The sorceress halted, staring at the lane. Lanokas and Kansten took a few steps past her, then turned around. Kansten narrowed her eyes. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Are you ill? Why are you stopping?”
“Why am I…? Kansten, don’t you see it?”
Kansten glanced all around. At one point she stared straight at the opening in the trees, but took no notice. Lanokas did the same, looking dumbfounded.
“See what?” Kansten asked.
“The path!”
Kora’s companions shared a concerned glance. “I think she’s feverish,” said Kansten.
“Kora,” said Lanokas, “there’s no path there.”
“Three yards in front of you. Right in front of me. At least four feet wide.”
Kansten said, “The forest is solid, a great mass of brown.”
Lanokas asked, “Are you feeling all right? Maybe we should rest a while.”
“I’M FINE. It…. How can you not see it, it’s right there! Look….” Kora tromped a few steps up to the path. “Here.”
Kansten bit her lip. Lanokas spoke hesitantly. “You’re pointing at a wall of trees,” he told the sorceress.
Kora stared at them, incensed. Then she marched five feet in the ankle-high grass before she turned to see Lanokas looking relieved and Kansten gaping like an idiot.
“The trees,” Kansten said. “You’re standing in the middle of a tree. Lanokas, have I lost…?”
“You’re perfectly sane. I see what you see.”
This was getting ridiculous. “How could I walk through trees?” snapped Kora. “How could you see me if I had? Wouldn’t they block me?”
Lanokas said, “They would if they existed.”
Kansten turned on her heel. “What the hell do you mean, if they existed? They’re in front of your face. You just said you can see them!”
“I see them,” Lanokas explained, “because I’m not a sorcerer. That doesn’t mean they’re real.” He followed Kora out into the path. Understanding dawned on Kansten, softened her face, and she joined them.
“Is this the first test?” she asked.
Kora said, “I don’t think so. It’s just a clever way to hide the path from people who have no business finding it.”
Kansten crossed her arms. “You honestly don’t see trees?”
“I see a grassy lane. It cuts pretty straight, but I’d better lead.”
The path ran for miles through the forest. It rose and fell with the hills, twisting before it met its end at a cave at the foot of the mountains.
“I guess we go in,” said Kansten.
“Let me get the torch,” said Lanokas.
445
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Towards the Hall
From where the Leaguesmen stood, the cave looked black as pitch and just as heavy in its darkness. Kora lit the torch Lanokas had toted from Yangerton, and before the others could stop her, stepped inside.
Her flame fizzled as it crossed into the mountain, but that caused Kora no distress. In fact, a burning torch would have ruined the sobering effect of the chamber within. Ancient magic must have blocked the lanterns’ glow from entering the outside world; they hung on the walls unlike any lamps she had ever seen, foot-high glass sculptures of men and women in robes like Petroc’s that all shone a self-sustaining, balmy yellow. The cave was spherical, so that only a thin strip of ground down the center was flat, covered with a violet rug that ran to the opposite side of the chamber, where a boulder as tall as Kora blocked the way forward. A gentle intake of breath from behind told her Kansten had followed her in. Lanokas said, “What now?”
“Now,” said Kora, a little testily—he had ruined the majesty of the moment—“we move the boulder. My guess is only spells of a certain strength will do the trick.”
Kansten’s smile looked ghostly, shadowed by the luminous foot-tall figure behind her. “I bet a spell from the Librette would work,” she said. “How about the one to disintegrate walls?”
Lanokas spun her around. “Wait just a minute,” he said. “You read the book? They wouldn’t let me touch it!”
Kansten put a hand on her hip. “I believe I found the book.”
“Now is not the time!” cried Kora. “I need to try that spell, and I need to concentrate. Stand back,” she directed. Then, “On second thought….”
She took a step back as well, handed the prince his torch, and grabbed both Kansten and Lanokas’s hands before conjuring her crimson shell around the three of them. “I don’t know what this magic’s capable of. Ready?”
“We’re ready,” said Lanokas.
“Polvassay.”
The boulder vanished, collapsed with a weak explosion to a dust pile, revealing a tunnel two feet high and two feet wide when the air cleared. Kora’s protective shell dissipated.
Kansten quipped, “That was disappointing.”
“I’ll go first,” said Lanokas.
“No you won’t!” Kora held him back.
“That boulder has to reform at some point. That very well may be when the first person goes through.”
Lanokas crawled into the tunnel. Immediately, an enchanted wind swept the chamber where the women stood, swirling the newly formed pile of dust, shaping it back into the boulder it had been. Kora trembled, with no shame that Kansten noticed. “I’ve never seen magic like this,” she said.
“Well, who knows what magic you just sealed Lanokas in with.”
“Right. Let me raise that shield…. Polvassay.”
The boulder crumbled again in a dense, choking cloud; once more, when Kansten cleared the tunnel’s entrance, a sudden wind reformed the debris, closing her away. Kora took a deep breath, repeated the process, and followed on her hands and knees.
The passage sloped upward, but the rocky floor was enchanted so that, though cold, it felt like no rock Kora had ever touched. It was soft, padded, and the fifty yards she crawled only felt uncomfortable when her back began to ache. A hairpin turn hid Kansten, but Kora heard her moving forward, and she followed the tunnel’s twists until she was not quite sure what direction she faced in relation to the entrance.
More glowing statues lit both the tunnel and the chamber beyond, a large, triangular area; its three sloping walls rose to a point high above the ground. A tapestry hung on the left, black, with a poem of white words woven in the thread. Kansten and Lanokas were examining it, Kansten’s brow furrowed in concentration, as always when she tried to read. Rubbing the small of her back, Kora joined them. She could have done nothing else had she wanted to; the only way in or out was through the tunnel she just exited.
“Read it out loud, one of you,” said Kansten. “This’ll take me forever.” Lanokas obliged.
To you who seek our Hallowed Hall,
We make one fact quite clear.
We commit ourselves to justice;
Our priorities are tiered.
Three loyalties we know and weigh,
Represented by three stones:
The crystal, ruby, greenest jade,
You must profess to own.
Crystal for our gracious king,
We are his subjects true.
If bribes to blind our eyes you bring,
‘Tis he you answer to.
Let ruby be your warning dire:
It shows us full of pride.
With faith in self as in our sire,
From self we never hide.
The jade, as green as hill or glen,
Will show we shall be free
As any squirrel or bee or wren
That flits amongst the trees.
Your task is this: to take the gems
Of freedom, king, and pride,
Prioritize them for yourself
And by their justice bide.
The three Leaguesmen stood for a moment, staring at the tapestry. Kora shut her eyes to think, and found she could not concentrate.
“How in the world do we do this?”
“Take it one at a time,” s
aid Kansten. “Crystal, well, all right, it makes sense to have that symbolize the king. The kings’ statues at the Palace are in crystal, aren’t they? And the poem explained the jade. It’s green, like nature. Represents freedom. What gets me is the connection between pride and the ruby.”
Kora said, “It’s not selfish pride, not arrogance. It’s knowing what you owe yourself, upholding your dignity. It’s heart and pluck, as trite as that sounds. People show hearts as red, I guess because blood’s red…. No, I get the gems and what they mean. I don’t understand how a mental task is going to let us onward.”
“We touch the stones in order,” said Lanokas.
“What stones?” said Kansten. Lanokas pointed to his right.
The women turned to the wall that had neither a tunnel nor a tapestry, to find it no longer blank: three stones, placed in a triangle, had appeared there, a jagged quartz crystal on top. The bottom left was an oval-shaped ruby, with perfect, glinting facets. To its right was a square-cut piece of jade, scratched and worn.
“This is a good task,” said Lanokas. “In the old days, sorcerers to come through here would have left with a pretty good notion of how the Councilors would react to them. We just have to think like the Court would.”
Kora said, “The Court didn’t exactly stand by its values. How many of them sided with Hansrelto? Nearly half.”
“We have no way to know how many went with him. No reliable accounts. Brenthor and Mayven opposed him, there’s no doubt of that.”
Kansten rolled her eyes. “Do we press the stones from least to greatest, or the other way around? And what happens if we choose wrong? That’s what I want to know.”
Lanokas looked at her. “We’ll find out when it happens.”
The prince’s calm amazed Kora. She herself was staring at the jewels, remembering her nightmare about a collapsing ceiling and wondering whether it had not been some kind of premonition.
“Clearly,” said Kansten, and Kora brought herself back to the moment, “clearly the crystal’s least. No offense, Lanokas….”
Lanokas held up a hand in surrender. “Hypotheticals matter here. Hypothetically, a rightfully born monarch could abuse his power. If loyalty to a king were to violate someone’s liberty, or oppose human decency….”
“I agree,” said Kora. “So we have something, at least. The crystal’s third. What’s first, then? The jade? I say the ruby.”
“The ruby,” agreed Lanokas.
Kansten said nothing. She studied the tunnel entrance, ignoring the others’ patient stares. Freedom was everything to her; Kora remembered her swearing she would kill herself rather than be captured. She had looked wild then and seemed fairly cornered now, the same blazing determination taut within her limbs. She spoke without looking at the others.
“The ruby. It’s the ruby. Go on, Kora, touch it. Greatest to least, we’ll go greatest to least.”
Kora tapped the ruby with her index finger; it glowed for a moment, filled the chamber with a soft red light reminiscent of sunset. Kansten then covered the jade completely with her palm. A green sparkle escaped from the cracks between her fingers. Kora nodded to Lanokas, who touched the crystal with the edge of his torch, and an explosion of pure white light left them all momentarily sightless. A few seconds after the flash, and with the aid of many squints and blinkings, Kora saw that all three stones had disappeared. In their place was a circular doorway she would have to duck to fit through.
Kora led the way into a passage that wound upward and around itself, in a wide but narrowing spiral. The air soon turned heavy and stale.
“I don’t like this,” said Kansten.
Lanokas told her, “We’re moving deeper in the mountain. No reason to be spooked, not yet. I’ll worry when the lights go out.”
They were rounding a curve when he spoke. As if on cue, the statue-lamps behind them darkened while the faint glow of those ahead vanished with a pop; the ensuing blackness was almost palpable. Kora’s heart pounded in her ears so that she barely heard Lanokas bark, “Don’t move.”
“You had to say that,” Kansten groaned. “You had to mention the light.”
Kora’s voice was high and squeaky. “You’re not helping!”
“I have the torch,” said Lanokas, “take it.”
Kora groped in the direction of his voice. Her hand brushed the prince’s, and she took the torch. “I can’t see,” she said. “I can’t see a blasted thing, I can’t light it.”
“Just try,” Kansten pleaded.
Kora ran her hand over the pitch-covered stick, remembering its shape, its texture. She formed a mental image. Then she whispered, “Fwaig Commenz.”
The torch lit. Not brightly, to be sure, but enough to show three or four feet ahead. The distance varied as Kora’s trembling arm made the light dance.
“Thank God,” whispered Kansten. Strange, it seemed appropriate to whisper. The flicker of light was eerier to Kora’s mind than the darkness had been.
They walked slowly, side by side with Kora in the middle, letting the torch illuminate a spot quite clearly before they took another step. They progressed thus for a quarter mile, the smell of dirt, of sweat, growing stronger with each step before the waning torchlight fell on two of the strangest creatures Kora had ever imagined, much less seen.
They were three heads taller than the average male, with leathery, crimson-hued skin stretched tight over a thick torso and muscular limbs. Their noses were long and thin to varying degrees, as were their ears, which protruded straight up from oval-shaped heads: though to be fair, the head of the shorter was a bit more round. They had large black eyes that seemed to sparkle and slack, toothy mouths, and their lengths of black hair looked matted. Their clothes, made from animal pelts, were ragged but fit their powerful frames. They stood only three feet from the humans, in the middle of the path.
Lanokas moved to draw his sword. Without tearing her eyes from the trolls—for trolls they were, Kora recognized them from her children’s books—she grabbed the prince’s forearm as his fingers closed on the hilt.
“They haven’t threatened us.”
The taller troll, the one with the oval-shaped head, chuckled to himself, a deep, booming sound. He had an air of authority about him and spoke with a voice deeper than any man’s.
“Haven’t forgotten you’re the invaders here, have you? That’s lucky.”
Three sharp pops sounded from behind. Kora spun around to see that three more trolls had appeared at their backs, blocking their exit.
“You sorcerers are not the only ones who turn invisible. You walked right past them.” The tall troll laughed again, and went on, “Human magic has no effect on us. A man this year came through here, he made himself invisible thinking we wouldn’t see him. Surprised, he was, when we called out.”
Petroc. He was talking about Petroc; the trolls must have let him go in the end. There was a chance, then, they would do the same now. With the relief of that thought Kora found she could speak, though there was a pleading, desperate quality to her voice that nearly made her clam up again.
“We only want to pass through, that’s all, we had no idea we were intruding in your caverns. We meant no harm.”
The troll laughed again. “If you had, it matters nothing now. You’re trapped. Still, you sorcerers have helped us in the past. You fought with us to put down the Great Revolt, even when you learned your magic was compromised against the rebels.”
Lanokas broke his silence. “The Troll Revolt really happened?”
All five trolls turned their gaze on him. Their leader narrowed his eyes. “This surprises you?”
“That my race would risk itself for another? Yes, that surprises me. I thought the story was a fairy tale.”
The second troll, the shorter one with the circular head, stared at Lanokas. His voice was shrill compared to the other’s. “You say human race be cruel?”
“Of course humans can be cruel!” said Kansten.
Lanokas said, “We’re also c
apable of great sacrifice. Great nobility of spirit.”
The taller troll nodded. He nearly smiled. Kora said, her voice stronger than before, “What Great Revolt? I’m sorry, it’s just that I, I never heard of it.”
The tall troll said, “A civil war, long ago, when a group of rebels tried to overthrow our Leader. There has always been blood prejudice among us, and he was kind to the light-skinned trolls, you see. Too kind. He treated them as equals. These rebels were monsters, true monsters. Your kind helped fight them.”
“You’re light-skinned yourselves,” said Lanokas.
The tall troll snarled, “What if we are?”
“You know what it’s like to be hunted. So do we, all three of us.”
The trolls gave him a blank look, so Kansten explained before her friends could stop her, “He’s our prince.”
A murmur of surprise sprung up among the trolls that stood behind them. The two in front exchanged dark glances. The tall one said, “A hunted prince? King Hune’s son?”
Kora gulped, but nodded.
“What does this mean? Hune is dead?”
The sorceress said, “We humans suffered a revolt of our own.”
The tall troll shook his head, strangely somber. “Hune was good to us. Worked with us, more than any of his predecessors. I am captain of the 3rd army, I wondered why his contact ceased. I’m glad Hune did not betray us. You three may pass. Rankush, lead them to where the path splits.”
The troll beside him grunted. His voice was shrill as ever. “How do we know that man is prince?”
“He’s the image of his father, you fool.”
Rankush grunted again, a harsher sound this time. He took off down the hall. Kora grabbed Kansten’s arm to move her forward, and Lanokas fell in step. Wherever Rankush might guide them, their only option was to follow.
The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) Page 26