Narasan squinted at the sky. “Probably about twenty thousand. The bulk of my army’s still marching here from Kaldacin. You arrived here about a week early, so we aren’t quite ready.”
“Twenty thousand might be a little light, but I guess it’ll have to do.” Veltan looked at the Trogite ships. “I don’t think your ships will move very fast, so you and I should go on ahead.”
“In this thing?” Narasan demanded.
“She may not look like much, Commander, but she’s very fast. Your second in command’s Gunda, right?”
Narasan nodded.
“I think we’d better go have a talk with him. There’s an open channel through the ice zone right now. It’s one of those seasonal things. Gunda shouldn’t have any trouble reaching the coast of Dhrall, but he needs to know exactly where to put your advance force ashore. We’ll be several days ahead of him, and that should give you and Sorgan Hook-Beak time to work out some details. There’s snow up in the mountains now, but the weather could break at any time, and as soon as it does, the enemy army will invade my sister’s Domain, and we’ll have to be ready to meet them.”
Narasan shrugged. “You’re the one who’s financing all this, Veltan,” he said, “so we’ll do it your way.”
LATTASH
1
Rabbit had no memories of his mother. He’d been raised from early childhood by Ashar Beer-Belly, a relative of some sort, Rabbit assumed, though Beer-Belly could never quite remember exactly what that relationship was. In general, Beer-Belly was a kindly blacksmith in the port city of Weros on the west coast of the Land of Maag, and when he was sober—which didn’t happen too often—he gave his small nephew instructions in the fine art of working with iron. Despite his bad habits, Rabbit’s uncle Beer-Belly was a truly masterful smithy, and his teachings took Rabbit far beyond the capabilities of ordinary apprentices.
And so it was that by the time that Rabbit was about twelve years old, his skills went far beyond those of most adult blacksmiths. He concealed that out of necessity. More and more frequently, Uncle Beer-Belly’s fondness for strong drink incapacitated him, and Rabbit was obliged to deceive prospective customers with assorted excuses, which had almost no element of truth in them. Of course, “He’s not here right now,” was very true, given Beer-Belly’s condition at the time.
The smithy’s regular customers noticed a distinct improvement in the products of Beer-Belly’s smithy at about that time.
There were a few drawbacks, however. Rabbit could do most of the work during the daylight hours, but the finer details required a certain amount of caution on his part, so he was obliged to close all the doors and windows and work at night, as quietly as possible.
Several neighbors complained about “all that whangin’ and bangin’ in the middle of the night,” but Rabbit had come up with a long line of excuses, so he was able to fend them off—most of the time.
By then, Uncle Beer-Belly had begun to see things that weren’t really there, and every so often he’d been seized by convulsions. Rabbit hoped against hope that the seizures would go away, and he found that he could control them to some degree by keeping Uncle Beer-Belly’s large tankard filled to the rim with strong grog.
It was on a chill winter morning some months later when Rabbit’s world came crashing down around his ears. He’d risen early and fired up the forge in the smithy, and then he went back into the living quarters to check on Uncle Beer-Belly’s condition.
Uncle’s eyes were open, and he didn’t seem to have the shakes as he had for the past several months. His face seemed to be rather relaxed.
“Are you feeling a little better, uncle?” Rabbit asked. “Would you like something to eat?”
Beer-Belly didn’t answer, and he kept staring at the ceiling.
“I’ll fry us up some bacon,” Rabbit said. “You really ought to eat something.” He put some wood in the stove and then went back into the smithy, dug some glowing coals out of the forge with a small scoop and fired up the cooking stove. “Are you going to be all right, uncle?” he asked as he sliced strips of bacon. “I have to finish up that frying pan for Old Man Gimpy today, so I’m going to be busy this morning.”
Beer-Belly didn’t answer, and he kept staring at the ceiling.
“Would you like a touch of grog to go with your bacon?” Rabbit asked.
Beer-Belly continued to stare at the ceiling.
A sudden chill came over Rabbit. He laid down the cutting knife and went to uncle’s bed. “Uncle?” he said. “Are you all right?” He reached out and put his hand on uncle’s shoulder. Then he snatched it back. Uncle’s skin was very cold, and he seemed quite stiff.
“No!” the boy gasped. He looked more closely. Uncle Beer-Belly wasn’t breathing, and his eyes were still fixed on the same spot on the ceiling.
“Oh, no!” Rabbit moaned, shrinking back. “What am I going to do now?”
Several possibilities flashed through his mind. He immediately threw announcing uncle’s condition out the window. If the word that Uncle Beer-Belly had just died got out, the neighbors would come in and ransack the smithy, and the tools and just about everything else would be gone by noon. He was obviously going to have to hide uncle, but where?
He shrank back from the obvious answer, but there wasn’t really an alternative. He was going to have to hide uncle somewhere—permanently—and he’d have to do it before very long. Dead people were probably like dead animals, so uncle would almost certainly start to smell in a few days.
Their living quarters had a solid wood floor; the dirt floor of the smithy was hard-packed, and customers frequently came in without much warning. The storeroom on one side of the smithy also had a dirt floor, though, and it had a door that was usually closed. There was all sorts of rubbish in the storeroom, but Rabbit was sure that he could drag most of it out—enough, anyway, to give him room for digging.
“At least he’ll still be here,” Rabbit murmured sadly.
At first, Rabbit had no serious problems at the smithy. Just about everybody in Weros knew that Uncle Beer-Belly had “bad days,” and Rabbit had been doing most of the work for over a year now. As time went on, though, more and more of their regular customers came to realize that their old friend wasn’t visiting his favorite taverns anymore, and they drifted away. Rabbit was sure that they just didn’t believe that he was skilled enough to complete anything beyond the simplest of tasks, quite probably because his small size had convinced them that he was much younger than he claimed to be.