Sagaria (35 page)

Sagandran did his best, but it was hard to find purchase for his hands and feet, which kept getting tangled in what he soon realized was the broad mesh of an old rope net. Samzing was moaning loudly somewhere above him. Sir Tombin was muttering imprecations even further above. The four of them were jumbled in a heap, with Perima at the bottom of it.

“A net!” said Sagandran. “We’ve been trapped by a net. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book.”

“It’s a pity Snowmane and the carriage weren’t a little closer,” observed Sir Tombin, obviously trying to inject some calm he didn’t feel into his voice. “Their weight would almost certainly have broken the mechanism.”

“It’s a pity Flip was small enough to slip through the mesh,” said Sagandran through gritted teeth. “If he were up here I could wring his neck.”

“No need to be so extreme, young man.” Sir Tombin was still clinging to that calm. “Besides, I rather think I might beat you to it. However, I have my sturdy blade Xaraxeer with me, so I should soon be able to saw our way out of here. Assuming,” he grunted, “I can manage to get it out of its scabbard. Samzing, dear fellow, do you think you could possibly move your stomach, just for a trice?”

“Too late,” said Sagandran. “Can’t you hear?”

“Stop trying to just ignore me, Sagandran,” Perima began.

“Sh.”

Coming closer to them was the sound of gurgling laughter that Sagandran recalled only too well.

A worg.

Just a little earlier that afternoon, somewhere not so far away in the forest …

The mountain worg, Bolster, wasn’t in a foul mood. If he’d merely been in a foul mood his mood would have been just as normal, and he’d have been perfectly contented with that. The mood he was in right now, though, was so much fouler than foul, there weren’t any words he could think of to describe it. Certainly not any words he knew anyway and, even though he was aware of the strict limitations of his vocabulary, he was pretty sure not any words that anyone else knew either. If you could imagine a bolt of lightning hitting a cesspit you might have had some pale glimmering of an idea of the nature of Bolster’s current mood.

No, even that didn’t come close.

The reason for his ill humor was that he hadn’t been able to sleep a wink last night. He’d had a very disturbing visitor late in the evening. The only way visitors could normally disturb Bolster was by giving him food poisoning, but this one was different.

The visitor had the outward form of an exceptionally handsome young man (not that Bolster was much of a judge of handsomeness), but the worg had sensed that this was something else entirely; something that wasn’t human at all; something that, in all probability, wasn’t even edible. Since just about
everything was regarded as edible by a worg, this meant that the visitor was extremely unusual indeed.

Bolster didn’t like unusual things. They made his warts crawl.

He’d been sitting in the forest cave he called his house, happily picking the remains of a wild boar from between his teeth, when the stranger was abruptly there beside him. Bolster could have sworn that the visitor hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t as if he could have crawled in through the cave entrance without Bolster noticing, because Bolster had been sitting with his ample rear end blocking the entrance.

He’d been so startled by the sudden appearance that he’d very nearly swallowed his nose.

“Who you?” he’d growled threateningly, reaching around beside him for his trusty club, Skullcrusher.

Skullcrusher wasn’t there.

Skullcrusher was lying on the far side of the cave, where Bolster hadn’t left it.

“A friend,” said the visitor with an amicable shrug. His smile was so ingenuous and fresh that it seemed to light up the cavern’s interior. “A friend who’s come to ask you a favour, in the name of the Shadow Master. I’m his emissary.”

“Wot is an enemiwhat?”

“Emissary,” the visitor corrected.

Bolster still looked puzzled. There were, after all, only so many words that could squeeze into a worg brain, even though he was considered one of the smarter ones.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, Mr. Bolster. Let me be more succinct.”

“Shuggint?”

“The Shadow Master’s
messenger,
” the visitor said with some testiness.

“Who he, then?” asked Bolster suspiciously.

“The person who will soon be the lord of this forest domain, and all others,” said the stranger. “You really don’t want to get on his wrong side before you’ve even met him, you know.”

“I da lord a dis forest,” snarled Bolster. “I da one dey call da boss.”

The visitor gave a shrug, so that his gleaming silver armor jangled. “Not for much longer, I’m afraid. However, my master can be very generous and kind. As long as you accord him the respect he is due, I’m sure he won’t interfere too much with your charming little ways. You’ll still be the boss of the forest. It’s just that the Shadow Master will be
your
boss.”

The idea of a hierarchy of authority was a little complex for Bolster. The way he saw it, the natural order of things was that there was himself and everybody else. It was his good fortune in life to have the right to splatter anybody else’s
brains out with Skullcrusher, and then eat the good meat. The only creatures he habitually spared were other worgs, just so long as they obeyed his orders. If they didn’t, they, too, got their brains splattered out with a few lusty blows from his club, though he only stooped to eating worgs when he was very, very hungry. He was dimly aware that as he grew older, another worg might come along who was bigger and stronger than him who would splatter
his
brains out and take over as the new boss of the forest, but that unhappy day lay in the future. As the future was another concept too complex for Bolster, he didn’t let it worry him. But he was worried by this unnatural stranger all right. Only that he mustn’t show it.

“Sez who?” he quipped.

“Says Arkanamon, proud tyrant of the Shadow World, soon to be the conqueror of all Sagaria,” answered the visitor with another of those unsettlingly bright smiles.

“Oh, does he? And he got a big club?”

“He has an army hundreds of thousands strong made up of troops who are virtually unkillable.”

Bolster considered this for a moment. “Dat a big number?” he asked.

“Very big,” the armored being assured him. “Think of the number of termites in a nest, then double it.”

Bolster tried, but all it did was make his head hurt. Multiplication had never been one of his strong points.

“Lots,” he said at last.

“Lots,” the stranger agreed.

“Um.”

There was silence between them except for the sound of Bolster sucking gobbets of gristle out of his caries. The silence stretched out until several minutes had passed.

“Dis favour?” said Bolster finally. “Wot is it?”

“My master is searching for a boy.”

“Lotsa boys around,” said Bolster with a wave of his greasy fingers. “Dey best cooked slowly wid a sprig or two of marjoram.”

“Not just
any
boy. A particular one. He has something that my master wants. That he needs.”

“Wot’s dat den?”

“A crystal. A jewel.”

“Bolster like jewels. Dey pretty.”

“Not just any jewel—”

“We been here before.”

“—but a particular jewel. One that my master treasures very highly. He
treasures it so highly, in fact, that he’s prepared to give a whole chestful of gold and precious gems to anyone who should find this boy and deliver him into the hands of my master.”

“Gold, you say?” Like all worgs, Bolster adored gold. This was because no worg had yet worked out anything they could do with it. It seemed to them completely useless. It was too soft to be made into weapons or arrowheads, and it was too heavy for much of it to be carried around at a time, even by somebody as strong as a worg. The sheer fascination of trying to work out what gold was actually for had engaged the minds of generations of worgs, and it was because of that fascination that they prized gold so greatly. So when the stranger mentioned a promise of gold, Bolster began to drool.

Began to drool – more than usual, that is.

“Yes,” said the bright creature. “Gold!”

“Oooh!” said Bolster.

“But only if you can capture this boy and deliver him to my master.”

“Aah,” said Bolster, disappointed. He’d known there would have to be a catch somewhere. “And how Bolster know dis boy?”

A picture flashed into Bolster’s mind. The picture was rather blurry and crumbled away around the edges, because Bolster didn’t have much of a mind for it to flash into, but it was clearly recognizable as that of a human boy. Then the picture was gone again.

And so, Bolster discovered as he blinked his eyes to get them back into focus again, was the stranger. Only the echo of his voice hung in the air, the whispered word, “gold.”

All night long, Bolster had tossed and turned, thrashed and flailed, and still sleep refused to come to him. Even sticking his thumb in his mouth hadn’t had its usual comforting effect. Every time he’d closed his eyes, he’d seen either the face of the boy or a mountain of glittering gold goodies that weren’t going to be his. It was anguish that had kept him awake, the adamantine spear of anguish thrust through his heart. For few boys were foolish enough to stray through the Everwoods, and the chances that one of them might be—

Now just wait a ganglion-pickin’ minute!

He’d seen that face before. Yes, that was right. Days ago – or it might have been weeks ago, because Bolster’s sense of time was as dull as most of his others – he’d met that boy.

Bolster had been going about his normal everyday business, just looking for something to terrorize or slaughter, when he’d found a human boy hiding in the bushes. The boy had deceived him with some tomfool story about how the skulls of human boys and girls exploded if you tried to smash them, and Bolster
had swallowed the falsehood whole. It wasn’t until much later, sitting at home with only a bucket of slugs to keep the hunger pangs at bay, that Bolster had recalled smashing the skulls of other human beings in the past. There had been no explosions then, just the usual satisfying squish.

Wrathful, he’d stampeded back to where he’d met the boy, but the horrid little liar was long gone by then. Bolster had been forced to wreak his dire revenge on a miniature cottage he’d found beside the path, even though he’d been virtually certain the boy wasn’t inside it.

It had been in the hour just before dawn, the most dismal time of the night, that this memory came back to Bolster, and it had haunted him ever since. The boy,
the
boy, had been almost within his grasp, and Bolster had let him slip away. No wonder his temper this morning was of the kind that most people would rather tear their own heads off than endure.

Bolster had an infallible recipe for cheering himself up when he felt miserable, and that was to make somebody else miserable – preferably lots of somebody elses. He was just trying to work out who he could most satisfyingly pick on, as well as some really deviously spiteful ways of making their lives a walking hell, when he heard a sudden crash that rang through the forest, startling birds up from the trees. It took him several long minutes to work out what it could possibly have been, and then he remembered.

The trap.

The trap he had set so many years ago by forcing a passing scholar, upon pain of death, both to build the mechanism and, the really difficult bit, to write the “Pull HERE!” sign. The scholar had proved to be a little stringy for Bolster’s tastes, but the man’s workmanship, the worg had admitted complacently, had been second to none. Even so, the trap had so far, despite the span of years, failed to snare a single captive.

Until now.

Lumbering to his feet and grabbing Skullcrusher, Bolster the Boss Worg began to shamble as fast as he could toward the clearing where he’d set his trap.

And as he shambled, he laughed.

Gurglingly.

After Flip awoke he couldn’t work out where he was for a moment. His bedclothes weren’t this muddy green color, were they? Besides, the smell was all wrong for his bedroom. Instead of the warm, cozy smell of a room much slept-in, his nostrils were filled with a cool damp odor composed of moisture, crushed
grass and just a hint of decay. Plus, he didn’t feel as he normally felt when he woke up in his nice comfortable bed, the familiarity of its various lumps and sags molding around him. He had little aches and pains all over his body, as if he’d been in a fight that was only half-serious, but where his opponent’s punches had nevertheless been hard enough to hurt, to raise bruises. Then he realized that what he was looking at was a clump of scuffed-up grass, and that he was lying flat on his face on the ground.