Triumph of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [45]
“Why should I want that fool around anyway?” he mumbled, wiping the rain from his face—rain that mingled with his tears of fear and frustration and the knowledge that he was now completely lost. “He’s only trouble. I—”
Mosiah hushed, listening.
The thunder boomed around him, lightning lit the gray gloom until it was nearly bright as day. But through the noise and confusion of the storm, he thought he had heard … yes, there it was again.
Voices?
Weak with relief, Mosiah nearly dropped the crossbow. Shaking, he set it carefully on the ground and peered out from the cover of the dripping foliage. The voices were near him, coming apparently from another small grove of trees only a few yards away. He couldn’t understand what the voices were saying, it was difficult to understand their shouts over the noise of wind and rain and thunder. Perhaps it was centaurs. Mosiah hesitated, listening closely. No, it was unmistakably human speech! Warlocks, undoubtedly.
Mosiah moved forward cautiously He planned to call out when he was close enough. The last thing he wanted to do was to startle some nervous warlock and find himself mutated into a frog. He could hear the voices quite plainly now, it sounded as if there were several men in the small grove, shouting orders of some sort. Words of glad relief were on his lips, words of thankfulness at finding friends, but Mosiah never spoke them.
Reaching the outer trees of the grove, the young man slowed his pace. Why? Mosiah didn’t know. His mind urged him to leap forward, but some deeper instinct kept his voice silent, his steps quiet. Maybe it was because—even though he couldn’t hear clearly above the storm—he didn’t understand the speech of these men. Maybe the bad experience with the Duuk-tsarith in the Grove long ago had taught him a bitter lesson in caution. Or maybe it was the same animal instinct for self-preservation that had kept him safe from the creature of iron.
Padding softly around a tree, knowing that he himself couldn’t be heard above the storm, knowing, too, that he would be difficult to see in the driving rain, Mosiah crept near the source of the voices. Gently parting the wet leaves, he saw them.
He held perfectly still—not out of fear or caution. He felt no emotion whatsoever. It was as if his brain had left him, had said, “I’ve had enough, let someone else cope with this for a while. Good-bye.”
Those speaking were humans. But they were like no humans he had ever before seen or imagined.
There were six of them. They were male, from the sound of their voices and the muscular appearance of their bodies. At first Mosiah thought they had heads of iron, for he could see the lighting reflecting off their shining scalps. Then one of them removed his head, wiping sweat from his brow, and Mosiah realized that the strange humans were wearing helms, similar to the bucketlike contraption Simkin donned on infrequent occasions.
In addition to their helms, the strange humans were dressed alike in suits of shining metal that fit them like their own skin. In fact, it might have been their skin, for all Mosiah knew, except that he saw one yank a glove from a hand, revealing flesh like his own. The man had taken off the glove to toy with an object he held in his hand—an object that was oval-shaped and fit neatly in the palm.
The man showed the object to a companion, saying something in his unintelligible language, apparently with regard to it, for he sounded disgusted and shook the object. The companion shrugged, barely glancing at his partner. He was keeping watch, staring out from the grove of trees, and he was obviously tense and nervous.
The man with the object in his hand continued to shake it until one of the other men made a hissing sound. Reacting hastily, the man pulled the glove on over his hand, turning to face the same direction as his other five companions. All of them crouched low in the wet brush, and now Mosiah could see through the driving