Darkwell

by Douglas Niles

  Then he spun sideways and leaped onto the stone wall. By memory, each of his feet and his free hand found purchase in a narrow irregularity in the rock face. The force of his spring lifted him several feet above the ground and allowed him to brandish the scimitar outward with his free hand.

  Carefully he raised one leg, then the other, until he could lift himself another foot. Still he held the blade at the ready, while his left hand stretched upward to grab another firm hold. Then, pulling himself up, he repeated the process.

  The yellow eyes still stared from the darkness, but the creature moved no closer. Once Daryth saw the eyes disappear, and he gasped in panic, but they instantly returned, and he realized that the thing had merely blinked. Again and again, he pulled himself higher on the wall. Finally he reached a ledge he guessed to be about fifteen feet from the ground, and here he paused to rest.

  He stood with his back to the cliff, staring outward and down. The predator had disappeared again, whether because it had moved or because he had carried the light source farther away, Daryth couldn’t tell. He derived little comfort from the fact that he couldn’t see it anymore.

  After his heart ceased its pounding, once again Daryth turned to climb. He began to wonder if he might not avoid the creature by scaling this granite face to the top, where the four-footed predator would be unable to pursue. He felt with his fingers to find a handhold above his head while he stood on the wide ledge. At last he found a grip, and he quickly pulled himself upward. Once again he held the scimitar away from the rock, ready to strike in the event of any surprise attack.

  Now came another growl from the darkness, this time deep and heavy. It rumbled off the rock and echoed through the silence with a sinister resonance. Daryth could see nothing below, but he sensed the thing slinking toward the bottom of the cliff. With a detached sense of wonder, he thought it uncanny that the creature always seemed to move in perfect stealth, never giving even a whisper of sound at its passage.

  Turning back to his task, Daryth pulled himself up the rock wall with practiced skill. He concentrated less on silence than on speed, for he sensed safety in the unseen heights above him. Pulling on tiny cracks in the rock, forcing his boots into impossibly narrow wedges, he made steady progress up the wall.

  And then the awful approach came from behind him, and his heart failed for a moment. With a soft moan of terror, he clung to the rock as he felt the presence, immediately below him, of death. The creature sprang to the ledge the Calishite had just left, landing soundlessly on the narrow shelf of rock. Daryth couldn’t hear or see the leap, but he knew that the thing once again crouched very near.

  He forced himself free from the paralysis of his terror and stared below, holding Cat’s-Claw out from the rock so that the blade shed as much light as possible. Those great yellow eyes, slanted up at the corners in oriental fashion, gazed hungrily at him from just a few feet below the level of his boot.

  The light from the scimitar spilled over the ledge where the creature perched, but though the Calishite could see the rock and patches of fungus and the huge eyes of the thing, he could see nothing else. A black shadow blocked his view of some of the rock, and from this he discerned a long, feline shape. He had to guess the creature’s shape more from what he couldn’t see than what he could.

  Heavy lids drooped over those terrible eyes in a slow blink, and immediately Daryth hurtled himself up the face. Perhaps, with luck, the ledge below would prove too narrow for the monster to gain footing to spring.

  His left hand forced into a wedge, while his right still held the blade. Daryth kicked and scraped at the rock with his boots, looking for a foothold. One boot caught on a rough spur, and he hoisted himself up with growing desperation. In a frenzy, he probed with his other foot, seeking any support that would hold his weight.

  A hot wound slashed through the leather heel of his boot, into the sole of his right foot. He cried out in pain as he felt a tug. Instinctively Daryth slashed downward with Cat’s-Claw into the black space below his foot. His other hand began to slip from its hold, but then the keen blade bit into something that twisted angrily beneath the impact and the tugging ceased.

  Gasping, he pulled himself up another few feet and wedged himself into a narrow, chimneylike crack that stretched vertically above him. Turning his back to the cliff, he held the blade across his lap and stared, wide-eyed, into the blackness.

  Even as he struck the thing, he realized, the creature had made no sound. Where was it now? Had it fallen back to the ground or to the ledge below? Or was it even now creeping up the cliff toward his tiny shelter? Was this where he was destined to die?

  Cursing silently, Daryth attempted to cast off these morbid thoughts. He realized that his hands—his whole body, really—were shaking from the close call. Oddly, the first biting pain in his foot had given way to numbness. He twisted his leg awkwardly to try to get a look at the wound. Resting Cat’s-Claw on his lap, he used both hands to pull his foot around, ignoring the pain that again flared with the movement.

  His eyes widened in shock, and the world began to spin around him. With a moan, he leaned back into the crack, afraid he would faint. Mercifully, after several seconds of dizziness, his senses calmed somewhat. He felt terribly weak, but he forced himself again to look at the wound.

  His foot was gone—or at least half of it. Numb with disbelief, he saw that some horribly sharp thing had ripped through the bottom of his boot and torn off the forepart of his foot. Nausea rose in his throat at the sight of the white bone, its red mass of flesh glistening, and the blood that dripped freely from the gaping wound.

  He leaned forward and vomited over the side of the rock, heaving until his stomach was empty. Weakly he leaned again into the crack, not sparing a hand even to wipe his mouth. Then he forced himself again to look at the wound.

  Though the heel and ankle remained intact, Daryth sensed that the wound had crippled him for life—however long that life might be. The Calishite decided he would gladly settle for one more sunrise at this point. He would make it to the dawn!

  With that determination, his thoughts once again focused on his enemy. Where was the creature? The camp seemed very near now … Wasn’t that Robyn stroking his forehead? How gentle …

  Startled, he snapped to wakefulness. The cold rock poked into his back, and his cramped muscles tormented him. He had lost consciousness. For how long? he wondered. Curiously, the knowledge terrified him more than had any of the events of the night. Death did not cause him great fear, as long as he could die fighting. But to grow weak, to lose consciousness so that death could creep up silently and claim him while he remained unknowing … this he could not allow!

  He looked down again, and again he saw nothing but vast blackness. Whether he had dozed for seconds or an hour, he couldn’t know. How long could it be before dawn? He felt with sickening certainty that night’s cloak would last for many more hours.

  Grunting in pain, he wrapped the wound crudely, using cloth torn from his tunic. The binding quickly soaked through with blood, but it would serve as minimal protection. Next he tried to lift himself from his awkward seat. Only with great exertion did he finally pull himself free from the crack. His muscles shrieked in protest. Once his wounded foot thudded into the rock, and the resulting explosion of agony threatened to drive him mad. Gasping and choking, he clung desperately to the rock until the pain subsided.

  Slowly, inch after pain-wracked inch, Daryth reached upward with his left hand. Scraping his blistered fingertips across the rock, he found another of the tiny cracks that had helped him climb this far.

  Then he discovered another problem. Allowing his injured foot to dangle loosely, he tried to hold the scimitar in his right hand while lifting his other foot higher on the rock. But the tiny handhold, gripped only with his fingertips, didn’t afford him enough purchase for the move.

  Grimacing, he slid Cat’s-Claw back into the scimitar’s sheath, reluctantly realizing that he now needed both hands for climbin
g. Gaining a hold with his right hand he pulled himself up until he could wedge his left boot into another crack. Once again he repeated the process.

  This time his right foot crashed into a jagged spur of rock, and he cried out from the pain. Instantly biting his tongue, he clung to the sheer rock face while the world closed in around him. Fiery gouts of pain erupted along his leg, and tears flowed freely from his eyes.

  Daryth’s fingers began to slip from their precarious holds, and he sensed the certainty of death below him. “If I let go, I die.” He whispered the words aloud, over and over, and from somewhere he found the strength to hold on. But even as his grip strengthened, a great well of blackness opened up in his mind as his pain threatened to swell up and swallow him.

  “Don’t faint … don’t … faint!” He chanted the words desperately to himself, struggling to retain consciousness, and finally the haze in his mind began to dissipate. Nevertheless, he held tightly to the rock for several minutes until he finally felt ready to proceed.

  In this way, he worked himself up the cliff, moving with great deliberation, taking care not to strike his wound on anything. Occasionally he wouldn’t be able to find purchase for his good foot, and at such times Daryth lifted himself solely by the strength of his arms and shoulders, holding his position with one hand until he reached through the darkness to find another hold.

  As he climbed, he felt the horror that had cloaked him dissipate. The prickling of his scalp lessened, and finally he was left with a sense of being alone in the night. Not a friendly night, to be sure, but only the night.

  Did he spend minutes, or hours, finishing his climb on the wall? The Calishite had no idea, though the time seemed to drag on for a half a lifetime. He could have climbed fifty feet or five hundred. The whole nightmarish ascent blurred together in a collage of pain, endurance, despair, and determination.

  But at last he reached the top. He sensed immediately, as he crawled onto the flat surface above a sheer face of granite, that no more cliff lay before him. He felt the wind on his face, and it carried the strong odor of forest rot. Gasping in relief, he pulled himself away from the brink and found the stump of an old tree to lean against.

  He sat facing outward, toward the cliff. It took him several minutes to convince himself that even a monster of supernatural ability would not be able to scramble up that face. Only something equipped with hands, or wings, could make such a climb.

  He looked toward the sky and saw nothing but vast and inky blackness. How much longer could this night last? Wearily he pulled Cat’s-Claw from its sheath, using the faint illumination of the blade to look around.

  Isolated trunks of the dead forest stood arrayed around him, as if the wood had crept toward the precipice to look over the edge. Large broken pieces of rock lay upon the ground, and these were covered with a phosphoresence that caught the light of his weapon and amplified it. The patches of reflective fungus gave the tiny clearing a friendly, welcoming aura.

  And then, between two of the tree trunks, at the limits of his vision but unquestionably atop the precipice with him, he saw the two yellow eyes, still unblinking, and coming closer.

  “Where’s Daryth?”

  Tristan, standing lonely guard duty over the little camp, spun in surprise as Robyn emerged from the darkness. He had assumed she slept.

  The Sword of Cymrych Hugh still leaned against the rock, casting its light around their small camp. Tristan worried about the possibility of the dim light giving their position away, but somehow this night had seemed too dark, too black to face without some form of illumination. He wondered if it was cowardice that caused him to leave the sword out as a light.

  “He … went off into the night.” Tristan didn’t want to confess that he had sent his companion away. “We had an argument. He got angry.”

  Robyn didn’t look surprised, just concerned. Tristan felt a need to talk to her, but he didn’t know what to say. How could he make her understand?

  “We fought about you,” he blurted suddenly.

  “Oh?”

  “He can’t forgive the way I hurt you. I understand that—believe me, I can’t forgive myself!” Tristan groped for words to continue, to keep her looking at him, talking to him. “Daryth …” But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her of the Calishite’s love.

  “You fought, and then you sent him away?” The words were cool and accusing.

  “No!” The denial was instinctive, and he immediately regretted it. “Yes … I did”

  “What’s become of the man I loved?” Robyn seemed honestly puzzled. “Why do you do such things? You have friends, followers, people who love you and wish to help you! And one by one you drive us away!”

  “I didn’t wish that! I was bewitched by something, some force I don’t understand. I only know that I feared for you when you were gone. If harm had come to you, I could not have lived with myself!”

  “Rest assured, sire, that if harm comes to me it will not be your responsibility to bear! I have control of my own destiny; I have chosen this mission for myself. If I suffer because of that, so be it. The responsibility is mine.”

  “Very well,” said the king quietly. “But will you let me help you?”

  “Yes,” replied the druid, equally softly. She turned and looked into the night surrounding their camp. “I wonder where Daryth is …”

  Taggar, shaman of Norland, threw down his ash-streaked deerskin and paced angrily around the smoky lodge. The signs, he was forced to admit to himself, were all bad.

  First, the king should have returned by now. Grunnarch the Red, of course, always pressed his raids late into the season, but winter was about to begin and there were still no signs of the Red King’s longships.

  Second, the storms had roared into Norland from the Trackless Sea every other day for a fortnight. Every shaman knew that seven storms in fourteen days bespoke great ill.

  And third, most awful of all, was the news brought by the abject farmer who even now stood outside the leather-bound shaman’s lodge. The wretch had lost nine sheep in one night!

  Each of these omens, in its own right, would have forced Taggar to call a prophecy of ill will for the coming winter.

  But all three together … it was too much to conceive!

  Indeed, Tempus was mightily displeased. And Taggar thought that he knew why. Tempus, brawny god of war and the deity worshiped by most of the northmen, relished the clash of battle, the shedding of blood, and the triumph of routing the enemy from the field. In normal circumstances, the northmen were the perfect tools for furthering the aims of Tempus. They had chosen him as their god, and he favored them with his blessing

  But during the last war, the northmen had crusaded under the auspices of a different god, though the warriors themselves had been ignorant of that fact. Tempus must have been angered by the slight, and the men of the north had done nothing since to gain his favor

  Taggar was now convinced, in the absence of his king and of any plunder of battle, that Tempus would call down his anger upon his people when they were most vulnerable, during the cruel months of winter.

  For the god of war was not a patient deity.

  or a long time, Daryth did nothing except meet the cold gaze of the predator with his own unblinking stare. Neither the monster nor the man moved a muscle, though the Calishite strained to keep his eyes open. He felt it would be disastrous to blink.

  He wondered how the creature had climbed to the top of the cliff. It had appeared off to one side, not directly behind him, so he deduced that it had gone up or down the gorge for a distance until it found a place where the sides were not so steep. Then it must have climbed the slope and come along the crest to find him.

  Suddenly the creature moved. Daryth saw the eyes disappear behind the bole of a tree, then appear again, still boring into him. The thing slipped sideways through the woods, marking a semicircle around him but not moving any closer.

  “Why don’t you attack, beast?” hissed Daryth, feeling a bi
t giddy from the strain. “Are you afraid? Yes, you know my cat’s-tooth has a sharp bite!”

  The creature did slink a little closer at his words, and Daryth found himself wishing it would leap at him or do anything but this patient stalk. The beast was, he sensed, playing games with him, the way a cat plays with a wounded mouse. The analogy struck him as decidedly unpleasant, if accurate.

  Gradually the man became aware of a dull grayness diffusing through the air. It could not yet be called light. It seemed more a slight lifting of the total darkness that had blinded him for so long. A smoky haze drifted among the gaunt tree trunks, reminding him of the scene after a devastating fire.

  As the light gradually increased, Daryth witnessed the advent of a heavily overcast, foggy day. Even the minimal illumination was far preferable to the inky darkness. And he decided something else, changing a decision he had made in the depths of the night: It was no longer enough to simply live until the dawn.

  He saw the creature take form against the forest, a nightmare thing of purest black. He saw the great shoulders and massive, soundless paws. The gleaming teeth, clearly visible in a widely gaping maw, seemed to hunger for his flesh. And he saw the long, sickening tentacles that coiled and twisted from the thing’s shoulders, clearly dispelling any suspicions he might have had that this was simply a great panther.

  And now, with the coming of daylight, he formed a new goal for himself: He would slay this nightmare creature. He didn’t know exactly how, for the monster’s physical tools far superseded his own. But that left him a battle of wits, and the Calishite had always been proud of his wits. Indeed, he resolved to outsmart the creature and bring it to its well-deserved death!

  But how? Obviously, he told himself, with a trap. The designing of a trap was a thing well taught at the Academy of Stealth, and a tactic at which Daryth excelled. Of course, he had never tried to trap anything like this before, but that was no deterrent. A basic rule of trap design states that no good trap is identical in purpose or execution to any other trap. The very concept of repetition, in a trap, becomes a weakness.