by Dorian Hart
“I’ve heard again from Abernathy through Eddings and Previa,” said Morningstar. “The archmagi are holding steady but grow ever more concerned about Aktallian’s harassment of their dreams. Blocking him is increasingly drawing them away from keeping the portal to Volpos closed. He urges us to hurry.”
“Shame,” said Dranko. “Since this is such a lovely vacation spot.” Though his remarks were flippant, he felt deflated. His leg injury would slow them down, and there wouldn’t be any chance for it to heal properly if he walked on it every day.
As if reading his mind, Grey Wolf pointed at his leg. “We have a plan to leave tonight, but we’ll only put it in motion if you can walk.”
“And what is the plan? Kibi, have you found our escape hatch?”
“I think so,” said Kibi. “One fellah pointed me toward a minin’ tunnel they closed up years ago ’cause the goblins breached it. Bit of a climb, sorry to say, but we could get there in a couple of hours.”
“And you can get us into it?”
“Don’t see why not.”
Dranko tried not to think about hiking two hours up a mountain on his wounded leg. “We’re taking a lot on faith. Once we’re in the tunnels, how do we know they go all the way through?”
Grey Wolf laughed bitterly. “We have no idea, but what choice do we have? It’s—” He stopped and looked at Certain Step. “I think you’re right. The gods must have been kind for us to have come even this far, Corilayna especially, given some of the lucky breaks we’ve had.”
“You would have Laramon to thank,” said Step. “For the people of Kivia, he is the god of fortune.”
“Seems we’ve had both good luck and bad,” said Kibi. “Don’t want to speak against the gods, but I’d say we make our own luck.”
Dranko glanced down at his leg. Was it bad luck he’d been shot or good luck that it hadn’t been fatal? “So. The plan?”
“Pewter is outside,” said Aravia. “The sheriff has appointed two people to watch the house, but both are in the building across the street. Our plan is to escape out the back window, after which Morningstar will invoke her invisibility cloak and lead us up into the mountains. Once we’ve gone far enough, we can bring out lights with little chance of being spotted. Kibi will open us a tunnel to get us past the cave-in the Culudians engineered to keep the goblins out.”
“We’ve bought plenty of food,” said Tor. “We’ve been talking up how we’re thinking of heading back to Gurund City and looking for another way to cross the mountains, so there’s nothing odd about us stocking up.”
A weariness settled onto Dranko, as much mental as physical, but the others had thought of everything. Well, almost.
“What about the goblins?”
Grey Wolf sighed. “What about them?”
“If goblins came out of that tunnel—”
“Yes, Dranko, they might still be in there. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Armies of goblins, filling the mountains like ants in a hill. We’ll have to sneak past them, obviously.”
“And this is the only way?”
“We can’t go over,” said Tor. “I tried yesterday while you were asleep. Took the carpet straight up, and before I was even close to high enough to get over the smallest ridge I could see, I had trouble breathing and the carpet was wobbling strangely. And I was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers.”
“I did warn you that was likely,” said Aravia.
Damn. That would have been so much easier. “What about going around?”
“The mountains stretch the entire span of the continent,” said Aravia. “The shorter distance, to the southern shore of Kivia, is still over five hundred miles. That’s a week of flying in the best case, and we’d be traveling through a kingdom called Ocir that’s notoriously xenophobic.”
“Which means they hate strangers,” added Tor.
“The people here in Culud say it’s illegal for a foreigner to travel unescorted through their territory,” finished Aravia. “We’d be arrested if we stopped to resupply.”
Sounds better than being shot on sight.
“And then we’d have to come north again,” added Step. “Another week. On the maps in my temple, the jungle is directly on the far side of the mountains from where we are now.”
“If things go well, we could be through in three or four days,” said Grey Wolf. “Step thinks the mountains aren’t more than twenty miles across.”
“If things go well?” said Dranko. “That’s a big if. And even assuming that the tunnels connect all the way to the other side and go more-or-less straight through, I’m not going to be moving very fast.”
Grey Wolf rolled his eyes. “Damn it, Dranko, we hashed this out for hours while you slept. This is our best option.”
He was right, of course. “I was kind of hoping that when we got here, the locals would point us to a pass that was still open. Or that flying over on the carpet wouldn’t be impossible.”
“I think we were all hoping that,” said Ernie.
Dranko pointed at Pewter, resting on Aravia’s lap. “Aravia, now that you’re a goddess, can’t you perform some kind of miracle that will help?”
She and her cat exchanged a silent look. She smiled. “Pewter reminds me that you haven’t been making the proper sacrifices necessary to earn miracles.”
“I’ve been busy being unconscious!”
Pewter meowed.
“He says no excuses. And Dranko, being a divine Spark of Quarrol still has not afforded me any new powers or abilities. I’ll let you know if that changes, but it’s not my powers that give me confidence that the goblin tunnels are our best option. It’s Kibi’s.”
Kibi shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Sometimes the stone gives me a sense a’ what’s around it. Talks to me, in a manner a’ speakin’, though that’s not exactly it. What I’m hopin’ for is that once we’re inside the mountains, I can learn where the straightest tunnels are that ain’t clogged up with goblins. And in a pinch I can make tunnels myself, just to get short distances.”
Of all his companions’ strange talents, Kibi’s stone-shaping was the strangest. “Couldn’t you just tunnel us straight through yourself?”
“Maybe,” said Kibi. “But it would take an awful long time. Twenty miles could take a month or more, assumin’ the stone was willin’ in the first place.”
“So we come back to the question,” said Grey Wolf. “Are you feeling well enough to start tonight?”
Everyone looked at Dranko. He shifted his weight in his chair and flinched at the pain. There was little chance he’d make it all the way through the mountains, but he’d be damned if he crapped out now.
“Yeah, sure, I’m good. If we’re sneaking out tonight, let’s do it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Grey Wolf wished he knew what they’d done to give away their escape. Noise? An indiscreet flash of light? Or maybe Pewter had missed a spy who had noticed them crawling out the back window. Morningstar’s Ellish cloak had shielded them from the eyes of the locals as they had crept down the main street of Culud, but twenty minutes into their climb the town below had come awake, a couple of shouts quickly blossoming into full-blown commotion. Lit torches had sprung up, which at least had the benefit of marking the progress and direction of the crowd.
For over two hours they clambered up the mountain in the dark, ever aware of the encroaching pursuit. Every so often they heard the loud crack of a crossbow bolt against the mountainside, never so near as to be alarming. The mob was taking pot shots in the dark, which was fine with Grey Wolf—the odds of a hit were low, and it slowed down the pursuit.
The shouts of the villagers rose up through the night air. Some were nothing more than curses, while others begged Dranko to come back and heal some injured person or another. One woman clearly called out, “That greenblood will betray us to the goblins!” Grey Wolf had to resist the urge to shout back that they were acting like a horde of goblins themselves; that would only have more clearly given away their
position.
“This is it,” said Kibi, panting a bit. They had reached the mine entrance, a shallow opening cut into the sheer rock, clogged solid with boulders from where the Culudians had collapsed it. Kibi put his hands against the rock several feet uphill from the mineshaft and closed his eyes.
Minutes passed. Kibi didn’t move an inch; his eyes remained shut, his face serene despite the danger. The mob was still a hundred feet below them, but the townsfolk had spotted Horn’s Company, and their bolts now struck all around them. One went right through Morningstar’s pack. Another winged the stone by Grey Wolf’s head, sending hard flakes of rock into his face. It was all Grey Wolf could do not to yell at Kibi to hurry, but like all of his friends’ bizarre mystical powers, Kibi’s stone-shaping required concentration. Grey Wolf guessed at the trajectory of the bolts and shifted his body slightly to better keep Kibi shielded.
“Come on, Kibi,” said Tor quietly.
Another bolt shattered high on the rock face above Kibi’s head.
“Ah, there we go.” Kibi stepped forward and vanished into the darkness. “Come on, there’s plenty a’ room.”
Grey Wolf made sure all the others were in ahead of him. Kibi had carved out a sizable cave; everyone piled in. Morningstar collapsed onto the stone floor. A bolt flew into the hollowed-out space, bounced off the ceiling, and clattered against the far wall. Kibi hastily put his hands back on the stone, and within ten seconds his cave mouth had closed.
Grey Wolf held up his light-rod. They stood in something like a half-dome extending into the mountainside. It was much like the gap Kibi had made in the Delfirian’s wall, though much larger. The walls were smooth and plain, a uniform gray.
“We can’t rest here,” said Kibi. “We’d run out of air. But give me another few minutes and I can open this up into the mine shaft a ways back, where it ain’t collapsed.”
Ernie shone his light-rod at the back wall. “Will there be air in the mine shaft?”
“It all connects up to where the goblins live, and they gotta breathe somethin’.”
Grey Wolf privately worried that the goblins might have sealed this area off after the Culudians collapsed their exit. In the worst case, they could always backtrack and return here; it was unlikely the Culudians would camp out, waiting for them to pop out of the solid mountain.
Presently another tunnel opened itself beneath Kibi’s fingers, cutting over to the right on a diagonal until it joined the existing passage of the mine. The old mining tunnel stretched away into the blackness, beyond the range of Aravia’s lights. Grey Wolf turned in the direction of the town and saw the near edge of the cave-in, a tumble of rocks, dirt, and wood stretching floor to ceiling.
“Try not touchin’ anythin’,” said Kibi. “Oughta be stable after all this time, but there ain’t no point in testin’ it.”
Grey Wolf rubbed his temples at the notion. “Bedrolls out. We need rest, Morningstar especially. Dranko, do you need help?”
Kibi helped ease Dranko to a sitting position, his back to a wall.
Dranko glanced uneasily at his leg. “I should change the dressing and smear on some more disinfectant.”
“I can help,” said Certain Step.
To Grey Wolf’s eye the wounds looked ugly, two angry red bullseyes where the bolt had stuck through.
“We don’t have many clean cloths,” said Step, as he and Ernie applied fresh bandages. “And since we don’t know when we’ll be able to get more water, it is best we not use too much washing out Dranko’s wounds. For his leg to heal properly, Dranko should stay off it for at least two weeks, but that is not an option.”
Grey Wolf nodded. “Dranko, would we save time in the long run if you channeled for yourself now, and Kibi carried you while you recovered?”
“Wouldn’t be a problem,” added Kibi. “You ain’t that heavy.”
Dranko shook his head. “I don’t think I can heal myself. Something about feedback, I think. And I just channeled three days ago; I can barely keep my eyes open as it is. Nah, I’ll be fine. I doubt we’ll be sprinting through underground tunnels anyhow, so I might not slow us down all that much.”
“What about the carpet?” asked Tor.
“And fill the tunnels with smoke?” said Dranko. “No thanks. Look, really, I’ll be fine.”
Grey Wolf lay down and closed his eyes, but the hours crept by and all he could do was toss and turn. Never mind that the ground was rough stone with only a bedroll and blanket between it and his back. He’d slept in plenty of uncomfortable spots over the years, on lumpy ground, hard ground, wet ground. No, it was his brain that kept him awake, spinning his worries around like a dust-devil.
It was getting away from him, was the problem. This was still the most idiotic assignment of his life, looked at from any sensible viewpoint. He wouldn’t have bet a silver piece that they’d even get through the mountains, let alone find a city in a jungle on the far side. And the Crosser’s Maze? A thing of “mind, magic, and metal”? Gods. And that assumed Shreen had even told them the truth about where it was.
And now, beyond all that, even in the vanishingly small likelihood that they’d find the maze and get it back to Abernathy, there was Step and his stupid poem, and Aravia’s report about Het Branoi and the Reaches. The farther Grey Wolf looked into the future, the bleaker his life became. A little piece of him harbored the hope that if they somehow delivered the Crosser’s Maze, Abernathy would let them retire, and some other collection of seven people were fated to retrieve a third Eye of Moirel.
Gods, he was doomed.
He listened to the soft noises, the stirring and the snores, of his sleeping companions. His team had turned out to be a collection of sorcerers and mystics and…hells, was Aravia actually a goddess now? A goddess of cats? What did that even mean? She had tried explaining it—that there existed a group of divine cats (and dogs, and horses, apparently), and she had been born with the divinity usually reserved for one of them. Did that mean she was immortal like the gods? Should they be humbled in her presence? Aravia didn’t think so, and the blood that came out of her shoulder when she’d been shot had looked human enough.
Kibi had his uncanny stone-shaping, and Dranko his channeling, and Morningstar trained a squad of dreamers to fight that Aktallian bastard. Oh, and she sometimes dreamed the future and could make them invisible. Ernie was normal enough if one discounted the fact that the bracelet keeping Grey Wolf from getting drawn into Naradawk’s prison world had been found on a statue of the boy, buried in his hometown.
As for Tor, there was nothing odd or magical about him (so far), but the boy was the heir to the throne of Forquelle and a dead ringer for a Delfirian leader. Abernathy had told them that the Delfirians had once occupied that entire region of Charagan under Emperor Naloric’s reign. The current Forquellian noble family must be descended from them.
Even he himself—solid, boring Grey Wolf—had turned out to be an oddity in his own right. Some twisted fate had bound him between Spira and Volpos, the world where Naradawk—
A goblin stands before him, laughing. The creature has pulled the axe from his mother’s back; her blood still drips from its dull head.
He wants so badly to reach out, take his revenge, but his muscles are frozen, as though he lives in a nightmare where all agency has been taken away.
“Should we take him?”
The voice—a human voice—comes from behind him, and he cannot turn his head. He tries to scream out a challenge, but he cannot speak. There is a time of blackness, a time outside of memory, a dead space in his mind, as though he has suffered a blow to the head.
His eyes were closed tight, bringing wetness to their corners. Why? Why did trying to recall the details of his encounter with Naradawk instead bring back these jumbled memories of his parents’ murder? Was it some horrific cruelty of Naradawk, like a trap set to spring when he tried to remember?
He opened his eyes in the pitch dark. There had been a voice. A question.
“Sh
ould we take him?”
In all his long years of reliving that terrible day, those words had never been spoken. But just now, in his memory of it, a man, not a goblin, had asked about his fate. Grey Wolf had asked himself a version of that question dozens of times. Why had the goblins left him alive? Why kill his parents and leave him alone and bereft, stripped of everything except a burning need for vengeance?
He shut that all out of his mind as best he could. Sleep, he told himself. Sleep, and tomorrow he could focus on the problem of traversing twenty miles of goblin-riddled mountains.
It was good advice he gave himself, but sleep was a long time in coming.
* * *
They ate sparingly at breakfast. They had food to last for a couple of weeks, but if unexpected difficulties cropped up—and Grey Wolf would bet a sack of gold that they would—they couldn’t rely on any resupply until they exited the mountains to the east. And maybe not even then.
Was it morning outside? Grey Wolf guessed that it was, but he knew they’d soon lose any sense of the cycles of sun and moon. The air tasted stale, but it was certainly breathable, so that was one fewer concern.
“We could get lucky,” said Tor. “Maybe this region of the mountains has been abandoned by the goblins, and we’re looking at nothing more than a few days walking in the dark.”
“And maybe gopher-bugs will fly out of my arse,” said Dranko. “That seems about as likely.”
Grey Wolf hoisted his pack, wiggling his shoulders to center it. “Let’s find out.”
Morningstar was still wobbly on her feet but insisted she could walk. Dranko hobbled along on his cane; Kibi had slung Dranko’s pack awkwardly over one shoulder, half-overlapping his own. Chalk that up as another mystery—Kibi wasn’t just strong, he was inhumanly strong. Grey Wolf remembered thinking back in Abernathy’s tower that the wizard had summoned a strange collection of nobodies to assist him, but obviously there had been more than randomness at work.
Except for Mrs. Horn. Had that been a mistake, a flaw in Abernathy’s master plan? She hadn’t had any unnatural powers or strange secrets. She was just an old woman, and she died for no good reason. Someday Abernathy would answer properly for that.
