Three days alone in a wagon with no one to talk to but Tillis sent Tobas into a deep depression. His luck was obviously still bad, after all, he told himself; he should never have stolen that boat, as that wicked deed had probably cursed him. He should have stayed in the Free Lands, waited until he could board a vessel honestly, or even have walked to Ethshar.
And once in Ethshar, he should have known better than to fall asleep in the street. That carelessness might be the true font of his misfortune. If he had stayed awake, he would not now be on his way to be killed by a man-eating dragon somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Looking out past the edge of the canvas as the wagon jolted along, he wondered why anyone would live in country like this, rocky and steep, but after a time, he realized that almost no one did. The caravan passed no villages and few homes. Dwomor, if this was the only way to reach it, must be unbearably isolated.
For a bad moment, he wondered whether any dragon really existed. Perhaps they were on their way to be sold as slaves in some barbarian realm, the story of the dragon being merely an explanation to cover their failure to return. Perhaps they would be sacrificed to demons. Perhaps they would be cooked and eaten.
Tillis babbled on maddeningly about how strange and beautiful the countryside was; Tobas did his best to ignore him.
The first night they reached an inn in the forested hills just as dusk was beginning to fade. There they received the best food Tobas had eaten since Roggit had died; he eagerly wolfed down everything put before him, then fell pleasantly asleep in a corner before the evening was well begun.
The next morning he awoke stiff and sore and foul-tempered and spoke to no one at breakfast. He refused to help with preparations for the next leg of the journey.
Only when he climbed aboard the second wagon, as directed, did he realize he was being put in with Tillis again. He turned to protest, but it was too late; the caravan master had given the mules the signal, and the wagon was moving.
The second night they were out of the thickest part of the forest and well into the lightly treed foothills; the inn was rougher, and the food less appealing. This time Tobas stayed awake, but contributed little to the after-dinner conversation, as it seemed to be made up almost entirely of boasting about prior exploits.
Tobas did not consider any of his prior exploits anything to boast about. He could not even resort to family, as Tillis did, since his ancestors had all been quiet farmers save for his father, and bragging about a pirate captain among Ethsharites did not seem a wise thing to do.
In the morning he tried to put himself in a different wagon, the fourth; its previous occupants, seeing him there, shrugged and boarded the second.
A moment later Tillis climbed into the fourth wagon. Tobas closed his eyes and pretended Tillis wasn’t there.
At times during the long day it almost worked.
The third inn was a ramshackle structure clinging to a rocky mountainside, but included an enthusiastic staff that made up for the physical shortcomings. Tobas took a particular interest in one of the proprietor’s daughters, a dark-haired beauty who appeared to be roughly his own age, but she was fascinated with Peren’s strange coloring and laughingly brushed aside Tobas’ tentative advances in order to devote herself to the albino.
Tobas shrugged off his disappointment; he was used to it. His successes with women had been few and far between.
But then, he was still young, he told himself.
For the last day he finally managed to pair himself with someone other than Tillis; he waited until the young Ethsharite had boarded the fourth wagon, then jumped into the fifth.
He found himself sharing the vehicle with Arnen and one of the other scoundrels, Korl Korl’s son. They stared at him for a long moment when he climbed in; then Arnen drew one of his knives, a long, narrow dagger, and began cleaning his nails with it. Korl simply leaned back against the side of the wagon and stared.
The entire morning passed without any of the three saying a word. Early in the afternoon, however, Korl whispered something to Arnen, who smiled nastily in return.
That was the full extent of conversation in the wagon that day, and Tobas quickly found himself wishing he’d stayed with Tillis.
Late in the afternoon the wagons pulled to a halt. Tobas had dozed off, despite the bumping; he woke with a start; sat up, and peered out the end of the wagon, wondering why they were stopping when day was still bright.
He realized why quickly enough; this was not another inn, but a castle, set in the middle of a small plateau.
This, obviously, was Dwomor Keep, the castle he had come to save from a dragon.
He wondered why anyone would want to bother. If he had lived in such a dismal place and had found it to be threatened by a monster, he would simply have left.
Dwomor Keep was a large, sprawling structure, obviously built piecemeal over a period of centuries; the various towers, turrets, and wings had only one unifying feature, that being that they were all in a sad state of disrepair. The town this miserable fortress guarded was a pitiful huddle of no more than a dozen sagging cottages, though a few scattered farmsteads could be seen here and there on the surrounding plateau; the entire area stank of manure. Any claim to be the rightful capital of Old Ethshar was obviously an unfounded boast. Either that, or the ruins of the capital had been completely buried centuries ago, and this place built on top.
He leaned out for a moment, gazing about at the surrounding countryside.
The castle stood at the approximate center of a more or less level area perhaps half a league in diameter; to the west, in the direction of the setting sun, Tobas could see nothing beyond, as if the World simply ended at the edge of the plateau. In every other direction, however, hills piled up around the little plain, and to much of the north and east mountains rose beyond the hills.
Looking back toward the castle once more, Tobas saw that the wagons had paused to allow a portcullis to be opened; when that had been done, the caravan proceeded on into the castle courtyard, where he remained unimpressed.
The courtyard was unpaved, simply an expanse of bare dirt that undoubtedly turned to a sea of mud whenever rain came; the castle structures around it were even more ramshackle and mismatched than the portions visible from the outside. The exterior, after all, had to be built of stone in order to be defensible, while the stables, mews, sheds, and other added interior features could be — and were — built of a variety of woods, bricks, and what appeared to be mud and straw.
What, he wondered, did Tillis make of this brave castle? It hardly lived up to the storytellers’ images.
The wagons came to a final halt, and the recruiter came marching back along the line, shouting, “All out! We’re here!”
Tobas clambered out of the wagon and dropped to the ground. He glanced at the gate they had entered through and noticed that the portcullis was being cranked back down; presumably the locals did not want any of their hired dragon slayers to escape.
And having thought of the locals, he noticed that there were certainly plenty of them around. He estimated thirty or forty people, mostly women and old men, were standing about the courtyard, studying the new arrivals.
He resisted the temptation to draw his athame and hidden vial of brimstone and set someone’s clothes on fire. The gesture would be startling, impressive, and probably very satisfying, but it might make too many enemies. Besides, he didn’t want to impress anyone; if he did, they might actually expect him to kill their ravening monster, wherever it was.
He wasn’t sure just what he wanted to do or where he wanted to be, but he was sure he didn’t want to tackle a dragon. Any fantasies he might have had back in Ethshar, brought on by the mention of a thousand pieces of gold, had been jounced out of him in the course of the long and uncomfortable journey from the city to Dwomor.