The ogres moved on, weapons and nets ready. Argaad held his breath as the circle of his warriors narrowed to a mere two dozen yards, then one dozen. The bushes remained motionless.
The ogres stopped when they were close enough for their spearpoints to reach the middle of the ring. They jabbed their weapons into the bushes, probing the spot where the rustling had stopped so suddenly. Nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Argaad called anxiously. “They should be right there!”
The ogres prodded the scrub with spears, hacked with swords and axes, and beat the bushes with cudgels. They trampled the brambles flat in some places, pulled their knotted roots from the ground in others. The kender, however, were gone.
“What witchcraft’s at work here?” Tragor grumbled, baffled.
“Torches!” ordered the Black-Gazer, his face creased with rage. “Burn them out!”
A pair of ogres pushed past the rest, wading out of the bushes, then ran toward the fiery ruins of Myrtledew. The other brutes edged outward again, toward the edges of the thicket, always watching for some sign of the vanished kender. Before long the runners returned, each bearing a pair of burning firebrands. They looked to Kurthak, ignoring Argaad altogether. Glowering furiously, the warlord waved them on toward the bushes.
The shrubs’ dry leaves and branches caught fire quickly, and the flames spread. The ogres waited all around the bushes, waiting and watching for the kender to flee the blaze. Within minutes the whole thicket was aflame, curling and blackening as the fire raged higher. And still there was no sign of the kender. The ogres watched the conflagration, gaping in confusion.
“You lost them!” Kurthak snapped at Argaad, who flinched beneath the lash of his words.
“I don’t understand,” the snaggletoothed warrior protested. “They couldn’t have escaped the fire. How could they enter the bushes without leaving? You saw them go in there, my lord!”
Slowly, Tragor moved to stand behind Argaad.
Kurthak nodded slowly, pondering. “Yes, I did,” he agreed.
“My lord,” Argaad began. “I didn’t-”
With a suddenness that startled even Kurthak, Tragor lifted his heavy, two-handed sword high above his head, then slammed it down on the cowering warrior from behind. The blade hacked through Argaad’s helmet, splitting his skull in half. The snaggletoothed warrior stood rigid for a moment; then Tragor jerked his sword free, and Argaad crumpled in a bloody heap.
Kurthak looked down at the corpse, then shrugged. “Come,” he bade, and motioned for Tragor to follow. “There is nothing left for us here.”
They left the thicket to burn and Argaad’s body to draw crows.
Argaad was not the only warrior to lose his prisoners inexplicably. When the ogres regrouped outside the smoldering ruins of Myrtledew, no fewer than six officers came to Kurthak and reported, with trembling voices, that their captives had broken free, opening their shackles with concealed lockpicks, and fled. Some had made their way to the underbrush or the forest itself; others had ducked into the village’s larger buildings. In every case, just when the ogres were sure they had them trapped, the kender had vanished mysteriously. Every one of the penitent officers avowed that the disappearances were the result of some unknown magic. Kurthak, who had never heard of a kender sorcerer, scoffed at the notion.
“Fools,” he told Tragor as they struck out eastward from Myrtledew, toward their barren, rocky homeland. “The stupid lackwits let them escape.”
Tragor grunted noncommittally, his sheathed sword swinging on his back as he trudged through the woods beside Kurthak. “What will you do?” he asked.
Kurthak pondered, glancing back at the columns of ogres who followed him. Of the thousand warriors he had brought with him on this raid, he had lost perhaps a hundred, with a like number wounded. Except for Argaad, the officers who had failed him marched with the survivors. They took great care not to meet his coal-black stare as he glared at them.
“I am not sure yet,” he said, his brow beetling.
“They should die,” Tragor declared flatly. He smacked a leathery fist against his palm. “Lord Ruog would not look well on you if you let them live.”
Kurthak shrugged as if this meant nothing to him. Ruog, hetman of the greatest ogre horde ever to emerge from the wildlands of the Goodlund peninsula, was a lord who valued swift action on the part of his followers. Kurthak would have to report to him immediately, and Ruog would not be pleased to hear that the Black-Gazer’s war band had captured fewer than a hundred slaves. He would demand blood for the lost kender.
Still, Kurthak hesitated as he considered the possibilities. “I hear your words, Tragor,” he declared, pursing his lips in concentration. “I think, though, that I have a better idea.”
Kurthak the Black-Gazer scowled fiercely, his face glowing orange in the firelight. He stood upon a tall, jagged boulder, looking down at the six officers whose prisoners had escaped. All around him the ogres of his war band shifted and leaned closer, muttering to one another. The flames of great bonfires licked upward, as if seeking to ignite the starry sky.
Though they were fewer than three leagues from the Kenderwood, the land could not have been more different. The ground was parched and rocky, unsuitable for farming-or even herding-and great shelves of rock jutted from the barren hillsides. There was not a single tree to be seen, though clumps of razorleaf bushes clung stubbornly to the loose, sandy soil. Scorpions and snakes scuttled and slithered around them.
The officers who knelt before Kurthak were tightly bound, strong thongs of leather securing their arms and legs. Stripped of armor, helm, and shield, they kept their gaze resolutely on the ground before them. None met the warlord’s fierce, one-eyed glare, though at times they did twist and crane to look over their shoulders. Tragor paced behind them, moving from one end of the row to the other. His hands twisted eagerly about the hilt of his sword.
“You have failed me,” Kurthak stated. “I do not brook failure.”
“But,” protested one of the officers, a fat ogre named Prakun, “my lord-”
“Silence!” thundered Kurthak. “There can be no excuses!”
Tragor moved quickly. His two-handed blade flashed in the firelight, cleaving flesh and bone. The ogre to Prakun’s right fell heavily against the fat officer, dark blood welling from the stump of its neck. Its head rolled in the dust, its eyes staring sightlessly at the pale moon.
Prakun cried out in terror, shoving the corpse away from him. A sharp stench filled the air as the ground beneath his knees grew dark and damp.
“Lord Ruog will ask for your heads,” Kurthak continued, gesturing at the prize that lay pop-eyed before him. “I will give him what he wants.”
Tragor’s sword whistled through the air a second time. The ogre to Prakun’s left drew a sharp breath, but before it could cry out its head came free, flying forward to crack against Kurthak’s boulder and tumble to the ground. The new corpse stayed stubbornly upright for a moment, then swayed like a drunk and sagged to the ground. Prakun’s face was livid with fear, gleaming white in the firelight. The other officers hunched their shoulders, cowering, as Tragor continued to pace behind them. Blood dripped from the champion’s sword, making black stains on the stony ground.
“But,” Kurthak concluded, “I am not unmerciful.”
Again the sword flashed. Sensing what was coming, Prakun threw himself forward, landing face-first in the dirt. Tragor’s swing went wide, and the champion struggled to keep the force of the unexpectedly unhindered blow from pulling him off his feet. Prakun rolled back and forth, blubbering pitifully, but could not otherwise move. Snarling, Tragor stepped forward and brought his heel down hard on the small of the weeping ogre’s back. Prakun screamed as his spine snapped, but his cries were short-lived. Tragor drove his sword downward. It took two mighty blows to cleave through Prakun’s thick neck.