Part IV: Into the North
With the rising dawn, the four companions set out to the east. Cañar and Alisa said that by following the ocean for some days they could find their way back to their homelands. The party traveled in sight of the waves, keeping the sea to their left as they marched.
Near the edge of civilized, or formerly civilized, lands, they passed through one of the old monasteries and decided to stop for a rest. Thob inspected the temple, wondering if there were any books left lying around, as seemed common in these places. There was a book, in fact, but there was also something much more interesting.
A slab of solid silver, glittering on a bejeweled pedestal. The thing was too heavy to hold comfortably, but Thob moved it into the light and read the ancient runes cut into its surface—cut with a care far beyond any dwarfcraft:
He didn’t know what it meant, nor did anyone else; but someone obviously thought it was worth remembering, enough to carve it in silver. He couldn’t take the slab with him, but he tried to memorize the words—he could copy them down and keep them in the library.
As they traveled they talked, and Thob got to know a bit more about his companions.
Strodno he already knew a little, but she began to open up a bit more with him, sharing her worldview. It wasn’t a pleasant one: she had a bitter and aggressive nature, finding excitement only in fighting. He figured being locked in a tower for six hundred years might do that to someone. At least it seemed to make her brave in battle.
Alisa, the human, struck Thob as a fairly brash but trusting sort. Most of the time, though, he was angry with someone or something. He blamed this on getting into arguments with the others, which he seemed to do with some frequency.
“Have you tried… not arguing so much?”
“
I don’t argue with them,” he said. “They argue with
me.”
The elf, Cañar, seemed to like arguing, which no doubt irritated Alisa. She wasn’t as temperamental as the others, though she warned Thob away from her “bad side” (probably the side most easily in range of her whip). Though generally scornful of material things, she had a soft spot for certain moving pieces of art.
The next morning they came to the edge of a wood, all snow-covered; Thob felt ill at ease as they entered, though.
Soon enough he saw why: a pair of wrens perched in a tree nearby—wrens big enough to swallow a dwarf whole! What was more, although the moved about, watching the ground for something (or someone) to eat, they didn’t seem exactly… alive.
Undead dwarves, elves, and humans were one thing. Undead giant birds? Thob didn’t think his little team were up to it. They slipped out of the forest and went the long way round.
Nearby the earth was cleft by a great river, around forty dwarf-spans wide, which would have blocked their way had it not been completely frozen over.
Around midday they entered a more salubrious forest, free, as far as Thob could tell, from any large fowl, living or dead. By evening the forest was giving way to patches of desert, stretches of rock fields and badlands interspersed with green dales. He could see the ocean to the north, and beyond, just on the horizon, the specter of distant land:
They camped in the desert near a frozen stream. In the morning, looking around the campsite, Thob saw they had not been alone that night:
He guessed the beast hadn’t wished to tangle with four armed adventurers, even if they were sleeping.
All that day they traveled through a dense forested country. Cañar called it the “Foggy Jungles,” though it wasn’t particularly foggy that Thob could see.
Around noon on the following day the party caught a glimpse of something odd: the distant treeline was broken by some taller-than-usual trees. Cañar and Alisa said they were nearing the old elven realm.
In about an hour they had reached the first stand of great trees. Thob gazed in wonder at their huge trunks and vast spreading canopies, far taller and broader than any tree he had seen before.
The elves grew them and lived in the branches, said Cañar. But there were no elves to be seen around here: only a few dark ravens croaked among the mighty trees.
Ahead they approached another of these “forest retreats,” as the elven settlements were apparently called. Here, however, they were met not with a great tree but a tall, crude tower of stone, surrounded by mounds and trenches of earth:
“Goblin earthworks,” said Strodno, “and watchtowers. These are goblin lands?”
“They are now,” said Cañar. “Have been for a long time: not many remember the old days except the elves.”
They passed the tower and entered the heart of the retreat. Here Thob was startled to see, not great trees, but some flora he knew very well: enormous tower-cap mushrooms, bigger than any he’d seen before, and growing on the surface!
More mushrooms towered over the trees to the south. Some of these had stores of nuts and berries in them; Cañar said they’d make good provisions, filling but easy to carry.
There were several elves sitting on the caps of the great mushrooms. They had the same dark skin and yellow hair as Cañar—these must be her people, Thob guessed. He spoke to one of them:
“Greetings, elf! I am Thob ‘the Mysterious’.”
“Ah… hello… whatever you are,” said the elf. “My name’s Fewetha.”
“Who’s in charge around here?”
Fewetha shook his head. “There’s nothing organized around here,” he said. “In fact there’s nothing organized for many miles around—we just live off the forest. You might try Lushnights, to the north: if anything’s still standing in the Jungle, it’ll be up there.”
There was another large retreat close to the south, so Thob decided to check it out before heading north. As they entered they passed through orderly rows of some odd, branching, spine-covered trees—“cactus,” Alisa called them:
Among the flowering cactus Thob saw a large building, all in ruins; it was the first real building he’d seen in these lands. Judging by the size and design it looked like a temple, but unlike the dwarf and human temples he’d seen it was made all of wood:
The place was all in ruins, of course, but some fine statues still stood. A particularly pleasing piece caught Thob’s eye—the image of a goblin priest (again), but made of pure spessartine gemstone:
Alisa walked up to Thob’s side. “Hmm,” he said, observing the statue. “Doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Really? I think it’s a fine work.”
“Who asked you!?” Alisa said, suddenly angry.
“What?” said Thob. “I was just… replying to you!”
“Well, I was just… stating my mind! You don’t have to jump down my throat like that! Gods…” The tall man walked away, grumbling, leaving Thob confused.
A short ways off was another enormous tower-cap, this one far bigger than the others; it had many smaller stems branching from the main one, a pattern of growth Thob had never seen before in the caverns. This, Cañar told him, was a “Home Tree”—sort of an elven palace, where the important elves used to live.
There wasn’t much here now, except a pile of old books. Most of them were philosophical in nature, treatises on happiness and individuality written by an ancient elven sage, Olava Styleprinces:
The only thing living in the Home Tree now was a solitary crow man. Thob asked him how things had been:
“So, pretty slow?”
“Very. Not much happens here, since the elves were driven out.”
“Is there anyone still here?”
“You might try the tavern, or the market.”
The “tavern” turned out to be a patch of bare dirt under the caps of a mushroom grove.
There were a handful of tables and chairs clumped at one end, and a chest with some weird instruments in it—but no beer, no barrels, not even any cups! “Didn’t elves drink?” Thob asked.
“Just fresh streamwater,” said Cañar. “Not likely to find any booze here.”
The market was similar, an open space among a cluster of tower-caps; but there were people here, quite a few actually—elves, crow men, and goblins, milling about among bins of trade goods.
From the looks of it, all they were selling was meat. “Is that all the elves trade? Meat?”
“Funny thing is,” said Cañar, “elves don’t even eat meat. Well, not usually. This stuff comes from the goblins.”
A few of the elves, in between trying to sell him some giant olm tripe, managed to tell him some about the area and recent events. Thob learned that some people—children, in fact—had been kidnapped from their homes by goblin agents:
“That’s terrible!” he said. “What did they want him for? Ransom?”
The elf looked at him quizzically. “It’s what goblins do,” he said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“There aren’t too many goblins where I come from. Strodno there’s one of the few I’ve met.”
“Well,” said the elf, “if you stay in these parts long you’ll meet goblins enough. Down here, in the forest, there’s not so many—but if I were you I’d stay out of the cities. They aren’t known for their hospitality.”
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Topic: Thob Goes to the Surface (Read 62251 times)