“Hmm-mmm-muhh,” it grumbled. It was a note of...curiosity. Alik was frozen: he could not think of anything. Safe...they had escaped...they had scaled all the way down the cliff...only to be...only to....
A second boulder-like humanoid stirred near the first. The first edged closer. Only to.... The first was near enough almost to stretch out one of its...three arms...and touch Flan’s shoulder. It edged slightly closer, then did.
Flan dragged himself away and bared an insignificant-looking knife. Alik ran forward to put himself between Flan and the humanoid but was too late: on seeing the knife, the thing swiped at Flan, knocking the knife away with a sickening crack. Flan rolled over, his keen arm laying at an unearthly angle. Alik dodged between them, waving his arms wildly—but the humanoid was already backing away, covering its face as though struck.
A third creature more repulsive than the first two, a huge, boar-like humanoid with a single tusk protruding from its cheek, loped onto the ravine floor. It was carrying a flimsy wooden stick that was frayed at both ends and was wearing a long, dirty cloak. At the very sight of this third creature, the one that had struck Flan threw itself to the ground and let out a plaintive moan.
The newcomer, evidently a leader of some kind, glanced up the side of the cliff momentarily, then gave a rough whistle. Immediately a white-furred yak-beast loped over the crag beside the leader and stopped, poised with slathering tusks and licking tongue.
Alik, sensing but not understanding, threw himself down beside the creature on the ground. “Alik!” came a voice—Piachras, leaping the rest of the way to the ground and running the few steps toward him. His falchion came out and stood poised, but at that a phantomly “Oooh!” arose from every nook and corner of the ravine floor. Piachras turned, first one direction then another, then turned back toward the leader. Rustles of movement haunted every corner but nothing could be seen. “Be there as many of you as the rocks I swear you shall not live!” Piachras declared.
The leader of the monstrous creatures smiled, or seemed to smile, and advanced slowly with his frayed reed staff. Slowly, deliberately, he took the staff and struck his subject over the back. Slowly, deliberately, he turned toward Alik. Piachras did not back down. Their eyes locked. A hungry growl came from the yak-beast waiting behind the leader. Then slowly, deliberately, the boulder-creature struck Alik.
The staff, as flimsy and worn as it was, felt almost like a broom or switch, so that although the strike was administered with great force, it was a relief when it at last came. Alik nearly burst in tears.
The leader faced Piachras once more with the same wry smile. Then he struck him as well, full across the chest. Piachras stood, petrified in his surprise. He slowly lowered his sword.
The yak-beast had already vanished from whence it had come. The leader also started to leave, but Alik burst to his feet, shouting, “Wait! Wait! Aeire ceae gai’ee aue t’myuq’us!”
The leader turned, his expression something like curiosity.
“You...may help...help us...going...,” Alik said brokenly. He pointed frustratedly upward, toward the tower hidden just above the pinnacle of the plateau.
That the creature understood. He breathed heavily out of his snout, compressing his face. Alik sighed and threw his hands open. The leader snorted.
Piachras tried to intervene. “Good Sir, we need to reach that tower. It is of utmost importance; we are....”
“Hold on,” Flan warned weakly. “You don’t know what side they’ll take.”
But it didn’t matter at all, for as soon as Piachras had begun to speak, the leader of the creatures snorted again—with clear contempt—and turned away from him, waving him away.
Alik moved back in front of him, jibbering indecipherably in his native tongue and with no care for being understood. He pointed with his drawn knife toward the tower above, hoping to indicate that they were enemies of that tower and that they needed desperately....
The chief seized Alik’s knife hand; it melted beneath him. With two fingers the chief gingerly plucked the knife free, his face snarling into the most horrendous expression Alik could have imagined. It held the knife close to its face for a moment, then in a low voice (it could only be described as a voice), spoke: “Phh...akun ‘hien u’nuh ‘hee....”
He wheeled laboriously away, toward the tower, and gestured for Alik to follow by waving Alik’s own knife. The first creature—the one who had struck Flan—got up and followed him. Alik waved to Flan and Piachras, both of whom looked quite skeptical, and then followed his knife.
“Allow me to assist you,” Piachras said to Flan.
Flan nodded and let him help him to his feet. A surge of cold pain—the poison, he knew—seeped through his veins and, in his arm, mixed with the numbing fire of a certain compound fracture. “Now I have to see that knife again,” he muttered. “Ooh...thank ye’.”
Behind them, he could half sense the presence of many more of the twisted, earthy creatures following them. He pinched the skin of his hand: his senses were fading in and out.
As they mounted over a rise in the chasm floor the chief called out, “Ngoree!” Frightened grunts and shufflings responded, refracted, and radiated like echoes in every direction. The chief stumped over the top. Alik was fascinated by what he thought might be the beginning of a tail of some sort beneath the creature's robe. The ground fell away into a deep amphitheater in a series of crude steps, and the plateau walls, which had been crumbling and uneven before, now fell away entirely into a maze of shallow caves supported by thin, sandy, twisting columns that looked as tenuous as the threads of a spider’s web.
The amphitheater was filled with little mounds of rock and rag, large or small, lumpy and misshapen. Alik thought at first they were all more of the same kind as the creatures they had already met, but on closer inspection he realized that the larger mounds were actually shelters. Yak-beasts groveled behind the mounds; six-legged cerberi growled on chains staked in the gravel; in the center of the camp a wildly neighing monster-horse was reeling against a dozen sturdy ropes. A tortoise was perched on the rock above Alik, but when it poked its head out to watch him, it bore but a single eye on a slimy stalk.
Something deeply ornate about the chaotic scene pushed itself at Alik’s consciousness. He was directly behind the chief and was about to walk ahead to the chief’s side when the chief dealt him a sudden whack over the shins with his shabby staff. Then, as one who glimpses a part of the pattern and straightway sees the whole, he became aware of the weaving hem of stones along the pathway, the band of colored sand lining the stones in which he had nearly set his foot, the fearful symmetry of the whole path with the other paths radiating outward and upward and around the amphitheater. Patterns, hieroglyphic pictures, were formed by the arrangement of everything with everything else; words, an intricately laborious script, were etched into the rocks. He could not read. He stepped back inside the pathway to follow the chief.
They proceeded downward clockwise—against the flow of the universe—to the center of the village, then upward along another pathway leading toward the heavy, imposing cliffs of Labrion Plateau. Up they went, the sounds of the amphitheater transforming behind them echo-like into a fractal buzz. A swarm of bats erupted from the labyrinthine cliffs as they approached, heading straight for them as though in panic. The chief, however, jabbed his stick into the air at the last moment and the flock swerved and scattered in every direction. Up, up into the cliffs they went.
Alik glanced back down into the amphitheater and recognized the two boulder-like creatures they had first met below, following them in their hobbling lope. For a moment he was afraid—but as soon as he stopped, they also stopped.
The chief turned. He also saw the two others, but, with eyes better trained to the appearance of his own, he could also make out sixty or seventy more watching forms. To all present he held up Alik’s Ristorian knife, twirled it with surprising dexterity, turned, and....
Flan knew what the knife was, so he was no
t surprised. The knife, he knew, was inscribed with the signet charm, unalterable and inimitable, of Caimbrand the Wizard. It had been carried back into Ristoria by the wizard’s descendant, Camber the Wanderer, the Restorer, and when the tribe had been routed and scattered at the catastrophic Battle of Assassin Bay, it had been lost. Foragers would have picked it up on the battlefield, thinking it a tidy profit; and when the Midrian Empire had fallen, it would have slowly, demurely made its way back to Ristoria to rest—hundreds and hundreds of years on end—in the Tower of Antiquities. But Flan, a man who even in his youth had been in love with elven culture, Flan who wore an elven cloak and studied elven lore, Flan who practiced to perfection the lost elven art of the rider’s hands—Flan remembered. And General Pendrax, scholar of the warriors of old Ristoria, he and his son Arrythh—they knew. And this twisted, mutated creature—this creature and its kin, raised beneath the shadow of the corrupter, Thaurim, whose hand, empowered by the shard of power over animal life, twisted all it touched into a nightmare of life, this creature raised, nevertheless, amidst carvings and murals of elven hopes that spoke of the ancient scattering of Ristoria, of the northward flight of the few survivors into these very mountains, of the decline of the tribe beneath the oppression of the goblin emperors and their Light-forsaken dragons, of the sequestering of the last remnants of the tribe in this vale beneath Labrion Plateau and of their final and most humiliating conquest under the treachery of Thaurim—this creature waiting with its people in its waning days for the return of Caimbrand’s heir, of the wielder of Caimbrand’s invulnerable knife, that they might rise up once again and, taking up arms against the evils that had overcome them, end them and put their torment to rest forever—this creature also remembered.
The creature, the chief of Essadden, raised Alik’s knife and carved in the mural above his head the ancient Ristorian characters for the word, “C O M E.”
Then he turned and began the climb toward the evil tower, and Alik, Flan, and Piachras followed him. And behind them, Essadden came.
The cliffs had either been carved or eroded over many years, and the cave floor where they entered was littered with rock-fall and sand. The ground sloped steeply upward, winding back and around into a sort of stair or slide. More like a slide. Alik began slipping at once, but before he went far, Piachras’ hand was on him. He glanced back. Piachras was supporting Flan also. The red-haired horseman looked paler than ever in the gloom of the cave.
Shafts of dusty light lay in the rubble ahead as the passage twisted around—and then they came out on a ledge overlooking the amphitheater. Alik was taken aback, both by the sudden appearance of what at first seemed to be a dead-end and by the way the entire vale below now seemed to be moving...sliding. The Tribe of Essadden: boulder-like, bull-like, bear-like, some with heavy beaks, others with cumbrous tails trailing through the dust, still others with limp extra limbs or beast-like heads appended.
The chief disappeared in front of him, and he looked around to find the thing shuffling back into a narrow crevice in the wall behind them. They went on.
The laborious murals of the Essaddenes continued for some way upward, but as they climbed higher and higher, the tunnel walls were in greater disrepair. Parts of wall had crumbled away; cracks ran through scenes of ancient valor and renown; then whole panels were missing or buried. Alik could partly gauge their progress by the brief glimpses he could catch of the vale below as it receded. It seemed to him they were already higher up than the plateau had ever been before.
A low moaning began to nag at his ears. Ahead of him the chief lumbered into darkness, brushing a clump of icy worms off the ceiling with the tip of his staff. Alik sidestepped them in disgust and crawled onward. The tunnel turned away from the light now and leveled off, taking on an atmosphere of paralytic decay. Something lunged out of the rubble ahead and was promptly crushed back into the rock by the Essadden chief. Then, all at once, their climb came to an end.
A heavy, rusty metal grate blocked the passage completely. Behind it the twisted sounds of moaning increased and reverberated through the earth.
The chief turned toward Piachras and tapped the quester’s broadsword with his staff. A deep, bass growl rumbled through the earth very close nearby. Flan backed away weakly with Alik, and Piachras readied his sword. From behind them several other Essaddenes appeared, macabre shadows against the dim light.
The tunnel walls seemed to crawl. The chief began tapping the edges of the grate lightly with his staff. Alik thought for certain he saw a dark movement against the darkness behind the grate’s darkness. The rumbling growl recurred.
A trickle of rock crumbled from the edges of the grate. In horror, Alik realized the rock around the grate was being tunneled away by...rats. Wherever the chief tapped the rock with his staff, they swarmed and pawed frantically as though the rock were just a grimy layer of dirt over the world’s largest refuse heap. Then the grate shifted dangerously downward, tilted...and fell in.
There was a ravenous roar and a blur of fur and luminescent bone. The chief fell to the ground, or at least disappeared, and Piachras, heaving his falchion into the attacking rush, was bowled over. The Essaddenes fell upon the beast, a huge, seething thing with dirt-matted fur and glittering eyes. The beast let out a tremendous scream, revealing its true power. The tunnel rumbled; Alik and Flan lost their grip in the loose gravel and went down with a shower of dirt and rock. An inhuman groan echoed and died. Alik spluttered and began digging himself out. There was a sudden quiet.
A hand reached his through the debris and hauled him up. The chief, he recognized. Flan managed to drag himself up behind Alik. And there, filling the tunnel, was the body of the beast, leaking a filthy black fluid like oil. One bead-like eye of it gazed mildly toward Alik. Suddenly the beast heaved—but it was only Piachras pushing his way out from under it.
The chief did not wait while Piachras wiped off the blade of his sword and said a quick prayer, but motioned all to follow him onward. “Now enter we into the house of wickedness,” Flan told Alik—and with that they entered into the dungeons of Labrion.
Deran and Krythar burst through the heavy, bone-ribbed doors into the tower room of Labrion, the private sanctuary of the wizard Thaurim, into a disordered and decaying collection of wreckage and disuse. Bones, shattered furniture, decaying chain mail, rodent husks (but no living rats), littered ash and coal, a few overturned incense burners, and the relics of nations could be seen scattered over the uneven, malformed bricks. Beneath the frosty windows lay the cold plateau and the battle raging there of life and death. And there, on a pallid, ridged slab bench before the window, was the black-cloaked figure of Thaurim himself, turned toward the window, an eerie purple light radiating from behind his form.
“I will not ought to be disturbed,” a cold, flat, withered voice came from the seated figure. There was a purple flash. He has the shard there, Zoris, Deran realized.
“Thaurim, we were near taken down there because of your arrogance. Now you have the effront t’ sta’ing me and barring me out? You a’ knowing our purpose hea’—hand over the shard.”
“Enough,” croaked Thaurim. Deran could hear the wizard muttering between breaths and became suddenly nervous. Before he could do anything, the uneven bricks of the floor closed around his feet like a vise.
Krythar hissed and the two drakes on his shoulder fluttered their wings with a menacing caw. “Take it,” Krythar ordered.
Thaurim held up his hand as the drakes spread their wings, and they contorted and dug in their claws against their wills. “You messing not with my drakes!” screeched Krythar.
Thaurim’s ridged slab bench rotated toward them on what Deran had previously taken to be ornamental gargoyles’ feet. “Enough,” the wizard repeated in a dead whisper. “The shard will ought to be engaged. It busies destroying the wretched elves and horsemen. After, we will taking it to Emperor together.” The face beneath the impenetrable cowl seemed to twist, even to grin; then it was steadily wheeled away
from them again by the monster bench. “You will ought to be seated,” the wizard spoke again mercilessly. Two beastly wicker frames loped up behind them, their claws clattering on the brick till they rammed blindly into the generals’ knees. Then Thaurim turned his attention back to the war. Krythar fumed.
V.iii.
A low yellow light flickered in the tunnel ahead as Alik, Flan, Piachras, and the Essadden elves trudged onward and upward. A strain of laughter filtered through the wails of the Labrian dungeons; a laugh, a grunt, a chink of coins. Incessant barking. Behind it all, a hoarse scream accompanied by the semi-rhythmic clanking of steel.
“Shards! Someone shut tha’ bloody sword up!” a heavy shout echoed down the corridor.
“Do it yerself, Porge, what am I, your servant? I’d just soon stick my head in a yakker’s throat.”
“Ee’l shut up sooner or later,” a third voice came. “Make yer bet.”
There was something else muttered sardonically, but Alik didn’t catch it. He crept closer.
The Essadden chief stood calmly in a pool of slime beneath a dripping sewer drain. Rats and other disfigured scavengers swarmed about his feet. The light came from above, from through the drain, bathing the chief in a halo of dank firelight that for a moment only gave him the appearance of something noble and serene. He stretched his tattered staff up to the edge of the drain and a large rat scampered up the bending rod and through the drain.
Four Essaddenes loped over to the chief and formed a pyramid of themselves in the slime. The chief waved toward Alik with his staff, then climbed up himself by way of his people. Alik felt a horrid reluctance to climb that human path. They were large and immobile, reaching all the way to the top. “Climb,” came Flan’s rasping whisper in his ear.
Alik laid his hand on the nearest of the boulder-like Essaddenes. “I...not will be...losing memory,” he whispered to it; then he climbed up. Simple, like blood, he reached the top. Flan came up behind him, then Piachras, then one by one the Essaddenes.
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