“Put the blade away, Rogen,” Amron commanded. “And stop being so truculent, Vilmar. You snap at every question.”
“Every stupid question,” the huntsman growled.
“Valid questions,” Amron came back, his patience thinning. “We must be seven or eight miles from the city by now. And there are Agarathi in these woods, if you haven’t forgotten. How long is this going to take?”
“As long as it takes,” the hunter said. He turned and kept on going.
Another ten minutes passed, the skies above darkening once more with rainclouds black as tar. Every so often, Vilmar stopped to turn his eyes about, sniffing like a bloodhound, listening. His garb was wool and fur and leather, all black, scratched and stained, his face almost entirely lost within the great forest of a beard that had grown wildly from his cheeks and chin, and the thick shock of hair that summited his dome. Two dark eyes peered out from that great thicket, resting above a nose scarred and torn by a dozen savage beasts.
“We’re close,” he said, in that monotone growl of his. “Keep quiet, and stay behind me. These creatures can be shy.”
Another five minutes went by, then several more, and no sign of their quarry materialised. Amron was trying not to express his frustration, though it was difficult. Rogen had no such inclination to remain quiet.
“I should take the lead,” he said. “Your nose is failing you, old man.”
“Still young enough to put you on your backside, ranger.”
Rogen Strand snorted loudly, causing a few birds to burst from an old oak tree, flapping away noisily into the skies.
Vilmar could not have looked more furious. “How did you ever survive in the Icewilds? You’re loud as a broadback in must.”
“Silent as a shadow when I need to be. A challenge. We part here, you go left, I go right. Walk a hundred paces. First to creep up on the other wins.”
“Accepted,” Vilmar said at once, entirely forgetting their mission.
Rogen grinned - a rare thing indeed - taking that as some sort of victory. “No man of confidence is so easily goaded. You know I’m the better tracker, Vilmar. You’d not survive in the Icewilds for more than a week or two alone.”
Vilmar opened his cloak, closing fingers around a savage hunting blade, the steel black as night, misting shadow. He had a dozen other daggers and knives and little axes on his person, hanging from belts and straps that criss-crossed his chest and torso like a lattice. “I would open your neck for that, boy.”
“Boy? I’m forty-one winters worn, old man.”
“A boy to me. In age and skill both.” A growl rumbled from Vilmar’s heavy chest. “We’ll settle this one day. With blood. That I promise.”
“No, you will not,” Amron said firmly. He was tiring of them, tiring of this. When Rogen and Walter entered their little verbal sparring contests, at least there was some humour to it. With the ranger and the huntsman it was just bitterness and bile, a member-measuring contest that Amron could do without. Vilmar was like a bear, Whitebeard a wolf, two bloody animals growling and snapping and circling one another. He’d had all he could take of it. “If either of you makes another challenge to the other, I’ll have their tongue out. Might give me a bit of bloody peace.”
“Challenge?” Vilmar repeated, with growling laughter. “This child would be no challenge to me…”
“Enough!” Amron bellowed. “Gods damn it, Vilmar, enough!” His voice stirred another flock of birds from the branches, screaming and flapping as they fled. “I’m going to give you another ten minutes. If we haven’t made contact by then, then I will have no choice but to turn back. I’m starting to feel like it was a mistake coming out here.”
Vilmar scowled, lips forming no reply. His black eyes met the upturned amber gaze of Rogen, seething. Then he sniffed the air, turned, and marched on, wordless.
The hunt continued, the tension between them thickening. Amron kept a few paces behind the hunter, as he had for some time now, shambling along, limping on his right leg. He had taken no tonic for the pain today, and refused to touch the Frostblade lest he must. It wasn’t much helping his mood, he knew. The throbbing pain, the bickering fools, the fact that they had been going for hours, now, and were going further and further from the city of King’s Point with each passing minute.
I should never have come, a large part of Amron thought. Vilmar had not said it would be so far as this, and for all he knew, King’s Point might have come under attack during his absence.
“Five minutes, Vilmar,” he said. “And don’t bloody lie to me again.”
“Lie?”
“You said they were close. A short march through the woods. That we’d be there and back within a couple of hours.”
“Things change. That’s the hunt. Creatures move, Amron. And we are on the way back to the city now. I thought your sense of direction was better.”
“How can it be in these woods?” The canopy was so thick in places that they could barely see the sky, and even if they could, the sun had been blotted a long time ago by the clouds. A few hours from now dusk would be setting in. He needed to get back by then. “And what do you mean, on the way back? Are you giving up, then?”
“No. They were moving, like I told you. We have reached the last place I saw them, but they have continued on toward the coast since then. Toward you, Amron. They are drawn to your blade. To him.”
For once Rogen Whitebeard did not disagree. “He is not wrong, my lord. The grulok is not like other creatures. Where a drovara or fellwolf is driven by hunger and fear and rage, by the need to survive, the grulok is designed only to serve. They are emotionless, single-minded. If they have awoken, as Vilmar claims, they will look to serve Vandar, their maker. They will find and follow his champions.”
A dark smile appeared behind Vilmar’s black beard. “The ranger has some wisdom, it seems. Perhaps you are not so useless, after all.” His smile broadened, brown teeth in a black bush of beard. “Now come. They have passed through this way. Look here, at these trees. At this undergrowth. Does it not look trampled to you?”
Rogen nodded. Amron wasn’t seeing it himself. “It looks much the same as the rest.”
A disappointed sigh broke through Vilmar’s lips. “Have you forgotten everything I taught you? We used to hunt often when he was a boy,” he said to Whitebeard. “But since then, it has been knight this, and lord that, duels and courtly duty. You are no hunter, Amron Daecar.”
Amron rolled his eyes. There were few people who could make him feel like a boy again, and the burly old huntsman was one of them. “I still hunt, Vilmar. Though…mostly by horseback.” And not for a time now, he thought. Hunting has always been a peacetime fancy, and his days of peace were done.
“Aye. Boar hunts and bear hunts. Trifling creatures, and no threat. Leave Wolfsbane in the stables and go on foot, just you. That is a real hunt. Man against beast, alone in the wild.” Vilmar looked him up and down, shaking his head. “And without this armour. It makes you soft.”
Amron was weary of this. “I fight dragons, Vilmar. Without armour I would stand no chance. Not even Varin would have. So spare me your lectures. And find these bloody gruloks.”
The rain was starting to drizzle down again, pattering upon the leaves as they passed the elms and ash, the woods thickening, opening, thickening again, sometimes blotting out the fading light, sometimes breaking into clearings where little ponds and marshy bogs had formed. Knowing now that they were at least heading in the direction of the city, Amron did not carry through on his threat to give Vilmar only ten minutes. That said, he had to trust the huntsman was telling the truth. For all he knew, they were still going directly north, right into the heart of the Wandering Wood, mile after mile from the coast.
There were more rocks and boulders here, in these parts, and some larger stone formations as well that looked, from certain angles, to have been carved by an ancient folk. Once or twice Vilmar stopped them with a raised hand, then crept closer, sniffing the air in that way of his, ears twitching like a cat, to study this boulder or that. Each time he would shake his head and return to them. “Sometimes it can be very hard to tell. And the light…it is fading.”
A short while later, they came upon a thatched cabin, its roof falling through, one of its wooden walls gone to rot. With the rains falling more forcefully, they took cover for a few moments, sharing food from Whitebeard’s pack, drinking from their skins. “This has been harder than I thought,” Vilmar confessed to them. “These creatures are elusive, big as they are.”
“How big are they?” Amron asked. Most mythical stories about the rock sentinels of Vandar claimed they could reach heights of over twenty feet. Some even said up to thirty, and he remembered a picture book he had cherished as a boy that painted a grulok as a true colossus, well over sixty feet in height, and their king as well, the book had said.
