by Dorian Hart
“It can’t take all of us at once,” said Ernie. “And it doesn’t get us through the netting.”
“And there may be more soldiers inside the ring, whom we’ll need to disable,” added Aravia. “We need a plan that gets us all through the arch at the same time.”
“I can fly myself up,” said Tor. “I can take Grey Wolf and Ernie, and we can cut through the netting and fight whatever guards are there. That will buy me time to come back for the rest of you.”
Aravia smiled. “That’s very brave, Tor. And it’s the best idea we’ve heard yet. But there could be a dozen guards in there, or twenty—too many for the three of you to fight.”
The very thought put a lump of ice in Ernie’s stomach. Just the three of them, fighting against an unknown number of Kivian soldiers? “Can we risk being spotted while we’re cutting the net?” he asked.
Grey Wolf paced again. “We could at least send Tor up alone on the carpet to see how many guards there are.”
“It’s a clear night,” said Dranko. “There won’t be tree cover, and the carpet puts out a lot of smoke. If even one Kivian happens to look up, we’d be screwed.”
Grey Wolf exploded. “Dammit, Dranko! We don’t have any perfect options! We’re just looking for something that has a chance of working. The wall is five feet thick. We can’t go under, we can’t go over, we can’t go through. The only way in is through the gate. Do you have some brilliant idea? Can goblins chew through stone?”
“Go easy on ’im,” said Kibi. “He’s only tryin’ to think things through.”
Ernie stared at Kibi. Through stone…
“Kibi,” he said softly. “Your trick…”
Kibi shook his head. “I ain’t never tried it on anythin’ like five feet a’ stone.”
“Tried what?” Grey Wolf’s voice was sharp, exasperated.
Ernie gave Kibi an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Kibi…”
“No, no, it’s all right. Morningstar knows, too. Shouldn’t be keepin’ no secrets from the rest a’ you, I suppose.” The stonecutter took a breath. “I can shape stone with my fingers. Work it kind a’ like clay, but it’s more than that. It’s… like I can ask stone to change, and it does what I ask.”
Grey Wolf stepped right up to Kibi. “Can you ask it to make us a tunnel through a five-foot stone wall?”
“I can ask, sure as rain, but will the stone say yes? Couldn’t say.”
“Can you guess how long it would take? Can you make a tunnel in four minutes?”
“Couldn’t say that neither. Maybe?”
Grey Wolf stared at Kibi for a long, hard moment. He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s the plan with the least bad consequences if it fails. We’ll try that first.”
* * *
They followed Pewter, who picked out a path that would avoid the enemy camps en route to the arch. Tor and Grey Wolf took turns propping Morningstar up, but she had recovered her wits enough to confirm Pewter’s route with her darksight.
The canopy blocked the moonlight, and they dared not bring out lights of their own. Shadowed branches snagged Ernie’s cloak while roots reached up to trip him. A tree limb caught him in the face. To Ernie’s ears, the crunching of leaves and sticks under their feet was alarmingly loud.
“Pewter thinks another five minutes before we reach the tree line,” Aravia whispered.
Ernie kept his eyes on Dranko, directly ahead of him in their single-file line. As the gray-on-black columns of trees loomed and moved past, he grew dizzy, that feeling coming upon him again that he had stolen someone else’s life, a life he was not qualified to lead. How had he come to this? Would this be his lot from now on? A procession of insane moments, each one likely to end with his death? Gods, how he wished he could be like Tor right now, worried not about saving the world or even getting cut down by a foreigner’s sword, but about unrequited love.
“Stop!” Aravia whispered sharply. “Get down!”
Ernie dropped to his stomach. The sound of everyone doing the same was like a wild boar crashing through underbrush.
A short distance through the trees, uncomfortably close, a light sprang up. Torchlight illuminated a human figure stalking toward them, his head turning left and right, searching. The tree cover where they lay was not especially dense, and some moonlight slipped down between the high branches. They’d be spotted any second. Hells, they may already have been seen! They were caught, dead to rights.
Someone whispered as the figure drew closer. Who? The sound drew the sentry right to them! Was Grey Wolf preparing them to leap up and attack? To retreat to the farmhouse? That would be madness; the soldier was too close!
Goddess of Night, hear my prayer and cloak us in your darkness. Goddess of Night…
The sentry arrived. Ernie held his breath and looked up to see a stout man in a dull hauberk, holding a spear in one hand and a smoking torch in the other. If he took one more step, he’d tread on Tor’s leg. Morningstar had grown quiet.
The man looked directly down at them, spread in a line in the brush. Ernie willed himself not to move, to cough, to breathe. Ahead of him Morningstar was propped on her elbows, body quivering.
Someone shouted from far away, in the direction of the arch. The soldier frowned and shouted back, “There’s nothing here!” He held his torch high, peered into the trees, shook his head, turned on his heel, and stalked off. Morningstar collapsed, her arms giving way, her chin thudding into the dirt. Dranko rushed to her side.
“Still alive,” he whispered. “But out cold.”
“We can’t wait for her to wake up,” said Aravia.
Ernie looked at his hand. “Are we still invisible? Is Morningstar’s magic still working?”
“Probably not,” said Dranko. “I’ll bet she needs to be conscious to maintain it.”
“Either way, we need to assume that,” said Grey Wolf. He pointed at Morningstar’s body. “I’ll carry her. We’ll give the guards five more minutes to decide there’s nothing out here, and then we’ll keep moving. Kibi, I hope you’re ready.”
“Makes two of us,” Kibi muttered.
* * *
Ernie peered out from the edge of the trees. The wall looked unconquerably massive. How had they built something that big in less than three months? The Kivians must have had the stone blocks already cut, waiting on the far side of the arch. Tree stumps speckled the intervening space, squatting like a little army of gnomes in the moonlight. The moon shone bright in a clear sky, bright enough to show Kibi to anyone who might wander by.
“Pewter says we’re nearly on the far side from the doors,” whispered Aravia.
Grey Wolf let out a breath. “We’ll wait until the sentry has gone around the curve of the wall. Kibi, you’ll need to go fast but quiet. Fast but quiet. Right?”
“Right.”
“Will your tunneling make any noise?”
“Don’t know. Probably not.”
The Kivian patrolman was preceded by the sound of his boots on the ground and the wavering glow of his torch. He peered into the forest as he made his circuit, but the shadows defeated him. The immensity of the wall made him look tiny, a doll with a torch and a spear. In another minute he was gone from sight.
“Go,” whispered Grey Wolf.
Kibi left the cover of the trees, moving toward the wall in an awkward crouching jog. Ernie waited for a shout from some unnoticed sentry, for Kibi to sprout a half-dozen arrows, but all was quiet. Kibi reached the wall, knelt, and put his hand on the stone before him. He appeared to be praying.
A minute passed, and nothing happened. Kibi kept his fingertips pressed to the wall, but no gap opened in the huge stone block. It wasn’t working!
Grey Wolf’s whisper sounded accusatory. “What is he doing?”
Two minutes, and still nothing. Ernie trembled. Kibi had become a statue, hand on the rock, head bowed. Had the wall been booby-trapped somehow? Coated with some kind of paralyzing poison?
Three minutes. Soon the sentry would finish
his round, come back into their view, and a few seconds after that he’d see Kibi kneeling with his hand frozen to the wall.
“Pssssssst!” Grey Wolf hissed as loudly as he dared, probably hoping it would jolt Kibi out of his reverie and summon him back to the safety of the trees. But Kibi didn’t move.
Pewter dashed out into the open space, but he wasn’t heading for Kibi. Instead he took an angle off to the right, heading where the Kivian sentry would soon be appearing around the sweep of the wall.
“He’s going to delay the guard,” Aravia whispered.
Ernie felt a hollow nausea at the thought of direct engagement, even through Pewter. “What? How?”
“He’s a cat. He has feline wiles.”
Another minute passed, and the guard hadn’t appeared. Whatever Pewter did to postpone Kibi’s discovery, it was working—but the same couldn’t be said for Kibi’s tunneling.
“Something’s wrong,” said Dranko. “We need to rescue him before he gets caught.” He lifted himself into a crouch. Ernie did likewise, ready to run.
“No, look!” Grey Wolf pointed at the wall.
Ernie nearly fell over, poised as he was to sprint to Kibi’s rescue.
The stone parted at last, like parchment with a candle flame held against it. An open alcove yawned black. Kibi turned to them and held up his palm: a “stay there” gesture. Then he took one step back into the hole he had made.
The sentry’s torchlight came into view, a blob of light dancing and limning the wall.
“He’s going to see Kibi,” whispered Grey Wolf. “Get ready to—”
Kibi put his hands against the walls of his alcove, and the opening sealed itself, as though a curtain of rock had drawn itself to give Kibi some privacy. It rippled and smoothed, and by the time the sentry reached the spot, the stone wall looked no different than before Kibi’s arrival. Ernie’s heart was at a dead sprint; how much more of this could he take?
A few seconds after the sentry had gone, the curtain seemed to melt, like a thin sheet of gray ice exposed to the sun. Kibi stood in the mouth of his tunnel, beckoning.
Grey Wolf had Morningstar over his shoulder; they all dashed out from their cover, across the exposed ground, and slipped into the darkness beneath the wall. Kibi had made his passage tall and wide, though it didn’t appear to bore all the way through the wall’s five-foot depth. Instead he had carved the tunnel inward four feet, then bent it ninety degrees to the left, leaving a pocket of space large enough for all seven of them to fit. Once everyone was inside (including Pewter, dashing out of the darkness), Kibi wiggled past Ernie on his way to the back of the line.
“Gotta reseal the openin’,” he muttered.
When he had done so, the blackness was absolute.
“This is great!” said Tor. “We’re like the rats inside the walls of my father’s castle!”
“Your father has a castle?” asked Grey Wolf.
“Ugh,” came Aravia’s voice. “What a horrible image. I can’t stand rats.”
“Kibi, what took you so long?” That was Dranko’s voice. “You had us worried there for a minute.”
“Stone took some convincin’ is all. It liked how it was, bein’ a wall solid through and sturdy, and rock ain’t gonna change if it don’t want to. Hard to hurry it up, too; it don’t figure time the way we do. Takes some explainin’ what ‘right now’ means to us surface people. Once I had it persuaded, I had to describe the kind a’ tunnel I was hopin’ for, sideways so it’d be big enough.”
“All that matters is that we’re through,” said Grey Wolf. “Or nearly so. Kibi, can you finish the tunnel?”
Ernie had a moment of panic. What if Kibi couldn’t? What if he had used up his stone-shaping power, the same way Aravia could exhaust her magic or Dranko his channeling? They’d be entombed in the rock! They could run out of air!
“‘Course I can,” said Kibi. “But I figured first I’d tunnel right up to the edge, and make a little hole we could look out a’ to see what kind a’ guards they got around the arch.”
“Excellent,” said Grey Wolf. “Do it.”
In the weeks after the death of the colossus, Aravia had enchanted small lengths of iron rod with her light spell; they were easier to use than coins. Someone took out a light-rod to make it easier for Kibi to squirm to the front of the line, then put it away again once he was in position. Before long a thread of light spilled into their hollowed-out space, then vanished as Grey Wolf pushed forward and put his eye up to the hole.
“Only three,” he whispered. “And one of them is the commander that Pewter was talking about, the one who looks like Tor. Here, I think each of you should take a look, so you know the layout ahead of time.”
One by one they put their eye to the tiny hole in the wall. What if one of the soldiers happened to look in their direction? Would they be spotted? When it was Ernie’s turn, he wriggled to the front of the line and looked out.
When Ernie had first seen the Kivian Arch, overgrown and draped in forest greenery at night, it had appeared dauntingly large. Now it seemed to have shrunk. It was the only feature in a wide and brightly lit arena, illuminated by dozens of torches set into the wall at even intervals. The wall had been built in a circle, but the arch wasn’t in the exact middle. Instead it rose near one edge of the enclosure, opposite the huge metal doors. That placed it quite close to their hidey-hole—only fifty feet or so. The air between its posts warped and shifted, a sourceless heat-shimmer in the cool night. Ernie couldn’t fathom that one step through would spirit one to another land thousands of miles away.
Three soldiers stood directly next to the arch, having an animated discussion that bordered on an argument. Two held spears, casually, while the third, the commander who even at fifty feet looked an awful lot like Tor, had a sheathed blade at his side. The ground beneath their feet, indeed the entire floor of the circle, was paved with smooth gray stone slabs. Ernie imagined carts full of weapons and supplies, pictured thousands of Kivian soldiers raising a forest of spears, rolling out of the arch, across this protected staging ground and out through the doors, then onward to wage war against Charagan. But for now the arch stood quiet; he could look through it at an angle and see the far wall, blurred by the shifting magic.
Ernie backed away and let Tor have his turn looking out. Tor said nothing about his clear resemblance to the Kivian commander.
“Can’t sneak up on them,” Grey Wolf whispered. “Our best hope is a fast dash.”
Ernie felt the cold tingle of fear. If it came to fighting, it would be three on three. Morningstar wasn’t even conscious, Aravia needed to save her magic, Dranko wouldn’t fight, and Kibi was still hopeless. “Should we wait for them to leave?”
“We can take them,” said Grey Wolf. “We’ll have surprise. And if we wait, with our luck more soldiers will arrive. Ernie, Tor, are you ready?”
“You bet!” said Tor.
The fear spread out from Ernie’s gut. He had been in several skirmishes since entering into Abernathy’s service and somehow had survived them all. But the fact was, all of his opponents had outclassed him: those thugs in Sand’s Edge, the Sharshun at that fort in the Norlin Hills, and the gods knew he would have been cut to ribbons by Aktallian Dreamborn had Tor not bull-rushed the man over the railing of an eighty-foot tower.
In every case he had survived by going fully on the defensive. Grey Wolf had been impressed from the beginning by his ability to dodge and parry, but he had warned him it wasn’t a sustainable long-term plan for martial success. Eventually you have to take a swing.
I fight like a coward because I am one. That’s what the voice in his head told him. But another voice, quieter but insistent, piped up. You flew that flying carpet and saved the world from giant turtles. If you can do that, what can’t you do?
His fear was still real, but he pushed it down, told it to be quiet for once. His sword trainer, Old Bowlegs, had had faith in him. Why shouldn’t he have faith in himself? Courage!
�
��Ready, Ernie?” Grey Wolf repeated.
“Ready,” he whispered.
“Kibi, after you make our opening, you’ll be in charge of carrying Morningstar. We’ll all need to go through the arch together, so that Aravia can teleport us away. If we go one at a time, we’ll probably be captured by the Kivians on the far side. The commander is likely their strongest fighter, so we should choose one of the other two and gang up, three on one, while we have the drop on them. We’ll start with the one on our right. And remember, we don’t need to kill them; if the first target goes down, don’t worry about finishing him off. We’ll just move on to the next one, three against one. When the fight is clearly going our way, that’s when the noncombatants come out. Everyone understand the plan?”
Everyone did.
“Ok, Kibi, do whatever it is you do.”
Kibi completed the tunnel, the final thin width of stone parting like cobwebs. Grey Wolf and Tor rushed out across the fifty-foot gap, weapons drawn. Excitement and fear surged into all of Ernie’s limbs, and he leapt after them. He should have drawn Pyknite before he started; it was awkward trying to free it from its sheath while running full out. He had to slow slightly and dropped another few yards back.
The three Kivian soldiers turned to face them, clearly surprised. The two underlings stepped swiftly in front of their commander, lowering their barbed spears to face the onrushing charge. Hadn’t Grey Wolf talked about that during one of their many sparring sessions? Against spearmen, constant lateral movement was the key, that and closing quickly. Once a spearman got a bead on you, you’d be skewered like a slab of pork, but spear handles didn’t have edges and were unwieldy at close range. Even so, Pyknite seemed pathetically small.
Closer, closer…Tor and Grey Wolf were nearly upon their opponents, Ernie huffing along ten feet back. The Kivians were unprepared and unarmored. Ernie tried to feel optimistic, but the terrified part of his mind wouldn’t hear of it.
Slab of pork.
Behind his guards the commander backed away, a long curved sword in his hand. Pewter had been right: at close range the man’s resemblance to Tor was startling. Same lantern jaw, same broad shoulders, same red hair and angled cheekbones. The only obvious difference was that the Kivian version of Tor was about twenty years older.