Once, during his ascent, he encountered one of the agenahls, a huge tank of a beast lumbering along just above him in the rocks. It spied him quickly enough and swung toward him, sensing the possibility of a quick meal. But then it caught his scent, identified what he was, and backed away quickly. The demon let it go. He appreciated the fact that animals were often much smarter than humans, and he thought that one day they might fill in the gap that would be left when the last of the humans were gone.

He reached the pass leading into the valley shortly before sunset on the third day of searching, when night’s gloom was settling in and its shadows were lengthening. He saw the remains of Trolls scattered about outside the pass and then again in the pass itself, the latter mixed with the bodies of humans. The scavengers had gotten to some of them, but not all. Four-footed scavengers were wary of confined spaces like this one, and preferred to do their hunting elsewhere. Mostly, it was the predatory birds that had begun to pick the bodies apart, and these were already gone for the day when he arrived.

A battle of some sort had been fought here, probably by Trolls from the same tribe as those he had encountered at the ruins and residents of the valley into which he was heading. Their numbers were small, but the fighting had been intense. It didn’t appear that much of anyone had survived. He wondered if the girl knew about it. He wondered if the bearer of the black staff had been involved.

He threaded the narrow defile, a twisting passageway that widened and narrowed by turns, its walls rising well over two hundred feet. The sky was a narrow strip of gray turning darker as sunset approached. He took note of the numbers of the dead, idly pausing to reconstruct what he thought might have happened and to admire the carnage. Already, he was thinking of what he would do once he was within the valley and had taken the measure of its people. Already, he was considering ways of flushing out of hiding the one who carried the black staff so that he could dispose of him quickly and claim his talisman.

At the far end of the pass, he came upon the abandoned defenses and the larger numbers of dead from both camps. He climbed a ladder to gain the far side, still counting bodies, feeling better now about his prospects. Finding the bearer of the staff could not be all that difficult given the obvious conflict taking place between humans and Trolls. Wherever the fighting was thickest, that was where the bearer would be. The ragpicker needed only to generate the sort of conflict that would bring the bearer out of hiding—something at which he was very good.