Crystal Gorge

Then Dahlaine introduced Tlantar to his beautiful sister Zelana and his youthful-looking brother Veltan.

Then a burly outlander with a broken nose came up to Tlantar. “Have the bug-people been snooping around up here yet?” he asked.

“Bug-people?” Tlantar asked.

“Captain Hook-Beak has some very colorful names for the creatures of the Wasteland, Tlantar,” Dahlaine explained. “Some of them are so colorful that he doesn’t use them in the presence of my sister. The creatures of the Wasteland are descendants of a peculiar kind of insect, but the Vlagh has been modifying them to the point that they’re not really insects anymore.”

“Ah,” Tlantar said. “If that’s what’s been happening, ‘bug-people’ sort of fits, I suppose.” He turned to the big-shouldered outlander. “We haven’t seen anything unusual down in the mountains, Captain Hook-Beak,” he said. “We don’t go down there very often, though. We hunt bison when we want meat, and the bison don’t go down there. They eat grass, and there isn’t very much grass in the mountains. I’ve asked the southern tribes to keep an eye on Crystal Gorge, but they tell me that they haven’t seen anything unusual down there so far.”

“It’s probably too early, big brother,” Zelana said. “It’s a long, long way from Veltan’s Domain up here to yours, and the Vlagh probably had to wait for her most recent hatch to mature before they could start.”

“We know that there have been a few of the servants of the Vlagh roaming around up here,” Dahlaine said. “There were at least two of them tampering with the Reindeer Tribes over in Tonthakan—up until Ox chopped them down with his axe, of course.” Then he turned to Tlantar. “Have the members of any of the tribes here in southern Matakan been behaving peculiarly lately?” he asked.

“Not that I’ve heard about,” Tlantar replied. “I don’t snoop around in the other tribes, though. Some of the tribes aren’t too happy about this ‘unification’ idea of yours, so I don’t go around beating them over the head with it. I just tell their chieftains what I want their tribes to do, and then I walk away. I think ‘unification’ is going to take several generations to settle in, so I try my best to avoid irritating—or offending—tribesmen who aren’t ready for it yet.”

“This one’s a very good chief, Dahlaine,” a tall bleak-faced man wearing deerskin clothes said. “The clever ones know when to back away; it’s the silly ones who cause most of the trouble.”

“I think you and Tlantar will get along very well, Longbow,” Dahlaine observed. “You’re very much alike.”

“So you’re the one who came up with the idea of using parts of dead enemies to kill live ones,” Tlantar said to the bleak-faced man.

The one called Longbow smiled faintly. “It wasn’t my idea originally, Chief Tlantar,” he replied. “The shaman of our tribe is called ‘One-Who-Heals,’ and he’s the one who showed me how to put the venom of dead ones on my arrow-points so that I could kill live ones faster.”

“Longbow here can kill more bug-men by accident than whole armies can kill on purpose,” a small Maag declared, “and he got even better after I forged him metal arrowheads.”

“Ah,” Tlantar said, “you’re the one Dahlaine told me about, then. He seems to think that metal spear-points might be better than the stone ones we’ve always used in the past.”

Rabbit shrugged. “That’s what they’re paying me for,” he said. “I’ll need to see one of your spear-points before I set up shop, though. I’m quite sure that you’ll want the weight and size to be close to what your original stone points are.”

Tlantar nodded. “If the weight’s too much different, the spear won’t go where I want it to.” He handed his spear to the little Maag.

“It is much bigger—and heavier—than an arrow,” Rabbit said, “but the general shape’s the same, so it shouldn’t give me too many problems. Now, then, what’s this ‘spear-thrower’ thing that everybody keeps talking about?”

Tlantar held up his thrower. “We set the butt of the spear in this cup-shaped part of the thrower at the end, and then we whip the thrower forward. It takes quite a long time to learn how to aim the spear when you’re using the thrower, but once you’ve mastered that, you can whip the thrower forward, and the spear flies much faster—and harder—than it would if we just threw it with our hands. A faster spear hits harder, and it drives the spear-point in deeper.”

“Does it really work?” Rabbit asked a bit dubiously.

“We don’t go hungry very often,” Tlantar replied.

“Dahlaine told me that you’ve been killing the creatures of the Wasteland for most of your life,” Tlantar said to Longbow as they watched the little Maag known as Rabbit pound a piece of hot metal into a rough imitation of Tlantar’s stone spear-point. “He didn’t tell me exactly why, though. It’s really none of my concern, so if you’d rather not talk about it, just forget that I said anything.”

Longbow gave him a speculative look. “We’ll be working together before very long, Tlantar,” he said, “so we should know each other as well as possible, I suppose.” He sighed then. “When I was very young, there was a girl that I knew, and we’d decided that we should mate. On the day of our joining, she went out into the forest to bathe herself in a pool of clear water. The bug-people had been creeping through the forest near our village, and I guess they didn’t want us to know that they were there, so they killed her. Now I kill them.” He smiled faintly. “Word of what I’d been doing reached Zelana, and she decided that I might be useful, so she came up to our village to ask me to help her when the creatures of the Wasteland invaded her Domain. I told her no, but then the little girl who’d come with her reached out and snared me before I even knew what she was doing. If you ever come up against that little girl, be very, very careful. First she charms you, and then she grabs you.”

“He’s got that right, Tlantar,” Rabbit said. “If you’re ever in her vicinity, try to keep some distance away from her. Some people will try to make you go along with them by using threats. Eleria uses kisses instead, and she wins all the time.”