Jiltha looked at this strange wonder, then smiled as if she had a very happy thought. “Captain Tiana, why don’t we sail away in this ship and leave the Bear marooned? The crew won’t try to stop us and I’m sure I can persuade Bjaine to help us.”
Tiana moaned inwardly. Jiltha seemed a storehouse of plans, all of which called for pressing her virginity on the Northman. She had framed an angry reply when she realized the plan had some merit. To a fighter such as Tiana it was galling to run away from an enemy. Yet where was the choice? The Eye of Sarsis was a Power and could not be harmed by mortal means.
“We’ve two problems, Jiltha. First it takes many hands to sail such a ship as this. Second the Bear has Powers and can draw us back before we get far. The first problem is yours. The crew has been so long under the Bear’s illusions that their wills are nearly dead. Perhaps you can rouse a few of them. Search the ship. The Bear didn’t bother to delude Morna and there may be others like her.” The tone of command in Tiana’s voice softened. “I’m trusting you with this task, Jiltha. Do it well and you will save all our lives. You’re a princess of a great royal line, bred to high courage. I know you’ll prove yourself worthy of the king your father, and your heritage.”
“You’re going to leave me alone?” Jiltha was trying hard not to show fear.
“Yes. I’m going ashore. The Bear can’t be slain but I hope to do something that will distract it long enough for us to escape.”
As Tiana spoke, she moved to the side of the ship. Before Jiltha could reply, she dived into the water and was swimming for shore with smooth easy strokes.
Tiana was uneasy about leaving Jiltha, but she had set her to an important task she hoped would keep the girl out of mischief. She was approaching the edge of the gem shield. Beyond the shield roiled five or so yards of violent surf, then the beach. Taking a deep breath, Tiana plunged downward. She was a strong swimmer and moved rapidly forward despite powerful currents.
The danger lay in the shallows; large sharp rocks like the teeth of a giant with the surf smashing against them. There was a moment when she thought she was being chewed by enormous jaws, then she was wading up the beach, bruised but not seriously injured.
Three long boats had been drawn up on the strand. Three hard pushes sent them sliding into the surf, where they were pounded to fragments.
After this small act of sabotage, Tiana set off on the trail of her enemy. The tracks in the sand were half erased by the cold rain. Despite that and the darkness they were clear enough for her to follow. Thirty yards up from the beach the sand gave way to bare rock. She saw no sign that marked the passing of the Bear and his men, but the rocks were nearly impassable except in one direction. What was this island? Because of the rain and the night she had never had a clear look at anything beyond a few feet distant.
Is this only a mass of naked rock, with a fringe of sand at its edges like a bald marts head? She had seen many such dead pieces of stone, but the Bear had come here for a purpose. What was there on this desolate isle that would aid in opening the steel egg?
She hurried on. The path went steadily upward. Perhaps half a mile from the beach she found the first evidence that something dwelt on this island. The path was partially blocked by thin, bright silvery lines. They were as fine as the strands of a spider web, although the pattern was not such as any spider would weave. It was a fragile thing, easily brushed aside. Tiana did not; she bent and examined it closely. The strands were not merely silvery, they were fine silver wire! After a moment’s consideration she lay down and began crawling under the web. There was one certainty about this web: someone or something had been to great trouble to build it. Was it a barrier or a trap? She had one fearsome enemy and wasn’t anxious to make another.
She went on, carefully and hardly comfortably. Most of the gleaming network was behind her when an even more discomforting thought came: the Bear and its men must have passed through here too, causing considerable damage in the process. Therefore the web had been repaired recently. She licked her lips. The spinner of silver had to be close by. It probably watched her at this moment.
Telling herself firmly not to hurry, Tiana hurried. And then she was out of it, and moving on over good old hard, normally dangerous rock and —
The second web was smashed and not yet repaired. That prompted nervousness. So did the corpses: Kroll pirates, four. They had shed no blood and the only wounds they bore were hand-breadth, round burns. The men had seen whatever slew them and had tried to use their swords. They had not drawn blood. One nice Sinchorish saber was still intact — save that in three places the edge was melted. The other weapons were fused blobs of steel. Tiana swallowed.
Some of the silvery network remained intact and she advanced, taking care to cause no further damage. Maybe if she —
Abruptly the darkness was broken by a dull glow. She turned and saw the source: a shining ball of blue radiance. It sat at one edge of the web, pulsing. And growing.
At first sight of it, it was no wider than her thumb. Already it had swelled to the size of the wounds on the dead men. Hello, she thought inanely; I was just out for a walk and saw your light …
The pulsing blob of radiance rose and slowly approached her — floating.
Wishing she were engaged in a nice pleasant sea-battle with a few attacking ships, Tiana saw no point in retreat. She was in its web. She continued, with care. See? I haven’t damaged your lovely artwork one little bit. Her skin crawled. Breathing became a voluntary act. The blue thing, which she recognized as ball lightning, hovered above her. It lighted her path while making no aggressive move.
She made it. Only when she was clear of its web did the thing of light begin to buzz about, lifting strands of silver, heat-fusing them into place. Tiana released a long breath and concentrated on standing up.
She continued to climb that eerie trail. The rain turned warm. It stopped. Pyre’s storm had ended. No, wait: that most powerful of wizards had admitted that he had only distorted forces summoned by the Eye of Sarsis. The air was calm now — a dangerous, unstable calm. The forces of Storm were gathering, gathering for a purpose. She was sure of it, and — the egg! The Eye of Sarsis had summoned the rage of the elements to open the steel egg!
All this was clear to Tiana now. What she did not understand was how the Eye would use such force — or how she could spoil its plans.
Now the moon broke from behind emptied clouds so that for the first time she was able to see more than a few paces in front of her. To her left rose a sheer wall of living stone. It was nearly featureless, though ten or so feet above her head ran a narrow ledge, like a shelf. To her right massive boulders towered, and from beyond them came the sound of the sea. She must continue straight ahead. There, of course, lay the problem.
Ten paces ahead glittered a large intricate structure of silver wire and ribbon. Its center was marred by a mass of broken. crystal fragments. Much of the web was torn and shredded and fully a score of the ball-lightning creatures bobbed bluely about, repairing it. Krollite corpses lay scattered about in front of the web, within it, and on the far side. The rock wall showed strange bum marks and jagged, freshly blasted pits.
Tiana put it together and knew that the Eye had fought a pitched battle here for passage. By ruthlessly spending the pirates’ lives — if those zombie-like slaves still lived — it had won through.
She could hardly be expected to read the mood of a shining ball, but from the vigor they displayed in speeding about their repairs, Tiana felt it clear that they would tolerate no interference. Nor could she hope to make her way through without interfering. And the web completely blocked her path.
She looked up at the shelf-like ledge again, and let her gaze roam the rocky face separating her from it. Scars of the recent battle should serve her as foot-and handholds, she thought. With a last glance at the busy, busy balls of living — sentient? — lightning, she began to ascend.
She gained the ledge that formed a walkway, worming over it and on he
r thoroughly wet stomach. The projecting shelf formed a path that went up rather steeply. So did Tiana. By the time she was past the web, she was too high above the trail to drop back. Her only choice was to continue along the ledge. It was wet, and slippery, and — Oh, wonderful! It’s getting steadily narrower. This must be my night to pay for someone else’s sins!
She kept moving. Too soon, she had to walk side-wise, her back pressed against the rock face. The moon hid its face and she was glad. She was not interested in seeing how far she was above air floored with jagged and very hard rock. She kept moving, sidewise step at a time. The shelf was only slightly wider than the length of her feet. Her legs trembled. She advanced, holding her breath. Almost abruptly the ledge widened. Just as she let her breath out in a sigh, the precarious walkway ended even more abruptly.
Oh damn. She stood still for a while, just breathing, trying to relax tense muscles.
The moon reappeared. Tiana looked ahead in the quicksilver glow. About an arm’s length beyond the edge of the ledge there appeared to be a hole in the cliff face. Perhaps it was a dead-end cave. Perhaps it went somewhere. Perhaps it was her imagination; just a shadow. Clutching what handholds she could on the smooth stone, Tiana leaned forward. To discern that it was a cave and to look in required her to stretch to her limit. And a little more … Now if she could just swing one leg over and sort of hurl herself …
The loud crack sounded directly beneath her feet. Even as her heart pounced straight up into her throat, she moved.
The stone ledge broke off and tumbled crashing into the valley below. For Tiana there was a moment of mad scrambling, followed by weightlessness and impact. Then she was crawling into the hole, on hands and knees. And then she lay down, and for a long while she concentrated only on being, and on how nice it was not to be straining one single muscle.
She began to crawl. The cave was not large enough for her to walk and yet not quite so small that she must wiggle in the manner of a worm.
Far too soon she discovered that she was not alone.
Something was coming out of the darkness toward her. It did not breathe; sound was amplified in this tight horizontal shaft and all she heard was a harsh, metallic grating. The thing’s hard body was obviously wide enough to scrape the cave walls on both sides. Tiana’s was not. As sword and knife were useless against the Eye, she had brought only a dagger. She reached for it only to discover that it had departed the sheath, probably in her mad scramble off the collapsing ledge.
Something about three feet wide and hard was coming at her, and she was unarmed. Retreat meant a most unpleasant backward scrabbling followed by a considerably less pleasant fall, a hundred feet onto solid rock.
A bit of groping in the darkness discovered a stone twice the size of her fist. It was a poor weapon, but better than none at all. Now she became aware of heightened light, between her and the approaching menace. Of it she could see only that its bulk was great. It had stopped. Seeming scores of futile plans raced through Tiana’s mind, and then the light began to retreat, slowly. It seemed … a beacon? Beckoning? Tiana followed.
Presently the cafe or tunnel forked. Her unseen guide took the rightward passage, and paused to wait. Tiana chewed at her lower lip. Should she trust this total unknown or take her chances on roaming blindly? The light-thing seemed polite enough — and she knew some cannibals were most polite in asking a person to dinner.
I came here to fight the Right Eye of Sarsis. I need whatever help I can find. Even … even a guide that might he a cannibal .
Hauling her stone, she turned down the cavern the light-thing had taken.
Through a labyrinthine system of caves that eerie bluish glow led her. Her knees suffered and the chunk of rock she dragged along grew heavier and heavier, more and more a bother. She abandoned it. Still the light retreated, just at her pace. Weaponless, alone, Tiana followed.
At long, long last they emerged onto a broad plain, and Tiana saw her guide. Almost she forgot to rise and stretch and flex her legs; the light emanated from the thing itself: a crystal worm many times her length!
Worm? Well, it was vermiform, and the five-score segments of its length were sharp-edged blocks of crystal, water-clear. The thousand legs appeared to be … silver! Though it was all beyond her experience and knowledge even of the impossible, she was sure the liquid she could see coursing through that incredible body was some liquid metal.
Even so, the wonder of the city before her distracted her from her strange guide-companion.
Perhaps to call it “city” was not right; the wrong descriptive term. Was an anthill a city of many creatures or was it a whole; a single vast entity? Whatever one called it, this great lacework was filled with a steady hum lit by small bright flashes; lightning in blue and white played over all. She mused: Buildings? No; but complex vast shapes of fine crystal; lucid and all sparkly. That spire’s twisting angles were such that they showed the moon many times; flashing images in silver, crimson, amber and azure, cerulean and slate. All gleamed and leapt about its curving surface. Leftward stretched a lake of what seemed molten glass. To her right lofted a many-pointed star twice her height. The impossible continued; the star was a single enormous ruby — burning at its highest point with a flame of intense cobalt blue. Tiana was horrified that such a fabulous treasure was being burned as a candle — until she saw that the blue flame licked downward , and that sand was being fed into it. The fire’s heat was creating the many-pronged ruby!
She was aware of a pattern in all this; metal and stone; heat and glass.
Throughout the crystalline complex moved strange beings in their numbers; she saw the ball-lightning creatures, and more of the crystal worms, and beings that flew on wings of fire. And she saw other things. Apparently sentient and certainly living, they were beyond her powers to describe even to herself.
Even while she stared, marveling, Tiana reminded herself not to let wonder dull the caution she thought of as her natural trait — as she denied impetuosity. All this fabulous beauty was manifestly and completely inhuman; nothing she saw was even normally animalistic or belonging to the kingdom of plants. She had merely followed, and could be in great danger indeed. She doubted that having her sword would have afforded her a whit of protection, though it might have increased her confidence — somewhat. As to the dagger: it was well lost. If something here tempted her to use arms, she was far better off not having them.
Slowly, trying to be casual and slow, she worked the kinks of long crawling out of her athletic body.
A second worm approached her, seemingly without hostility. On its back rested two small black cubes. Had it brought them to her? She reached out — and it backed away with a crystalline shimmer and flash. She wondered what she’d done wrong. The creature had moved slowly and cautiously; perhaps it wanted to be sure she handled the cubes with care? Again she reached, slowly, gently, and this time she was permitted to take them.
Both black cubes were of a size to fit in one of her hands, and she could close her fingers over them.
One of the silver-spinning lightning balls appeared, hovered, and moved slowly away. Feeling that she was being invited to follow, Tiana did. None of these beings, she mused, must be able to speak. Well, little matter. Surely their message was plain enough: We mean you no harm. The black dice are fragile, so … throw them and give someone an unpleasant fate! The question was, why didn’t they use such a weapon themselves?
Maybe it’s so dangerous they prefer giving it to an expendable … friend, she thought without delight. And she followed the thing of ball lightning.
The blue-glow led her to the edge of a cliff — and rose, to speed away. Tiana gave it a look askance. Oh, thanks a lot, she thought. Yet from this elevation she could clearly see Lightning Island at last: a single great mountain rising from the ocean like a great shiny beast arching its back to shake off the water. The summit rose to a towering height, and flashed. At first she thought that was an illusion of the moonlight, but she realized that
the mountain was indeed veined with silver.
Why, she wondered, with no scientific principles to guide her. Did a silver mountain somehow attract lightning? Was that the basis for the island’s weird life that was so alien to anything she knew — including sorcerous demons?
Her cogitation was cut short. Lights flashed from near the mountain’s top and thunder roared. A flight of the winged flame-creatures dived at the mountainside. They look like giant attacking fireflies, converging on a specific point — oh! They must be attacking! Ohhh … Lights played and flickered over her face and Tiana had to blink and squint. She watched some of the brewings rise to strike again, while others fell like dying sparks. She jerked at the sound of a ringing crash that might have been the smashing of one of the crystal worms.
It is an attack — a battle!
The Eye had come here to perform its fell sorcery atop the mountain — and the island dwellers were fighting with all their ability to defend the source of their very existence! Suddenly Tiana was cursing by the Cud and by the Back. Why had her allies trusted her so, given her what she took to be a weapon and then led her here, where she was only a helpless spectator to their battle for life?
While the sky was alive with flitting flashing fire and ringing crashes and eerie humming, Tiana glanced down. Her anger dissipated.
Beneath the cliff on which she stood, a trail led up toward the summit of the mountain. She realized that these creatures of light and lightning, though they put their all into the battle, knew they would lose and trusted her to avenge them. Soon her enemy, their enemy — our enemy would be flush with victory and weakened by its efforts. Then it would return, to pass beneath her and her black dice.
The flashing battle reached its climax: a crescendo of thunder and lightning, followed by an eerie, total silence. One way or another, it was over. The air was calm, though it smelled strange and she was aware of an unstable feeling. A cloud, massive and black as a smith’s anvil, was moving slowly toward the mountain. Tiana watched tensely.
The Eyes of Sarsis Page 15
