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Mom knelt by the man. He had the look of someone who'd been around. Our kind of people perhaps, a mercenary, an adventurer. His hair was that color people call salt-and-pepper: the same amount of white as dark, which put him at about Mom's age—her real age, not Felice's. But he looked strong—at least a head taller than Robin, the tallest of our group, and his shoulders were about as wide as any two of us put together. He wore a leather breastplate which had seen better days, and he had on a wolfskin vest. Maybe the wolves had recognized it for what it was. Maybe that was why they'd pursued him so intently.

"Your arm," Mom said. "You've been hurt." She tried to push his bloody sleeve up his arm, but he pulled away from her, pressing his arm against himself. He wiped his other arm across his face, smearing the trickle of blood that came from the corner of his mouth.

"I'm all right," he assured us. "If you hadn't come when you did..." He shook his head and didn't finish his thought. He didn't need to.

Cornelius said, "What happened? Were those your companions?"

The man looked up sharply.

"Cornelius," Thea said in a warning tone. Then to the man, "Sorry. Sometimes he doesn't stop to think before he talks. I'm Thea Green leaf, of the Greenmeadow Clan. This model of discretion is Cornelius. This—"

"The Magnificent," Cornelius interrupted.

"The Magnificent," Thea added. "This is Robin. Felice. Harek Longbow."

Each of us bowed or smiled in turn.

The man looked at us somewhat warily. "My name is Wolstan," he said, just when I was beginning to suspect he had no name. Slow-witted or in shock? In shock, I hoped.

Thea licked her lips, no doubt wondering how to broach the subject delicately. Good old Cornelius took over for her. "So, were those your friends up there on the road?" At least he didn't add, "Mangled and lunched on by the wolves."

Wolstan gulped. "Yes," he said slowly. "The wolves..." He glanced away.

"The wolves killed them?" Thea asked gently. "Or did something else?"

"The wolves. It happened so fast. One of the wolves jumped—landed right on my horse's rump. The horse panicked, bolted. I panicked," he admitted with another quick glance at us. "I could hear my brothers screaming ... There was nothing I could do..." He buried his face in his hands.

"Your brothers?" Mom asked, her voice hardly more than a breath.

"How terrible," Thea said.

"Then my horse threw me, and I started to run." He shook his head and looked up. "It's all my fault," he said. "If I'd handled things better, been braver and quicker, my brothers might still be alive."

I could sympathize with that feeling. I patted his shoulder but didn't know what to say. For a moment I even wished that pain-in-the-buns Marian was still with us: she seemed to have a knack for comforting people.

Not like Robin who, somewhat callously I thought, brought everyone back to our business. "We were headed for Sannatia," he announced.

Wolstan started, as though he'd been slapped.

"We're on a quest," Robin explained, ignoring my dirty looks for his timing, "To rescue the Princess Dorinda."

Wolstan's dark eyes widened in amazement. "To rescue...," he repeated, "the Princess Dorinda...?"

"She's been kidnapped," Robin said. "Disappeared. Members of the Grand Guard killed. She appears to have been taken to Sannatia."

"Yes," Wolstan said. "I know. We—my brothers and I—we'd heard the same story." His eyes shied away from ours again. He stared at his hands, clasped in his lap. "We too ... wanted ... to rescue the princess."

Robin flashed me a self-satisfied grin to show his had been the right approach all along. "Would you like to come with us, then?"

Wolstan's gaze went to each of us in turn. "Yes," he said. "If you'll have me."

"Of course," we all said.

We sat down on the grass while Wolstan went to the lake to clean off the wound on his forearm ("You don't have a cleric with you?" he'd asked) and to wrap it with a makeshift bandage ripped off the bottom of his shirt. Mom offered to help, but he wanted to do it himself. Maybe to prove he was a tough guy. OK with me. His sleeve was soaked with blood and the arm must have been a mess, though he acted like it was nothing.

"Think he's a coward?" I asked. "Is he going to be a liability?"

"Arvin!" Mom started, obviously shocked. But it must have hurt her head to talk, for she didn't say anything else.

Cornelius, however, was never at a loss for words. "What a terrible thing to say, Harek. The poor man's been through a lot."

"Yeah," I said. "And he ran away from it."

"Think you would have done better?" Thea asked.

Ouch, that hurt.
I nibbled on a blade of grass. "The point is, the way this game is going, I'm not expecting much help from Rasmussem."

Robin reached over and whacked my arm. "You worry too much," he said.

I'd strangle the next person who said that, I decided.

"Now quiet," Robin said. "He's coming back."

Wolstan approached, the bandage around his arm already bloodied.

"You sure you'll be all right?" Thea asked.

In answer, he bent his arm and straightened it several times.

Thea said, "Then we'd better get going, or we'll be caught out here by dark."

"But," Wolstan said, "surely we should camp here for the night?"

"With all those wolves hanging around?" Cornelius asked.

"Better them than the caves," Wolstan said.

We looked at each other. "What caves?" I asked.

"The Shadow Caves." Wolstan was obviously amazed that we didn't know. "They're just ahead. That's the way to Sannatia. They'll bring you almost to the desert's edge. Unless you go around the long way, which takes two days instead of half."

"Wolstan," Robin said, "why is that bad?"

"It's not—during the day. But at night, orcscome out of the side tunnels." He shuddered. In a quiet voice he added, "I hate ores."

Robin wiggled his eyebrows at me.

Thea looked excited about the prospect, but she only said, "Yes but, Wolstan, if we stop now and wait till dawn, think of all the time we'll lose."

"If you don't want to come with us," Cornelius said, glancing at us for approval, "we could still give you a horse."

We told him about the extra horse we had now that Brynhild was gone. We didn't, of course, tell him
where
Brynhild had gone.

"But you're going on?" Wolstan asked.

"We have to," Cornelius said.

Wolstan sighed. "Personally, I'd rather deal with the wolves." He shook his head. "But I'll come with you."

We gave him Brynhild's sword, which she'd kept wrapped in her saddle roll. It was a bit short for him, since she'd been a halfling. But we were glad of his company. If we were going to be meeting a horde of ores—on their own ground, no less—we could use any help we could get.

The caves were only a few miles' journey from the clearing. The entrance dipped into the ground, looking less like a hill than a big bump.

"It looks like a burial mound," I said.

Everyone glared in my direction.

Disconcertingly near, a wolf howled.

Wolstan nearly jumped out of his skin.

Cornelius said something that sounded like "
Turgid hostage FORTRAN,
" and a little ball of light appeared in his cupped hand.

"Ah! Tinkerbell!" I said.

With a condescending smile, Cornelius motioned for me to take the lead, since it was still my turn.

I took a deep breath and stepped into the darkness. Behind me, muffled by the stone walls, once again came the eerie cry of the wolf.

Cornelius and his horse crowded in behind me. The light he held let us see about as far ahead as you might at night with a car's high-beam headlights, except it was a circle of light, not a beam, so we could see the sides and behind too.

The cave dipped sharply downward and widened. Cornelius moved in next to me, and we started walking right away, leading our horses behind us to make room for the rest of the group. Above the clatter the horses' hooves made on the stone floor, I called back to Wolstan, "Who carved this out? Ores?" for the passage obviously hadn't been chipped out by nature.

"Dwarfs," he answered. "Mining for copper. Some of the smaller tunnels interconnect, some are dead ends, some are filled with water. Once the dwarfs moved out, the orcsmoved in."

It was a natural orc habitat: dark, damp, smelling of mildew and worms. They'd love the mazelike construction of the place, too, which would make it impossible ever to ferret them out.

We passed countless offshoots, smaller tunnels that branched away into darkness. The main tunnel dipped, curved, climbed repeatedly. Sometimes it would open up into a huge cavern, though mostly the ceiling was too low for us to ride horseback. Once we skirted an underground pool. Its black surface reflected back Cornelius's light, showing nothing of what was underneath. Ripples gently lapped the stone basin, though there was no breeze. When we spoke, our voices echoed back in sinister whispers. Our road was smooth, constructed that way by dwarfs with wheelbarrows full of copper, or worn by the feet of countless travelers.

And all the while we watched and listened, alert for ores.

I was used to a game moving faster. "You have entered the Shadow Caves," a dungeon master might say. "After walking for two hours, you come to a door." Or, "Several furlongs later, you hear the rattle of loose pebbles from a corridor off to your right." Instead, I was in a constant state of expectancy, the surging of my own adrenaline wearing me out, the tense waiting dulling my warrior's edge. Already I knew that if orcsattacked
now,
I wouldn't be able to fight them off as well as I could have an hour ago. But the alternative was to give in to boredom, to deaden the instinct to strain my senses outward, to depend on the others to catch any telltale clue that we were being followed or were approaching danger.

Something skittered in the tunnel behind us. We all whirled around, flashing swords, daggers, bows: ready to battle for our survival.

It was only a red-eyed rat, its sharp claws clicking on the stone path before it disappeared into a crack in the wall.

Cornelius released a breath. "How about we break for supper?" he suggested.

I didn't point out that his timing was disgusting. Instead I said, "Sounds good to me." I stretched, trying to work the beginnings of stiffness from my muscles.

Cornelius went to unload Phoenix, while Robin watched the rear. It was Thea's turn to be up front; and as for Mom, she just sat down where she was, looking exhausted.

"How about you, Wolstan?" I asked. Nobody was talking to the poor guy. That was a situation I would have hated, but I was never good at small talk. "You hungry?"

He shook his head. He had a way of always avoiding people's eyes. "My brothers and I, we'd just eaten. You know. Before."

There I went, trying to be helpful, dragging up painful memories. I sniffed at an unpleasant odor. "Lucky," I told him. Then, to Cornelius: "What
is
that?"

"Smells rancid," Thea said. "Something go bad?"

Cornelius sniffed at the various containers of food and shook his head.

Robin called up, "I don't smell anything."

"Good," Thea said. "You can eat first and we'll watch to see how sick you get." She swept her scabbard to one side and sat down, still facing outward. Resting her chin on her knee, she buried her nose into the crook of her arm.

I approached Cornelius. "What have you got?"

"Smoked mutton." He held out the strip of oiled leather in which the meat had been wrapped.

"Yeah?" Thea said. "How long's it been dead?"

The pieces of meat looked hard and dry and salty, but when I sniffed them, they smelled more smoky than anything else.

"Stop making such a fuss," Robin called from his position. "Next time, take your vacation at the Hyatt Regency."

"Hmph." Thea pulled the scabbard onto her lap and began to polish the pommel of her troll-acquired sword with her sleeve.

She
wasn't
making a fuss though. The smell wasn't so bad back where Robin was, but up by Cornelius and the packhorse it was foul. And beyond him ... it was even worse. I sniffed like a bloodhound following a track, approaching Thea.

She'd unsheathed her sword to polish the blade. Just as I reached her, she swung the sword at me.

I yelped, falling backward.

"Harek!" she cried.

"What?"

Again she shoved the sword in the direction of my face, but now I realized she wasn't trying to give me a nose job; she was trying to have me look at the sword.

It was glowing, and the words etched in its surface, ORC SLAYER, appeared to be written in red.

I raised my eyebrows.

Then I sniffed the sword, to see if the awful smell came from it.

Nothing.

I sniffed beyond Thea, where the tunnel stretched before us.

No.

I tipped my face up. Directly above, about seven feet off the floor, was a hole—a huge hole: another tunnel high up. And from the darkness within, a stench as bad as the time I'd opened my locker the first day of school and found a salami sandwich someone had left from the previous year.

And glowing amber eyes, which blinked in recognition of having been discovered.

"Orcs!" I screamed.

Three of the creatures leapt out. I threw myself to the side to keep them from falling on me. At the same time I scrambled to get my sword out of its sheath, calling myself an idiot for having left the crossbow hooked to my saddle.

I only had my sword maybe a quarter of the way out when something slammed into my chest. I saw the glint of a dagger hilt, and remember thinking,
Aw nuts. Just when things are getting exciting, I have to go and get myself stabbed to death by an orc.
A half second later, the ore's momentum hurtled us both to the ground. Concussion on top of everything else, I thought. And here was this stupid orc who didn't even realize he'd already killed me, with his greasy little hands around my neck, trying to strangle me.

I was vaguely aware that the other two orcshad missed entirely and landed face first on the floor, but that was small consolation for being dead.