He stumbled and nearly went down, his concentration drifting from the task at hand. He righted himself hastily and shoved the vision crystal back into his tunic front.
"Watch yourself," Edain Elessedil whispered at his elbow. Jair nodded and went on.
Antic.i.p.ation began to build within him. An entire army of Gnomes guarded Graymark"s battlements and watchtowers. Mord Wraiths walked its halls. Things darker still might lie in wait within, sentinels against intruders like themselves. Their company was but six in number. What hope had they against so many and such power? Little, it would appear; and yet, while it should have seemed altogether hopeless to the Valeman, it did not. Perhaps it was the faith that the King of the Silver River had shown in choosing him for this quest-a demonstration of the old man"sbelief that he could somehow find a way to succeed. Perhaps it was his own determination, a strength of will that would not let him fail.
He shook his head gently. Perhaps. But it was also the character of the five men who had elected to come with him and had sustained him. It was Garet Jax, Slanter, Foraker, Edain Elessedil and Helt-come from the Four Lands to this final, terrible confrontation, an enigmatic mixture of strength and courage. Two trackers, a hunter, a Weapons Master, and a Prince of the Elves had traveled different life-paths to reach this day, and none might live to see its end. But here they were. Their bonding to Jair and to the trust that had been given him transcended the caution and reason that might otherwise have caused them to give greater consideration to the obvious danger to their own lives. It was so even with Slanter. The Gnome had made his choice at Capaal when he had turned his back on a chance to flee north to the borderlands and the life from which he had strayed. All were committed, and in that commitment there was a unity that seemed almost indomitable. Jair knew little of his companions. Yet one thing he knew with certainty, and it was enough: whatever was to happen to him this day, these five would stand by him.
Perhaps that was why he was not afraid.
The defile widened again before them and sunlight streamed down from a new broadened skyline. Garet Jax slowed, then dropped into a crouch and eased ahead. One lean arm beckoned them after. Hunched down against the rocks, they crept forward until they were beside him.
"There," he whispered, pointing.
It was Graymark. Jair knew it instantly without need of being told. The fortress sat high upon a cliff face that curved away before them. It rested upon a broad shelf of rock that jutted sharply outward against the noonday sky. It was a grim and ma.s.sive thing. Battlements, towers, and parapets rose upward from stone block walls hundreds of feet high, like spikes and blunted axe-heads reaching into the cloudless blue. No pennants flew from the tower standards; no colors draped the cas.e.m.e.nts. The whole of the fortress had a flat and wintry cast to it even in the brilliant light of the sun; the stone had a sullen, ashen tone. What windows there were small, pinched openings covered over with bars and wooden shutters. A single narrow roadway wound upward against the mountainside-little more than a ledge cut into the rock-ending at a pair of tall, ironbound gates that fronted the complex. The gates stood closed.
They studied the stronghold wordlessly. There was no sign of anyone. Nothing moved.
Then Jair caught sight of the Croagh. He could see only pieces of it lifting from behind Graymark, a rugged arch of stone that seemed almost a part of the towers and the parapets of the complex. Curling back upon itself like some suspended stairway, it threaded its way skyward until it ended high upon a solitary peak that rose above those surrounding it.
Jair caught Slanter"s arm and pointed to the peak and the slender ribbon of stones that joined to it.
"Yes, boy-the Croagh and Heaven"s Well." The Gnome nodded. "All that the King of the Silver River has sent you to find."
"And the Maelmord?" Jair asked quickly.
Slanter shook his head. "On the other side of the fortress, down within a ring of cliffs.
There the Croagh begins its climb, wrapping about Graymark as it pa.s.ses, then rising on."
They were silent again, their eyes fixed on the fortress. "Doesn"t seem to be anyone in there," Helt murmured after a moment.
"What"s in there wants you to think exactly that," Slanter observed dryly; easing back onhis heels. "Besides, the walkers prefer the dark. They rest for the most part during the day and move about at night. Even the Gnomes that serve them here soon begin to live like that and don"t show themselves when it"s light. But make no mistake. They"re in there, Borderman-walkers and Gnomes both. And a few other things as well."
Garet Jax was studying the mountain trail that wound upward to the fortress entrance.
"That is the way they would expect us to come." He spoke more to himself than to the others.
"On the trail or by scaling the cliffs." He glanced left to where the shelf they stood upon curved down among the rocks and disappeared back into the mountains through a narrow tunnel.
"Maybe not this way, though."
Slanter touched his arm. "The tunnel connects to a series of pa.s.sageways that leads upward into the fortress cellars. That"s how we"ll go."
"Guarded?"
Slanter shrugged.
"I"d feel better if we could find a way to climb the Croagh from out here," Foraker muttered. "I"ve seen enough of caverns and tunnels."
The Gnome shook his head. "Can"t be done. Only way to reach the Croagh is through Graymark-right through the walkers and whatever serves them."
Foraker grunted. "What do you think, Garet?"
Garet Jax continued to study the fortress and the cliffs about it. His lean face was expressionless. "Do you know the way well enough to take us safely through, Gnome?" he asked Slanter shortly.
Slanter gave him a dark look. "You ask a lot. I know it, but not well. Went through it once or twice when I was first brought here, before this whole thing began..."
He trailed off abruptly, and Jair knew that he was remembering how he had chosen to come back to his homeland to be with his own people and been sent by the walkers to track the Druid Allanon. He was remembering and perhaps regretting momentarily how he had let things get turned about.
"Fair enough," Garet Jax said softly and started ahead.
He took them down through the rocks to where the shelf opened into the tunnel that led back under the mountain. There, out of sight of Graymark, concealed within the shelter of a gathering of ma.s.sive boulders, he beckoned them close.
"Do the walkers always rest during the daylight hours?" he asked Slanter. It was close and hot within the cl.u.s.tered rocks, and there was a fine sheen of sweat on his brow.
The Gnome frowned. "If you are asking whether we should go in now rather than when it is dark, I say we should."
"If there remains time enough to do so," Foraker interjected. "Midday is gone, and darkness comes early in the mountains. We might be better off to wait until tomorrow when we have the use of a full day. Another twelve hours or so can"t make that much difference."
There was a moment"s silence. Jair glanced skyward, his eyes scanning the ragged edge of the cliffs. Another twelve hours? An uneasy suspicion tugged at his mind in warning. How far had Brin gotten? The words of the King of the Silver River repeated themselves once again.
"You must reach Heaven"s Well before she reaches the Maelmord."
He turned quickly to Garet Jax. "I"m not sure we have twelve hours left. I have to know where Brin is to be certain. I have to use the crystal again-and I think I had better use it now."
The Weapons Master hesitated, then rose. "Not here. Move into the cave."They slipped through the darkened opening and groped their way back into the gloom.
There, huddled close about, the others waited patiently as Jair fumbled through his tunic for the vision crystal. He had it in a moment"s time, gripping it by its silver chain as he pulled it forth.
Cupping it gently in his hands, he wet his lips and fought back against the fatigue that bore down against him.
"Sing to it, Jair," he heard Edain Elessedil encourage softly.
He sang, his voice low and whispered, wearied by the strain to which he had put it in leading them safely through the Caves of Night. The crystal began to glow and the light to spread...
Brin paused in the gloom of the tunnel through which she stole. She had a sudden sense of being watched, of eyes following after her. It was as it had been on entering the Dragon"s Teeth and again on leaving-as if someone watched her from a great distance off.
She hesitated, her thoughts frozen, and a flash of insight whispered to her. Jair! It was Jair! She took a deep breath to steady herself. There was no logical explanation for such a conclusion-it was simply there. But how could that be? How could her brother...?
In the tunnel behind her, something moved.
She had come some distance from the causeway, a slow and cautious pa.s.sage through darkness with the aid of Cogline"s flameless torch. She had neither seen nor heard another living thing in all that time. She had come so far without sensing other life that she had begun to wonder if perhaps she had been mistaken in taking this tunnel.
But now there was something there at last-not ahead of her as expected, but behind. She turned guardedly, the feeling of being watched forgotten. She thrust the torch forward and started in shock. Great, luminous blue eyes blinked at her from out of the gloom. Then a ma.s.sive whiskered face pushed its way into the circle of her light.
"Whisper!"
She spoke the moor cat"s name with a sigh of relief and dropped to her knees as the beast came up to her and rubbed its broad head against her shoulder in friendly greeting.
"Whisper, what are you doing here?" she murmured as the cat dropped down on his haunches and regarded her solemnly.
She could guess readily enough the answer to that question, of course. Discovering her absence, the others must have backtracked to the stone bridge. Being unable to follow farther themselves, they had sent Whisper after her. Or rather, Kimber had sent Whisper, for Whisper answered only to the girl. Brin reached out and rubbed the cat"s ears. It must have cost Kimber something to send Whisper on like this without her-as close as they were, as much as the girl relied on him. As was her nature, she had chosen to give the moor cat"s strength to her friend.
The Valegirl"s eyes misted, and she put her arms about him.
"Thank you, Kimber," she whispered.
Then she rose, stroked the cat for a moment and shook her head gently. "But I cannot take you with me, can I? I cannot take anyone. It is much too dangerous-even for you. I promised myself that no one would be exposed to whatever it is that waits for me, and that includes you.
You have to go back."
The moor cat blinked up at her and remained where he was.
"Go on, now. You have to go back to Kimber. Go on, Whisper."
Whisper didn"t move a hair. He simply sat there, waiting."So." Brin shook her head again." As determined as your mistress, I guess."
She was left with no other choice; she used the wishsong. She sang softly to the cat, wrapping him close about with her words and music, telling him that he must go back. For several minutes she sang, a gentle urging that would not injure. When she was done, Whisper rose to his feet and padded back down the corridor, disappearing into the dark.
Brin watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and started ahead once more.
Moments later the darkness began to dissipate and the gloom to lighten. The pa.s.sageway, narrow and close before, broadened and lifted in seconds so that her small light could no longer reach to the walls and ceiling. But now there was light ahead that rendered her own unnecessary, filling the pa.s.sageway with dusty gray brightness. It was the sun. Somewhere close at hand, the tunnel was opening back into the world without.
She hurried forward, Cogline"s flameless torch dropping to her side. The pa.s.sageway turned upward, a stairwell honed and shaped from the tunnel rock rising far ahead into a ma.s.sive, open-air cavern. She went up the stairs quickly, her weariness forgotten, sensing that her journey was nearing its end. Sunlight spilled down into the cavern above, silver streamers thick with swirling bits of dust and silt that danced and spun like living things.
Then she reached the last step, walked clear of the tunnel onto the broad ledge that lay beyond, and stopped. Before her, a second stone bridge spanned a second chasm, this one twice the size of the first, rugged and ma.s.sive. It dropped away down the mountain rock thousands of feet into an abyss so deep that even the sunlight streaming down through crevices in the cavern ceiling could not penetrate its blackness. Brin peered downward, her nose wrinkling against the stench that wafted up. Even with Cogline"s salve to numb her sense of smell, she felt nauseated.
Whatever lay at the bottom of the pit was much worse than what pa.s.sed through Graymark"s sewers.
She glanced across the stone bridge to what waited beyond. The cavern stretched back into the mountain several hundred feet, then opened into a short, high tunnel. Yet it was not a tunnel so much as an alcove, she thought-hewn by hand, shaped and smoothed, with intricate symbols carved into the rock. Light streamed down at its far end, and the sky stretched away in a dim and hazy green.
She looked closer. No, it was not the sky that stretched away. It was a valley"s misted wall.
It was the Maelmord.
She knew it instinctively, as if she had seen it in a dream and remembered. She could feel its touch and hear its whisper.
She hastened forward onto the bridge, a broad arched causeway some two dozen feet in width with wooden railing posts pegged into its rock and linked with chains. She moved forward quickly, pa.s.sed the apex of the arch, and started down.
She was almost across when the black creature rose suddenly from a deep crevice in the cavern floor a dozen feet in front of her.
Muttering irritably, Cogline shuffled to a halt, Rone and Kimber crowding close behind him. Ahead, the sewer bisected into a pair of tunnels, each exactly like the other. There was no indication of which offered pa.s.sage to wherever it was that Brin had now gone. There was nothing to suggest that either was the better way to go.
"Well, which do we follow?" Cogline demanded of Rone.The highlander stared at him. "Don"t you know?"
The oldster shook his head. "No idea. Make your choice."
Rone hesitated, looked away, then looped back again. "I can"t. Look, maybe it doesn"t make any difference which one we follow. Maybe both end in the same place."
"Sewer tunnels run to the same place, not from the same place! Any fool knows that!" the old man snorted.
"Grandfather!" Kimber admonished sharply.
She edged forward between them, scanning the tunnels in turn, studying the blackened waters that flowed through the grooved channels cut into each. At last she stepped back, shaking her head slowly.
"I cannot help you," she confessed, as if somehow she should have been able to do so. "I have no sense of where either leads. They appear the same." She looked over to Rone. "You will have to choose."
They stared at each other for a moment like frozen statues. Then Rone nodded slowly.
"All right-we"ll go left." He started past them. "At least that tunnel seems to run back toward the chasm."
He hastened into the sewer corridor, his flameless torch held firmly before him, his face grim. Cogline and Kimber looked at each other briefly and hurried after.
The black thing rose from the split in the cavern floor like a shadow come alive out of night"s dreamworld and crouched down before the bridge. It was human in look, though as hairless and smooth as if sculpted from dark clay. Hunched. over until it rocked forward on its long forearms, it was still taller than Brin. There was an odd, shapeless quality to its limbs and body, as if the muscles beneath lacked definition-or as if there were no muscles there at all and it not a thing of flesh. Sightless, deadened eyes lifted to find hers, and a mouth as ragged and black as the creature"s skin yawned in a deep, toneless hiss.
The Valegirl froze. There was no way to avoid the creature. It had clearly been placed there for the purpose of guarding the bridge, and nothing was to pa.s.s it. Probably the Mord Wraiths had created it from the dark magic-created it, or called it to life from some nether place and time, as they had done with the Jachyra.
The black thing advanced a step, slow and certain, dead eyes staring. Brin forced herself to stand where she was. There was no way to know how dangerous this creature was, but she sensed that it was dangerous enough and that, if she turned or backed away, it would be on her.
The creature"s black maw split wide and its hiss filled the silence. Brin went deathly cold.
She knew what would happen next. And that meant that once again she was going to have to use the wishsong. Instantly her throat tightened. She did not want to use the Elven magic, but she could not let this monster reach her, even if it meant...
Abruptly the black thing attacked, lunging forward from its half-crouch. The swiftness of the thing caught her by surprise. It was hypnotic. The wishsong stuck in her throat, her indecision freezing it away. The moment hung suspended like a knot in the thread of time, and she waited for the impact of the blow.
But the blow never came. Something came streaking from behind her in a sudden blur of motion, caught the black thing in midleap, and hammered it back. Brin staggered away, dropping to her knees. It was Whisper! The spell of the wishsong had not been strong enough to counteract the command of his mistress; Whisper had shaken the magic and come after her!The antagonists went down in a tangled heap, claws and teeth ripping. The black thing was caught completely by surprise, having seen only the girl. Hissing with rage, it struggled to dislodge the moor cat from its back where the great beast had fastened himself in a death grip.
Over and over they tumbled along the length of the bridge, the moor cat"s jaws tearing at the monster"s neck and shoulders while the ma.s.sive black form hunched and thrashed convulsively.
Brin remained frozen with indecision a dozen yards away at the center of the bridge. She must do something, she told herself. This was not Whisper"s fight-this was hers. She flinched at the fury of the struggle, a small cry escaping her lips as the battle between the two took them perilously close to the railing, shaking the iron chains. She must help! But how could she? She had no weapon save for the wishsong, and she could not use the magic. She could not!
She surprised herself with the intensity of her declaration. She could not use the wishsong because...because...Rage and fear flooded her, mixing with confusion to hold her bound. Why?
She howled the question within her mind, a cry of anguish. What was wrong with her?
Then abruptly she was moving forward, edging her way to the far side of the stone arch, away from the combatants. She had made her decision-she would flee. It was she whom the black thing sought. Seeing her run, the thing would follow. And if she were quick enough, she would make the Maelmord before it...
She stopped. Ahead where the cavern floor stretched away to the arched opening, she caught sight of something new as it emerged from the creviced rock.
A second creature!
She went perfectly still. The pa.s.sage opening to the daylight and the valley beyond was too far and the black thing stood directly in her line of flight. Already it was coming for her. It lifted from the rock, then lumbered toward the bridge on all fours, its blackened maw gaping.
Brin backed away. She must defend herself this time. The fear and uncertainty ripped through her. She must use the wishsong. She must!
The black thing hissed and reached for her. Again, she felt her throat knot.
And again, it was Whisper who saved her. Breaking free of the first creature, the cat whirled and catapulted violently into the second, knocking it away from the girl. Scrambling up again, Whisper turned to meet this new enemy. The black thing came at him with a rasping howl, vaulting high into the air. But Whisper was too quick. Sidestepping deftly, the big cat slashed at his attacker"s exposed underbelly. Chunks of dark flesh ripped free, yet the monster did not slow.