He tried to stay on his feet, but failed miserably. A smoking ball, he tumbled down the slope, bouncing off saplings and crashing through bushes in a way that would have broken the bones of almost any being save a kender or a dwarf. It was a good thing that he'd put out the fire on his clothes in the house, or he might have left a trail of burning sparks enough to start a fire even in the damp late-winter woods.
A squat, dark shape sprawled ahead: a stone hut that he remembered seeing on his way toward the house. Now he saw that it had a light roof of twigs and strips of canvas, and he was going to hit that roof.
He struck like a hailstone, crashing through the roof. Twigs and sod, strips of canvas and dead leaves rained down on him as if the whole forest had been upended, then flung down like a chamberpot from a high window.
Elderdrake rolled as he landed, which kept him from breaking any bones. He went on rolling, across patches of mud and through a puddle of rainwater, until he struck something hard, knocking all the breath out of himself.
What he'd struck was a small keg. It fell over and in its turn rolled, striking the wall hard enough to break open. Something grayish-white spattered everything inside the hut, including Elderdrake.
He lay still for a moment, knowing he ought to get up and run again, but also knowing that his legs wouldn't carry him more than a few steps unless he first won his breath back.
The pursuit Elderdrake had feared did not come. Probably the men were too busy keeping their house from burning down to worry about chasing kender, After a while, he was able to sit up.
As he did, he saw that the puddle had settled, until he could see a face in it. It took a moment before he could recognize it as his own face-the kender ears were the big clue-and then he wanted to shout all over again. This time it would have been a shout of joy.
His face was all patches and smears of the same revolting gray-white that the ghostriders wore on their faces and hands. He looked as though some particularly gruesome fungus was eating away at his skin, and he smelled like a mixture of rancid weasel fat and aged pine tar.
He looked around for something in which to carry a sample of the ghost paint back to Tirabot Manor. After a moment, he decided to settle for what was on his skin-which was beginning to itch-and a barrel stave dripping with the muck. He couldn't even think of tasting it without his stomach twitching.
But if he could get a sample back to the manor, Serafina could study it. She was a better herbalist than most, which meant that she could learn what had gone into somebody else's medicine as well as making up her own. Although if she ever made up anything as foul as this, Elderdrake wasn't going to touch it, even if she said it was an elixir of immortality!
Shouts up the hill reminded Elderdrake that he had better be on his way, even if the forest was close. He scrambled up the wall, flung himself through the hole in the roof, and dropped to the ground.
"There he goes!" someone shrieked.
Several more someones had found bows. Elderdrake heard the twang of bowstrings and the whistle of arrows. Then he heard a series of blistering oaths, which stopped the archery as abruptly as if the archers had all been strangled with their own bowstrings.
Kender curiosity made Elderdrake halt and look back, not even waiting for a convenient tree. A small round figure sat on a small horse or perhaps a large pony. It held a staff out at arm's length, one end on the ground, the other sloping toward Elderdrake.
The kender ran. As fast as he ran, the fire bursting from the head of the staff would have overtaken him if it had been aimed properly. Instead, it seared through the base of a fir tree, second growth but stout and tall for all that. The tree wavered, swayed, then toppled.
It fell directly atop the hut. Whatever energies had gone into the spell, they multiplied the impact of the tree tenfold. The hut disintegrated. It also burst into flames.
No, it erupted into flames. The spell had multiplied tenfold the heat in the ghost paint and everything else in the hut. A fireball as tall as the tree had been sprouted where the hut had stood, like a hideous, eye-searing mushroom.
And the sound!
Once, on his first journey, Elderdrake had found himself hiding in a ceremonial drum during a particularly long ceremony. He did not care to remember the details even now, and had told them only to his old friend Imsaffor Whistletrot. But he had been deaf for a week after his hours in the drum.
This eruption of flame gave the loudest sound that he had heard since he was in that drum. It also sent out a wave of air like a charging herd of oxen, to fling him head over heels again. He landed rolling, but missed hitting any trees before a thornbush stopped him.
This time Horimpsot Elderdrake ignored the fact that he was breathless, that his clothes were in ruins, and that he had aches in his legs, his head, his stomach, and other places that respectable kender were delicate about mentioning. He lurched to his feet, put his left foot in front of his right root, and kept on doing this, faster and faster, until he was running.
Behind him he thought he heard a few faint shouts, or perhaps screams, over the crackle of the flames.
Gildas Aurhinius stood arm in arm with Lady Eskaia on the Drapers' Quay in Vuinlod. The sea breeze made the torches burning all along it flicker, but their yellowish light let even Aurhinius's dimming vision see clearly what lay before him.
The heavy trader Long Sulla was tied up at the quay, and from her upper deck a broad gangplank angled down. To either side of the gangplank, sailors were hoisting nets full of stores and ship's gear.
Four abreast, the foot soldiers of Vuinlod were marching aboard. Or at least they were moving in that direction; Aurhinius found it hard to describe their progress as a march. Even allowing for their being heavily laden, he thought they could have done a little more to keep in step, for the good reputation of their town if nothing else.
Those heavy loads, however, were good arms and sound armor, and he had seen that the Vuinlodders knew how to use them. Also, the fighting this campaign might see was not likely to require keeping fine formations or shifting from one to another at a run. It was most likely to be work aboard ship or from boats, and he trusted the Vuinlodders more in that kind of fighting than he would have trusted most of the Istarans he had led in his last campaign as a leader in the Mighty City's host.
"They may look like a mob, but I will be proud to lead them into battle," he said.
He felt his wife flinch. There, he thought. I did not have to think twice before calling her my wife. In a year or so, I will not think of her otherwise. Old dogs can learn new tricks, if they have a good teacher, and Eskaia is the best. Look at her children.
"I did not mean that I was going to put myself at their head every day or even in every fight," Aurhinius went on. "I am too old and fat to be a hero when one is not needed.
"Of course," he added, "being old and fat also means that I cannot run away So I will have to bring up the rear in a desperate retreat, and let the younger men live to fight another day."
This time Eskaia did not flinch. She merely nodded. "Very well," she said. "But I will lead the younger men back to find your body when the battle is done."
Aurhinius did not quite sigh. His wife seemed determined to sail on this quest.
"I could hope you would not be anywhere near the battlefield," he said.
"I could hope that this matter was settled," she replied. "I must sail as far as Istar, at least."
"We are not going to Istar. Some who sail with us would not be safe that close to the city. Nor would the Istarans feel safe with some of us in their waters or even at their waterfront."
"I meant," she said, "as close as the fleet goes to Istar, which is Karthay."