“Good tidings to you, Old Man,” said Thorhall with reverence. “Did you sleep well?”
Old Man cracked a slight smile. “My dreams were of yesterday,” he replied enigmatically. “Or of tomorrows yet to come.”
There are strangers in the Hall, Old Man. Friends from Aran and the East who have come to save our land. They wish to speak to you, ask you many questions of your younger days …”
The man nodded. “I am ready for their questions. They may ask what they will.”
Then, refusing the offer of a seat, he leaned heavily on his cane and waited in silence.
The Prince was the first to speak, and Old Man turned his sightless gaze in his direction.
“How do the Druids keep the people of Speca in subjugation?” the Prince asked.
“By the Stones,” came the reply without hesitation. “By the Seeds of Destruction that are tossed to the winds and blown from the hills. By this do my people wither and die. By this are they robbed of minds and wills both.”
“What are these Stones?” asked Mariana. “These Seeds of Destruction you speak of?”
The elderly Specian sucked in his breath and shivered. “A ghastly potion are they, a magician’s concoction harmless against the Druids, but deadly to all others. From evil is it spawned, spreading further evil upon evil and closing in the Darkness.”
Mariana glanced at the Prince. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“From the sky!” cried Old Man. “The Seeds and the sky are one!”
Ramagar scratched at his chin. Obviously Old Man was telling them of some connection between the Eternal Dark and the poison, but what that connection was he could not understand.
“From where are these Seeds scattered?” asked the Prince.
Old Man lifted his face skyward. “From the highest of the highest. From the very pinnacle of stone that rests within the clouds.”
Mariana beat a fist into an open palm. “The Devil’s Tower!” she cried. “It must be! The highest edifice of the land — where stone walls reach up inside the mists!”
“Aye,” wheezed Old Man. And his face tightened with fear and contempt as he continued. “High, high among the clouds, where the winds howl and the world freezes. Up from the labyrinth, winding through the tunnel across the devilish shrines and altars, up the Thirty Thousand Steps until the zenith is reached. From there, aye, from there, do the black-hearted men of magic, these unholy wizards, spawn their brew and their vileness. Up, up in the Tower, up, up, where no man can go, where no man can bear the agony, where no man can see all this and live …”
“Yet you have seen these things,” reminded the girl. “And you still survive.”
Old Man hung his head. “Survive? Do I? Do I yet live? If this be life, then surely death is to be preferred. Like thieves in the night did they steal my mind, like scavengers did they rob me of all I had, like grim vultures did they pluck my eyes from their sockets and render me useless before all those who knew and loved me. Nay, girl, this is not life. My mind knows no peace, no rest. My dreams haunt me with memories I cannot dare to speak of. Eternal damnation is my fate, to have seen what I have seen, to have witnessed the unspeakable and never be able to wipe it from memory.” His entire body sagged; he pressed his weight so heavily against his cane that it seemed he would topple over. “Doom is waiting, doom is waiting. Would that I had eyes so that I might cry!”
“All the world sheds tears in your place,” said the Prince. “But harden your heart and regain your resolve, for we, Old Man, have come to battle these forces. Speca shall be freed!” Old Man sighed deeply, his ears hearing these bold promises but his heart too broken to have any faith. Again he fell silent, waiting for the next question to be posed.
Mariana turned to her companions. “If the Druids must continually seed the clouds,” she said, “then the effects of the poison must be short-lasting. What we must do is find something certain to counteract these effects …”
“Easily said,” grumbled the haj, crossing his legs and drumming his fingers on the stone. “But how?”
The dancing girl chewed at her lip, then to Thorhall’s father-in-law she said, “The antidote, Old Man! Do you know of one?”
“The world can gather a thousand alchemists and still there would be no solution. The poison cannot be stopped. How can one hope to defeat the epitome of Evil?”
“With the epitome of Good.” It was the Prince who had spoken.
Old Man turned to him sharply. “Have you such a thing?”
“Only this.” And he placed the golden scimitar in the old man’s hand, waiting as the sightless philosopher ran his fingers over the engraver’s mark.
“Will Blue Fire dispel the magic?” asked Mariana breathlessly. “Can the blade’s flame defeat the Seeds spawned in the Black Sky?”
“The forces of Good against the forces of Evil,” contemplated Old Man. “I cannot say. But this I am sure of: the Druids fear Blue Fire as nothing else. For centuries they have toiled to duplicate it …”
“So we have been told,” said Ramagar. “But its powers must not be wasted. Tell us what we must do, Old Man. Tell us how to use our weapon against theirs.”
Silver hair tumbled across his shoulders as the philosopher bent his head and pondered. The thief fidgeted uncomfortably while they waited for the answer. It was not long in coming.
“On the first day of the full moon, Moon Time, the magicians in holy procession carry the Seeds for the new month into the clouds. To the Devil’s Tower your blade must be brought. The Thirty Thousand Steps must be climbed — but in secret, lest you be caught — and then, while aflame, the dagger must be hurled from the zenith into the Eternal Dark itself …”
“Throw away the dagger?” gasped Oro, who had listened in disbelief.
Old Man nodded darkly. “It is the only way. The Blue Flame must then battle on its own against the very Blackness and the poisons within. And a terrible battle it shall be; the world itself shall seem to go mad. But if Blue Fire succeeds, and I fear the chances are slight after so many centuries, then the cloud will swirl and shatter, the light of the sun shall pour across Speca, and the Druids will be devoid of their powers …”
“As I suspected,” sighed the Prince. “The clouds themselves hold the key.”
“Aye. And the Evil will consume the Good. Blue Fire will be lost to mankind forever. Yet if we are fortunate, so shall Good destroy Evil. The Specian people shall awake from their trances and overthrow their tyrannical masters. The scimitar shall be lost, but the North shall be saved.”
“But we cannot destroy the blade!” cried Oro frantically.
“You are a fool,” snapped the Prince. “The safety of the world is at stake and must be preserved. It grieves me to think that the scepter of my fathers should be consumed — yet to save my land, to save the North, there is no price I would not pay.”
“Then to this Devil’s Tower we must hasten,” said the haj. “By the calendar, if my calculations are correct, Moon Time comes in three days.”
The Prince pounded a fist. “Can the Tower be reached in so short a period?” he asked.
Old Man looked at him worriedly. “Only if your travel is unhampered. You will have to walk the Valley of Morose, the place where Death-Stalkers nest, where the birds of prey scour the skies and keep careful watch over the road to the citadel.”
“We are armed,” reminded Argyle.
A grim laugh sifted from between the philosopher’s cracked lips. “Axes and swords do not frighten Death-Stalkers. If you are set upon, many of you will not live to reach the Tower.”
The group of adventurers exchanged sour expressions. Ramagar took Mariana’s hand and held it tightly. “We have no choice,” he said quietly. “We’ll have to take our chances and do the best we can.”
“No more than that can be asked,” replied Old Man in wise observance.
Argyle turned to his friend Thorhall. “Your aid has been of great value to us,” he said. “And our part of the bargai
n shall be kept. But there is one last favor we would ask before we depart on our journey.”
Thorhall nodded. “Ask anything. It shall be granted.”
Argyle smiled. “We need you to lead us into the Valley of Morose.”
Several leagues past Thorhall’s village and the defile, at the very foot of the hideous Black Forest where only the ghosts of the dead can be heard, the band came to the heinous Valley of Morose.
High atop a craggy hillock the adventurers stood, their cloaks tossing wildly amid the vicious winds that screamed around them. Wordlessly they looked across, hardly aware of the open plain to the south and its meandering riverbeds long since turned to stone and chalky powders.
The Valley of Morose seemed to be the eye of a tempest of bedrock. At either side, bleak walls of gray swept up toward the sky a thousand meters and more, looming over their heads like malevolent breakers ready to come crashing down at any moment. Mist, white as soft clouds, shredded eerily among the fingers of slate and rock, silently rising from the bogs below to greet the dim brightness of Specian day. In parts the valley showed hints of the palest green, places where weed and tussock poked from between cracks in gravel and caked soils. Overall, though, it was easy to understand why the place had been named Morose; grimly the valley maintained its dulled brown sameness, a monotonous stretch of grisly marsh and bogs and fog punctuated occasionally by the remains of decayed bones — bones of unknown creatures who had dared to chance a crossing and who now rotted along the ruts and ridges.
Thorhall sighed at the sight, shaking his head. “Once this valley had been a refuge for forest life,” he commented sadly. “They say that herds of caribou and elk roamed these hills by the thousands …”
“And mighty redwoods grew as tall as the mountains,” added the Prince, recalling his father’s teachings. “There were brooks, and fields of sweet grass. Birds sang in the morning, and a traveler could spy the smoke rising from farm chimneys and be sure of a welcome breakfast.”
Ramagar put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and smiled wistfully. “It will be so again,” he promised. “The soil will be fertile as before, and there will be flowers, wildflowers in abundance.”
Wishing it could be, the Prince hung his head and nodded. It would take a lifetime to recreate what had been lost, to renew the barren wastes that covered the land from shore to shore.
A cruel wind whipped savagely down from the mountains and across the shadowy cliffs as they prepared to enter the valley.
“Best we should not stay put in one place for too long,” Thorhall told them all. “A sitting target is easy prey for Death-Stalkers.”
And the stranded Aranian led them on, among the great tapering rocks, until they came upon a hard path of packed dirt. The twists of the path were reasonably clear, but at each side the clinging white mist thickened.
“This trail remains for some way,” Thorhall said. “With any luck we can stay on it all day and perhaps come within sight of the Devil’s Tower itself.”
Mariana rubbed at her arms, feeling the chill quicken to her weary bones. Treading carefully over sharp pebbles, she glanced nervously at both sides of the trail. She knew that if any one of them happened to step more than a few meters off the road, they would quickly be lost from sight in the mist. With a shiver she turned her gaze ahead, thankful that Ramagar and the haj were both close by. Otherwise, she would probably have taken Thorhall’s advice and turned back long before.
After hiking for a while they began to gain altitude. The narrow path’ was winding its way higher on an increasingly steep incline. For the first time, the travelers were able to look far past the mists, and they could see that the climb was heading them along the valley’s edge toward the reaches of the cliffs and ridges — a happenstance, they were soon to realize, not without importance.
It was while they crossed over an extremely treacherous ledge of cracked shale set along a craggy peak that the haj, blinking as he stopped dead in his tracks, mumbled aloud in disbelief. “Dungeons of the Caliph! Look at that!”
Mariana spun and stared. Nestled at the edge of the gray chalk cliff stood a nest, carefully woven, made of weed and moss and broken bits of branch. Half buried among various niches, well concealed from the bite of the wind, were two unhatched eggs beneath the lip of moss. They were brownish-yellow in color, each as big as an oversized melon.
The haj reached out his hand to inspect. “Don’t touch them!” warned Thorhall with a grimace.
Burlu adroitly pulled back his hand. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“These are nestlings. Hideous offspring of our enemy, the Death-Stalkers …”
Ramagar ran his fingertips over the hilt of his dagger. “These are bird eggs?” he asked incredulously. “Look at the size of them!”
The nearer of the two eggs suddenly showed a crack; Mariana put a hand to her mouth, and her eyes widened in wonder. First came a scraping and then a crunching, and before any of them knew it, a piece of shell had been tossed aside and a long, hawk-like black beak protruded from the opening.
“It’s hatching!” cried Oro.
The Prince pushed the staring hunchback aside and stepped in closer to examine. At first glance the bird seemed much like a vulture or any other carrion, what with its long, thin neck and dark, intense beaded eyes. The nestling pushed its beak toward the sky and rolled its infant eyes until they came to rest on the agog strangers. Colorless and bald, it tilted its misshapen head and peered curiously.
The Prince moved in closer; instinctively the nestling drew back. Powerfully the carrion hunched its body and rose up, splitting more chunks of shell and scattering them to the wind. Then it howled its high-pitched wail, a shrill cry for its mother.
“We’d better move away from here quickly,” urged Thorhall, already looking skyward for sight of its parent Death-Stalker.
Argyle also scanned the clouded heavens. “You mean you want us to let this … this … monster live?”
“It can’t harm us; not yet, anyway —”
But Thorhall’s words went unheeded. Before anyone could move fast enough to stop him, the lord of Aran lifted his mighty ax with both hands, swung it above his head, and heaved again and again. The fragile shell smashed into a thousand bits. The dying bird screamed an awful scream, so ghastly that Mariana was sure it was the worst sound she had ever heard.
His tunic and cloak both splattered with dark blood, Argyle commenced to smash the yet unbroken egg. As the ax fell, a slimy yellow liquid oozed from within the rupture, bringing with it a foul and putrid smell.
Sickened, everyone looked away while Argyle cleaned his weapon on the rocks and moved away from the deepening pool of blood and mucus. “At least those two won’t fly these dreaded skies,” he commented sourly.
Thorhall shook his head. “Perhaps not, but their mother will. And she’ll be looking for the slayer of her young.”
Argyle scoffed. “Be this bird devil or no, let her come.” He lifted his ax again. “I am prepared …”
A distant cry caused Mariana to raise her head sharply. A shapeless dark form suddenly appeared from behind the swirling clouds, moving across the sky with lightning speed. As yet it showed no form, but one fact was singularly apparent: the gliding bird was huge, its wingspan as long as a horse. And the carrion was shrieking at the top of its lungs in an insane, witless moan of grief.
“Quick!” shouted Ramagar, yanking Mariana by the arm and pulling her off her feet. “Get to the bluffs! It’s attacking!”
Helter-skelter the small band dashed, bounding for cover among the grainy and broken ridges that slanted along the side of the cliff. The bird was coming head-on, blazing fury in her red slotted eyes. Her nest ravished, her unborn dead, she sought no reason to her anger, only the heat of unleashed rage seeking retribution.
Huge, gleaming talons spread malevolently as the great bird began her rapid descent. Peering down at the heights and her shattered nest, she caught sight of the scampering adventurers and w
ith a terrific wail came charging upon them.
Mariana screamed as talons whooshed inches from her scalp; the dancing girl rolled over barely in time, gazing straight into the hideous face as the bird spread her black feathers and darted up to the sky.
Eyes burning with frenzy, the soaring Death-Stalker closed in again. On one knee, Argyle swung his ax; tattered feathers danced before his anguished eyes while the bird squawked and glided up, unharmed. Then down again she was flying, flapping wildly and crying, beak parted to emit her deathly screech.
Thorhall leaped to his feet, brandishing his spear in a desperate attempt to parry the thrust of the talons. As the bird circled and dived, his heart began to pound in further agitation. The calls of the mother had not been lost on empty air:
fanned by the gusty winds, her wail had carried the length and breadth of the valley, and now, from every point in the dark sky came more of the menacing carrion. Perhaps a dozen more in all, each as fearsome, each as frenzied.
Ramagar’s twin-edged dagger slashed wildly as the host of Death-Stalkers tore at his body; the haj reeled with the sting of claws slashing along the side of his throat. Mariana screamed as young Homer drew back against a boulder and with both hands flaying vainly tried to ward off the terrible blows.
A piercing cry filled the air; Mariana saw one of the carrion twist in a tizzy as Argyle’s ax broadsided the beast and severed a wing from its haunch. The bird twisted and moaned, blood spouting like an evil fountain, then it smashed against a crevice and plummeted to its death in the bogs below.
The Prince swung his blade with all his might; the nest mother yanked back her head, but not in time. The slash was deep, running down from her throat to her plumed breast. For an instant the mighty bird wavered, then forward she toppled, clawing and scratching as life ebbed out of her. The Prince spun and fended off the blows, then again Blue Fire struck, deep, deep into her black heart. And there, pinned against the edge of the ridge, the carrion mother gasped for breath and futilely tried to lift her wings once more to fly.
The Thief of Kalimar; Captain Sinbad; Cinnabar Page 35
