The Elder Gods (The Dreamers 1)

“Of course.” Longbow took an arrow from his quiver and handed it to the small man.

Rabbit carefully examined the arrow. “Do you make these your very own self?” he asked.

“Naturally. If I’m going to be the one who shoots them, I want to be sure that they’ve been made correctly.”

“It must take quite a while to chip one out,” Rabbit observed, “and they wouldn’t all have the same weight, would they?”

“They’re close enough.”

“Why don’t I hammer a few out of iron, and you can look them over. I think they might surprise you. That lady who orders everybody around told me that someday soon you’re likely to need a whole lot of arrows, but she didn’t come right out and tell me how come.”

“I’m going to shoot some geese for the entertainment of your people,” Longbow told him.

“That sort of explains why you’ll need so many,” Rabbit said. “You must lose a lot of arrows when you start whanging them up in the air.”

“They’re easy to find again, Rabbit. The dead geese float.”

“What about the ones that don’t hit no geese?”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t never miss?”

“It wouldn’t be useful to miss. How do you go about making arrowheads from this iron?”

“Like I said, I heat it up in a fire until it starts to glow. That means that it’s soft enough to pound into the shape I want.”

“A soft arrowhead wouldn’t be very useful, Rabbit.”

“It don’t stay soft. After I hammer it into the right shape, I dunk it in cold water, and it gets hard again.”

Longbow looked at the beach sliding slowly past as the Seagull moved west. “If we’re going to make arrows, we’ll need arrow shafts. I don’t think it’ll be much longer before the Seagull leaves the Land of Dhrall behind, so you and I should probably go to the beach and cut saplings before we begin making arrowheads. I’ll speak with Sorgan and tell him what we need to do.”

“That makes sense,” Rabbit agreed. “We’ll have plenty of time to hammer out arrowheads once we get out on the open sea. It’s a long ways between Dhrall and Maag—a whole lot farther than the cap’n seems to realize.”

“But you realize how far it is, don’t you?” Longbow said shrewdly.

Rabbit looked around quickly to make sure there wasn’t anybody close. “I think I’d rather you didn’t say anything about that to the cap’n, Longbow,” he said quietly. “He doesn’t pay too much attention to the sky after the sun goes down, and if you know what you’re looking for, you can tell by the location of certain stars just where you are. When that sea current took hold of the Seagull, it took her a whole lot farther east than the cap’n— or anybody else—seems to have realized.”

“You’re a very clever man, Rabbit,” Longbow observed. “Why do you go to so much trouble to conceal it?”

Rabbit shrugged. “It makes my life easier,” he said with a sly little grin. “If the cap’n and Ox and Ham-Hand don’t realize that I’ve got something besides air in my head, they won’t expect too much from me. If they happen to find out that I can tell my right hand from my left, they might start ordering me to do things that aren’t quite as easy as the things I have to do now. I’ve always believed that ‘easy’ is a lot nicer than ‘hard,’ don’t you?”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Rabbit. Someday, though—and I don’t think it’s very far off—you and I might have to explore the land of ‘hard,’ and our lives may depend on how well we do it.”

“You just had to go and say that, didn’t you, Longbow?” Rabbit said sourly.

“I just thought I’d warn you, that’s all.”

The Seagull turned westward a few days later, and the Land of Dhrall receded behind her, soon dropping below the eastern horizon. The open sea made Longbow a bit edgy. He had always been a creature of the forest, and the vast emptiness of Mother Sea disturbed him.

He also felt twinges of guilt, since he had abandoned his lifelong purpose. He was supposed to be in the forest killing the servants of the Vlagh, or at the burial ground tending to Misty-Water’s grave.

His memory reached back to his meeting with Zelana of the West and child Eleria. Zelana held dominion over the West, and her command to him should have been the law, but it hadn’t been the word of Zelana which had made him agree to go with her to the Land of Maag; it had been the clever word of child Eleria. Her suggestion that the Maags could provide a way to kill more servants of the Vlagh in a short time than he’d be able to kill by himself during a lifetime of hunting had moved him to come on board the Seagull.

The more he thought about that, the more peculiar it seemed. Zelana had absolute authority in her Domain, but he’d refused her peremptory command quite easily. Eleria, however, had lured him into acceptance with numbers. In a peculiar sort of way Eleria had just imitated Zelana’s approach to Sorgan. Zelana had bought Sorgan with a large number of gold blocks, and then Eleria had bought Longbow with a large number of dead enemies. Their tactics had been almost identical, and that raised a very interesting possibility. Just exactly who was Eleria? Her evidently simpleminded need for affection could conceal a hard but devious drive to get what she wanted, which made Zelana look soft by comparison.

Eleria’s little game had almost succeeded, but she’d taken it a step or two further than had been necessary, and that had alerted Longbow’s instincts. If Eleria wanted to play games, Longbow was more than ready to show her that he could play much better than she could.

It might just turn out that this tiresome journey would be much more interesting than he’d thought.

“Hook-Big just doesn’t believe her, Longbow,” Eleria said a few days later, when they were alone in the tar-smeared cabin at the stern of the Seagull. “When the Beloved told him that your arrows always go where you want them to go, he said that nobody could do that.”

“Hook-Big?” Longbow asked.

“He seems to be terribly full of himself,” Eleria replied with a naughty little grin. “That’s why I call him ‘Hook-Big.’”

“That’s unkind, little one.”

“I know,” she admitted. “Fun, though.”