The Sword of Darrow (21 page)

Darrow knew right away what this money could mean. He had his men bring the chest into the cabin, and then he called together Hugga Hugga, Timwee, and Mempo. “Our prayers have been answered,” Darrow exclaimed, his whole face glowing with the blessing that had fallen into his lap.

“We need swords, but swords cost money. Now we have a fortune. Our men can be armed!”

But Timwee asked the one question that Darrow had yet to consider.

“Where can we buy them? Someone might sell us one or two, perhaps even five swords. But no one has the hundred swords we need. The goblins control every town.”

“There must be swords somewhere!” Darrow exclaimed, pounding his fist against the table. “Someone must have swords!”

Mempo suggested that they might travel to Pfisterstellen, the small kingdom that lay on the other side of the forest. But no one knew the way.

“What about the road through the desert?” Timwee asked. But Kaylin explained that the road had been closed since the goblins took Sonnencrest and it was probably not passable.

Hugga Hugga signaled his thoughts. “This treasure has no value for us,” he said. “To get our swords, we will have to take them from the enemy on the field of battle.”

Darrow was alarmed. “We can’t leave the forest without weapons. In three days, the goblin king will know about the fort. An army will be on its way. Against trained soldiers with real weapons and real armor, we will have no chance.”

Hugga Hugga once again spoke.

“What chance do we have in the forest? We are out of food. There are no weapons here. Our volunteers are dying. Leaving is our only chance.”

All were silent, considering their grim prospects. It was Darrow who finally spoke.

“Hugga Hugga is right,” he said, choosing his words slowly. “Time is precious. Tomorrow, we break camp and leave the forest. On the plain, our volunteers can find us. The villages can provide food. Our chance is a small one, but if we don’t move fast, there will be no chance at all.”

The three others looked at one another, wondering at Darrow’s bold decision. A loud cry arose from the camp. Fifty men had just entered the yard. They carried food and wine sent from the villages on the plains. When they heard that the goblin fort had fallen, they cheered and hugged one another, some with tears in their eyes.

Looking away from this scene, Darrow turned to Timwee, Hugga Hugga, and Mempo.

“Believe,” he told them. “Nothing is possible unless we believe.”

3

That night, Darrow peppered Timwee and Hugga Hugga with questions about the goblin army. Timwee explained their tactics.

“They are well armored with helmets and breastplates. When they attack, they do so in one line with their shields locked together in a great metal wall.”

“How can you break the wall without swords?”

“You can’t break the wall even with swords. We must surprise them. Against the formation, no army can succeed.”

That night, Darrow considered this advice. How do you surprise an army on an open field? The plains offered no cover at all. How can you break a wall of iron with wooden spears? Darrow had no answers. He tossed and turned, unable to sleep for the longest time.

When Darrow awoke, the sun was well into the sky. The cabin was empty. The eight or ten men who had slept there had already risen. Panicked, Darrow jumped out of bed and pulled on his shirt. There was so much to do. How could his men have allowed him to sleep so long?

He moved for the door. But before he left the cabin, he stopped and turned back to look at his bedside. The chest? Quinderfill’s chest?

It was gone.

He called out to Timwee and Mempo to see if someone had put it away. But neither knew anything of the chest. Frantically, he searched the camp, questioning the men, almost accusingly, but no one admitted any knowledge of where the chest might be. Darrow wondered if thieving men might have entered his camp. Timwee came to calm him.

“The chest is of no use to us. Forget it,” he said.

Darrow knew he was right. So he assembled the men and spoke.

“We have won a victory, but larger ones await. There are no more goblins in the forest. We must march to the plains where we can find more warriors. We will arm ourselves in the villages. And when we meet the goblins on the plains, we will avenge all they have done to our kingdom. We will defeat them in battle. We will drive them from our land. And we will bring ten long years of unspeakable tyranny to a just and lasting end.”

The soldiers were packed tightly together in the small clearing and Darrow’s words made their spirits soars. Twenty of them returned to the fort to search the ashes for swords. The rest began their march from the forest. As their first steps struck the ground, Darrow hoped against hope that somehow his words would ring true.

T
he soldier stared at his feet, unwilling to look into the eyes of the monarch before him. His clothes were discolored with the mud of the forest and the dust of the road.

“Well?” shouted the king. “Tell me again!”

The soldier cleared his throat but did not lift his head. The great general Beltar and Bekkendoth, the king’s advisor, looked on.

“H-h-h-his sword. It was his sword. I never saw such a sword so quick. He was just a little guy, but no one could take him. All fell before his blade.”

“You did not fall!” the king cried. “You ran.”

“There was no hope,” the soldier whispered.

The king turned to Beltar. “One man! Really a boy, not a man!”

“These were not our best soldiers, Your Majesty.”

The king barely heard his words.

“Fifty soldiers killed or fleeing like mice before a kitten. My fort in ashes and you tell me I have not a single soldier who can take out a lame boy from some place no one even knows!”

Beltar did not speak.

The king turned to the soldier. “Take him to the dungeon, I say. And drop him in the coward’s cell.”

Bekkendoth whispered something to the guard as he carried the soldier away.

The king walked to the window. Dark splotches of sweat appeared on his robe. Beltar spoke.

“Your Majesty, Darrow has only thirty men. If they leave the forest, we can crush them in a matter of days.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They will starve.”

“Where is Zindown? Maybe he can fix this problem.”

Bekkendoth answered. “He has left Globenwald. I believe he is in the forest now.”

The king stood silent, seething. A small puddle of sweat collected at his feet.

“We have already taken action, Your Highness,” Beltar continued. “I have sent word by horseback to move five hundred men toward the forest.”

“I would recommend more,” Bekkendoth suggested. “After all, there are two thousand you can send.”

“Two thousand to snuff out thirty peasants? You must be mad.” Beltar gave Bekkendoth an angry glare.

“He is a hero now. Others will join him. Why not be safe?”

“He can find a thousand for all I care. How will they fight? With pitchforks and hammers?”

The king looked at Beltar. “Are you leading this army?”

“No, they are already marching toward Hexenwald. I will ride to Blumenbruch tomorrow. He has no army. He is a one-legged rabbit. We will bring him to Blumenbruch alive.”

“Alive? What then? What then?” the king sputtered, lifting his arms and splattering the walls with droplets of sweat.

“We will cut off his head. And when we do, Your Majesty, you will be sitting in the very first row.”

T
he trails of the forest echoed with footsteps. Darrow’s army was four hundred strong now, and though hardly any had seen battle, they stepped boldly and without the slightest concern for dangers that lay ahead. In their own minds, they were warriors, lifted far above the common conditions of ordinary life. They were lifted by their belief in a larger cause, men and women who knew without a doubt that they held the great and precious power to transform the future and write history with their very own hands. These were days to which every person aspires but only a few have the privilege to live. These were the days they would treasure until age and death lifted them from the earth.

As the first among them stepped out of the forest and into the sunshine of the plain, he cried out and four hundred more joined together in the song composed by Cedrick on the trails of Hexenwald Forest.

All hail the mighty Darrow

All hail his growing fame.

The goblin nation shudders

To hear his mighty name.

Four warriors in the forest

A fellowship began.

They faced a goblin army

And the goblin army ran.

Thirty in the forest

Besieged a fortress strong.

They slew the goblin forces

And righted what was wrong.

All hail the mighty Darrow,

All hail his growing fame.

The goblin nation shudders

To hear his mighty name.

Freedom for our kingdom

Justice for our land

For victory we shall battle

’Til none of us still stand.

For ten long years we’ve waited

We’ve suffered hard and long

But tomorrow will be different

When we sing our victory song.

All hail the mighty Darrow,

All hail his growing fame.

The goblin nation shudders

To hear his mighty name.

But while his army forged ahead, drunk with visions of their victory to come, Darrow was a tormented man.

He had his soldiers, four hundred, with more arriving every day. But they were untrained, unruly, and barely armed. Even after ransacking the goblin fort, they held less than a hundred swords and no armor. Their weapons were knives, hammers, pitchforks, axes, wooden clubs, and crooked spears.

Hope. Belief. Optimism. These words had brought him a multitude. But to win his victory, he needed weapons and he needed them fast.

His army surged forward, in high spirits, joined on all sides by new recruits eager to follow his every command. But Darrow’s mood was dark. He would soon meet the goblin army—not a paltry force of fifty lesser soldiers assigned to the forest duty that better soldiers refused. Darrow would face an army numbering hundreds at least, maybe a thousand or more. The soldiers? Not an unruly band of raw volunteers but warriors, well trained and battle hardened. Every one would wear armor. In every hand would be a fine sword. And behind their line of hardened shields would stand Beltar, the greatest general of their time.

Outside the forest, there was a great plain with nowhere to hide. Could he tell his men that he had summoned them to disaster? Had his brashness and daring only sentenced his nation to still more decades of tyranny? He had no answers. He had no choices. In a week, maybe days, he would face the goblin line. When he did, he could only hope that courage would be stronger than iron.

T
he whip whistled through the air as Sesha shouted, “Faster, Zauberyungi, faster.” The mule hardly noticed the whip. It was the urgency in Sesha’s voice that pushed him ahead.

The wagon jolted onward in fits and starts. Ahead and behind lay a broken road that crossed a vast, lonely desert. To either side were barren mountains. At odd spots, a scrubby tree broke this landscape of rocks, sand, and starving brown grass.

The road itself was narrow and dotted with craters and fallen rocks. Whole sections had been washed away in some long-ago storm. The road led to Pfisterstellen, a tiny kingdom that bordered Sonnencrest on the eastern side. Fearing the goblins, Pfisterstellen had closed its borders long ago. The road was no longer used.

Across this landscape no houses stood. There were no people or animals. The only sign of life was a small wagon pulled by one mule. The wagon was headed to a small cove on the sea. There, Sesha and Scodo hoped to find Telsinore the pirate, who they hoped would sell them swords.

“How many do you think he will have?” Sesha asked earnestly.

“I don’t know,” replied Scodo, answering the question for the third time. “A pirate like Telsinore keeps lots of swords. We can only carry two hundred in this wagon.”

“Will this treasure be enough?”

“If he does not kill us and steal it, it will.”

Sesha and Scodo were silent for a long time. In the wagon lay Quinderfill’s treasure. Two hundred swords would not arm Darrow’s entire army. But two hundred soldiers with swords might give Darrow a chance. Time was short. They needed to reach the cove and return in three days. It would take a miracle to succeed.

As Sesha and Scodo drove through the desert, a fine mist surrounded the wagon. It was a strange mist, floating above them, not quite rain but more than a cloud. It extended three or four wagon lengths in all directions. To Scodo, it seemed strange, but Sesha barely noticed at all.

Sesha should have known better. Having studied ten years at Asterux’s side, she knew the spells of the great wizards. And this mist was the greatest of all magics, the encirclement.

In the encirclement, the wizard loses all human form and becomes an encircling cloud. The spell has no physical effect, other than the dampness that the victim may feel. But what is taken from those encircled is far more precious than any physical possession. Because the encirclement is a robbery of the mind—a theft of the knowledge, memories, and even secrets its victim cannot recall.

The maker of this spell was Zindown. And so, at that moment, unknown to Sesha or Scodo, their most powerful enemy knew everything.

Even before the encirclement, the evil wizard’s spies had told him much. Zindown knew they were carrying Quinderfill’s treasure. He knew they were traveling across the desert to meet the evil pirate Telsinore. He knew that they would offer Telsinore the treasure to buy his swords. He knew those swords would be used to arm Darrow’s army.

But now he knew even more. Now he knew that Sesha was not Sesha at all, but the escaped Princess Babette. He knew that Babette had learned magic at the side of the great wizard Asterux. And he knew that Babette had used her powers to give Darrow a magic sword.

This knowledge alarmed Zindown.

Darrow was marching from the forest with hundreds of men. At every step, new volunteers were flocking to his cause. In a few days, Darrow might lead a thousand men.

The first wave of the goblin army was marching to meet him. Darrow might have more men, but his men had no weapons. If Sesha and Scodo delivered the swords, Darrow might somehow succeed.

But these were mere possibilities. The job of a wizard is to shape events. And Zindown was determined to write the outcome of this battle with his very own hand.

He had reason to be confident. Against Sesha and Scodo, Zindown had an ally even greater than his magic alone—time. The goblin army would meet Darrow in three days. Even without obstacles, the task facing Sesha was difficult indeed. And obstacles were exactly what Zindown had in mind.

Sesha and Scodo leaned into the wagon, pushing it with all their might. A dry streambed, two feet deep, crossed the road. Once, twice, three times they shoved. On the third try, the front of the wagon lifted, Zauberyungi jolted forward, and the wagon fell with a loud plop onto the road.

Sesha and Scodo hardly noticed that the fog was lifting. A slight breeze nudged at the wagon from behind, moving the mist ahead and into the sky. The air ahead began to swirl. Sesha looked up at the whirlwind and wondered if bad weather lay ahead.

She did not wonder long.

In an instant, the breeze reversed itself and menacing clouds collected in the sky. At first, the wind was easy, even soft, but the air slowly gained speed. The breeze became a gale. Sesha grabbed the wheel of the wagon to hold her balance. Scodo’s hood blew back and he lifted his arm to block the stinging sand.

Against this wind, Zauberyungi leaned hard, his hooves struggling to grip the road. But the winds reached a mad rage, hurling sand and rocks against the wagon. Sesha’s feet lifted from the ground as she gripped the side of the wagon. Frightened, she looked beseechingly at Scodo. Stronger and heavier, Scodo was making small steps forward.

“Zauberyungi! Zauberyungi!” she called out. “You must help him, Scodo!”

Slowly, carefully, the scorpion man moved forward until he had almost reached the old mule. Zauberyungi slipped, falling to his knees in a backwards slide that sent the wagon into reverse.

The jolt broke Sesha’s grip, but she managed to grab the back of the wagon. Had her hand missed its target, she surely would have been blown like a fallen leaf across the autumn sky.

Meanwhile, Scodo had edged forward yet another two feet. He turned his body sideways to the wind and planted his tail hard in the soil. With both hands, he pulled his sword from its scabbard and raised his arms high. He tottered and shook, struggling to hold his position. But he regained his balance and with a mighty force, he plunged the sword deep into the ground. Scodo wrapped his large arm around the mule’s neck. With one foot steadied against the sword, he lifted Zauberyungi to his feet and held him in place.

Sesha clung desperately, five fingers away from being lost to the sky. Behind the wagon, the wind was at its worst. It blew down both sides and around the back of the wagon, creating an unpredictable swirl that from time to time lifted and shook her body. But amidst the raging storm, Sesha’s mind was hard at work.

With a great burst of strength, she pulled her body into the wagon. There, she turned, her face again to the wind, feet pressed hard against the back of the wagon. She lifted two fists into the air, her hands closed tightly, every knuckle white. Her eyes were closed as well, not against the wind or the sand but against everything around her. Her body tight, her mind entranced, she began a low whistle.

The sound had a strange and penetrating melody. It was not quite a tune but a string of notes, barely twenty seconds long.

When these notes reached Scodo’s ears, he turned and looked, shocked at the eerie tune that seemed to have entered from a world far beyond.

A small whirlwind appeared, just in front of Zauberyungi. The whirlwind began spinning sand in a circle, and the circle began to grow.

Amazed, Scodo stepped back. Now the whirlwind was larger. It was expanding, exploding in size, by the second. Then he realized what was happening. As the raging winds struck the whirlwind, their power was drawn into its vortex. Its swirl expanded until it became so large and powerful that Scodo feared it would consume him and Zauberyungi and Sesha.

Horrified, Scodo stood tensed, bracing for the worst. But as Sesha’s circular storm expanded across the plain, an amazing thing happened. Just like a hurricane, a center of calm opened up inside. The eye of this storm moved back and surrounded the three travelers. Suddenly, there was no wind at all. Outside, in every direction they looked, the new storm blew round and round. But inside, at the center, tranquility reigned. Scodo looked back at Sesha.

“Unhitch Zauberyungi,” she cried out, firmly and confidently. Scodo hesitated, but Sesha shouted again and he scrambled to obey.

Just as Zauberyungi was released and moved to the side, the eye of the storm passed by and the wind welled up again, this time from behind. The storm was moving. Now the wind was blowing at their backs. Unprepared for this new surge, Scodo and Zauberyungi were swept into the air. There was no way to stop. As they dropped to the ground, they did their best to recover their feet and run with the storm. The old mule and the scorpion man bounced across the ground and back into the air until, finally, they lay on the ground, the air still and the storm behind them.

Meanwhile, the wagon, freed of Zauberyungi and Scodo, was thrust down the road at a fantastic rate, Sesha gripping the seat as the wagon bounced and rolled far from the road and across the sandy plain. When the wind finally passed and the wagon stopped, Sesha looked back at Scodo and the mule, a good distance behind.

She waved with both arms, trying to get their attention as they looked at one another, dazed by the dramatic events. “Quit your dallying,” she teased. “The pirates are waiting!”

Back on the road, Scodo turned to Sesha with a look of wonderment. “Do you understand what happened?” he asked.

Sesha looked down, not sure what to say.

“You must understand that the wind may not have been a storm,” she began, carefully choosing her words. “There are windstorms in the desert but not like that one. I suspect it was the work of a wizard.”

“A wizard? How can you know?” Again, with patience and calm, Scodo waited as Sesha considered her words.

“Only a great wizard can move the skies into a raging force. There are only two wizards who could have done this, and one of them is on our side. I believe our journey is being opposed by Zindown.”

A chill raced through Scodo’s body. Zindown was a legend, both for his evil and his power. He asked the question at the front of his mind.

“But what was that noise? And why did the wind suddenly change?”

Sesha was quiet for a long time, but Scodo waited.