Raven shrugged. “These names mean naught to me.”
“Frodo’s from a famous story about a war against an evil magician-a lot like Shadow, from your description.”
“But a mere story?”
Reluctantly, Pel nodded. “But Hitler was real,” he said.
“And was this Hitler assassinated, as you propose?”
“No,” Pel admitted.
Raven said nothing, but his expression was plain for Pel to read. Raven clearly thought both Pel’s examples were silly.
And Pel had to admit that he had a point; this was real life, not Tolkien’s Middle Earth-but then, this wasn’t Earth at all, and the only experiences Pel had ever had with other worlds had been in books and movies, and in all of those, a few brave and determined people could destroy the all-powerful enemy and save the world.
In the real world, nobody had ever assassinated Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon, but how hard had anyone tried? And if he remembered his history right, someone had assassinated Caligula, and who knew how many other tyrants had been destroyed before they had reached Hitler’s level?
Besides, what else was Pel supposed to do?
“Well, what alternative are you offering us?” he demanded. “Just how do you propose to defeat Shadow and send us home?”
“In truth,” Raven said, “I know not. I would have us find shelter, that we might take what time we need in gathering our forces, that we might await whatever opportunity the Goddess might send-for surely, She will not allow Shadow to rule forever, in despite of Her.”
“I don’t believe in your Goddess,” Pel answered. “We have a saying in my world that God helps those who help themselves; those who simply have faith and wait usually wait forever, if you ask me. And if someone does save them, it’s other people who weren’t waiting, not God-or your Goddess, either.”
Pel didn’t want to wait, sitting around the way he had at Base One, with nothing to do but remember his dead wife and daughter, sinking in morose helplessness. He needed to do something. He had set a goal of getting home to Earth, and that was what he intended to do.
Besides, what did he have to lose? Nancy and Rachel were dead; if he got himself killed, as well, so what?
“Then you insist on going on?” Raven asked.
“That’s right,” Pel said.
Chapter Seventeen
“If this Shadow’s so tough with its magic,” Wilkins asked, looking around at the scattered bones, “why hasn’t it spotted us and sent a bunch of its monsters after us?”
“It probably hasn’t noticed us yet,” Pel muttered unhappily, as he trudged on down the highway. He looked straight ahead, at the tree-lined highway, trying not to see the bones below or the clouds overhead.
“Well, why the hell not?” Wilkins demanded, stopping in his tracks. “It noticed these people!” He kicked at a skull fragment.
“We don’t know that,” Pel insisted, pausing reluctantly. “Maybe it was wild animals or bandits that killed them.”
“Bandits?” Wilkins picked up a thigh bone. “Something sucked the marrow out of this, Brown-what kind of bandits would do that?”
“Animals, then,” Pel said. “Come on, let’s keep moving; I don’t like it here. Whatever did this, it might come back.”
“I never heard of any animal that would do anything like this,” Sawyer said, joining the discussion.
“’Twas most likely Shadow’s beasts,” Raven said, leaning his bandaged left hand against a tree by the roadside. “This looks very much in their fashion.”
“Which is what I said in the first place,” Wilkins pointed out. “So why hasn’t Shadow sent the beasts after us?”
“It did, back at the ship,” Amy said, not very confidently.
“But not since then,” Wilkins argued.
Amy shrugged; she was obviously struggling to hold down her lunch. Her bouts of nausea had become far less frequent over the last few days, but she still had trouble when they came across something unpleasant.
Human bones scattered across the highway were definitely unpleasant. Pel had no idea how old these were, or how long they had actually been there, but he didn’t think they had been brought there from somewhere else; it looked as if a small group of people had been killed and torn to pieces right there on the spot.
“Maybe they did something to attract attention,” Pel suggested. “Used magic, maybe.”
“Brown, we’ve been using magic,” Wilkins shouted. “Back at the ruin that twit Taillefer was bloody flying, and why didn’t that attract Shadow?”
“I don’t know,” Pel said. “Maybe we were just lucky that time.” He frowned.
“We’ve been using magic over and over again, Brown,” Wilkins insisted. “Our tame wizard here’s lit us a fire with his fingers every night.”
“We’d no need, had we funds to pay an inn, or had Shadow not done away with all laws of hospitality,” Valadrakul pointed out. “But as it is, we’ve no tinderbox, no other way to make fire. Would you eat your food raw, and sleep unwarmed?”
“It’s better than getting ripped apart, like whoever these people were,” Marks snapped.
“But we haven’t been,” Wilkins said. “And I want to know why.”
Raven said, “Perhaps the Goddess protects us.”
“Shit,” Wilkins replied.
Pel didn’t say anything more; he just turned and marched onward.
For five days now they had been off the Starlinshire Downs and onto flat country that Raven assured them was a coastal plain; they had marched on across Shadow’s countryside, passing through towns and villages without stopping, since they had no more coins to spend. No one spoke to them; children, and sometimes adults, ran and hid at the sight of strangers. Even those who spotted them stealing food never called out or protested; they turned away, or simply watched, without intervening.
Most of the towns had had gibbets in the square, and most of those gibbets had been in use, with corpses of varying age. Some had been fresh, as if the travelers had only just missed the execution; others had been little more than bone and blackened skin. Most were men; some were women; and in one village four children had dangled there, naked and eviscerated-three girls and a boy, none older than twelve.
Pel no longer argued that Shadow might just be the victim of hostile propaganda.
The travelers had grown quieter, gloomier, and more nervous with each new atrocity, and the weather had not helped any; the bright sunlight and greenery of Castle Regisvert were only a memory, and they had been walking beneath a heavy overcast since shortly after that first town, where they had wasted Susan’s handful of coins at the inn.
Pel almost wished it would rain and get it over with, but it didn’t; the clouds hung oppressive and unmoving overhead, growing steadily thicker and darker, but never releasing so much as a drop of rain. Wind rustled ominously in the leaves, but at ground level the air was still and thick and heavy, and smelled of mold.
Pel waited for a moment longer, but Wilkins seemed to have said his piece.
“Come on,” Pel said. He started walking. Raven straightened up and joined him; the others followed.
“You know what it is,” Wilkins said. “We’re walking into a trap, that’s what it is. Shadow wants us to come to its fortress and save it the trouble of hunting us down. If we turned back, we’d probably have the monsters after us in a minute.”
Pel turned to argue, and saw Susan and Prossie staring at Wilkins intently as they walked; they obviously thought the soldier was onto something.