Miradel found it hard to argue, but she tried. “Do you think there is such a waterfall in Hell?” she asked, more to hear the comforting sound of her own voice than from any real desire for an answer.
In fact, her words were all but drowned in the thunder of the lofty spume, the source of the whirling maelstrom in the stone-walled channel that had given focus to Belynda’s teleport spell. Never had she been in such a forbidding place, and her immediate thought was that she was a fool, had made a disastrous decision that would inevitably cost two lives for no good purpose.
The two women were standing on a flat-topped boulder no larger than a typical dining table. The base of the waterfall was up the channel a hundred yards or so, but the air was cold and penetratingly wet. The water, a white inferno of rapids and foam, churned past them, ten feet below the rock. On the other side of their precarious platform was a small eddy, where the stream spilled into a natural bowl in the rocky bed, spun through a rapid circle, then poured itself back into the main current. It was that minivortex that had caused her to select this location for their arrival.
When she had made that selection, she had identified what looked like a negotiable trail leading up a ravine and out of the gorge. Now that route seemed more like a narrow chute of loose scree, an invitation to a fatal fall. She had brought a rope, of course, but it suddenly occurred to her that at least one of them would have to be able to reach the top on her own before that rope would be any use to the other.
“It’s cold in here!” Shandira said, shouting again. There was a little light from the stars circling overhead, but the temperature was lower than anything one could experience on Nayve.
“We need our cloaks!” replied Miradel, shrugging out of her pack as Shandira nodded in agreement. Moments later they had pulled their woolen shawls around themselves, hoods pulled up and cinched around their faces.
“Now we have to get away from the river. We’re getting soaked, just by being in this air!” The African woman took the lead, lifting her pack onto her shoulders again, then hopping from the rock to the steeply sloping ground at the base of the ravine. A cascade of loose stones tumbled down, and she lurched forward, landing on her hands and knees. “Careful!” she shouted back.
Miradel didn’t need the warning. She was trembling, frightened to move, but Shandira’s decisiveness gave her the strength to follow. She, too, donned her backpack, then stepped after her companion, taking a strong black hand to keep her balance as she made the long step to the ravine.
Slowly the two women made their way up the steep, narrow passage. Miradel was grateful as the river fell farther and farther away below them, but she was acutely conscious of her scraped hands and knees, of the aches and cramps that were growing in muscles kept taut to prevent a fall. Again it was Shandira who served as a tireless example, pressing ahead with sure steps, then pausing to encourage Miradel, often to extend that helping hand.
Whether it was an hour or three hours later she could not tell, but at last they crawled from the top of the ravine to collapse on a flat and barren wasteland of dark rock. It was still cold, though the air was drier. Stars whirled and danced overhead, providing a minimal spray of light. For a long time the two druids simply lay still and rested, catching their breath, easing their sore limbs.
Finally Miradel sat up and looked around. She was facing the direction of center, and saw a vast sprawl of descending terrain, a series of shelflike terraces of stone dropping eventually to a dark, flat lowland. She could not see the Worldsea, a hundred or so miles away.
Only then did she look behind her, in the direction that was neither metal nor wood. She could barely suppress a gasp of horror as she saw the citadel rising there, like a grim and black-faced mountain of sheer cliff, vaulted parapet, and impossibly lofty summit. Black space yawned beyond, like an infinity of bleak hopelessness or an eternity of suffering.
“I told you,” Shandira said, sitting beside Miradel and following the direction of her gaze. “Nothing less than Hell itself.”
12
Deathscape
In the Third Direction rises
The End of all Beginnings,
The Proof of all Lies,
And the Virtue of every Sin.
From The Tapestry of the Worldweaver, Bloom of Entropy
The forces of the cosmos marshaled, summoned by the immortal will of a proud deity, deepened by the forces of frustration, boredom, and immortal anger. These powerful forces had been contained for a very long time, but as events on the Fourth Circle settled into a stasis of war, the need for change exploded, and the effects rippled outward, upward, downward, tearing through the fabric of six circles.
The storm was fierce near its epicenter, so that it wracked the very bedrock of creation. In the distant corners of the cosmos it was naturally less potent, but even there it was felt as much more than a ripple of distant thunder.
Waves of destructive energy concentrated at the source of the immortal one’s power, emanating outward in a great explosion, mighty and violent, though at first it made no sound, emitted no visual indication of its presence. Instead, it flowed as an invisible river of energy, palpable proof of the diety’s power as it crossed the middle of a world and took hold of the landscape in a physical grasp. For there was a god, and she desired entertainment.
The pony pranced anxiously, hooves skipping across the rocky ground. A loose pebble bounced away, tumbling over the rim of the canyon. Janitha Khandaughter heard it bounce several times, tumbling against the cliff wall as it vanished into Riven Deep.
“Easy, big boy. What’s got you so nervous today?” asked the elven rider, patting the stallion on his shoulder.
In fact, she felt the same agitation that seemed to be bothering her normally steady horse, as though the air itself was charged, ready to release some unimagined force. She scrutinized the dark mass gathered across the canyon, knowing that the Delvers had been arrayed there with their iron golems for an unusually long time now… not moving, just formed up as if for march or battle, but with no place to go.
It was not far past the Lighten Hour, and her elves were still in their bivouacs for the most part, though the usual scouts were posted. The Hyac patrolled the edge of Riven Deep for a distance of more than fifty miles, as far as the Swansleep Waterfall in the direction of metal. There, where the river of the same name plunged from the precipice into the misty well of the Deep, her elves had linked with the regiments from Barantha, who held the river line against the ghost warriors. Even with all the clans gathered here, the mounted Hyac were far too few to garrison that entire length of canyon. Instead, they maintained fast-moving patrols, riding ceaselessly back and forth along their entire position.
In fact it had been her stallion, Khanwind, that had awakened her this morning. All the horses had been restive in the late-night hours, but he had been the loudest, most demanding. At the first signs of pale daylight he had whinnied and kicked in the corral, and as the Lighten Hour advanced, his agitation had correspondingly increased. Though she herself had been up till well past midnight, Janitha found herself unable to ignore the agitated animal. She had risen and saddled him, allowed him to canter along the rim of the canyon for several miles, finally turned back toward her encampment. They had just made their only stop, for both of them to drink from a shallow stream, but as the elfwoman regained her saddle, the pony once again began to dance and whicker in agitation.
Everything seemed normal on this side of the canyon, she thought. There were crows and ducks flying nearby, good indications that the harpies had not made a recent aerial foray. Of course, there was that oddity across Riven Deep, the formation that had lasted for a surprisingly long time, now. She could see them from here: the Delvers standing in those precise ranks that they had maintained without wavering for ten days. But they were miles away, across an unbridged gulf of space. They remained still, arrayed in blocklike formation, making no move to march, nor did they display any visible preparations for some kind o
f battle.
Even so, she was concerned. She knew that the great invasion had come ashore. Faeries continued to bring her twice-daily reports on the progress of that battle. Janitha had known the despair of the retreat from the shore and the encouragement of the stand at the river. Even though Natac’s army had held the ghost warriors up at the Swansleep-a stand that had lasted four days now, without a single breach in the position-she knew that Nayve was threatened in a new and lethal fashion. But there was nothing for her to do about that except to stay vigilant and keep the Hyac focused on guarding the Deep, the task they had maintained for fifty years.
Abruptly Khanwind whinnied and reared, surprise almost dropping Janitha from the saddle. She held on and whispered soothingly-until she, too, felt a stab of irrational terror. Some force was moving through… through everything. She could feel it in the ground, in the air, in her belly; a rumble of invisible strength had made her seem smaller than the most insignificant bug.
Next she heard a sound, a rumbling of the deepest basso, growing louder and louder as she worked to control her panicked, bucking pony. Khanwind staggered, went down to his knees, and Janitha flew from the saddle, smashing to the ground with a force that drove the breath from her lungs. The sturdy horse quickly stood again but staggered like a drunkard. Only then did the elfwoman realize that the ground itself was rippling and surging in the throes of a major quake.
She looked across Riven Deep, sensing that, as violent as it was here, the disturbance was actually focused over there. The first crack appeared quickly, as if a blade of cosmic proportions had torn through the fabric of the precipice, rapidly widening the breach. It looked to Janitha as though the opposite face of Riven Deep had been slashed in two, the gap growing wider and extending downward until it vanished into the misty depths.
Then other cracks appeared, great chunks of the landscape breaking away. The movement, miles away, was clearly visible to her. She stared in awe, waiting for the huge pieces of ground to tumble, even allowed herself a flash of dizzying hope: the Delver army was arrayed on those great platforms of rock; surely the hated invaders would be carried to their doom in Riven Deep! There, another piece broke free, and another. The whole shelf over there was obviously crumbling, broken apart by this quake that was affecting all the ground under the enemy army!
The rocky terrain cracked into great slabs of rock that teetered and wobbled precariously. Below, the face of the vast cliff broke and fell way, carrying downward the cliff that supported the far rim of the canyon. Now, the Delvers had to fall!
Janitha held her breath, waiting… and waiting. Finally she exhaled in slow, dull realization. The pieces of ground that had broken away from the opposite precipice were not going to fall, not going to carry the enemy army to its doom. Instead, those huge slabs began, very slowly, to rise into the air.
Miradel looked at the sun, low in the sky, faint of brightness, and impossibly far away. It was hard to imagine that it was full daylight on the world of Nayve, but she knew that the Lighten Hour had passed some time ago, that the sun was suspended above the world, directly in line with the loom rising from the temple of the Goddess Worldweaver. She could remember the power of that orb of warmth and heat, imagine the rays soaking into her skin.
But from here, in the remote recesses of the Fifth Circle, that distant light was a mere flicker, low on the horizon, struggling vainly to penetrate the gulf of space, to cast some semblance of life-giving heat toward the two druids in their lonely place. The black massif rose to the high horizon, a wall across the very path they needed to follow. It stood as if a barrier at the edge of the cosmos, the perfect refuge for a god who sought the dead of other worlds and turned them into his own pawns.
Against that backdrop Miradel felt like less than a tiny speck, a mere mote of vitality in a panorama of death-or not death, so much, as a lack of life. There was no grass to be seen on this whole vast mountainside of stone, not a tree or bush sprouting from the lands spreading out behind and below them. Even the course of the mighty river, as it emerged from its gorge, looked more like a crisp line carved into the ground than any naturally eroded waterway. There were other canyons and chasms cutting through this vast mountainside, but wherever she saw them, they reminded her of vast graves, full of shadow, yawning, and silent. Finally, there was that sun, so very far away, so faint.
“It’s like early dawn’s light on an autumn day, back on Earth,” Miradel mused, as she and Shandira paused to rest and eat a little of the trail bread, followed by a few sips of water. “Only the sun will never rise over us here.”
“And perhaps we’ll never be warm again,” Shandira said. “At least, we won’t if we don’t keep moving.”
“You’re right,” Miradel agreed, suppressing a shiver. Fortunately there was no wind, and their cloaks had dried since they had emerged from the misty gorge, yet the chill in the air remained a palpable if insidious enemy, constantly trying to penetrate through skin and flesh into the very substance of her bones. She pushed herself to her feet, noticing for the hundredth time how cruelly the straps of her heavy pack dug into her shoulders. She shifted the load around, but each bit of her upper back seemed to be bruised.
“I miss the river-at least it made some noise,” Shandira said. She lifted her pack easily and slung it onto her shoulders, standing tall, moving with easy grace as she turned.
Miradel felt small and weak by comparison, desperately dependent upon her companion. She felt the same about the river, feeling the vast and lifeless silence of this world as an oppressive force. “I think your notion of Hell is beginning to seem apt,” she admitted.
Shandira smiled wryly, then turned toward the ground rising before them and said, “Let’s go.”
As they started to walk, Miradel limped against the pain of a blister that was forming on her right foot. For a dozen steps she analyzed the pressure against her heel, trying with some success to shift the way she placed her foot. Satisfied, she noticed that they had climbed another steep section of trail while she worried about the sore on her foot. She chuckled aloud as she rationalized that at least one source of her pain-the blister-was bad enough to distract her from the nagging ache of her contusions.
“Do you see something funny up there?” Shandira asked.
“Just the opposite,” Miradel admitted, turning her attention to the vast and precipitous citadel rising before them. It was as big as a whole range of mountains and climbed toward the twilit sky in a series of massive cliffs and crenellated towers. They could pick a path freely along the relatively open slope, but every route toward the Deathlord’s citadel had one thing in common: it led steeply upward, an ascent greater than any mountain to be found upon Nayve.
Carefully they made their way around a shoulder of mountainside, a craggy knob of natural rock into which had been carved numerous platforms and ramparts. All of these seemed vacant now, at least to their visual inspection from below, but the elevation nevertheless presented a dour and forbidding aspect. Passing the foot of that height, they started moving upward again on an open slope that was crisscrossed by a wide road that cut back and forth through dozens of switchbacks.
“The armies marched down that road,” Miradel explained, “After they appeared in the hall of Karlath-Fayd.”
“So that is the way to his citadel?” asked Shandira.
Miradel nodded, her gaze rising toward the summit of the long slope. Abruptly she gasped and seized the African by her arm.
“What is it?”
“I see the gargoyle up there!”
“The statue you told me about-the winged guardian carved into the mountaintop?” The African woman looked upward and grimaced as she, too, spotted the stony image. She squinted, and they both examined the frightening visage, the monstrous shape perched on the edge of the upper ramparts of the mountain. They could see it well from where they stood. The gargoyle overlooked a pass that was also flanked by two castellated fortresses. That gap in the cliff seemed to be the only way throu
gh the palisade and into the citadel. The two humans were at the foot of a long, steep climb leading up toward that pass, while the gargoyle was two miles or more overhead.
“It’s terribly realistic, as if a living being frozen in stone.”
“I have studied it for many years in the Tapestry and never seen it move,” Miradel declared. “But the Goddess Worldweaver told me that it is a living guardian-at least, that it will spring to life to defend the citadel against intrusion. She claims that, thousands of years ago-before the first ghost warriors came-the gargoyle flew above Loamar as a living monster, a sentinel patrolling the Fifth Circle. Only when the Deathlord started to bring his warriors here, some three or four thousand years ago, did it come to rest on that summit. It has been there since, but it may take flight again.”
“Then I think we should do our best to make sure it doesn’t see us.”
“Yes, I agree. For the lower part of the climb I think we can stay out of sight by keeping off the road. It will be harder going on the mountainside, but if we stay just below those walls, I think we can zigzag our way close to the top without coming into view.”
“Very well,” Shandira agreed.
They made their way sideways across the slope until they came up against the wall of the roadway, rising some ten or twelve feet up to the paved surface. It served well to block the line of sight, so they continued upward, with the barrier at first rising to their left.
Now the real agony began, Miradel soon realized. The ascent out of the gorge had been child’s play compared to the long, steep climb up this massive incline. The ground was rough with sharp-edged rocks and loose scree. Often they needed to use their hands to help keep their balance on the steeply pitched slope. Though the great roadway that ascended here took a sprawling approach through dozens of switchbacks, the druids followed a more direct route. They were able to use outcrops of rocks and sometimes the fortress walls themselves to keep out of view of the gargoyle.
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