The Tyranny of Ghosts_ Legacy of Dhakaan - Don Bassingthwaite [67]
Ekhaas pushed back the doubt. After Volaar Draal, if they didn’t have hope of finding something in Suud Anshaar, they had nothing. She had nothing. “Absolutely certain,” she said.
Tooth shook his head, but then looked at Ekhaas hopefully. “If do you see any treasure, could you bring some back to me? Just to prove that I was here, of course.”
“Of course,” said Ekhaas.
The sun rose the next day to the kind of sticky, mist-shrouded morning they’d come to expect in the Khraal. They set off early, Tooth leading them with even more care than he normally did. About mid-morning, with the mist burned away, he paused to sniff the air, then cautiously pulled aside a big fern. Behind it were the gnawed and broken bones of a jungle boar—several boars, Ekhaas realized—all heaped up together. The bones were several days old, but there was a foul tang in the air that had nothing to do with rot.
“Varags,” said Tooth. “They piss on the remains of their kills.”
“There’s not much left for a scavenger to pick over,” observed Geth.
“They don’t piss on the remains to spoil them. They do it to mark their pack’s territory.”
Geth bared his teeth. “They sound more like animals than goblins.”
“They are more animal than dar,” Tooth said. He glanced sideways at Ekhaas. “There’s an old legend that the Dhakaani used magic to breed them out of hobgoblins and dire wolves.”
“That’s just a legend,” said Ekhaas stiffly. “Legends also say that before the rise of Dhakaan, hobgoblins bred bugbears as warriors and goblins as slaves.”
“Didn’t they?” asked Tenquis. “I’d heard that they did.”
Ekhaas gave the tiefling a dark look. So did Chetiin.
Marrow, sniffing around the bones, squatted beside it and sprayed her urine onto the stinking heap. Tooth noticed what she was doing too late to stop her. “No!” he snarled. “Balinor’s blood, if they come this way now, they’ll know we were here.”
The worg snarled back at him, and Chetiin clarified, “She says that if they mark their territory with scent, they’ll already know we were here when they come this way. Now they’ll also know this pack has a strong female with them.”
Tooth grimaced. “That isn’t likely to help. Keep going and stay alert. Varags spend most of the day sleeping, but when they hunt, they’re almost silent.”
The sun rose to its apex, and the stifling heat of the morning became oppressive. They saw and heard nothing more of the varags, though once or twice Ekhaas thought she caught a whiff of varag urine. Tooth’s wariness was contagious. Ekhaas found herself tensing up and frequently had to force her body to relax. Geth didn’t so much walk as prowl, hand never far from Wrath’s hilt, the hair on his neck and forearms as visibly ruffled as Marrow’s coat. Chetiin all but vanished into the undergrowth, invisible unless one knew where to look for him. Tenquis held his wand at the ready, twitching it at every unexpected noise or motion.
The end of the undergrowth was so sudden, it was startling. One moment they were among trees and ferns, and the next they were stepping out onto the hard surface of an ancient Dhakaani road. Trees grew together overhead, the canopy turning the road into a tunnel. In spite of its age, the road had survived remarkably well. The black paving stones had mostly remained level, and few plants broke through between them.
“The last landmark,” said Tooth. “Stories said there was a road running through the jungle to Suud Anshaar.” He looked to Geth and Ekhaas. “We can follow it and be there faster, but we’re more visible.”
“We’re not entirely silent when we have to chop our way through the jungle, either,” Geth pointed out.