It had been the bandits’ ambush, certainly, but the bandits had been ambushed themselves. There were nearly thirty people lying in ungraceful attitudes under the trees, with rain trickling on their clothes and pattering upon their white, unfeeling faces. Blade felt sick when he saw the wounds on some of them. The attackers had been brutal.
Geoffrey pointed at a broad trampled swath of grass and bushes, leading away uphill. “Looks as if the attackers were after their horses, whoever they were.”
One of the dead people, and only one, was wearing shiny black armor. Blade knew who the attackers were. They were some more of the escaped soldiers. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said hoarsely.
When he thought about it later, Blade realized that this was the moment when his tour started to go wrong. Entirely wrong. The fact was, he panicked. At the time he thought of himself as behaving rather well. Although the one thing he wanted to do was to translocate far, far away from there at once, he knew he could not either do that alone or try to bring all the Pilgrims and their horses with him if he went. He thought he controlled his panic. He told himself he was quite calm. But he knew what those soldiers were like, and now, looking at the dead bandits, he knew what they could do to people. His one thought was to get everyone as far from those soldiers as possible.
He returned solemnly to the road. He stuck his hands into his sleeves in what he hoped was a mystical posture and cried out in what he hoped was a mystical voice, “Danger! I have foreseen danger! We must leave this place at once.”
The merchant shot him a shrewd look. “Well, in that case I’ll love you and leave you,” he said. “It’s mostly beets and apples at this time of year, but I do have a living to make.” He trotted away to the lead cart, calling orders to his guards and drivers. In less than a minute the train of five carts and six outriders was in motion. In a minute more they had the carts turned around, and in another minute they had gone, hell for leather, back down the road. The Pilgrims watched uncertainly.
“Everyone get on your horses,” Blade called.
“Yes, mount up, all of you,” said Geoffrey, and everybody did, including Shona, who was looking rather the way she had the morning the soldiers broke out of the dome. “I’ll make sure you’re all right, my love,” Geoffrey said to her. “They won’t come near you again. Where to, Wizard?”
It seemed to Blade that the road they were on wound off in the same direction as the trampled track the attackers had made. And the high banks on either side of it made it perfect for an ambush. Blade forgot the road and trusted to the instinct by which he found places when he translocated. He pointed in what he thought of as the right direction. That way was toward the next tour event, which was the attack by avians in two days’ time. Geoffrey nodded and gestured. The Pilgrim Party rode up the bank on the other side of the road, shed Mother Poole at the top, retrieved her, and set off across country.
For the next two days Blade struggled to get to the rendezvous with the avians. It was very confusing country, all ups and downs, and little wooded ravines where deep streams rushed. Blade was so busy trying to get his Pilgrims in the right direction to the right place that he forgot that the black book said he was supposed to be telling the Pilgrims that they faced the menace of the Dark Lord. Shona reminded him once or twice, but Blade was too anxious about the journey to attend.
“But they have to be told, Blade,” Shona protested. “They have to know where to pick up the clues. Where’s the first one?”
“I don’t know.
I’ll look it up tonight,” Blade said.
He had forgotten again by that evening. Everything and everyone was so miserable. It was still raining, and because they had left the proper tour route, they had to make their own camp. There was very little food. According to the black book, the bundles everyone carried behind the saddles were full of food for the horses. Food for the Pilgrims was to be found in the camps along the route, carefully bespelled to keep it fresh, but of course they were not at a proper camp. Luckily most of the Pilgrims had brought some things to eat, filched from the inn, but it was only the sort of thing you could slip into your pocket. That night they had oatcakes, apples, a few lumps of cheese, and a lot of bad temper round a smoky, fizzling fire. Most of the bad temper was directed at Miss Ledbury, who sat with her waterproof hood snugly up around her face, sharing a large slab of chocolate with her brother.
“I haven’t enough to go round,” she stated. “You should have thought of bringing some yourselves.” She fetched a small self-heating kettle from her backpack and rattled her coffee jar at Blade to show him she needed some water.
“I’ll fill it,” said Reville, looking at the kettle even more greedily than he had looked at the chocolate. Blade was surprised when Reville came back with the kettle full. But Reville seemed determined not to leave Sukey. Blade could understand that even less. Among all the Pilgrims’ grumbling voices, Sukey’s was raised highest and loudest and most peevishly—and most often.
“Why can’t we all have some coffee at least?” Sukey demanded.
There was such an outcry of agreement from the other Pilgrims that Shona said hectically, “Listen, and I will tell you the bards’ tale of the menace of the Dark Lord.”
Blade thought she told it much better than he would have done. Shona’s tale was full of spine-shivering phrases and snatches of songs, and her description of the horrors of the Dark Lord’s Citadel was masterly. “But it is said that the Dark Lord has one weakness,” she said, staring meaningly at Blade, “and that there are clues to be found as to what this is.”
Clues! Blade thought. Help! “I must meditate,” he mumbled for the benefit of anyone who was not riveted by Shona’s tale telling, and scrambled away into the wet bushes. There, with rain plopping off his beard and his long hair damply trailing across the pages, he managed to read the dog-eared pamphlet in the last of the daylight.
Shona, still describing the terrible creatures that inhabited the Dark Lord’s Citadel, looked at him expectantly as he came crawling back.
“Mum’s Lair,” Blade mouthed at her.
She nodded. “To go back to the matter of clues to his weakness,” she said, “it is told that an Enchantress holds the secret. If we wish to defeat him, we shall have to brave her clutches.”
The rain stopped during the night. Everyone was a little more cheerful when they set off again. They spent that day ducking under wet trees and splashing through streams, and around sunset, very hungry, they toiled up a rocky rise and did reach a camp of sorts. It did not look as if anyone had used it for some time.
“I think it must be one from last year,” Shona whispered to Blade, pretending to help him with his horse while Geoffrey was organizing people to gather firewood.
Blade thought the same. But he went to the food cache and hopefully took the stasis spell off it. The large cauldron of stew inside it had dried to a sort of cake over the year or so it had been there. Blade thought that they could cut it into lumps and pretend it was steak or something. The bread was awfully stale, but they could toast that. And the cheese was—well, better leave the cheese. He took the rest to Mother Poole.
“Don’t ask me, dear,” she said. “Ask Dad. He’s the cook in our house.”
Dad Poole did his best, but it was not wonderful. Miss Ledbury meaningly fetched out another slab of chocolate. When they had all eaten what they could, Blade stuck his hands mystically in his sleeves again. “I feel danger near,” he said portentously. “I think it best if we build a very large fire tonight.”
“Won’t that attract the attention of this Dark Lord?” someone said anxiously.
“Fire keeps all magical ills away,” Blade said firmly.