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as Colin could tell, excellently dramatized illogical poppycock. The men around him didn't share his
views, however. Watching their faces as they lapped up her oratory was enough to make his skin crawl
in three different directions.
"Is she like this often?" he whispered to the bandit beside him.
"Oh, no. Better most times. We generally does this every night, when we're all together and Sal ain't out
on patrol or chasin' 'round after 'corns. Gives a man a wonderful lift, don't it?"
They were shushed angrily by the men closest to them, but Sally seemed not to notice. Her bosom was
heaving with pride as she told how the Dark Pilgrim had come to her stream, recognizing her at once as
no mere nymph but as a being of intelligence and resource as well as charm and beauty.
The bandits nodded, listening open-mouthed and rapt, though Colin thought at times one or more of
them looked rather puzzled, as if he was trying to remember something. Wulfric whimpered now and then
to punctuate the narrative. He looked very much as if he'd like to howl.
"Our great leader explained to me," Sally continued, "that it was my duty, and even my holy destiny, to
gather you together and lead you in gathering together the tools with which we will purge this land of our
oppressors. I was chosen, I, who had been favored above you poor mortals with an inborn knowledge
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of our land, important friends among faery and mortal, were and even ogre-kind, since my brother
husbanded the quasi-ogress, our sister-in-the-cause, Belburga."
"Tell us again how that ogress was so hot your brother had to turn into a tree to get some rest, Sal," the
ruffian next to Colin shouted.
Sally continued with a sweet smile, "My brother will recover in time to take his rightful place in our new
regime, I'm sure, for it will be a wonder and a glory, with health, youth and beauty for the righteous, and
punishment for the wicked. Our magnificent hand-picked army, of which you, my beloved comrades, are
the vanguard, shall be the backbone of a reign whose like has never been seen in the world."
"I beg your pardon, ma'am," Colin said, trying to sound like an eager acolyte. "But what exactly is our
mission and-please excuse my ignorance, but why do we need a new order?"
Sally regarded him as kindly as if he was a child who had just asked why larks sing and she was his
mother. "To replace the OLD order, of course. Because this land is now ruled by a magically endowed
few who control the hard working, deserving masses-folk who gain what little they have by personal
merit alone." She said it word for word, he was sure, just as she had learned it from her so-called "Dark
Pilgrim."
Naturally it didn't take into account that she herself, and the pilgrim too, no doubt, were magic, as were
the unicorns, but Colin thought he had best not go into that. It would sound too much as if he were
arguing with her, and he was really not in any position to debate anything. Clearly she and all her men
were thoroughly convinced by something beyond good sense of the truth of the twaddle she was feeding
them.
He looked away, disgusted. For someone who claimed to disdain magic, the Dark Pilgrim was certainly
using a lot of it to his advantage. No wonder Sally and the helpless villagers could travel with this bunch
of cutthroats unmolested, and no wonder the ruffians cooperated with a scheme that had no visible profit
in store for them except the distant promises of "health, youth, and beauty." They were as ensorcelled as
the poor villagers. He hated to think what lay in store for the Everclear folk at the bandit stronghold. And
for himself, as far as that went. But at least he knew what he was doing, unlike those poor unseeing
clods. Look at them. They didn't even close their eyes to sleep, and their breath smelled terrible from
their lower jaws hanging slack all the time. Why, only the tricks of the firelight gave them any expression
at all-like that one just at the edge, toward the back, the woman in the kerchief who seemed to wink at
him.
Sally droned on, "Do you, my comrades, remember all that I have told you?"
"Aye," the bandits chorused in a voice as solemn as one of the classes at the minstrel academy being
asked to recite all seventy-eight verses of some obscure dirge. "And the Dark Pilgrim met her at the
stream and..."
Colin, for his part, nodded and smiled as if he understood, and shuddered, and looked back at the
zombies. He preferred the honestly idiotic faces of those who were at least visibly bewitched to those of
the bandits, who were under the illusion they were thinking for themselves.
He nibbed his eyes, tired, and looked back at the zombies again. Then repeated the process. It actually
looked as if one of those will-less beings, the woman he had noticed before, had moved forward, to the
edge of the group, just beyond the burly smith. She now occupied the place he was sure had formerly
contained the cobbler's wife. Then, very slowly, she raised her head and looked straight at him, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]