by David Weber
“We can rest here,” the wizard said calmly. “We could all use some sleep.”
“And you’re not worried about Wulfra noticing that?” Kenhodan jutted his chin at the glowing globe, and Wencit chuckled softly. There was an unpleasant, satisfied edge to that chuckle, the red-haired man noticed.
“The cave’s shielded, Kenhodan. I ─”
“Thought that might be a good idea back when you were setting the Dragon Ward,” Kenhodan interrupted, and Wencit grinned.
“Precisely,” he murmured with a half bow.
“Well I’m sure it’s a great weight off my mind that all’s working out to plan so well and all,” Bahzell said sourly, “but it’s not so very happy Walsharno’s after being at all this creeping about like so many worms in a burrow. It’s entirely too much of that we’ve done before—aye, and most of it with the likes of you, Wencit!”
“It’s scarcely my fault you and your friend are built on a…lavish scale,” Wencit pointed out.
“No, but I’m thinking you’ve quite a penchant for meeting sorceresses in holes in the ground,” the hradani rumbled, allowing his eyes to flit briefly—but pointedly—in Kenhodan’s direction.
“Perhaps I do,” Wencit replied mildly. “On the other hand, most of those previous ventures seem to have worked out fairly well. Which undoubtedly owes a little something to my habit of bringing along the right people when they’re needed. Why,” he allowed his own glowing eyes to drift even more briefly towards Kenhodan, “sometimes I don’t even know they are the right people until the proper moment comes along. Still, I’m seldom wrong, am I?”
“Aye, there’s that,” Bahzell agreed. “Still and all, it’s in my mind as that’s after being the sort of mistake a man only gets to make once.”
“That’s probably true enough,” Wencit conceded. “This isn’t that ‘once,’ though, Mountain. Not yet. So, as I say, let’s get some rest. I want to move in early this afternoon. Wulfra should feel confident we can’t penetrate her patrols without the cover of darkness.”
“Surprise is always worth having,” Kenhodan said, setting his saddle aside, and poured grain into a feedbag for Glamhandro. Then he grinned. “Bahzell might not like caves, but do you realize it hasn’t rained on me for over a week, Wencit? And with this nice roof—” he waved at the cave walls “—I may even stay dry!”
“Get some sleep, Kenhodan,” Wencit advised kindly. “There’s no rain in here…but there are a few damp patches.”
Kenhodan looked at him reproachfully as he shook out his bedroll.
* * *
Kenhodan sat up quickly when Bahzell woke him six hours later, and his heart gave one strong surge before its beat dropped back to normal. The cave seemed dark and threatening, but the smell of horse flesh was comforting and his panic passed. He sat quietly, feeling its echoes vanish into his depths to be replaced by a sort of quivering tension—something more like eagerness than fear.
“Leave the horses saddled behind us,” Wencit advised. “I hope we won’t be in any hurry when they return, but you can never be sure.”
“And if we don’t return?” Chernion asked harshly. “This little lady’s served me well. I won’t leave her tied to starve!”
“Never fear, Border Warden. We won’t tie them at all; Glamhandro and Byrchalka will see to it they don’t stray…or stay here and starve if we don’t come back.”
Kenhodan listened to them absently as he stroked Glamhandro’s nose. The big stallion was unhappy at being left behind, but the exit tunnel was far too cramped for him, just as it was too narrow for Walsharno and Byrchalka. Kenhodan soothed the big gray gently until Wencit took up a torch and brought it alight with the touch of a finger. He waited until its flame burned steadily, then waved them all in close about him.
“The cave may be shielded, but I’d prefer not to use the art any further from this point on if I can help it,” he said evenly. “Sooner or later, I’ll have to, but I want to wait as long as possible. I’m even dispelling my blocking spell—this close to her, even that might sound Wulfra’s alarms. Besides—” he smiled wolfishly “—I doubt she’s scrying this particular spot.
“I’ll go first to probe for trap spells, but we’ll rely as much on your eyes and ears as my spells from here on. Understood?”
They all nodded silently.
“Good. Our way lies there.” Wencit’s torch waved at a narrow stone gut to their right. “Kenhodan, you’ll follow me, please. Then you, Border Warden. Mountain, I’ll trust you to watch our backs, but it might be unwise to try raising any of Tomanāk’s power this close to Wulfra…until she already knows we’re here, at any rate.” Bahzell chuckled grimly and nodded, and Wencit continued. “The passage narrows occasionally, but it’ll always be wide enough for us to pass. Be ready, but carry no drawn steel! Some of Wulfra’s servants will sense a readied weapon long before they can see us.”
He paused once more, until each of them had nodded yet again.
“Then let’s begin,” he said calmly.
* * *
Wencit’s torch cast sharp shadows whose flickering dance confused the eye. Kenhodan wished he were leading rather than the wizard so that he could see ahead, but only Wencit had any idea of their route or of what they might expect to meet.
At first the passage was high and wide enough for even Bahzell to move easily, but then it narrowed, twisting back and forth with serpentine patience. The ceiling lowered as it dove under the lake’s water, and the rock grew slimy and damp, covered with algae and odd, knobby projections, almost like rocky mushrooms. The air smelled wet, and a damp breeze pressed coldly into their faces and fluttered Wencit’s torch flame. Before long, the passage became so narrow Bahzell was forced to turn sideways, and sword hilts hung irritatingly on rough spots. Kenhodan swore as his bow stave scraped the roof and caught infuriatingly on the walls until he finally slid it from his back and carried it in his left hand. The sounds of their panting breath, the scrape of weapons and mail on stone, the splash of boots in puddles—all seemed magnified by the passage so that Kenhodan felt someone must hear them coming.
No one did, and Wencit led them unhesitatingly, lighting fresh torches at need. Their flames torch fumed, trailing acrid smoke, and side passages opened at ragged intervals, but he never hesitated. Some of those passages gave on mineral-crusted galleries where the torchlight touched flowers of rock into glowing webs, but such flashes of beauty were rare.
Half a mile from its start, the passage opened into a huge cave. Water fretted and foamed through fissures in one wall, plunging fifteen feet into a rippling pool forever beyond reach of the sun. The rush and plunge of water generated the breeze which had blown into their face on the way in, and the sound of it filled the cavern with a ceaseless, eternal murmur. Stalactites and stalagmites flashed gleaming fangs at the torch, and the floor was coated in fine, liquid mud. Wencit held his torch high and grinned as Bahzell struggled through the narrow slit of an opening into the cave.
“Well, Mountain!” His voice echoed weirdly. “It seems size isn’t always an advantage.”
“Aye, and it’s after making my clothes cost more, too.” Bahzell dabbed at a deep scratch on one cheek. “So how much longer is it, this worm warren of yours?”
“The ‘worm warren’ is over. From here on the passages will be wider and higher. I warn you, though; don’t drink from any water we pass along the way. It’s tainted by the power of the thing we’ve come for.”
“You’re hunting something that evil?” Chernion asked, startled.
“Not evil, Border Warden—only powerful. The art is neither good nor evil in and of itself; it’s the use to which it’s put which makes it black or white. What we’ve come for was never a thing of the Dark, yet the power radiating from it could blow out your life like a thought.”
“I dislike dealing with wizardry that powerful,” she said softly.
“Sometimes we have no choice…Border Warden.”
She flashed him a daggered look
and then fumbled for her water bottle. The act was contagious, and Kenhodan unstoppered his own. It tasted flat, but he preferred its stale taste to the poison of the fresh pool.
Wencit let them rest briefly before he led them across the cave. His companions followed, slipping occasionally on the skim of slickness underfoot, then stopped dead behind him and stared wonderingly at their further path, for this was no natural tunnel.
It was a tube, its round walls glass smooth, and the torchlight reflected from polished black stone like an ebon mirror. The tunnel bored sword-straight into the hill, and runes no one had used in over a thousand years crawled across its lintel. They were deep-cut and black in the torchlight.
“What does that say?” Chernion asked edgily, but Wencit didn’t answer. Another voice spoke instead, low and soft, almost dreamy against the cavern’s water-rustling sounds, and yet crystal clear.
“Wizard wrought by wizard taught,
This gate to death and birth.
The dark road runs through bloody earth
Where future’s past is locked.”
Chernion and Bahzell stared at Kenhodan in amazement, and only then did he realize who’d spoken. He blinked and shook his head, and the memory of what he’d said fled.
“How did you know that?” Chernion asked softly.
“I-I don’t know,” he said, his green eyes wondering. “But that’s what it says, even if I don’t have a clue what it means.”
“If it so happened you did have a clue, it’s worried about your sanity I’d be!” Bahzell said. “It’s little enough I’ve understood about this whole Tomanāk-forsaken trip! Wencit?”
“Kenhodan’s translation is correct,” the wizard said.
“And that’s all you’ll be saying about it, you vise-lipped old faker?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so.” Bahzell sounded morosely pleased by the response. “Well, I’ve no doubt at all, at all, as how all will become clear in time—assuming we’re after living so long—but anyone as might expect explanations from you has more faith in miracles than I! I trust you, but I’ve given over pumping you for information.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed how patient you’ve been for this entire journey, but I simply put it down to the slowing effect of old age.”
“Old age, is it?!” Bahzell laughed and slapped Wencit’s shoulders so hard he knocked the wizard several steps sideways. “I’d not be so quick to be throwing those two words around anywhere as Leeana might be hearing them!”
Wencit grinned at him and made shooing notions with his free hand until the group fell back into formation. Then he stepped under the carven lintel and his torchlight licked ahead into the passage.
Chernion moved up beside Kenhodan as the passage tightened, and the torchlight flowed redly over her face, sparking off the badge on her beret. It fumed and guttered from the mirrored walls, throwing its light down the passage in a spill of blood and ebony that dazzled the eye. Kenhodan had room to sling his bow once more, but he strung it instead, for the reflected light glittered and bounced as much as fifty yards ahead and offered the possibility of shooting if they met something. When they met something, he corrected himself grimly.
Yet despite the wider tunnel, they actually moved more slowly. Wencit stopped every few yards to feel for trap spells or other sorcery, and Kenhodan watched him wonderingly. Clearly this passage had been carved by sorcery, and if Wulfra knew nothing about it, then someone besides the baroness must have made it. And, given the hidden highway through the Scarth Wood and the shield protecting the cave in which they’d rested, he had a pretty shrewd idea who that “someone” might have been, but how could even Wencit have guessed such elaborate preparations would someday be necessary?
The tunnel offered no answers. There were no turns or side openings, as if its creator had had no time for frills or decorations. Even the breeze of the outer passages had vanished, and the air was heavy with years, though there was no dust. Kenhodan smiled at that thought. It would take a hardy-soled speck of dust to venture into this passage!
He lost track of how far they’d come. The coiled tension, briefly relieved by the byplay between Wencit and Bahzell, flooded back and clamped him in a vise of expectancy that tightened inexorably until he longed for something to break its grip, and his mind wandered back to the inscription. It was baffling enough that he’d been able to read it, but what did it mean? It smacked of yet more hidden meanings, and the last thing he needed was mysterious messages he had no idea how to decipher.
His contemplations slithered to a halt as Wencit suddenly stopped before a blank wall. It sealed the passage with the same glossy blackness, reflecting the torch in a long spill of blood until they were surrounded on all sides by the glare. Light bounced off the end wall, the sidewalls, the roof and floor, eating their shadows, and Wencit turned to face them.
“This is where the danger truly begins,” he said simply. “The maze is beyond this wall, and I can’t open the way without using the art. When I do, Wulfra will know we’re here. The maze’s nature confuses scrying, but she’ll know roughly where we are, and she’ll throw everything she has at us. Are you ready?”
“That’s a stupid question for someone who’s supposed to be such a mighty wizard!” Chernion snapped. “How could we be ‘ready’? But we’re as close to it as we’re going to be, I suppose!
“Elrytha’s after speaking for all of us,” Bahzell rumbled. “But I’m hopeful as there’s no need to be going further with weapons sheathed?”
Wencit shook his head, and steel scraped as the hradani drew both sword and hook knife.
“What does this open into, Wencit?” Kenhodan asked as he handed his bow and quiver to Chernion and drew his own sword.
“A cross passage of equal width.”
“Which way should we go when we get through?”
“To the right.”
“All right. As soon as it’s open, Bahzell, you go left and I’ll go right. Wencit, you stay behind me from here, and Elrytha will cover you.”
Heads nodded, and Wencit hid a smile despite his tension as Kenhodan assumed complete command. Even the wizard must yield in the end, it seemed.
He pushed the thought aside and handed Chernion the torch. She took it gingerly, and her eyes widened as raised his hands to lay them against the stone and his fingers sank into the rock past the knuckles. His brow furrowed with concentration, and brilliant fire washed from his eyes to lick the wall and flare back down the passage. It threw his silver hair into sharp, gleaming relief, and Kenhodan raised his dagger hand to shield his vision against the fierce glare, staring slit-eyed as the light burned savagely.
Wind burst back from the wall in a heated storm that whipped hair and clothing. Wencit leaned into the wall, and the brilliance engulfed him, gusting and glaring and all the more frightening for the utter silence of the violence mirrored in the glossy black walls about them. They were trapped at the heart of a seething cocoon of reflected fire, and their skins prickled as the power crackled.
Silver streaks burned up out of the stone, radiating in a jagged web from the incandescence of Wencit’s hands. They veined the stone with white fire, like a web of lightning, and a hissing roar arose at last as steam and the sharp smell of molten rock billowed all about them. The silver lines flared, and Wencit’s voice was a shout.
“Toren ahm laurick! Enlop ef Toren!”
Kenhodan cringed at the violence of the wizard’s cry, but its thunder was swallowed without trace in a sudden tortured scream of stone. The silver lines pulsed once, twice, three times—each beat more brilliant than the last—and the wall shattered, spitting out stone shards in a cloud of steam and dust.
Kenhodan bent his head instinctively, gasping as bits of rock pelted his bowed back and mailed shoulders. More of it flew past him and clattered down the tunnel behind him, but he vast bulk of it blew outward, away from the wizard, and Kenhodan straightened, blinking as the brilliance faded to purple and red afterimages. Then he le
apt through the dust, coughing harshly, and landed in a crouch, facing up the passage they must follow. Boots clattered on stone as Bahzell charged through to face the other direction.
“Nothing.” The hradani’s voice was low and his sword gleamed in the torchlight. Chernion passed the torch back to Wencit, nocked an arrow, and followed Bahzell. She couldn’t draw Kenhodan’s bow as far as he could, but she could bend it far enough to be deadly.
“They’ll be along shortly,” Wencit said softly.
“My thanks for the encouragement,” Bahzell rumbled.
“Think nothing of it. They may come from either direction, too.”
“Lovely. Well, Kenhodan?”
“We may as well meet them coming as going. Let’s move.” He started down the corridor at a rapid trot, his companions following close behind him. “How far is it, Wencit?”
“Allowing for the need to follow the maze, perhaps a league.”
“Phrobus!” Bahzell muttered. “Would it happen as there are any good inns along the way?”
“Use your breath for running, Bloody Hand,” Chernion advised grimly.
“Sound advice,” Wencit agreed. “But be ready to stop if I shout. I smell the stink of spells ahead.”
“Better and better!” Bahzell chuckled.
Kenhodan glanced back and smiled despite his tension. The faint blue nimbus he’d seen around the hradani in the battle against the black dragon surrounded him now, yet that wasn’t what made him smile. No, Bahzell not only matched their pace but did it trotting backwards without ever once looking over his shoulder at the rest of his companions. His eyes never wavered from the rear, and his sword made little swinging motions, impatient for something to cleave.
All in all, Kenhodan was more than content to leave the rearguard to him.
“There’s a three-way split up ahead,” Wencit warned. “Bear left.”