by Terry Brooks
“I think so, too,” Morgan agreed.
Dees gave a satisfied smirk. “But it won’t be so easy for him now, will it? Because we’ll be watching.”
They packed up, tightened their cloaks against the weather, and stepped back out into the downpour. They continued to follow the shoreline as the afternoon lengthened, reaching the northernmost point of the peninsula without finding anything, and turned back again into the city. The rain finally ended, changing to a fine mist that hung like smoke against the gray sky and buildings. The air warmed. Shadows yawned and stretched in alleyways and nooks like waking spirits, and steam rose off the streets.
From somewhere underground the rumble of the Maw Grint sounded, a distant thunder that shook the earth.
“I’m beginning to think we’re not ever going to find anything,” Horner Dees muttered at one point.
They followed the dark corridors of the streets and searched the brume that lay all about, the doorways and windows that gaped open like mouths in search of food, and the flat, glistening walkways and passages. Everywhere the city lay abandoned and dead, stripped of life and filled with hollow, empty sounds. It walled them away with its stone and its silence; it wrapped about them with such persistence that despite memory and reason it seemed that the world beyond must have fallen away and that Eldwist was all that remained.
They grew weary with the approach of evening; the sameness of their surroundings dulled their senses and wore against their resistance. They began to stray a bit, to wander closer to the walkway’s edge, to look upward more often at the stone heights that loomed all about, and to give themselves over to a dangerous and persistent wish that something—anything— would happen. Their boredom was acute, their sense of being unable to change or affect the things about them maddening. They had been in Eldwist almost a week. How much longer would they be forced to remain?
Ahead, the street deadended. They rounded the corner of the building they were following and discovered that the street widened into a square. At the square’s center was an odd depression with steps leading down on all sides to a basin from which a statue rose, a winged figure with streamers and ribbons trailing from its body. Almost without thinking, they turned into the square, beguiled by its look, so different from anything else they had seen. A park, they thought to themselves without speaking. What was it doing here?
They were halfway across the street when they heard the catch that secured the trapdoor beneath them release.
They had no chance of saving themselves. They were standing in the center of the door when it dropped, and they plunged into the void beneath. They fell a long way, struck the side of a chute, and began to slide head-downward. The chute was rough, its surface littered with loose rock that cut and bit into their faces and hands. They clawed frantically in an attempt to slow their descent, heedless of the pain. Boots and knees dug in; hands and fingers grasped. The slide broadened and its slope decreased. They quit rolling, flattened themselves in a spread-eagle position, and came to a grinding halt.
Morgan lifted his head gingerly and peered about. He lay facedown on a slab of rock that stretched so far away into the shadows on either side that he could not see its end. Loose rock lay upon the slide like a carpet, bits and pieces of it still tumbling away. There was a faint glimmer of light from somewhere above, a narrow shaft that sought in vain to penetrate the gloom, so thin that it barely reached to where Morgan lay. He forced himself to look down. Horner Dees lay some twenty feet below him on his right, sprawled on his back with his arms and legs thrown wide, unmoving. Farther down, like a giant, hungry mouth, was a chasm of impenetrable blackness.
Morgan swallowed against the dust in his throat. “Horner?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Here,” the other said, his voice a faint rasp.
“Are you all right?”
There was a grunt. “Nothing broken, I think.”
Morgan took a moment to look about. All he could see was the slide, the shaft of light above, and the chasm below. “Can you move?” he called down softly.
There was silence for a moment, then the sound of rocks clattering away into the dark. “No,” the reply came. “I’m too fat and old, Highlander. If I try to get up to you, I’ll start sliding and won’t be able to stop.”
Morgan heard the strain in his voice. And the fear. Dees was helpless, laying on that loose rock like a leaf on glass; even the slightest movement would send him spinning away into the void.
Me, too, if I make any attempt to help, the Highlander thought darkly.
Yet he knew that he had to try.
He took a deep breath and brought his hand up slowly to his mouth. A shower of loose rock rattled away, but his body stayed in place on the slide. He brushed at the silt on his lips and closed his eyes, thinking. There was a rope in his backpack, a thin, strong coil, some fifty feet of it. His eyes opened again. Could he find a way to fasten it to something and haul himself up?
A familiar rumbling shook the earth, rising from below, shaking the carpet of rock about him so that small showers of it slid into the abyss. There was a thunderous huffing and a great, long sigh as if an enormous amount of air was being released.
Morgan Leah glanced down, cold to the bone. In the depths below, right beneath where they hung, the Maw Grint lay sleeping.
Morgan looked up again quickly. His breath came in short, frantic gasps, and he had to struggle to overcome an almost overpowering urge to claw his way out of there as fast as he could. The Maw Grint. That close. It was huge beyond belief; even his vague glimpse of it had been enough to tell him that. He couldn’t begin to guess how much of it there was, where it began and ended, how far it stretched away.
He gripped at the rock until his hands hurt, fighting back against his fear and nausea. He had to get out of there! He had to find a way!
Almost without thinking about what he was doing, he reached beneath his stomach and began working free the broken remains of the Sword of Leah. It was a slow, agonizing process, for he was unable to lift up without fear of beginning his slide down again. And now, more than he had ever wanted anything, he did not want that.
“Don’t try to move, Horner!” he called down softly, his voice dry and rough. “Stay where you are!”
There was no response. Morgan inched the Sword of Leah clear of its scabbard and out from under him, bringing it level with his face. The polished metal surface of the broken blade glittered brightly in the faint light. He pushed it above his head with one hand, then reached up with the other until he could grip it firmly with both. Turning the jagged end of the blade downward, he began to slide it into the rock. He felt it bite into the stone slab beneath.
Please! he begged.
Jamming the Sword of Leah into the stone, he hauled himself up. The blade held, and he pulled his face level with its handle. Bits of rock fell away beneath him, tumbling and sliding into the void. The Maw Grint did not stir.
Morgan freed the Sword, reached upward to jam it into the rock again, gripped it with every ounce of strength he possessed, and pulled himself level once more. He closed his eyes and lay next to it panting, then felt a rush of heat surge through his body. The magic? He opened his eyes quickly to see, searching the Sword’s gleaming length. Nothing.
Holding himself in place with one hand, he used the other to dive into his pack and secure the length of rope and a grappling hook. A handful of cooking implements and a blanket worked free in the process and fell onto the chute. Ignoring them, the Highlander slipped the rope about his waist and shoulders and tied it in a harness.
“Horner!” he whispered.
The old Tracker looked up, and Morgan threw the rope to him. It fell across his body, and he seized it with both hands. He started to slip almost immediately, swinging over until he was beneath Morgan. Then the rope went taut, catching him. The shock to Morgan’s body was staggering, an immense, wrenching weight that threatened to pull him down. But he had both hands fastened once more on the Sword of Leah, an
d the blade held firm.
“Climb to me!” he whispered down harshly.
Horner Dees began to do so, slowly, torturously, hand over hand up the rope and the slide. As he passed the cooking implements and blanket that had fallen from Morgan’s pack, he kicked them free, and they tumbled farther down in a shower of rock.
This time the Maw Grint coughed and came awake.
It grunted, a huffing sound that reverberated against the stone walls. It lifted itself, its massive body thudding against the walls of the tunnel in which it slept, shaking the earth violently. It rolled and pitched and began to move. Morgan hung on to the pommel of his sword, and Dees clung to the slender rope, both gritting their teeth against the strain on muscle and bone. The Maw Grint shook itself, and Tracker and Highlander could hear a spraying sound and then a hiss of steam.
The Maw Grint slid away into the black and the sound of its passing faded. Morgan and Dees looked down cautiously.
An odd, greenish stain was working its way up the stone of the chute, just visible at the far edge of the shaft of light several dozen feet below Dees. It glistened darkly and steamed like a fire advancing through brush. They watched as it reached the blanket that had fallen from Morgan’s pack. When it touched it, the rough wool turned instantly to stone.
Horner Dees began climbing again at once, a furious assault on the loose stone of the slide. When he was almost to Morgan, the Highlander stopped him, beckoned for slack on the rope, and began his own ascent, jamming the Sword blade down into the rock, pulling himself up, jamming and pulling, over and over again.
They went on that way for what seemed an endless span of time. Daylight beckoned them, drawing them like a beacon toward the surface of the city and safety. Sweat ran down Morgan’s face and body until he was drenched in it. His breathing grew labored, and his entire body was wracked with pain. It grew so bad at one point that he thought he must quit. But he could not. Below, the stain continued to advance, the poison given off by the Maw Grint’s body solidifying everything in its path. The blanket went first, then the handful of cooking implements that hadn’t fallen into the abyss. Soon there was nothing left save Morgan and Horner Dees.
And it was gaining steadily on them.
They struggled on, hauling themselves upward foot by foot. Morgan’s mind closed down on his thoughts like an iron lid on a trunk of useless relics, and all of his efforts became concentrated on the climb. As he labored, he felt the heat spread through him once more, stronger this time, more insistent. He could feel it turning inside him like an auger, boring and twisting at the core of his being. It reached from head to heels and back again, from fingers to toes, through the muscles and bone and blood, until it was all he knew. At some point—he never knew exactly when—he looked at the Sword of Leah and saw it glowing as bright as day, the white fire of its magic burning through the shadows. Still there, he thought in furious determination. Still mine!
Then suddenly there was a ladder, rungs lining the walls of the chute above him, rising up from the darkness of their prison toward the fading daylight and the city. The light, he saw, came from a narrow airshaft. He scrambled toward it, jamming, hauling, releasing, starting all over again. He heard Horner Dees calling to him from below, his hoarse voice almost a sob, and looked down long enough to see the poison of the Maw Grint inches from the old Tracker’s boots. He reached down impulsively with one hand and calling on a strength he didn’t know he possessed, hauled upward on the rope, pulling Dees clear. The other kicked and scrambled toward him, bearded face a mask of dust and sweat. Morgan’s hand released the rope and closed over the bottommost rung of the ladder. Dees continued to climb, digging his boots into the loose stone. The light was failing quickly now, gone gray already, slipping rapidly into darkness. Below, the Maw Grint’s muffled roar shook the earth.
Then they were both on the ladder, scrambling upward, feet and hands gripping, bodies pressing against the stone. Morgan jammed the Sword of Leah back into his belt, safely in place. Still magic!
They burst from the airshaft into the street and fell on the walkway in exhaustion. Together, they crawled to the doorway of the nearest building and collapsed in the cool of its shadows. “I knew… I was right…in wanting you for a friend,” Horner Dees gasped.
He reached over, this great bearish man, and pulled the Highlander close. Morgan Leah could feel him shake.
XXI
Pe Ell spent the day sleeping.
After he walked out on Quickening and the others of the little company from Rampling Steep he went directly to a building less than a block away that he had chosen for himself two days earlier. Rounding the corner of the building so that he was out of sight of anyone who might be watching, he entered through a side door, climbed the stairs one floor, followed the hallways to the front of the building, and turned into a large, well-lighted chamber with windows that ran almost floor to ceiling and opened on the street below and the buildings across, one of which was where his once-companions were presently hiding.
He permitted himself a brief smile. They were such a pack of fools.
Pe Ell had a plan. He believed, as Quickening did, that the Stone King was hidden somewhere in the city. He did not believe the others of the company would find him even if they searched from now until next summer. He alone could do so. Pe Ell was a hunter by instinct and experience; the others were something less—each to a varying degree, but all hopeless. He had not lied when he told them he would be better off on his own. He would. Horner Dees was a Tracker, but a Tracker’s skills were useless in a city of stone. Carisman and Morgan Leah had no skills worth talking about. Quickening disdained the use of her magic—maybe with good reason, although he wasn’t convinced of that yet. The only one who might have been useful to him was Walker Boh. But the man with one arm was his most dangerous enemy, and he did not want to have to worry about watching his back.
His plan was simple. The key to finding Uhl Belk was the Rake. The Creeper was the Stone King’s house pet, a giant watchdog that kept his city free of intruders. He turned it loose at night, and it swept the streets and buildings clean. What it missed one night, it went after the next. But only at night, not during the day. Why was that? Pe Ell asked himself. And the answer was obvious. Because like everything else that served the Stone King, willingly or not, it could not see. It hunted by using its other senses. The night was its natural ally. Daylight might even hinder it.
Where did it go during the day? Pe Ell then asked. Again, the answer seemed obvious. Like any house pet, it went back to its master. That meant that if Pe Ell could manage to follow the Rake to its daytime lair he had a good chance of finding the Stone King.
Pe Ell thought he could do so. The night was his ally as well; he had done most of his own hunting in the dark. His own senses were as sharp as those of the Creeper. He could hunt the Rake as easily as the Rake could hunt him. The Rake was a monster; there was no point in thinking he stood a chance against such a beast in a face-to-face confrontation, even with the aid of the Stiehl. But Pe Ell could be a shadow when he chose, and nothing could bring him to bay. He would take his chances; he would play cat and mouse with the Rake. Pe Ell was feeling many things, but fear wasn’t one of them. He had a healthy respect for the Creeper, but he was not frightened of it. After all, he was the smarter of the two.
Come nightfall, he would prove it.
So he slept the daylight hours away, stretched out of sight just beneath the windows where he could feel the faint, hazy sunlight on his face and hear the sounds of anyone or anything passing in the street below.
When it grew dark, the shadows cooling the air to a damp chill, the light fading away, he rose and slipped down the stairs and out the door. He stood listening in the gloom for a long time. He had not heard the others of the company return from their daytime hunt; that was odd. Perhaps they had come into their shelter through another door, but he thought he would have heard them nevertheless. For a moment he considered stealing in for a quick loo
k, but abandoned the idea almost immediately. What happened to them had nothing to do with him. Even Quickening no longer mattered as much. Now that he was away from her, he discovered, she had lost something of her hold over him. She was just a girl he had been sent to kill, and kill her he would if she was still alive when he returned from his night’s hunt.
He would kill them all.
The cries of the seabirds were distant and mournful in the evening stillness, faint whimpers carried on the ocean wind. He could hear the dull pounding of the waters of the Tiderace against Eldwist’s shores and the low rumble of the Maw Grint somewhere deep beneath the city.
He could not hear the Creeper.
He waited until it was as black as it would get, the skies obscured by clouds and mist, the gloom settled down about the buildings, spinning shadow webs. He had listened to and identified all of the dark’s sounds by then; they were as familiar as the beating of his pulse. He began to move, just another shadow in the night. He slipped down the streets in quick, cautious dartings that carried him from one pool of darkness to the next. He did not carry any weapon but the Stiehl, and the Stiehl was safely sheathed within the covering of his pants. The only weapons he needed right now were instinct and stealth.
He found a juncture of streets where he could crouch in wait within a deeply shadowed entry that opened out of a tunnel stairwell and gave him a clear view of everything for almost two blocks. He settled himself back against the stone centerpost and waited.
Almost immediately, he began thinking of the girl.
Quickening, the daughter of the King of the Silver River—she was a maddening puzzle who stirred such conflicting feelings within him that he could barely begin to sort them out. It would have been better simply to brush them all aside and do as Rimmer Dall had said he must—kill her. Yet he could not quite bring himself to do so. It was more than defiance of Dall and his continued attempts to subvert him to the Shadowen cause, more than his determination that he would handle matters in his own way; it was the doubt and hesitation she roused in him, the feeling that somehow he wasn’t as much in control of matters as he believed, that she knew things about him he did not. Secrets—she was a harborer of so many. If he killed her, those secrets would be lost forever.
