Talent? Win? How could he have ignored the obvious for so long? “It’s not just girls, is it?” Rap said bitterly. “It’s all people. Men, too. You tricked me.” Andor had done to Rap what Rap had done to Firedragon’s mares. Thief! Traitor!
Andor shrugged heavy, furred shoulders. “The goblins are no trick, and I don’t intend to stay around to entertain them. You’re being foolish, Master Rap. ”
Then he turned to face the arrivals.
Three shadowy figures had emerged from the dark into the edge of the firelight, visible even to eyes.
If goblins valued courage, then they were not going to be impressed by Rap’s quivering jaw, or the way he was keeping his knees pressed together. He resisted the temptation to sidle in behind Andor and hide.
The three came slowly closer, spears raised, inspecting their catch with care. They were short and very broad. They wore jerkins and trousers and boots, but made of buckskin instead of fur, gaudily decorated with fringes and beadwork. The fire’s glimmer showed hard, unfriendly faces, dark-skinned and marked by complicated tattoo patterns around the eyes.
The one in the center seemed older than the others. He had the most ornate decorations on his clothes and on his face, and he spoke first, barking out a question that Rap could not understand, accompanied by a threatening movement of the spear.
Andor seemed to straighten up, tall and imposing. He rolled off a long answer in the same tongue, and his voice was harsher and much deeper than usual. Rap jumped with surprise when he heard it. It had never occurred to him that the goblins spoke another language.
Then he wondered how Andor knew it.
The spear points dipped slightly. The leader spoke another question, sounding surprised.
Andor replied and pointed to his face. Now Rap could catch a word or two. It was a strangely coarse dialect, but not a totally different tongue.
The chief snapped an order to his two companions and then advanced alone, holding his spear at waist height now. He peered up into Andor’s hood.
Rap had just noticed that he could barely see over Andor’s shoulder. Andor was much taller than he ought to be and certainly much broader. His parka strained over massive arms and shoulders. He looked wrong to Rap’s eyes, and also to his farsight. There was a bigger man in there than Andor.
The chief had rattled off more questions, Andor replying. The chief showed irregular teeth in a broad grin. He reached out a mitt and turned Andor around. He wanted to see Andor’s tattoos in the firelight, but in doing so he showed that face to Rap. It was not Andor. It was a huge man, a man with the ugliest and most terrifying face Rap had ever seen-nose crushed over to one side, one corner of his mouth lifted by a scar, the corner of one eye pulled awry by another. Andor’s dark, stubbly beard had vanished-this man looked newly shaved. He was not a goblin, but he had goblin tattoos around his eyes—pale jotunn’s eyes, which now met Rap’s and crinkled with contemptuous amusement. He grinned. His front teeth were missing, top and bottom, giving him a most hideous and sinister wolfish leer.
Rap backed away in dismay, almost into the campfire. “Where is Andor?”
“You won’t be seeing him again, not likely.”
Rap’s heart was spinning, and he thought he might be going to faint. Andor had been there only minutes before. “Who are you?” he cried!
“A friend of his,” the big man said. “I’m Darad. You were warned about me.”
5
The chief inspected Darad’s tattoos by the trembling light of the campfire and apparently approved of them. He smiled and dropped his spear, attempted to embrace the giant, and received a bear hug in return. That ought to be a good sign for Darad, but who was going to hug Rap?
The chief’s two companions were smiling also and coming forward for introductions and more embraces. The rest of the goblins floated in from the trees, silent as moonbeams, appearing suddenly in the firelight like ghosts. They were younger men, mostly, bearing spears or bows, and all wearing the same fringed and beaded buckskins.
What was going on? Obviously there was some sort of sorcery at work, yet Andor was most certainly not a sorcerer. Sorcerers need not endure the hardships of long days’ trekking through the wastelands; they had abilities to avoid such dangers and discomfort. If Andor was a sorcerer and wanted that damnable magic word that he thought Rap possessed, he would surely have revealed his powers sooner.
And who was this Darad, against whom Jalon had warned him, this Darad who so conveniently wore goblins’ tattoos and spoke their tongue? Rap trembled as he thought of Kranderbad and the others who had tried to fight Andor and had then been so callously maimed. The idea that the soft-spoken, kindly Andor might commit such atrocities, even in the heat of a fight, was just as unthinkable as the notion that he might be a sorcerer. Darad, however, looked capable of anything. Perhaps Darad was a demon who came to Andor’s rescue when he was in trouble. If so, and if the goblins were going to be friendly, would Andor now reappear?
But the goblins were not being totally friendly. The four horses had been caught and led forward into the firelight, tugged unwillingly by their manes, too weak and dispirited to resist. Darad and the chief were in guttural argument with much pointing and waving of hands. As the voices rose, Rap began to catch a few of the words: horse and four and saddle. The old chief turned and looked at Rap, who quivered instantly and reminded himself sternly that goblins respected courage. The thought brought him little comfort.
The chief asked a question, Darad replied. Rap made out his own name, but little else. The argument seemed to go back to the horses, then to him again.
Darad stepped over, took Rap’s arm in a grip that made his bones creak, and turned him away from the fire, toward the dark of the forest.
“I’ll give you one more chance.” His voice was low and harsh, blurred by the missing teeth.
“I don’t know any words of power!” Hopefully Darad-and the goblins, too-would think it was the fearsome cold that was making Rap tremble so much. Why couldn’t he stop?
“The chief must have a gift. I offered two horses. He wants all four. But he’ll settle for something less.”
“What?”
“You.”
“You wouldn’t!”
Darad grinned. His tongue and his eyeteeth were very prominent because of the gaps, and his grin was lupine and inhuman. His eyes were shiny and cold as the polar night. If Rap had been able to give him what he wanted, those eyes alone would have been persuasion enough.
“I don’t know any—”
Darad pushed contemptuously. Rap toppled into a snowbank. By the time he had picked himself up, Darad and the chief were embracing again.
Experienced woodsmen would not have made their camp half a mile from a goblins’ village. As soon as Rap was pointed in the right direction and jabbed forward by the point of a spear, he could sense it at the limit of his range. He had been careless; now he was going to pay dearly for his stupidity.
He staggered along, dimly aware of the guards around him, and of Darad and the goblin chief walking arm in arm at the front of the line. They were an incongruous pair, for the huge Darad made the other seem like a dwarf. The big man was hobbling, as if Andor’s mukluks were hurting him.
Having registered that the horses and the equipment were being brought along, Rap concentrated on sensing out the clearing ahead, where four log structures stood in a square. He could soon tell that the closest was a stable containing three runtish ponies—small wonder that the chief had wanted all four of the Krasnegarian horses-but the farthest was much larger than the others and there were many people in there, mostly women. Of the two others, one seemed to be reserved for women and girls, and the smallest for boys. All three houses were sending up lazy columns of smoke into the crystal-cold night, but the big one was the communal house, and it was there that the procession headed. As it left the forest and crunched over the snowy clearing, a chorus of barking broke out in greeting.
Before Rap had any time to study all the details with his sensing, he had reached the largest but and was hurriedly pushed inside. Blinded by a blaze of light, half choked by a fog of acrid smoke and fetid odors, he recoiled and was shoved forward bodily into a melee of undressing men. He tripped and rolled among greasy legs and smelly feet. He began to cough; his eyes streamed tears; he gasped in heat unbearable to him after a whole week of arctic cold.