to mention a particular fondness for wintermint.
As the dragon trotted through the cavern's tunnels and out into the forest, two things happened. First, both of her front legs gradually returned to normal and her pace accelerated into a dizzying, plant-crushing charge. Second, it began to occur to her that she was very, very hungry and that perhaps this interruption was not such a bad thing after all.
Night was falling upon the Forest of Tethir, and Vhenlar eyed the deepening shadows with an intense and growing dread. In the days that followed the battle at the pipeweed farm, the mercenaries had pursued the elven raiders deep into the forest-far deeper than ever they had ventured before, and much too deep for Vhenlar's peace of mind.
The ancient woodland was uncanny. The trees had a watchful, listening mien; the birds carried tales; the very shadows seemed alive. There was magic here-primal, elemental magic-of a sort that put even the hired mages on edge, even the high-ticket Halruaan wizard in whom Bunlap put such store.
Other, more tangible dangers abounded. Since daybreak, unseen elves had been clipping arrows at the humans' heads and heels, nipping at them like sheep dogs gathering a flock for spring shearing. Beyond doubt, the mercenaries were being herded-toward what, Vhenlar could not say.
But he had little choice other than to move the band as swiftly northward as they could go. He'd tried to keep on the trail of the southbound elves, and lost five good men for his troubles. And so they headed northward, as their unseen tormenters intended. They would pick up the trail later, after… whatever.
Nor were the wild elves the mercenaries' only unseen foe, or their unknown destination their only worry. There was trouble enough to be found along the way. Not even the best woodsmen among them-and these included foresters, hired swords who'd knocked about in a dozen lands, and a couple of rangers gone bad-could identify all the strange cries, roars, and birdcalls that resounded through the forest. But all of the men had seen and heard enough to know there were creatures here that were best avoided. They'd stumbled upon a particularly unsubtle piece of evidence shortly before highsun. It was an image that stuck in Vhenlar's mind: a pile of dried scat in which was embedded the entire skull of an ogre. Whatever had killed that ogre-which had been an eight-footer, by the look of the skull, a creature probably as strong as any three men-was big enough to bite off the monster's head and swallow it whole. Ogres were bad enough, in Vhenlar's opinion, and he didn't even want to contemplate a creature big enough-and hungry enough-to eat such grim fare.
Monsters had always lived in the forest, but if tavern tales and lost adventuring parties were any fair measure of truth, the sheer variety and number of such creatures was spiraling into nightmarish proportions. To Vhenlar's way of thinking, this was partly the result of the troubles the elves were currently facing. Their attention had been diverted from forest husbandry to the more pressing matter of survival. This was, of course, precisely what Bunlap and the mercenary captain's mysterious employer had intended.
"Bunlap just had to order us to follow them elves," muttered Vhenlar. "Don't matter to him, what with his being snug behind fortress walls with nary a tree in sight, and no damn wild elves planting arrows in his backside!"
"Speaking of which," put in Mandrake, a mercenary who also doubled as the company surgeon, "how's yours?"
It was not an unreasonable question, considering that the surgeon had plucked two arrows from the back of Vhenlar's lap since sunrise. The unseen