Hallin had seen the remains of Dith’s last camp, the warm ash of the last night’s fire and the freshly trampled grasses and plants that still bled, and he had known that Dith could be no more than a few hours ahead of them. So he had sent the Montor men along the river toward the falls with their noisy ill-mannered horses while he stayed well out of the way, hoping to use them to draw Dith out and exhaust him, or at least divide his attention during the attack. Except that Dith was here, not where he should have been, and the hunter, if he chose to attack now, would face him alone and unprepared.
Hallin’s mouth twitched in annoyance, and he retreated still further into the woods, but as soon as he heard his horse’s hooves in the leaves and needles, he cursed his mistake. Dith’s easy crouch tightened against the sheer almost vertical wall, and he stared out over the forest, calmly scanning the trees with those terrible ice-blue eyes. Those eyes seemed to stare right through the wood of the tree, right into the hunter’s heart, and yet Dith’s gaze continued to move over the trees as if he had seen no one.
The hunter breathed out slowly, grateful for his luck.
But what was Dith doing this far from the river? For a month, he had clung to the bank even when following so closely meant climbing down steep ravines and making his way blithely past suffocating bogs and bubbling hot pools of mud, as if he did not so much as see them. So why now, when all he faced was a simple lift up that nice solid cliff near the falls, why had he brought himself here, to this impassable place?
The whole of Dith’s journey had been baffling. Wood fires started with flint and steel, meals of no more than what he had found along the way. But then Dith was shrewd; traveling thus, he left no thready traces of magic to mark his passing. But between the Hallin’s ability to track and the Montorians’ knowledge of the mountains, they had consistently gained ground on Dith, even through the worst of the journey, until now he hung just there, waiting to be trapped.
Hallin saw here thick potent strands of power touching every tree, every rock, a kind of power he had never seen before, staid and confident as if it had always been a part of these woods. Dith had not heard him coming, no; he had felt it through these strands, and he was waiting to close his own trap on them, waiting to unleash all the power he had been hoarding. The hunter licked his lips carefully. He, on the other hand, had not been conserving his power, and he would be lucky to escape with his life if he let Dith force a confrontation here.
Slowly, calmly, he turned his horse and nudged him up into a gentle gallop, retreating audibly if not visibly to the safety of the river for a time.
He glanced back to the west as he rode, but the trees were too thick for him to be able to see Dith now. He could be no more than halfway to the top of that wall—that sheer glassy wall that rose straight out of the ground—and he had a steep climb from there to the promontory above the falls if he would regain the river. The hunter grinned and rode still faster toward the river. With any luck, he and his men would soon be on that promontory waiting when Dith came over the last rise.
Dith scrambled up over a stack of smaller rocks and heaved himself up the last large boulder. A horse, Dith mused. Even Zinion would not let Dith ride him, not for all his Brannagh training, not for all Gikka’s coaxing and cooing. Not even for all that he was fond enough of Dith—at a distance. The feel of a mage’s power, even separated by as much as a good Bremondine saddle and blankets, made a horse’s flesh crawl.
Yet this one comes riding. If this rider were a sorcerer, and after all, what else could he be, riding through this part of the range, then that must be a rare horse indeed. He looked back toward where he had heard the beast loping away toward the river, wishing he had gotten a single glimpse of it. Why, he could not say. It could be no more than idle curiosity, he decided. After all, he was no more inclined to ride than Zinion had been to let him.
But rare horse or no, it would not be able to find its way up this peak, and soon enough his pursuer would be forced to continue on foot or turn back.
Pursuer. Dith sighed, letting the word roll around in his mind, and rejoined his climb with concentration.
“Hallin,” called one of the men, Haan by name, who came running to greet him. He was the youngest by far of the men whom Dalthaz had chosen to accompany the hunter. The youngest of his hostages.
Hallin slowed his horse and raised a hand in greeting.
The six Hadrians had moved themselves to the base of the high granite cliff near the falls and broken out their climbing gear already, anticipating Hallin’s orders. Two of the men were eyeing the wall and touching it carefully, making ready for their climb.
Haan stopped beside him with a grin and helped him dismount. “What news?”
The hunter looked up at the rock face of the cliff. It looked to be an easy climb even without magic; heavy coarse granite with plenty of toeholds, plenty of crevices for his men, and the minerals in the stone had more than enough resonance to lift him neatly to the top. Were it any more welcoming as a climb, it would be a marble staircase. They would have to leave the horses behind, which meant they would have to leave most of their supplies behind as well, but if his plan succeeded, they would rejoin the horses before sunset.
He turned a confident smile to the Hadrian. “Our mage climbs a vertical cliff not a mile west. Assuming he survives the climb,” he added with a smirk, “he’ll be making his way back to the river, and there, while he stands drained, we’ll take him.” He clasped his hands behind him and walked toward where the men were gathering their equipment.
“But take him how?” Haan’s voice was almost whining with insistence, and his brow bunched with worry. A worry, Hallin saw, that the young man had been carrying for quite a while. “This Dith, Hallin. I seen him at the tavern, burnt a man’s hand without a thought, and after, I seen what he done to the temple. And the prison guards.” The man’s eyes were widening with each panicked word he spoke. “He’s—”
“All hot air and baggage, lad,” laughed the hunter, and as he hoped, the boy’s fear was allayed somewhat. “Look you, any mage who spends power like that...” He shook his head in dismissal. “Got no control, Dith. Spews out all his power right off, and then he ain’t got none left, is why you’re not seeing him use his magic now. He’s saving it up. But now, he’s got to use it to get up that cliff, and once he’s wrung out, he’s but a boy in robes, is all.”
“Yeah, but—” Haan was not convinced.
“The trick is to catch him when he’s spent.” Hallin clapped Haan on his shoulder. “Spent or off his guard, say. Then,” he said, spotting a squirrel patting leaves over its newly buried winter cache near the base of the cliff, “it’s just a matter of—” The squirrel suddenly screamed and lay still on the ground with blood draining from its nose and mouth even before Hallin finished what had seemed a casual gesture. “—skill.”
The two who had been examining the wall began their climb, starting up the low mound of granite that lay at the base. It seemed a bit slick underfoot, and they seemed to slip over it rather clumsily, but at last, the one on the left managed to sink his pick into a crevice in the rock face and pull himself along. He reached a hand back to the man at his right and drew him up as well.
“Fine rock,” spoke a soft Hadrian voice behind the hunter, and he turned to see Tawn Baybric, a Hadrian whose judgment he had grown to respect, crouching on the ground and squinting up the cliff. Tawn had been a miner, a trapper, even a bounty hunter in his own right many years ago, and he was a fine tracker and a sensible woodsman besides. While he was the first to say he did not know this particular part of the Hodrache Range, he knew the rest of the mountains well enough and had managed to get them past every sinkhole and moss slicked ravine and boiling mud pit thus far without blinking an eye. But just now his words were not confident; they seemed almost distrustful. Finally, he stood and tossed away a small bit of rock he had found. “Should be a good climb.”
“Aye,” answered the hunter, and he was surprised to hear
a note of challenge in his own voice. It was unlike Tawn to remark on something for no reason, especially something obvious, and it worried him. “A fine climb indeed,” he added more gently.
For a moment, the Hadrian’s colorless eyes met his, and the Hadrian’s pale lips tightened. Hallin expected him to speak, expected to hear him disagree and somehow be able to convince him in spite of the full face of granite he saw before him, but instead, Tawn turned away to see to his gear. Somehow, the old Hadrian had not yet managed to break out so much as a rope.
“Don’t mind him,” spoke another of the Hadrians. He came up and took Hallin by the elbow. “Tawn hates to be wrong, is all.”
Hallin looked up the cliff to see the two men making great progress up the face of the cliff, as if the crevices in the granite had been placed just so to speed them along. Already they were halfway to the top; at this rate, all seven men would be up when the time came to face Dith. He turned to see the little Hadrian still staring at him.
“Wrong?” he frowned, suddenly registering what the man had said. “What about?”
The other Hadrian, the one they called Pax, drew him aside to speak under his breath, out of earshot of the others. “Tawn told us we would find no stone worth the climbing this near the falls, not if the stone in the riverbed meant anything. Argued the whole way no matter how I tried to calm him, saying we were wasting our time to even consider it, that we should be turning well to the west.” He did not see the hunter turn his gaze toward where Dith was climbing. “And then, right ahead, right in the midst of his arguing we see this perfect cliff.” The Hadrian laughed self-consciously. “Well, can’t you see? He’s a bit—”
A hideous scream ended in a thump before Hallin’s eyes could turn back to the cliff to where his men were climbing, but even before he looked, he knew what he would see.
One man hung high on the cliff, dangerously high on the cliff, by his ax. His feet scraped uselessly against the rock to try to get a footing before the ax slipped out, but they seemed to be pushing him away from the face, pushing the ax further out of its niche. The other man lay like a boneless sack of mush, broken and lifeless over the mound of rock at the base.
No one breathed. Their eyes only stared up the cliff in horror. Even over the roar of the falls nearby, they could hear the climber’s boots scraping desperately on the wall, breaking away great sheets of the rock that fell to cover the dead man below. The ax slipped a bit more, and he paused his panicked scrabbling to watch it slip from its berth in the rock.
Hallin raised his hands toward the rock to lift his man if he could, but the rock gave no resistance to him, nothing to brace the lift. It was like lifting against pudding. Beads of sweat broke out over Hallin’s brow as he focused more and more of his power against the stone, pushed against it to buoy the Hadrian upward, but the rock drank away his energy like a sponge. Too late he tried to use his power to lower the Hadrian to the ground slowly, but by then, he was drained.
With a cry of despair, the Hadrian huffed and clawed at the cliff wall with his free hand and his feet, pulling away chunks of it beneath his bleeding nails, trying to carve away just a bit of the rock, just the tiniest shelf to hold himself up by his fingertips. But the stone beneath the ax at last gave way, and the climber skidded and bumped his way down the cliff on a broken mat of stone until at last he lay still at the bottom.
Tawn shut his eyes and turned away. Without a word, he wrapped the oilcloth around his pick ax, the only piece of his equipment he had managed to uncover, and slowly tied it to his saddle.
Hallin moved toward where the two dead men lay, one buried under a pile of the other’s broken stone, the second shattered and bleeding atop it. He had seen the man’s battle against the cliff; he had seen the stone, the thick solid granite of the mountain, pull away like pastry crust beneath the man’s hands, to fall and shatter below. He had felt the emptiness of the rock against his lift, even emptier than the open air, so it seemed to him. He remembered the first steps of their climb up this very mound, how their feet had slipped, and only now did he seem to recall how that slipping did not seem to him the same motion as a man moving over ice or mossy stone but more of a man climbing a hill of...
“Sand,” he murmured. He looked up the tall cliff, wondering just how far a man might climb a pillar of sand before he fell.
“Not sand,” sighed Tawn. When Hallin looked at him, he shrugged. “This rock is rotten, or it should be.” He reached into his pocket and took from it a crumbly piece of rock. “See this? This is your cliff.” He crushed the strange rock in his hand, and it came apart in flakes. “Found this a quarter-mile downriver and along the way. It’s been miles since I saw granite, not since the river bent east.”
Miles. Hallin looked up at the huge face of granite. Every stone in the riverbed, or at least most of them, should have been of the same granite, especially this close to the falls. So Tawn was right; this cliff could not possibly be what it appeared. Hallin narrowed his eyes over the hillside again, looking for the telltale threads of magic over the stone.
At first, he saw nothing, but when he looked closely enough, he began to see them. The threads danced and billowed over the impossible granite face of the cliff like ancient cobwebs, dusty and fragile with the passing of time; to his eye, the passing of millennia. A few more eyes, a few more souls to pass this way and try its power, and the threads of this particular illusion would come apart completely. Or would it? The threads seemed to be growing, thickening, extending. No, it was impossible. But he looked down at the two fresh bodies on the mound and wondered if those strands of power might not have gained some tiny bit of strength from them. Or even from the dead squirrel. Impossible. From the power he had spent here, then. As wispy as the illusion’s threads had been, he had not seen the true face of the cliff beneath it, and now they were much stronger.
He had never seen anything like this before.
Illusions faded, quickly or slowly, depending on how often they were tested, but inevitably, they faded away unless they were refreshed. But these defenses renewed themselves, just as the legends claimed. The hair on his arms rose.
Dith was looking for Galorin’s Keep; the mayor had told him as much. But he had had no idea that Dith might actually find it.
The Galorin myth had grown over time, seeded with his victories against Byrandia in the Liberation and the spectacular sinking of the Pyran landbridge, all accomplished with power of a magnitude unknown before or since, but Hallin had a shrewd eye for finding the truth behind any rumor, any overblown tale. Distilled to its essentials, the legend held that Galorin had exiled himself to his Keep in punishment for some unknown crime of his own pride. Had he murdered his mistress, killed an apprentice who had grown ungovernable? No one but Galorin himself knew for certain, though everyone had his own ideas. In any case, the mage had gone into hiding almost immediately after the Liberation.
Undaunted, young mages had still sought him out, begging him to teach them what he . Some had even attacked his castle in rage when he turned them away. Over time, the castle fell, so it was said, all but the keep, and he had built an enormous array of defenses throughout the surrounding countryside to protect it.
That was all Hallin could accept from the legend, the only portion with any sort of tangible proof about it. But there was more; millennia of telling and retelling had not left the legend unaugmented with morality and virtue. And so the legend went on. For reasons known only to himself, Galorin decided that his knowledge was indeed too precious to keep to himself, but he was unwilling to dismantle his defenses completely and train every half-wit mage who came to the keep. So he created the River Stone, a guide to lead a single worthy mage right to his door. Worthy defined as only Galorin could know, which rather left the whole business open to interpretation.
Bah. Children’s stories, legends, myths. So much wishful thinking that the mighty Galorin would take an apprentice. That made of the defenses mere tests, to try the strength and cunning of his wou
ld-be apprentice, which bafflingly enough seemed to lessen their danger in some eyes. In any case, Syon had lost many of her most powerful mages over the years to that quest, at least until the war against Kadak began, and the tyrant had taken his own toll on them, so that now a man could go the better part of his life without ever meeting one. Now that the war was over, any fool who could bend a spoon with his will would be in these mountains again to find the legendary Galorin’s Keep, and Dith was just such another.
And then there was the River Stone. He remembered the odd footprints in the mud at the river’s edge, down where Dith’s trail first met the river. Rubbish. Even if the thing existed, Dith was the least worthy mage by anyone’s measure to find it. Surely it had not answered his summons or Hallin would have seen traces of his power. Besides, Dith should have ported straight to the keep when he found it. Now Hallin himself was far more worthy; if it would come to any mage, it would have come to him. Except that he had not called for it. Not yet.
By now, the other two Hadrians, the pair who had been waiting at the bottom to follow the first two up, were touching Tawn’s collected bits of crumbly rock tentatively and listening to Tawn’s explanation. Hallin smiled. They would not doubt Tawn’s knowledge of the mountains again, although he wondered if they would be so lucky next time. His memory turned back to the thick strands of power he had seen near Dith, strands left by Galorin. They were virtually untried over all those years, and his mouth bent into a wicked grin at the thought of the immense power still waiting in whatever traps and illusions Galorin had placed there. The unworthy Dith could not hope to survive.
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 28
