"We don't know where they are, and we can't tell from here. Let's see if we can sneak back to the Oracle trail and get back to your mates without putting the wind up anybody, hey?"
"What if that doesn't work?" Ivradan said dubiously.
"Then we try something else," Glory said, with far more confidence than she felt.
"Before we go . . . " Ivradan said, hesitantly.
"Yes?"
"Give me the magic doll. You can't hold onto him and fight at the same time," Ivradan said.
"Oh."
Reluctantly, Glory extricated Gordon from beneath her arm. She wrung him out carefully before handing him over to Ivradan. Ivradan tucked him just as carefully into the front of his tunic (lucky Ivradan, to be wearing proper clothes, and layers at that, even if they were wet) and cinched his belt tight. "There."
Glory smiled. "'Come, camrado,'" she said, consciously quoting. And hoped Evil was taking the rest of the night off.
This time she led, trying to remember what the road had looked like during the day. It would have been too easy if the ponies Charane had magicked down off the top of the mountain were waiting here for them. Maybe they weren't dead, wherever they were. That had been the Warmother's style, hadn't it, really? Not to kill outright when she could make things miserable instead? Maybe she'd sent the ponies back to the Allimir just to make Belegir's lot unhappy, bad cess to her.
As they got closer to the raiders, Glory began to wonder if anyone in the mercenaries' camp was asleep. There seemed to be entirely too much drinking and carousing going on for anybody to get his head down in the middle of it. And what could they possibly be drinking? From what she'd seen of them earlier, they hadn't been carrying much with them.
Unless Great Drathil'd had vast untapped wine-cellars that had escaped the original fire . . . ?
She looked around. The ring-road had dipped. They were out of sight of the fires, and from the sound of things, the mercenaries were still some distance away. "Ivradan?" she whispered, stopping him. "When this place burned, did anybody ever come back here?"
"What?" He stared at her as if she'd lost her wits.
"Did any of the Allimir come back? To salvage anything?"
"Of course not," he whispered back. "It is a cursed place."
And everything above ground had been burned by the Warmother. But from what she'd seen when she'd been mucking about in the ruins today, there'd been a lot built in stone, and the ground itself hadn't been too badly damaged, just . . . sterilized, like. The city had burnt from the top down, not the bottom up.
"Were there cellars? Deep cellars?" she asked.
"Are you feeling all right?" Ivradan demanded incredulously.
She gritted her teeth and held on to her temper with an effort. "Cellars? Wine cellars?"
Finally he saw what she was getting at. "Yes. Of course. Wine—beer—mead—the vineyards of Great Drathil stretched for miles, and its vintages were famous. Why?"
She patted him on the shoulder with relief.
"Because every soldier I ever heard tell of went looking for the pub first. And from the sound of things, I'd say this lot found it."
It took a moment for Ivradan to work that through. "The— They— You mean they're drunk?"
"I hope they're drunk. They sound drunk, anyhow. What time is it—how long until dawn?"
Ivradan looked up at the sky, judging the time from the position of the stars and moons. "Nearly midnight."
It had been around noon when the mercenaries had arrived at Great Drathil. Say four or five hours to find the cellars and get at least some of the stock out, and by now the party should be well underway. If she were lucky, at least half of them were legless with drink by now.
"Come on."
Moving faster now, they continued along the road. The Oracle was north of the city, and the entrance to the forest road was on a ridge overlooking one of the main city gates. Anybody who cared to look would be able to see them at that point, and there was no cover, but with only a little luck they were too drunk to notice.
Glory and Ivradan were walking close beside the ditch-moat—she had a vague back-up plan that involved jumping in and hiding if they spotted anyone—when up ahead, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone retching.
Glory froze. Then, to her own astonishment, she began to move forward quickly, giving Ivradan a hard shove in the chest so he'd stay put.
Something that was puking like that had to be human-shaped, didn't they? And with so many different kinds of imported talent around here, who was to say she looked out of place?
She hoped.
She could see the sufferer silhouetted against the road. It was one man, alone, sicking his guts up, leaning on a spear for support. He didn't even notice her approach. And he reeked of vomit and wine.