The Prince put a gentle hand to her brow. “Back up there,” he replied. “Where we left them. Safe and sound, I’m sure.”
A small laugh from behind broke into the conversation. Oro stepped from the fog, a hand rubbing at the bruises on his crooked shoulder. “You really expect to find them alive?” he said caustically, his brow furrowing in a sharp downward slant. “Have you forgotten those birds, eh? Likely as not the carrion have whisked everyone away and into the hands of the Druids.”
“I won’t believe it!” cried the girl.
Oro snickered. “Oh, no?”
Ignoring the irritating hunchback, the Prince tried to smile. “Don’t listen to him, Mariana. He’s only trying to confuse you while he plans a way to wrestle the dagger from me. Ramagar’s as safe as we are, I promise. They’re all safe, and probably looking for us at this very moment.”
The dancing girl sat up. “Maybe we can find them first,” she said hopefully. “Maybe we can meet them on the heights —”
The Prince frowned. “Perhaps,” he sighed. “But …”
Something was bothering him, she saw, something that suddenly made her feel very cold and alone, as if her companion were a stranger again and no longer a friend. “What’s the matter?” she asked, shaken, forcing his reluctant eyes to meet her own.
The Prince took her hand and held it firmly. “Listen to me, Mariana,” he said. “For now, at least for a while, we have to forget about the others …”
Mariana was aghast. “Forget? What are you talking about?”
The Prince leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “By my reckoning there are only two days left until Moon Time. Two days until the wizards will have to seed the clouds for another month. We can’t allow that ritual to take place. We have to stop it, and stop it now. Free Speca while there’s time. Our allies are waiting, but they won’t hold still much longer. Aran’s ships can’t be asked to wait another month. There is too much danger.”
Mariana drew back. “What are you saying?” she gasped. “You mean we should abandon them? Leave them on their own, to die?”
The Prince bit tensely at his lip, struggling to find a way to make the girl understand the gravity of the situation facing them.
“It’s not that I want to,” he insisted. “Rather that we have no other choice. We must press on at all costs. We must reach the Devil’s Tower and put an end to these insidious deeds. Won’t you understand that, Mariana? Won’t you listen and see that too much is at stake?”
She shook her head, tears coming to her eyes. She could picture Ramagar and the haj at this very moment, in a frenzy with worry, doing anything, risking anything, to find her. They would be easy prey for the Death-Stalkers and the cohorts of Druid troops searching for them high and low.
“Two days, Mariana,” repeated the Prince. “That’s all the time we need. Then, we can come back …”
She sniffed, childlike eyes wide and sad. “By then it may be too late.”
The Prince nodded darkly. “Perhaps. But think of this poor, wretched land. Think of how long she has suffered. And think of the North — how long will even Aran remain free while the Darkness spreads across the sky? We must not fail …”
Although her heart was breaking, she had to acknowledge that everything the Prince had said was true. “What … what do we have to do?” she asked at last.
“Continue on. East. Try and stay to the lower grounds, if we can. And find our destination before it’s too late.”
Oro cackled; he rubbed his hands together one over the other. “And how long do you think we’d last, eh? Have you a map to show us the way? Or fast horses to carry us there?”
“We’ll find the way,” replied the Prince with defiance. He stood, holding out a hand for the girl to come by his side. Forgetting her sorrows and pains, Mariana drew on her courage and wiped away her tears. “All right,” she said. “I gave my word long ago, and I won’t break it now.”
The Prince smiled.
“Fools!” barked Oro, standing before them and glaring. “Look about you. Just how long do you think you’ll last, eh? It’s hopeless, I tell you. Hopeless. Take my advice and give up. Maybe we can work our way back toward the coast, give Osari the signal, and at least get out of here with our lives.”
The dancing girl glowered at him. “You go back,” she hissed. “Save your skin if that’s what you want. As for me —”
Oro’s jaw hung. “You mean you’re actually going on? Listening to this, this … He gazed in astonishment at them both. “Bah. You’re both mad! And you’ll pay the price for it!”
The hunchback continued to rant as the two companions stepped away from him and wandered off into the fog. Oro’s face beaded with sweat from fear at being left alone, but no one paid any attention.
“You’ll be sorry!” Mariana heard him call, his voice already sounding dim and distant as they marched deeper into the mists. “And you’ll rue the day you didn’t listen to me!”
Mariana said nothing, and was not surprised after a short while to hear shuffling footsteps behind. Without bothering to turn around she knew it was Oro, his cowardly mind changed, now racing to catch up with them before it was too late.
VI
The Devil’s Tower
22
“Hallooo!” called Ramagar, his hands cupped tightly around his mouth as he stood mired in ankle-deep muck.
From the distance he could hear his echo reverberate off the mountain walls.
“Mariana! Can you hear me?” came the haj’s furtive cry. Again and again the swineherd called, while the band stopped and waited for a reply. Nothing. Nothing at all, save for the dull, mournful moan of wind through the swirling mist.
“Let’s keep going,” said Argyle doggedly. He flung his tattered cloak over his shoulders and stiffened his resolve. They were almost at the end of the line, he knew, having searched for their missing companions all the way down from the heights, negotiating the tricky path back to the bottom, and since this morning, tramping right through the damnable fog that seemed never to go away.
To make matters worse, they had no way of knowing that their chosen course through the bogs was the right one; everything so far only led to the conclusion that it was not.
Ramagar wiped his sweaty brow with his sleeve and clenched his teeth. The mist engulfing them was so overwhelming that, should Mariana and the Prince indeed be alive somewhere close by, finding them was a million-to-one chance. The very thought of them lying helpless and stricken in this mire made him physically sick, all the more so because there was so little he could do.
The haj walked on ahead of the others, sullen and quiet, his head bowed in despair. Although it was unspoken, they all shared the knowledge that each passing futile hour only lessened their chances that much more.
All through the night they had searched, and all through this dismal Specian day. Slime and mud clung underfoot; at times the terrain of the bogs was like quicksand, so they sank knee-and even thigh-deep as they passed from one barren patch to the next.
At the end of one swampy field, where the landscape rose high enough for them to get glimpses of the sky, they paused to rest.
Argyle sat apart from the others with his head gloomily in his hands. Homer and Ramagar shared a lichen-infested boulder, while the haj settled himself beside the stump of a long-deadened tree. Thorhall, still quite ill but at least conscious, huddled beside him.
“We’re almost at the beginning of the Black Forest,” said the injured Aranian glumly.
Ramagar sighed. “What do we do now?” he asked.
“Double back,” offered the haj wearily. “What else can we do?”
“Is it possible that the Prince could have lost direction and wandered into the forest with Mariana?” wondered Homer. “After all, they’d be just as directionless as we are …”
Ramagar was afraid even to speculate; it dawned on him that it really didn’t make very much difference; in these foul climes all roads seem
ed to lead to the same place: nowhere.
“We have nothing to lose if we try,” observed the haj. “We can always return to the bogs.”
The thief hunched his shoulders. It all seemed so pointless. But he mustn’t lose hope, he told himself. Better to keep going, search anywhere, no matter how dim the chance. “What do you say, Thorhall?” he asked at last.
The wounded guide sucked in a breath of dank air and let it out in a slow hiss between his teeth. “Whichever way,” he replied, “it won’t do us any good to sit here and moan.”
“I agree,” said Argyle, joining in the conversation for the first time. He got up from his place and swung his weapon over his shoulder. “Point the way, Thorhall,” he said.
And one by one they all stood, cold and hungry, dejected and as pessimistic as they could be. Thorhall shivered; he rubbed at his arms and gestured with his head toward the thin line of black trees already apparent past the misty field. “Straight ahead,” he told them, and without another word spoken they marched on again.
The foliage of the Black Forest was a sight to sadden even the cheeriest of hearts. Where once mighty redwoods had risen halfway to the clouds, there were now only row upon row of thick, ugly trunks, with gnarled and rotting roots hideously twisting up from the coarse soil and grotesquely wraping into the air. Heavy branches clung like lifeless appendages to the trunks, intertwining, intermingling in an overall effect so unnatural that the sight caused every member of the band to avert his eyes. And the trees rolled on for as far as they could see, the occasional clearing they came to no more than a gutted mat of caked, crumbling dirt, brittle to the touch but ready to crumble like powder at the slightest pressure.
At various spots chosen at random both Argyle and Thor-hall would stop, kneel down, and run their fingers through the dirt. Their eyes searched with true hunters’ guile for any sign of tracks or pieces of fallen fabric. But as before there were no clues to be found.
The dark Specian sky was becoming bleaker, and they knew that the night was about to set in. At length they stopped to rest and debate whether they should go on or turn back.
It was then that they first noticed a new sound. Ramagar hushed the others and put a hand to his ear. From somewhere not too far off he could hear a low pounding noise, a steady rhythm that reminded him of beating drums.
“What do you make of it?” asked the thief.
Argyle shook his head; he turned to Thorhall. Thorhall listened in silence and took a few steps toward the constant beating. “Perhaps we’d better go see,” he said.
Slinking cautiously, the adventurers closed in on the noise, which became steadily louder. At the base of a low hill they stopped. The sound was coming from just over the other side; they could hear it quite loudly now, and it began to sound more and more like the swinging of hammers.
They inched up the hill crouching, careful not to stumble over the multitude of twisting roots and fallen branches. Toward the crest they lowered into a belly crawl, each man pushing himself forward by his elbows, keeping his head no more than a few inches above the ground. As they reached the top and peered over, they held their breath and looked on incredulously.
Down below they could see a vast patch of cleared forest, barricaded with barbed wire. Huge mounds of recently dug soil were piled near a large man-made shaft leading straight down into the bowels of the earth. Close by stood what appeared to be great vats of steel, their contents boiling over roaring fires.
Ramagar gasped at the sight of a squad of Druids, all with weapons in hand, marching away from the vats and toward the entrance of the shaft. And from somewhere deep inside the shaft came that pounding of sledgehammers and picks.
“It’s a mine!” cried the thief.
Thorhall hushed him. then shook his head while the others moved in for a better view. His face broke into a cold sweat, as the memory of such a place as this came flooding back over him.
Just then the stillness of the scene was abruptly broken by a shrill whistle whose blast nearly shattered their eardrums. The pounding of the hammers ceased and the adventurers watched in wonder while a shackled group of pitiful souls began to file out from the mine. Unspeaking, the ill-clothed, expressionless work gang docilely placed down their tools and formed an inspection line before their Druid masters.
“A press gang!” wheezed the haj.
Thorhall nodded glumly. A press gang it was for certain — a hundred chained men, half-starved and drugged under the influence of the evil Seeds, toiling in the pits for sixteen hours a day and more, suffering within that brutal hole where the temperatures were intolerable and many perished for lack of a single swallow of water. A Druid press gang, where hunger and depravity were the rule, and only the strongest of the strongest could hope to survive more than a few seasons.
It took some time for the last of the slaves to reach the surface. Transfixed and dazed, they waited like children while the taskmaster took them all to account for their day’s labor. One of the soldiers worked his way slowly through the silent lines of sweaty, exhausted men and seemingly on a whim chose one from here and one from there. Those selected followed him meekly and knelt while another Druid, a fat beast of a man, flexed a gruesome bullwhip. Then with a cruel grin, he beat them mercilessly.
Sickened and incensed, the haj slipped out his dagger. Argyle quickly grabbed the swineherd by the arm. “Don’t be a fool!” he reprimanded. “What good do you think that will do? They’ll be all over us like flies.”
Burlu nodded; he sheathed his weapon, too stunned by it all to have words for reply.
“But we can’t just stand here and watch,” objected Ramagar. feeling for the prisoners’ plight. “Isn’t there anything to be done?”
A sudden scream turned every head back to the grisly scene. One of the whipped slaves had been forcibly picked up by a handful of soldiers and sadistically heaved into one of the uncovered vats. The prisoner splashed in the molten liquid. his flesh sizzling to cinder.
“Mercy of heaven!” cried the haj in despair. No one else uttered a sound; they all looked on in disbelief, recalling the grim tales they had been told of such terrible doings, but never once dreaming they would come face to face with such a thing themselves. It was ghastly, a shameless act, without reason and without sanity.
“The prisoners must have caused a bit of trouble today,” Thorhall explained knowingly. “The Druids enjoy making examples of those who disobey their orders. But at least this poor fellow went quickly. I’ve witnessed others who were racked and tortured for days on end until they died …”
The press gang taskmaster continued to exhort his charges for a few minutes more, carrying on as if nothing had happened. When he was finished, his men marched the prisoners off toward a grouping of ill-constructed shacks where they were fed their daily allotment of slop. Then their legs were unshackled and they were permitted to sleep.
Ramagar shuddered; the wretched existence of these slaves had made its mark upon him, and for the first time he truly understood the fanatical drive of the Prince — a drive that would never cease until his people and the world were rid of such terrible barbarity.
“We’d best get away from here,” said Thorhall after a time. “Who knows what guards may be about on patrol —”
The haj tapped the Aranian lightly on the shoulder; Thorhall slowly turned his head and glanced beyond the deadened stumps leading back down the hill. Hands on hips, a black-bearded Druid stood watching them with a grim smile. And although there were five men and he was alone, he didn’t seem the least bit perturbed.
Argyle grasped his fearsome ax and made ready to rush at him. The Druid held out a hand and snapped his fingers.
A rainfall of short, snubbed arrows came sailing over their heads; the adventurers leaped to their feet as the darts smacked into the ground all around them. Then from behind boulders and stumps a cohort of Druids raised themselves, reloading crossbows similar to those used on the Dragon Ships, and waiting for the next signal to be given
by their captain.
“Throw down your weapons,” came the terse command from the grinning Druid, speaking in the language of the North.
The band hesitated. Ramagar glanced to Argyle, both men having made a quick assessment of the situation. By now the archers had finished loading and were taking dead aim. There was no chance against such firepower; before they reached the bottom of the hill the next volley would cut them down.
“Better do as he says,” advised the thief, slipping his dagger from its sheath and tossing it toward the impatient soldier.
With a grunt and a growl, Argyle threw down his ax. The haj sighed and let his own knife fall; Homer did the same. Thorhall overcame his own reluctance, scowling as his blade dropped from his hand.
All at once the Druids moved in, swarming over them like a plague of locusts.
“Are they going to kill us?” said the haj, turning to Thorhall as their hands were bound behind their backs.
“To what purpose?” replied the fugitive Aranian bitterly. “Laboring in the mines will do it for them. You see, we’re as good as dead already, my good friends. After a few days of such misery, we’ll regret ever being taken alive.”
“Az’i!” grumbled Mariana, wincing with the sting as she bathed her blistered foot in the shallow water of the murky stream. She rubbed at the instep and then leaned back along the coarse bank. Overhead, the white mist still swirled, only thinner than before. Marching all night had taken them virtually to the end of the dreaded canyon, and the road to the citadel lay directly before them.
The Prince sat in deep contemplation of the dangerous task ahead. Through the haze, he could almost make out the fuzzy outline of the tower itself. It was a huge structure, built of gray stone, rising so high that its upper limits were completely shrouded by the clouds. And from the Black Forest, which itself tapered and ended at the limits of the tower, chalk cliffs rose up and up, moss-and lichen-covered, to merge gradually with the more massive stones of the edifice.
The Thief of Kalimar; Captain Sinbad; Cinnabar Page 37