had shifted far to the east of us. But our group would still be caught by the edge of the magical tempest, that much was certain. And though the downpour might be less powerful, the rain would still be pretty substantial—no one had the slightest doubt about that.
The menacing clouds blocked off the entire sky. A furious wind tossed up handfuls of sand aimed at my face and I had to pull the hood of my elfin drokr cloak up over my head.
Others suffered worse than I did. Deler screwed up his watering eyes and swore nonstop until the sand got into his mouth. The wind flapped Hallas’s beard and the horses’ manes. Mumr’s hat was torn off his head, but he didn’t stop to try to take the wind’s new plaything away from it.
A whirlwind of a thousand demons howled in our ears and the solid wall of clouds advanced on us like a herd of cattle on the rampage. Again and again the festoons of diamond-bright lightning flashes fused together into broad sheets running across the entire horizon and lighting up the wasteland, which looked even more desolate in the dark. The wind was like an insane cowherd, driving his rain-swollen clouds straight at us. The rain hadn’t actually started yet, but soon, very soon, behind the rumbling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning, streams of water would come cascading down onto the ground that was frozen in impatient anticipation.
There was a flash, and we heard an angry rumble on the wind.
Another flash.
“Now there’ll be a real bang!” shouted the jester.
There was a right royal bang. The skies were split apart by the roaring of the gods, and the horses whinnied in fright.
“Forward!” Tomcat shouted from somewhere up ahead, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the wind.
An intense peal of thunder reverberated across the sky, hurtling past us like a wild stallion and blocking my ears for a moment. The thunderclap was loudest right above our heads.
I barely managed to keep my seat on Little Bee, and Loudmouth’s horse reared up, almost throwing its rider. Deler was unlucky: He went flopping down onto the ground and if not for Marmot, who adroitly grabbed the dwarf’s horse by the ear, the startled animal would have bolted. Deler showered the “stupid beast, unworthy to carry a dwarf on its thrice-cursed hump” with fearsome abuse and scrambled back into the saddle. We all had to make an incredible effort to calm our frightened horses.
“Forward!” Tomcat had no intention of stopping, and he set his horse to a gallop.
The group strung out into a line and followed the tracker.
The rain covered us with its wet wings, and the isolated drops were replaced by a roaring cataract cascading down from the sky. In the blink of an eye, everyone who wasn’t wearing an elfin cloak was soaked to the skin.
The thunder and lightning, the cataracts of water and other attributes of any decent, self-respecting storm shifted farther east. The booming was more distant now, no longer threatening us.
But the rain had not gone away. The entire sky was shrouded in dismal clouds that poured water down onto the earth from their inexhaustible heavenly stores. Not a single blue patch, not a single ray of sunshine. Hargan’s Wasteland was enveloped in a gloomy, autumnal atmosphere. The earth was soaked with water and thick mud appeared out of nowhere under the horses’ hooves, completely covering the grass.
The weather was foul, cheerless, and cold, especially for men who had grown accustomed to constant heat. Hallas suffered the worst of all. He was soaked right through and shuddering with the cold, and his teeth could be heard chattering ten yards away. The stubborn gnome rejected Miralissa’s suggestion that he should put on a cloak.
“Watch out, you’ll fall ill, and I won’t make a fuss over you,” Deler muttered from under his cloak. “Don’t expect me to spoon-feed you medicine.”
“You!” the gnome snorted. “I wouldn’t take any medicine from you. I know your lousy k-kind! You’ll sprinkle in some poison or other and then I’ll wheeze, turn blue, and k-kick the bucket. I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction!”
“You’re no good to me soaking wet,” the dwarf said sulkily.
Hallas snorted and didn’t say anything else. The group was no longer galloping headlong through the meadows of the wasteland; the horses had changed to a rapid walk.
In about three hours it would start to get dark, so we would have to stop for the