3 Weaver of Shadow Read Free Page B

was getting ready to rise on the edge of the Blight. I met an elf-woman who was carrying its siblings in her quiver. She pointed one at me.”
    Grogan’s eyes widened. “You’ve met our ghost then…”
    “Ghost?”
    “Green-haired elf woman, face tattoos in camouflage pattern. She’s been coming and going through the Settlements for months. Some of the woods runners claimed to have seen her. Most of them think she’s got something to do with raids and the slavers. They’ve made a few attempts to catch her but she always slips away.”
    “You always told me it was folly trying to catch an elf in a forest.”
    “It can be done, Guardian, but it takes skill rare among men.”
    “You could do it if you had to.”
    “Maybe but I’ve had better things to do these last few months, keeping the peace in town, calming the Council, trying to organise a defence against these raids, looking for the lost in the woods. I’ve bigger things to worry about than some elf girl who may or may not exist.”
    “She exists.”
    “If you say so I don’t doubt it. But most of the reports have come from people I would not believe if their trouser fronts were wet and they told me they had pissed themselves. You think she may have something to do with the Blight?”
    Kormak shook his head. “I think she was just warning me to leave the dead man alone. She had already pinned him to a tree and her arrows would probably have kept him there.”
    Grogan’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder what she’s up to then.”
    He tilted his head to one side. “What’s wrong?” Kormak asked. He felt something himself. It was too still, and a small voice was niggling at his consciousness, warning him to be ready. Listening to that voice had saved his life many times in the past.
    “I don’t know. Thought I heard something. I think I am going to make a round of the walls. Care to come with me?”
    Before Kormak could reply the temple gongs started an irregular peal of alarm. Screams split the night. Grogan calmly walked over to the wall, took down the huge long bow and started stringing it. When he finished he strapped on the sword and took up a couple of quivers of arrows. All his movements were methodical, unhurried but swift. Kormak remembered him behaving exactly the same way during the darkest moments of the Orc War.
    “We’d best make that sweep now,” he said. “The village is under attack.”
     
     
    Kormak glanced out through the doorway. He peered round it, not wanting to be silhouetted against the opening by the lantern light.
    Shadowy figures moved through the night. They were taller and thinner than human and they carried long spears whose points, deliberately dulled, did not glitter in the moonlight. Around them, at their feet, dog-sized things with glittering eyes scuttled. Spiders, he thought, very big ones.
    Kormak went out through the door and onto the porch. He rolled over the verandah fence and dropped into the street. Movement on the roof overhead made him look up and he saw that there were figures, elf and spider, there as well. One of them raised a bow and aimed at him. He sprang aside. An arrow thunked into the ground beside him and stood there in the mud, quivering.
    Grogan sprang through the door, turned and fired three shots in quick succession. Each was rewarded with a scream or a curse from the roof. Kormak glanced around, trying to assess the situation.
    It was bad. The elves had got a long way into the village before someone had managed to raise the alarm. They were moving through the main square, dragging women and children and some of the merchants with them. The captives were penned in by the massive spiders. It reminded Kormak of the way dogs had been used to herd sheep in the Aquilean Mountains in the days of his youth.
    Swiftly he ran to the corner of the building and used the carved wooden projections to pull himself up onto the roof. He counted five elves there, two wounded, one possibly dead and a pack of