by Doug Niles
But there was a barrier! Strong magic reared before him, pushed him back, and screened the city from his sight, his reach. Finally the spell sizzled away, and he found himself standing on uneven, rocky ground. There was no source of light to illuminate the utter darkness, so for a few breaths he didn’t move. He groped with his other senses.
The air was cool, still, and very damp. It penetrated his sweaty tunic and chilled him to the bone. Somewhere nearby water dripped, a musical plink-plink amplified by the lack of any other noise, save for his own increasingly ragged breathing.
No wind. One eternal sound … and that penetrating cold. He knew at once:
Coryn had teleported him some place under the ground.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A PATH, FOUND
Everywhere around him was pitch darkness, a cold and lightless void that utterly engulfed the lord marshal. Jaymes heard a terrible hissing in his ears and only vaguely realized it was the pulsation of his own blood, impelled by the heightened hammering of his heart. A sudden wave of vertigo swept over him, and he staggered, trying to regain his balance, but his foot stumbled over a jutting rock, and he fell to his hands and knees.
His fingers felt rough rocks, some of them loose and crumbling, as small as gravel, and others that seemed to be part of the bedrock of what was obviously some kind of cavern. His right knee throbbed where it had landed on a jagged stone, and he clutched the ground like a drowning man clinging to a raft. Bile surged in his throat, but the warrior forced it back down and clenched his jaws, forcing his breathing to slow.
“Where am I?” he demanded of the darkness, the words a bare whisper of sound passing through his parched lips.
“I’m somewhere under the Garnet range,” a voice said. “The question is, how did you get here?”
The voice came from behind him and though the tone was friendly, the mere presence of the speaker was enough to startle Jaymes. He whirled around, pushed himself into a crouch, straining to see some sign—any sign—of the other person. Unfortunately, the rough ground proved his undoing again, and his feet slipped out from under him, dropping him unceremoniously onto his rump.
“Who’s there?”
This time the reply was only a sharp, scraping sound, followed immediately by a flaring of light. The brightness was a searingly painful sensation, blinding him every bit as effectively as had the previous darkness. Jaymes closed his eyes against a yellow brilliance that was like staring right into the sun. He raised his hand to screen his face.
But he quickly realized that there was no sensation of heat upon his skin, nothing to suggest that sunlight was actually spilling into this forsaken pit. Almost immediately he recalled the harsh sound that had accompanied that flash: it was merely the scraping of a match upon tinder! Opening his eyes again, keeping one hand raised to shade the spot of fire from his direct gaze, he began to discern more about his surroundings.
The match-holder’s feet were plainly visible; he was clad in moccasins that—like the voice—were strangely familiar. When those feet advanced closer, not in a stride, nor a charge, but with an almost childish skip, the warrior understood.
“Moptop?” he asked in amazement. It was the first time in his life that he was able to derive even a modicum of pleasure from the presence of a kender. “Is that you?”
“Sure is. This is the most amazing place! You should see it! Well, I guess you will see it, now that you’re here—unless you rush away as fast as you arrived. But tell me, confidentially of course, how did you do that? Get here so fast, I mean?”
“Wait. Let me collect my thoughts.” Jaymes turned his back to the light and inspected his surroundings. He found himself in a cave, an area that was very constricted. A cracked and broken wall loomed no more than four or five paces away, and—though the overhead ceiling was lost in shadow for the most part—he could see the tips of fanglike stalactites jutting down from above in all directions.
The floor was even rougher than he had imagined. A glance around showed that he would have been in for a nasty fall if he took more than a single step in any direction. It seemed the teleport spell had brought him to the top of some kind of square-edged boulder in the middle of a small cavern. The kender was standing on another rock nearby, and as Jaymes’s eyes adjusted, he perceived the opposite wall was not very far beyond his diminutive companion.
“Where did you say we are?” asked the warrior. “Under the Garnet range?”
“Yep. I just happen to be exploring through here. You know, working on my maps. I was thinking there might be a way to Solanthus through here. I wanted to go there and see that place—I’ve never been inside of a siege before! But the goblins wouldn’t let me walk through their camp when I tried to go the regular way. So I came down here. That’s what I was doing when I heard you come along. But you never told me how you—wait a moment! She sent you, didn’t she? The White Lady has magicked you here! Wow, that’s great! She must have figured I’d be needing a partner! Can’t have too many partners when you’re exploring. Real mind reader, the White Lady.”
“Hmm, it’s damned disorienting,” Jaymes retorted. “And confusing. I don’t think she was trying to send me here—we both thought I would arrive in Solanthus!”
“Oh, but you can’t go there by magic. Everyone knows that. There’s a spell that prevents such a thing. I’m surprised she didn’t know that. I should probably write her a note or something and advise her accordingly. You don’t happen to have a piece of paper on you?”
“No! And she does know about the magic barrier. She thought she had found a way to defeat it.”
The kender laughed merrily, the sound grating on the man’s nerves like a squeaking axle. “Well, she was wrong!” Moptop’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s annoying how, sometimes, she acts like she knows everything!”
“Yeah, annoying,” growled Jaymes. He checked over his gear, trying to think, to plan. His great sword, Giantsmiter, was secure upon his back, and his pair of small crossbows remained in their holsters at his waist. Fortunately the sensitive weapons were not loaded—he might easily have shot himself while stumbling around in the darkness here. He was wearing his ring, the little circlet of metal Coryn had imbued with one additional teleport spell. He briefly considered using that to escape this place but shook the idea away. No, Coryn must have some reason for sending him here with the kender. And it would be bitterly disappointing to simply return, without having accomplished anything.
“Ow, hey—that burns!” snapped the kender, dropping the consumed match and most likely popping his singed fingertips into his mouth as darkness surrounded them again.
“Do you have another one of those? Or maybe a torch?” asked Jaymes. He thought of Giantsmiter’s blade, the steely edge that could hiss with its own bright, bluish flame, but he was reluctant to use the legendary weapon for anything so mundane when he would soon need all its powers. He was also loathe to advertise the existence of the weapon, with all its ancient and potent magic, in a place he knew so little about. And it wouldn’t do, he reminded himself, to tell the kender anything he preferred to keep secret.
Fortunately, Moptop did indeed have a supply of dry, lightweight torches, and he quickly ignited one of them and handed it to the man. “I don’t really need the fire to see down here,” he explained. “We kender can see pretty well in the dark. But sometimes a torch is good for details. I like to put in a lot of details when I’m making my maps.”
“Now tell me again: What are you doing here?” Jaymes asked. “Looking for a way into Solanthus?”
“Well, I’m making a map, seeking the best path of course. Did I tell you I’m a professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire? It’s kind of what I do.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. But isn’t it a little different, taking me to the Lady Coryn’s house in Palanthas, and poking around through some lightless cave under the ground?”
Moptop shrugged. Clearly, no difference was apparent to him. “A path i
s a path. Some places have better maps, is all.”
“So you know a path out of here?”
“Well, no. I never said that, did I?”
“How did you get here in the first place?”
“Well, I did come down the path that leads into here, of course.”
Jaymes drew a breath. The torch quivered slightly as his fingers clenched around the wooden length. “All right. Think about it this way. Couldn’t we walk out of here on the same path that you walked in on? And wouldn’t that make it a path out of here?”
“Well, for you maybe. But that’s not the way I’m heading. Plus that would simply take me back the way I came, when what I really want to do is find a path to Solanthus. Didn’t you say that the White Lady was trying to magic you into the city? This must be her way of telling you that you might have to go about it the old-fashioned way.”
“And this cavern, you think, will take us to Solanthus?” Jaymes asked warily.
“Well, I sure hope it does, otherwise this whole thing has just been a big waste of time. Not entirely, of course. Lots to see down here.” Moptop pulled out a piece of parchment from one of his innumerable pouches. From another he found a short stick of charcoal with one end sharpened to a point. He gestured to the torch. “Here, I’ll show you. Hold that up a bit, will you?”
Jaymes obliged as the kender slid down off of his boulder to stand on flat space between the two rocks. The man dropped down beside him, holding the light up, and studying the kender’s map as Moptop added a few notes with the smudgy black stick.
Unfortunately, to the human the sketch was simply a confusing mess of scrawled lines and shapes, often intersecting or curving around each other. In some places, crude notations were marked: “No!” “Rong turn” “Watch owt—sinkhole!” and “Oops” were among the few he could decipher. Now the pathfinder was laboriously adding “Find Guy,” next to a big black X. Abruptly, he looked up to see Jaymes observing him.
“I know you’re not just a ‘guy,’ ” Moptop exclaimed hastily. “But I couldn’t fit Lord Marshal Jaymes and all that into this little space.”
“ ‘Guy’ is fine,” the warrior said curtly. “But what about Solanthus?”
“Oh, that’s where the really interesting part comes in.…”
An uncountable number of hours later, Jaymes was starting to understand exactly what “the interesting part” entailed. It meant numerous smashes of his head against low-hanging rocks, long stretches of spelunking where he had to crouch down on his hands and knees and crawl along over dust and grime and irregularities in the floor that scraped against his shins or, on more than one occasion, sent him sprawling onto his face.
The farther they continued along, the more he was convinced that Moptop Bristlebrow was simply poking around down here, that he didn’t have any real idea of where they were going, or, more important, how they would ever get there—that is, to Solanthus—through this nightmare world of darkness and stone. By the same token, he despaired of the kender’s ability to retrace his steps, so he was forced to conclude that his best hope was to simply press on and take his chances with the professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire.
Even so, more than one time, Jaymes caught himself fingering his ring. He considered activating its one precious teleport spell. He merely needed to twist it on his finger and envision a destination, and he would be out of here in an instant—an increasingly attractive option, the more time he squandered on his quest with the kender.
“Here we are!” Moptop finally announced brightly.
“What’s that?” Jaymes held the torch up as they stumbled into a small, circular chamber. He spotted at least four dark passageways shooting off in different directions.
“Well, here.” The kender helpfully raised his map and indicated a splotch on his parchment. The man couldn’t help but notice that the sheet had grown increasingly smudged and illegible as they had ventured deeper into the labyrinthine caverns. “It’s very clear. This is where we are, and we’ve been through here three times already. Well, I have; you’ve only been with me twice now. But that means there’s only one more of those caves leading out of here to check out. So we’re narrowing things down, which is good.”
“You mean—we’ve been spinning in circles?” The marshal’s voice was very low and threatening.
“Not really.” Moptop shook his head, dismissing the idea as inane. He brandished his map as proof positive. “It’s more like a zig-zaggy square pattern. We were going north by northeast for a while, but then here we zigged straight west, and there we zagged west by southwest—or south by west-west, or something—and then we came back to north-north-east, and like I say, here we are.”
“In the same place we were before!” Jaymes’s voice rose a notch.
“Well, yeah. But now we’ve ruled out that way, and that way, and that way—and that way too—so we know that this way is probably the best way to go!”
“Probably! What makes you think that any of these damned passages leads to Solanthus?” demanded Jaymes.
Moptop looked at him in amazement, an amazement that suggested he had never been subjected to such a stupid question before. “Why, where else is left?” he asked. He plunged into the—presumably—unexplored tunnel before Jaymes could come up with a reply.
Surprisingly, this cavern seemed more passable than the others they had traversed. Right from the start the floor was smooth and relatively free from obstruction, though the occasional chunk of stone or rock had to be stepped around. Often they could discern, in the torchlight, where these obstructions had broken off the walls or ceiling. In combination, these facts suggested this place had once seen a lot of use, but it had been centuries, perhaps many centuries, since anyone had taken the trouble to clear the floor.
But there were other signs of onetime habitation as well. The narrow bottlenecks that had constricted so much of the rest of the cave network had been expanded in this cavern, even carved into regular arches and frames. The stonework was so flawless it looked almost like a natural extension of the bedrock.
“Do you suppose dwarves hollowed this out?” Jaymes asked as they passed along a section where both walls had been smoothly widened, so the warrior could easily walk without bumping his head or shoulders against the confining stone.
“Nope,” Moptop replied with certainly. “With dwarves you at least see some chisel marks. And they’re masons, for the most part, not carvers. They build with stones and bricks—those arches would have keystones, for sure, if dwarves made ’em. These look like they’re just the regular stone of the underground, but shaped somehow.”
The marshal had to agree with his guide. He was just about to say as much when the kender stopped so abruptly that Jaymes nearly bumped into him.
“Uh-oh,” said Moptop.
There are few phrases that arouse more alarm in a listener than when those very words are uttered by a member of the almost suicidally fearless kender race.
“What?” hissed Jaymes, holding the torch high, trying to peer into the shadowy distance. His free hand drifted to the hilt of his sword.
The narrow corridor opened abruptly into what looked like an underground hall that appeared to be lined with stone pillars placed at regular intervals on the right and left sides. The torchlight was inadequate to reveal the extent of the hall or to penetrate the galleries that yawned, dark and shadowy, behind the parallel rows of pillars. But the regular lines and careful right angles were clearly the work of some intelligent design.
Jaymes waved the torch and the resulting flare of light did little to illuminate the farther distance. It did, however, bring the nearer stone pillars into crisp focus. The warrior recognized that they were not columns at all, but statues—statues of warriors dressed in ancient garb and standing at rigid attention along both sides of this long hall.
They wore skirtlike kilts that looked to be carved models of originals that had been formed of metal strips, perhaps bronze. Their helmets were tall, with sti
ff plumes extending like cocks’ combs from brow to nape. Each warrior’s left hand gripped a small round shield to his breast, while the right held the shaft of a spear planted on the floor, with the stone tip rising slightly higher than the crest of the warrior’s helm. The stone spear shafts were slender and held close to the bodies but intact and unbroken despite their apparent fragility. At each statue’s belt was a short sword with a broad, crude-looking blade. This weapon, like the armor, was suggestive of an era before the blacksmithing of steel, and possibly even iron. The faces of the statues were impressively realistic, down to creases in cheeks and brows and the wrinkled skin of knuckles. Several were bearded, and the unremembered carvers had gone to the trouble to etch individual hairs in place. But, equally obvious, the faces were of stone, cold and lifeless and eternally immobile.
“I think maybe we should go back,” Moptop said quietly.
“Go back? To where?” growled Jaymes. “No, this is the way to Solanthus. You said so yourself, and I think were right. I can feel it now. We’ve got to continue on!”
“Do you think these guys really want us here?” the kender pressed.
“They’re statues. They don’t want anything!”
“All right!” the kender agreed. “If you say so. I just didn’t want the wizardress blaming me if something happens. Because you know something is going to happen.”
Again, Jaymes had to agree with the kender. There was an eerie sense of vitality about these very lifelike statues. He wondered how many of them there were, how long this hall could be. Jaymes raised the torch and waved it back and forth to fan the flames into brightness. There were easily eight or ten visible on each side; the existence of many more was suggested by his flickering, unsteady light. Their presence was distinctly uninviting.
“Here, hold this.” Jaymes handed the brand to Moptop, who took it without comment, watching as the warrior pulled the great sword from its scabbard on his back. Holding the hilt in both hands, Jaymes extended the weapon upward and held it poised behind his right shoulder. With a twist of his hands, he ignited the blade, bringing to life the blue flames that flickered silently but brightly along both edges of the weapon.
