But there were supposed to be three, he realized suddenly. Where was the third?
Warned by a sixth sense, by instincts honed to a fine edge, he looked up just as it dropped from its hiding place in a stone niche in the stairwell wall. He flung himself aside, and it thudded to the stairs with a snapping of broken bones. Still, it didn’t quit. It rose in a flurry of teeth and claws, shrieking and spitting, and launched itself at him. Bremen acted instinctively, throwing up the Druid fire that served as his defense in a blue curtain that engulfed the creature. Even then, it did not stop. It came on, burning, the black hair of its body flaring like a torch, the skin beneath peeling and melting away. Bremen struck at it again, frightened now, amazed that it could still stand. The thing careered into him, and he twisted away, falling back upon the stairs, kicking out in desperation.
Then, at last, the creature’s strength failed. It lost its footing and tumbled away, rolling to the edge of the stairwell and dropping from view, a bright flare in the inky black.
Bremen lurched to his feet, singed by flames and raked by the creature’s claws. The other two attackers continued their approach with slow, mincing steps, like cats at play. Bremen tried to call up his magic in defense, but he had exhausted himself defending against the first attack. Startled by its ferocity, he had used too much of his strength. Now he had almost nothing left.
The creatures seemed to know this. They eased smoothly toward him, mewling anxiously.
Bremen put his back to the stairwell wall and watched them come.
As he did so, Kinson and Mareth crept silently through the corridors of the Keep, searching for him. The dead lay everywhere, but there was no sign of the old man. Though they watched and listened for his passing, they could detect nothing. Kinson was growing worried. If there was something evil hidden within the Keep, waiting for intruders, it might find them first. It might find them before they found Bremen, and Bremen would be forced to come to their rescue. Or had the Druid already fallen victim without their hearing? Were they already too late?
He should never have let Bremen go on alone!
They passed through the bodies of the Druid Guard who had made their Last stand at the top of the stairs on the Keep’s second level, and continued up. Still nothing showed itself. The stairs wound upward into the black, endless in number. Mareth was pressed against the wall, trying to get a better look at what lay ahead. Kinson kept glancing behind them, thinking an attack would come from there. His face and hands were slippery with sweat.
Where was Bremen?
Then something stirred on the next landing up, a faint altering of light, a detaching of shadows. Kinson and Mareth froze. An odd whispery wail drifted down to where they stood.
Breeemen, Breeemen, Breeemen.
They glanced at each other, then cautiously eased ahead.
Something dropped onto the stairs above them, a heavy body, too far away yet to see, but close enough to imagine. Blue fire exploded through the darkness. Shrieks rang out, and bodies thudded. Seconds later, a flaming ball hurtled over the edge of the stairs and fell past them, a living thing, if only barely, thrashing in agony as it crashed to the floor below.
Caution forgotten, Mareth and Kinson charged ahead. As they climbed, they caught sight of Bremen higher up on the stairs, trapped between two hideous creatures that were advancing on him from the landings above and below. The old man was bloodied and burned and clearly exhausted. Druid fire flared at his fingertips, but would not ignite. The creatures who stalked him were taking their time.
All three turned at the approach of the Borderman and the girl, startled.
“No! Go back!” Bremen cried on seeing them.
But Mareth raced up the stairs and onto the lower landing with a sudden burst of speed, leaving a surprised Kinson behind. She planted her feet and hunched down within her clothing like a coiled spring. Her hands came up, her arms stretched wide, and her palms turned upward as if to beseech help from the heavens. Kinson exhaled in dismay and rushed after her. What was she doing? The monster closest to the girl hissed in warning, whirled, and came at her, bounding down the stairs as swift as thought, claws extended. Kinson cried out in anger. He was still too far away!
Then Mareth simply exploded. There was a huge, booming cough, and the shock wave threw Kinson against the wall. He lost sight of Mareth, Bremen, and the creatures. Fire burst upward from where Mareth had been standing, a blue streak that burned white-hot. It ripped into the closest creature and tore it apart. Then it found the second, where it was closing on Bremen, and bore it away, a leaf upon the wind. The creature shrieked in dismay and was consumed. The fire raced on, burning along the stone walls and stairs, swallowing the air and turning it to smoke.
Kinson shielded his eyes and struggled to his feet. The fire disappeared, gone in an instant. Only the smoke remained, thick clouds of it filling the stairwell. Kinson charged up the steps and found Mareth collapsed on the landing. He lifted her, cradling her limp body. What had happened to her? What had she done? She was as light as a feather, her small features pale and streaked with soot, her short dark hair a damp helmet about her face. Her eyes were half-closed and staring. Through the slits, he could see they had turned white. He bent close. She didn’t seem to be breathing. He couldn’t find a pulse.
Bremen appeared abruptly before him, materializing out of the haze, disheveled and wild-eyed. “Take her out of here!” he shouted.
“But I don’t think she’s . . .” he tried to argue.
“Quick, Kinson!” Bremen cut him short. “Now, if you want to save her, get out of the Keep! Go!”
Kinson turned without a word and hastened down the stairs, Mareth in his arms, Bremen trailing in a ragged swirl of torn robes. Down through the Keep they stumbled, coughing and choking on the smoke, eyes tearing. Then Bremen heard something rumbling in the earth beneath. It was the sound of something waking, something huge and angry, something so vast it was unimaginable.
“Run!” Bremen cried once more, needlessly.
Together, the Borderman and the Druid fled through the smoky gloom of dead Paranor toward daylight and life.
The
Search
for the
Black
Elfstone
VIII
After leaving Bremen, Tay Trefenwyd proceeded west along the Mermidon through the mountains that formed the southern arm of the Dragon’s Teeth. Sunset arrived, and he camped for the night still within their shelter, then set out again at daybreak. The new day was clear and mild, last night’s winds having swept the land clean, the sun dazzling. The Elf worked his way down out of the foothills to the grasslands below the Streleheim and prepared to cross. Ahead, he could see the forests of the Westland, and beyond, their tips coated in white, the peaks of the Rock Spur. Arborlon was another day’s walk, so he traveled at a leisurely pace, his thoughts occupied by all that had happened since Bremen’s arrival at Paranor.
Tay Trefenwyd had known Bremen for almost fifteen years, longer even than Risca. He had met him at Paranor, before his banishment, Tay newly arrived from Arborlon, a Druid in training. Bremen had been old even then, but with a harder edge to his personality and a sharper tongue as well. Bremen in those days had been a firebrand burning with truths self-evident to him but incomprehensible to everyone else. The Druids at Paranor had dismissed him as being just this side of mad. Kahle Rese and one or two others valued his friendship and listened patiently to what he had to say, but the rest mostly looked for ways to avoid him.
Not Tay. From the first moment they met, Tay had been mesmerized. Here was someone who believed it was important—even necessary—to do more than talk about the problems of the Four Lands. It wasn’t sufficient simply to study and converse on issues; it was necessary to act on them as well. Bremen believed that the old ways were better, that the Druids of the First Council had been right in involving themselves in the progress of the Races. Noninvolvement was a mistake that would end up costing everyone dearly. Tay und
erstood and believed. Like Bremen, he studied the old lore, the ways of the faerie creatures, and the uses of magic in the world before the Great Wars. Like Bremen, he accepted that power once subverted was twice as deadly, and that the rebel Druid Brona lived on in another form and would return again to subvert the Four Lands. It was an unpopular and dangerous view, and in the end it cost Bremen his place among the Druids.
But before that happened, he made an ally of Tay. The two formed an immediate bond, and the older man took the younger for his pupil, a teacher with a store of knowledge so vast that it defied cataloging. Tay did the tasks and completed the studies that were assigned him by the Council and his elders, but his spare time and enthusiasm were reserved almost exclusively for Bremen. Though exposed from an early age to the peculiar history and lore of their race, few of the Elves at Paranor who had taken up the Druid pledge were as open as Tay to the possibilities that Bremen suggested. But then, few were as talented. Tay had begun to master his magic skills even before he arrived at Paranor, but under Bremen’s tutelage he progressed so rapidly that soon no one, save his mentor, was his equal. Even Risca, after his arrival, never reached the level that Tay attained, too wedded, perhaps, to his martial skills to embrace fully the concept that magic was an even more potent weapon.
Those first five years were exciting ones for the young Elf, and his thinking was shaped irrevocably by what he learned. Most of the skills he mastered and the knowledge he gained he kept secret, forced to do so by the Druid ban against personal involvement in the use of magic except as an abstract study. Bremen thought the ban foolish and misguided, but he was in the minority always, and at Paranor the Council’s decisions governed all. So Tay studied privately the lore that Bremen was willing to share, keeping it close to his heart and concealed from other eyes. When Bremen was exiled and chose to travel west to the Elves to pursue his studies there, Tay asked to go, too. But Bremen said no, not forbidding, but requesting that he reconsider. Risca was of a like mind, but for both there were more important tasks, the old man argued. Stay at Paranor and be my eyes and ears. Work to master your skills and to persuade others that the danger of which I have warned is real. When it is time for you to leave, I will come back for you.
So he had, five days earlier—and Tay and Risca and the young Healer Mareth had escaped in time. But the others, all those he had tried to convince, all those who had doubted and scorned, probably had not. Tay did not know for certain, of course, but he felt in his heart that the vision Bremen had revealed to them had already come to pass. It would be days before the Elves could verify the truth, but Tay believed that the Druids were gone.
Either way, his leaving with Bremen marked the end of his time at Paranor. Whether the Druids were dead or alive, he would not return now. His place was out in the world, doing the things that Bremen had argued they must do if the Races were to survive. The Warlock Lord had come out of hiding, revealed to those who had eyes to see and instincts to heed, and he was coming south. The Northland and the Trolls were his already, and now he would attempt to subjugate the other Races. So each of them—Bremen, Risca, Mareth, Kinson Ravenlock, and himself—must be held accountable. Each must stand and fight on what ground was given.
His was the Westland, his home. He was returning for the first time in almost five years. His parents had grown old. His younger brother had married and moved into the Sarandanon. His sister’s second child had been born. Lives had changed while he was away, and he would be coming back into a world different from the one he had left. More to the point, he would be bringing change to it that dwarfed anything that had occurred in his absence. It was the beginning of change for all the lands, and there were many who would not welcome it. He would not be well received when it was known why he had come. He would have to approach things cautiously. He would have to choose his friends and his ground well.
But Tay Trefenwyd was good at that. He was an affable, easygoing man who cared about the problems of others and had always done his best to give what help he could. He was not confrontational like Risca or stubborn like Bremen. While at Paranor, he had been genuinely well liked, even given his association with the other two. Tay was governed by strong beliefs and an unmatched work ethic, but he did not hold himself up to others as an example of how to be. Tay accepted people as they were, isolating what was good and finding ways to make use of it. Even Athabasca had not quarreled with him, seeing in Tay what he hoped was hidden even in the most troublesome of his friends. Tay’s big hands were as strong as iron, but his heart was gentle. No one ever mistook his kindness for weakness, and Tay never let the first suggest the second. Tay knew when to stand his ground and when to yield. He was a conciliator and a compromiser of the first order, and he would need those skills in the days ahead.
He ran over the list of what he must accomplish, laying out each item, one by one.
He must persuade his king, Courtann Ballindarroch, to mount a search for the Black Elfstone.
He must persuade his king to send his armies in support of the Dwarves.
He must convince him that the Four Lands were about to be altered by circumstance and events in a way that would change them all irrevocably and forever.
He strode across the open grasslands thinking of what this meant, heading north and west toward the forestlands that marked the eastern boundary of his country, smiling easily, whistling a tune. He did not yet know how he was going to accomplish any of this, but that didn’t matter. He would find a way. Bremen was counting on him. Tay did not intend to let him down.
The daylight hours slipped away, and the sun passed west into the distant mountains and disappeared. Tay left the Mermidon at the edge of the Westland forests below the Pykon and turned north. Because it was night and he could no longer see well on the flats, he stayed within the concealment of the trees as he continued on. His skills as a Druid aided him. Tay was an elementalist, a student of the ways in which magic and science interacted to balance the principal components of his world—earth, air, fire, and water. He had developed an understanding of their symbiosis, the ways in which they related to each other, the ways they worked together to maintain and further life, and the ways they protected each other when disturbed. Tay had mastered the rules for changing one to the other, for using one to destroy the other, for using any to give life to another. His talents had grown quite specialized. He could read movement and detect presence from the elements. He could sense thoughts. On a broad basis, he could reconfigure history and predict the future. It wasn’t the same as having a vision. It wasn’t linked to the dead or to the spiritual. It was tied instead to earth laws, to the power lines that encircled the world and tied all things together with linkage of acts and counteracts, of cause and effect, of choice and consequence. A stone thrown into a still pond produced ripples. So, too, everything that happened to shift the world’s balance, no matter how small, resulted in change. Tay had learned to read those changes and to intuit what they meant.
So now, as he walked in the shadow of the forest night, he read in the movement of the wind and the smells still clinging to the trees and the vibrations borne on the surface of the earth that a large party of Gnomes had passed this way earlier and now waited somewhere ahead. He tasted their presence more strongly the farther along he went. He eased deeper into the trees, listening for them, reaching down periodically to touch the earth in search of their lingering body heat, the magic that served him rising within his chest in small, feathery trailers that flowed outward to his fingertips.
Then he slowed and went still, sensing something new. He held himself perfectly still, waiting. A chill settled deep inside, an unmistakable warning of what it was that he had sensed, of what it was that approached. A moment later it appeared in the sky overhead, just visible through breaks in the trees, one of the winged hunters, the Skull Bearers that served the Warlock Lord. It soared slowly, heavily across the velvet back, hunting, but not for anything in particular. Tay held himself in place, resisting the nat
ural impulse to bolt, calming himself so that the other could not detect him. The Skull Bearer circled and came back, winged form hanging against the stars. Tay slowed his breathing, his heartbeat, his pulse. He disappeared into the still darkness of the forest.
Finally the creature moved on, flying north. To join those it commanded, Tay reasoned. It was not a good sign that the Warlock Lord’s minions were this far south, daring to nudge up against the kingdom of the Elves. It strengthened the likelihood that the Druids were no longer perceived as a threat. It suggested that the long anticipated invasion of the Warlock Lord was at hand.
He took a deep breath and held it. What if Bremen had been wrong, and the invasion was to be directed not at the Dwarves, but at the Elves?
He mulled over the possibility as he proceeded on, still searching for the Gnomes. He found them twenty minutes later, camped within the fringe of Drey Wood. There were no fires in the camp and sentries at every turn. The Skull Bearer circled overhead. A raiding party of some sort, but Tay could not imagine what they were after. There was not much to raid this close to the grasslands save a few isolated homesteads, and the intruders would hardly be interested in those. Still, it was not comforting to find Eastland Gnomes, let alone a Skull Bearer, this far west and so close to Arborlon. He eased ahead until he could see them clearly, watched them for a time to see if he could detect anything, failed in his attempt, took a careful head count, and eased away again. He retraced his steps a safe distance, found a secluded stand of fir, crawled beneath the sheltering boughs, and fell asleep.
It was morning when he woke, and the Gnomes were gone. He checked carefully for them from within his shelter, then emerged and walked to their camp. Their footprints led west into Drey Wood. The Skull Bearer had gone with them.