It was enough to make a man wish he were on better terms with his gods.
Dru felt a tug on his tunic. He looked down into the goblin's smiling face.
"Good sir not worry. Sheemzher take good care, good people. Sheemzher knows Greypeaks, Dekanter. Sheemzher born Dekanter. Sheemzher marry Ghistpok daughter."
7
3 Eleint, the Year of the Banner (1368 DR) The Greypeak Mountains
If the Weathercote Wood had been an odd, unpleasant place for a city-bred man named Tiep, then the interior of the Greypeak mountains was ten times worse. Two days out from Lady Mantis's grove, Tiep found himself wishing that the bug lady had cast her spells on him rather than Galimer. The life of a mindless statue couldn't be worse than following a dog-faced goblin on the back route to Dekanter.
At least the bug lady had kept her word about their gear. Their six horses, saddled and packed with their gear and a generous supply of food, had been waiting late yesterday when Sheemzher led them out of Weathercote-not at the little wooden bridge where they'd entered it, but at another spot, farther east of Parnast. A pair of ratty goblins had been waiting with the horses. Both had run off the moment they spotted company coming.
Tiep suspected magic and he'd refused to climb into Hopper's saddle until Dru and Rozt'a had each applied their specialist's eye to horseflesh and gear. They assured him than nothing had been tampered with. If Tiep couldn't trust his foster-parents, then there wasn't anyone he could trust. He'd lived without trust when he was younger and had no nostalgia for old times. He'd considered splitting while he could still find his way back to the village last night, when Dru was studying his spells and everyone else was asleep.
Manya's kin would give him a roof and meals until he could put something else together. However, abandoning the quest to free Galimer from the bug lady was too craven for his gut to tolerate. For Galimer's sake, Tiep swore an oath to Tymora. He'd follow the dog-faced goblin to Dekanter, even if it got him killed along the way.
He half-expected death with every step Hopper took.
There were two kinds of traveling in the Greypeaks: treacherous and weird. The rocky trails were the treacherous part. Little more than glorified ledges, the trails weren't much wider than a horse's rump. They left Tiep riding with one stirrup banging into the mountain and the other hanging out over a whole lot of nothing. Worse, the trails weren't clear. Say what you would about the Zhentarim, if they claimed a trade route, they sent crews out to keep it clear of rock falls and water cracks. Here in the Greypeaks, when Hopper planted a hoof, there was no telling whether the ground would slip or stay firm beneath it. The horse was lathered from nerves, and so was Tiep.
Still, he'd rather be up on the ledges than down in the valleys. The valleys were the weirdest part of their traveling. Tiep had never set foot in anything like the Greypeak valleys. Neither had Dru or Rozt'a, nor any of their horses. The goblin had a name for the place, in his own language, of course. The word sounded like a cat getting sick; a human tongue couldn't hope to pronounce it. The best Druhallen, who knew the name of almost everything under the sun, could call it was bog and forest.
Bog because, once they started seeing the valleys for what they really were, they could see that the Greypeaks were a huge bowl, ringed with mountains and part-way filled with water. The water had rotted some of the inner mountains, turning them into a mare's nest of broken spires and spines. Where the water should have become a lake there appeared to be solid ground. Solid, that was, until Hopper set his hooves on it, then trees as tall as ten men standing together started quaking. The floating forest swayed like reeds in the wind when six horses moved through it.
Tiep had thought nothing could be more sick-in-the-gut scary than the shifty ground-until the dog-faced goblin announced that there were giant leeches under the bog. The dragons that Sheemzher said dwelt in the unbroken clouds sounded better than giant leeches. He heaved a sigh of relief when the goblin led them onto the rocks again.
They climbed in earnest after that, crossing the spine of a dead mountain in the middle of the bog. They'd cleared the crest and were on their way down to the bog again when Cardinal-the gelding Galimer usually rode-lost his footing. In less time than it took to scream, the chestnut had fallen into a dry ravine. Bones stuck out of his forelegs. With a safety rope tied between his waist and his horse, Druhallen scrambled down and put the animal out of its misery.
"Helm's mercy," Rozt'a said, with one hand on the rope and the other on Dru's horse. "Be grateful Cardinal carried our gear and not Galimer."
The fall hadn't hurt the blankets and bean sacks they divvied up among the survivors, and Tiep didn't object when Rozt'a decreed that they'd all walk, leading the horses, from there on. Two feet were steadier than four, even in the bog.
Dru and Rozt'a each led two horses, Tiep led Hopper, and the goblin took the point alone. They were in the bog, not all that far from the ravine where they'd left Cardinal, when they heard the hooting and hollering of scavengers. Tiep told himself he wasn't going to look back over his shoulder once they were back on stone and above the quaking tree-tops, but Dru called a halt and he succumbed.
Big mistake. They had clear sight on the ravine and poor Cardinal. The scavengers were more than beasts, less than men. They'd butchered the horse on the spot and were eating him raw. Tiep wanted to say that the scavengers were Sheemzher's kin but the truth was that though the size was about right, the scavengers were uglier than any goblin and odd. Most of them were gray, like the mountains, rather than red-orange like Sheemzher. Some of them had faces that thrust out like a bear or weasel's. One had a long furry tail, another, a ratty one, and one had what looked to be an extra arm growing out of its left shoulder. That extra arm didn't have the joints an arm should have, but whipped about like a serpent with a hand-shaped head.
"What are they?" Rozt'a demanded before Tiep could loosen his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Her words dashed Tiep's hope that his eyes were deceiving him.
She'd directed her question at Druhallen, but the goblin intercepted it with, "Demons!"
Sheemzher immediately pulled his hat low over his eyes, as if what he couldn't see couldn't see him either. He scampered ahead to the trail's next bend where he tried to hide behind a rock that was too small by half. "Hurry! Hurry!" he pleaded.
Rozt'a made her way to the black mare, Ebony, and the bow she kept lashed to the mare's saddle. "I'm going to put a little fear into those beasts, whatever they are," she muttered.
"Let it rest," Druhallen told her, kindly but firmly. "He's meat now, nothing more, and you don't have arrows to waste."
"They're not natural creatures, Dru. They shouldn't be tolerated."
Dru had removed the ring he used to ken strangers and held it up to his eye. He squinted through the opening.
"Who's to say what's natural and what's not?" he asked cryptically when he'd finished his examination and returned the ring to his finger.
Tiep would have given much to ask Dru what he'd meant by that remark, but there were four horses between him and the wizard. They paid their final respects to Cardinal and headed toward Sheemzher.
It was rock and bog, bog and rock after that. Somewhere above the thick, gray clouds, morning became afternoon. The air heated up, the light breeze died, and breathing got difficult, especially on the bogs. Then it started to rain: a fine, steady rain that threatened to last all day and most of the night, too. Sheemzher's hat looked good enough to steal as Tiep's soaked hair stuck to his face and streams of water ran beneath his clothes to his boots. In no time at all, he had blisters like mushrooms on his heels and toes.