When they woke, it was raining again, a slow, persistent drizzle that fell out of low, empty leaden skies. The whole of the land about them had gone gray and misty in the early morning light. They mounted Jurisdiction once more and rode out into the weather. Bunion went on ahead, a small, spidery figure skittering into the gloom until he was lost from view. The summer day was warm and filled with the smell of damp earth. Ahead, the Greensward stretched away in a patchwork of greens and browns, of tilled fields and grassy pastures, of mature forests and midseason plantings, all interspersed with rivers and lakes that in the rainy haze took on the look of molten metal, their surfaces stirred by the faint breezes that swept down across the flats.
By midday Bunion had returned with a second horse. He didn’t offer an explanation of where he had gotten the beast, and Ben and Willow didn’t ask. It was not a farm animal; it was a trained riding horse. Willow stood in front of the horse, a brown mare, and spoke to it encouragingly for a moment, then mounted smoothly and wheeled over beside Ben. She gave Bunion a smile and a wink, and the kobold was gone again.
They rode on through the rest of that day and most of the next. All the while it rained, leaving them wet clear through except for brief periods of dryness when they camped and were able to chase away the damp with the help of the fires Bunion always seemed to be able to construct. They passed Rhyndweir and several of the other castles of the Lords of the Greensward but did not stop to ask for shelter. Ben had no interest in seeing anyone, preferring to minimize the chance of further attacks from Rydall. Surprisingly, there were none. Since Rydall had found them in the Eastern Wastelands with the wurm, Ben had supposed he would be able to find them anywhere. Given the frequency and consistency of the attacks, he had expected another by now. On the other hand, Rydall had used up four of his promised seven challenges, so perhaps he was rethinking his strategy. Ben didn’t consider it worth his while to ponder the matter further. He was simply grateful for the respite.
He used the time to think. With his travel cloak a shield against the elements, Willow a silent wraith riding next to him, and the rain a curtain that shrouded everything in damp, gray silence, he shut himself away from his discomfort and tedium and concentrated on the puzzle of Rydall of Marnhull. He was beginning to consider possibilities he had not considered before. Some of this was prompted by his growing sense of desperation. He could feel time running out. Sooner or later Rydall was going to send a monster from which no one could save him—not the Paladin, not Strabo, not anyone. Sooner or later his defenses were not going to be strong enough, and the struggle to survive would be over. The only thing that could prevent that from happening was uncovering the secret behind Rydall, and Ben seemed to be no closer to doing that than ever. So he determined to quit thinking in predictable ways, to be more innovative, more daring. He had to stop being led around by Rydall. He had to refuse to follow the paths Marnhu’s King left open to him and start opening a few of his own. There was a net being woven about Ben Holiday, and he could sense it tightening with every new strand laid out. He had to find a way to cut through the webbing.
His thinking, however, was prompted not so much by his desperation as by his realization that there were a few loose threads in Rydall’s carefully woven net. First, there was Ben’s growing certainty that Rydall’s sending of monsters to do battle with the Paladin was part of a game that had far more to do with Ben than with Landover’s throne. Second, there was his recognition that three of the four monsters had come from the stories in his Monsters of Man & Myth book. Three created in painstaking detail from the writer’s descriptions, as if Rydall had copied the creatures directly from the book’s pages. Three, but not the fourth. No, the fourth, a wurm, had come from somewhere else.