“Bek, do you see, do you see?” Quentin was laughing almost hysterically. “The sword is magic after all, Bek! It really is!”
Bek found his cousin’s enthusiasm entirely unwarranted and would have told him so if he could have spared the strength. But it was taking everything he had to stay focused on the movements of their attackers. He had no energy to waste on Quentin.
“Leah! Leah!” his cousin howled, darting out from their little circle, faking a strike at the shadows, then quickly retreating. “Panax!” he cried. “What are we supposed to do?”
Then something even darker and quicker than the u’wolves crossed in front of them, trailing shards of cold wind in its wake. The three defenders shrank from it instinctively. The night hissed as if steam had been released from a fissure, and the ur’wolves began to howl wildly and to snap at nothing. Bek couldn’t see them in the darkness, but he could hear the sounds they were making, sounds of madness and fear and loathing. A moment later, they were in full flight, gone back into the forest as if swallowed whole.
Bek Rowe held his breath in the ensuing silence, crouching so far down he was almost kneeling, his long knife extended blindly toward the trees. Beside him, Quentin was as still as carved stone.
Suddenly the darkness shifted anew, and a huge, tattered form that was not quite human, but not quite anything else, rose against the flicker of the firelight. It came together in a slow gathering of shadows, taking shape but not assuming identity, never quite becoming anything recognizable, formed of dreams and nightmares in equal parts.
“What is it?” Quentin Leah whispered.
“Truls Rohk,” Panax breathed softly, and his words were as chill and brittle as ice in deep winter.
FIFTEEN
Hunkered down in the sprawling, treacherous tangle of the Wilderun, Grimpen Ward was ablaze with light and suffused with sound. Patrons of the ale houses and pleasure dens overflowed into the dirt streets, celebrating nothing, as lost to themselves as to those who had once known them. Grimpen Ward was the last rung on the ladder down, a melting pot for those who had no other place to go. Inquiries of strangers were as apt to get your purse stolen or your throat cut as your questions answered, fights broke out spontaneously and for no particular reason, and the only rule of behavior that mattered was to keep your nose out of what didn’t concern you.
Even Hunter Predd, a veteran of countless reckonings and narrow escapes, was wary of those who lived in Grimpen Ward.
Once, Grimpen Ward had been a sleepy village catering to trappers and hunters seeking game within the vast and little explored expanse of the Wilderun. Too remote and isolated to attract any other form of commerce, it had subsisted as an outpost for many years. But there was little money to be made in hunting game and much to be made in gambling, and slowly the nature of the village began to change. The Elves shunned it, but Southlanders and Rovers found that its location suited their needs perfectly. Men and women seeking escape from their past, from pursuers who would not let them be, and from failed dreams and constant disappointment, men and women who could not live under the constraints of rules that governed elsewhere and who needed the freedom that came with knowing that being quickest and strongest was all that mattered; and men and women who had lost everything and were hoping to find a way to begin anew without having to be anything but clever and immoral; eventually all such found their way to Grimpen Ward. Some stayed only a short time and moved on. Some stayed longer. If they failed to stay alive, they stayed forever.
In daylight, it was a squalid, sleepy village of clapboard buildings and sheds, of rutted dirt roads and shadowed alleyways, and of a populace that remained inside and slept, waiting for nightfall. The forests of the Wilderun closed it about, ancient trees and choking scrub, and it was always on the verge of being swallowed completely. Nothing of what it was seemed permanent, as if everything had been thrown together on a whim, perhaps within a few desperate days, and might be torn down again by the end of the week. Its populace cared nothing for the town, only for what the town had to offer. There was a sullen, angry cast to Grimpen Ward that suggested a caged and malnourished animal waiting for a chance to break free.