Something huge surged out of the dark recesses he searched, a thing of such monstrous size as to give the momentary illusion that it dwarfed even the buildings. It rose from between the monoliths as if kindred, all bulk and weight, but long and sinewy like a snake as well, stone blocks turned momentarily liquid to reshape and re-form. Then jaws gaped wide—Morgan could see the jagged edge of the teeth clearly against the backdrop of the moon—and they heard a horrifying cry, like a strangled cough. The earth reverberated with that cry, and the members of the company from Rampling Steep dropped into a protective crouch—all but Quickening, who remained erect, as if she alone were strong enough to withstand this nightmare.
A second later it was gone, dropping away as quickly and smoothly as it had come, the rumble of its passing hanging faintly in the air.
“That was no Creeper,” Morgan whispered.
“And it wasn’t here ten years ago either,” a white-faced Horner Dees whispered back. “I’d bet on it.”
“No,” Quickening said softly, turning to face them now. Her companions came slowly to their feet. “It is newly born,” she said, “barely five years old. It is still a baby.”
“A baby!” Morgan exclaimed incredulously.
Quickening nodded. “Yes, Morgan Leah. It is called the Maw Grint.” She smiled sadly. “It is Uhl Belk’s child.”
XVIII
The six that formed the company from Rampling Steep spent the remainder of the night huddled in the shelter of the cliffs, crouched silently in the darkness, hidden away from the Maw Grint and whatever other horrors lay in wait within Eldwist. They built no fire—indeed, there was no wood to be gathered for one—and they ate sparingly of their meager food. Food and water would be a problem in the days to come since there was little of either to be found in this country of stone. Fish would become the staple of their diet; a small stream of rainwater that tumbled down off the rocks behind would quench their thirst. If the fish proved elusive or the stream dried up, they would be in serious trouble.
No one slept much in the aftermath of the Maw Grint’s appearance. For a long while no one even tried. Their uneasiness was palpable as they waited out the night. Quickening used that time to relate to the others what she knew of the Stone King’s child.
“My father told me of the Maw Grint when he sent me forth from his Gardens,” she began, her black eyes distant as she spoke, her silver hair gleaming brightly in the moonlight. They sat in a half-circle, their backs settled protectively against the rocks, their eyes shifting warily from time to time toward the forbidding shadow of the city. All was silent now, the Maw Grint disappeared as mysteriously as it had come, the seabirds gone to roost, and the wind faded away.
Quickening’s voice was carefully hushed. “As I am the child of the King of the Silver River, so the Maw Grint is the child of Uhl Belk. Both of us were made by the magic, each to serve a father’s needs. We are elementals, beings of earth’s life, born out of the soil and not of woman’s flesh. We are much the same, the Maw Grint and I.”
It was such a bizarre statement that it was all Morgan Leah could do to keep from attacking it. He refrained from doing so only because there was nothing to be gained by voicing an objection and diverting the narration from its intended course.
“The Maw Grint was created to serve a single purpose,” Quickening went on. “Eldwist is a city of the old world, one which escaped the devastation of the Great Wars. The city and the land on which it is settled mark the kingdom of Uhl Belk, his haven, his fortress against all encroachment of the world beyond. For a while, they were enough. He was content to burrow in his stone, to remain secluded. But his appetite for power and his fear of losing it were constant obsessions. In the end, they consumed him. He became convinced that if he did not change the world without, it would eventually change him. He determined to extend his kingdom south. But to do so he would have to leave the safety of Eldwist, and that was unacceptable. Like my father, his magic grows weaker the farther he travels from its source. Uhl Belk refused to take such a risk. Instead, he created the Maw Grint and sent his child in his place.
“The Maw Grint,” she whispered, “once looked like me. It was human in form and walked the land as I do. It possessed a part of its father’s magic as I do. But whereas I was given power to heal the land, the Maw Grint was given power to turn it to stone. A simple touching was all it took. By touching it fed upon the earth and all that lived and grew upon it, and everything was changed to stone.
“But Uhl Belk grew impatient with his child, for the transformation of the lands surrounding was not proceeding quickly enough to suit him. Surrounded by the waters of the Tiderace, which his magic could not affect, he was trapped upon this finger of land with only the way south open to him and only the Maw Grint to widen the corridor. The Stone King infused his child with increasingly greater amounts of his own magic, anxious for quicker and more extensive results. The Maw Grint began to change form as a result of the infusions of power, to transform itself into something more adaptable to what its father demanded. It became mole-like. It began to tunnel into the earth, finding that change came quicker from beneath than above. It grew in size as it fed and changed again. It became a massive slug, a burrowing worm of immense proportions.”
She paused. “It also went mad. Too much power, too quickly fed, and it lost its sanity. It evolved from a thinking, reasoning creature to one so mindless that it knew only to feed. It swept into the land south, burrowing deeper and deeper. The land changed quickly then, but the Maw Grit changed more quickly yet. And then one day Uhl Belk lost control of his child completely.”
She glanced at the dark silhouette of the city and back again.
“The Maw Grint began to hunt its father when it was not feeding off the land, aware of the power that the Stone King possessed and eager to usurp it. Uhl Belk discovered that be had fashioned a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the Maw Grint was tunneling into the Four Lands and changing them to stone. On the other, it was tunneling beneath Eldwist as well, searching for a way to destroy him. So powerful had the Maw Grint grown that father and son were evenly matched. The Stone King was in danger of being dispatched by his own weapon.”
“Couldn’t he simply change his son back again?” Carisman asked, wide-eyed. “Couldn’t he use the magic to restore him to what he was?”
Quickening shook her head. “Not by the time he thought to do anything. By then it was too late. The Maw Grint would not let itself be changed—even though, my father tells me, a part of it realized the horror of what It had become and longed for release. That part, it seems, was too weak to act.”
“So now it burrows tic earth and sorrows over its fate,” the tunesmith murmured.
He sang:
“Made in the shape of humankind,
To serve the Stone King’s dark design,
The Maw Grin tunnels ‘neath the land,
A horror wrought by father’s hand,
Become a monster out of need,
With no true hope of being freed,
It hunts.”
“Hunts, indeed,” Morgan Leah echoed. “Hunts us, probably.”
Quickening shook her head. “It isn’t even aware that we exist, Morgan. We are too small, too insignificant to catch its attention. Until we choose to use magic, of course. Then it will know.”
There was a studied silence. “What was it doing when we saw it tonight?” Horner Dees asked finally.
“Crying out what it feels—its rage, frustration, hatred, and madness.” She paused. “Its pain.”
“Like the Koden, it is a prisoner of the Stone King’s magic,” Walker Boh said. His sharp eyes fixed the girl. “And somehow Uhl Belk has managed to keep that magic his own, hasn’t he?”
“He has gained possession of the Black Elfstone,” she replied. “He went out from Eldwist long enough to steal it from the Hall of Kings and replace it with the Asphinx. He took it back into his keep and used it against his child. Possession of the Elven magic shi
fted the balance of power back to Uhl Belk. Even the Maw Grint was not powerful enough to defeat the Stone.”
“A magic that can negate the power of other magics,” Pe Ell recited thoughtfully. “A magic that can turn them to its own use.”
“The Maw Grint still threatens its father, but it cannot overcome the Elfstone. It lives because Uhl Belk wishes it to continue feeding on the land, to continue transforming living matter to stone. The Maw Grint is a useful, if dangerous, slave. By night, it tunnels, the earth. By day, it sleeps. Like the Koden, it is blind—made so by the magic and the nature of what it does, burrowing within darkness, seldom seeing light.” She looked again toward the city. “It will probably never know we are here if we are careful.”
“So all we have to do is to steal the Elfstone.” Pe Ell smiled. “Steal the Elfstone and let father and son feed on each other. Nothing complicated about it, is there?” He glanced sharply at Quickening. “Is there?”
She met his gaze without flinching, but did not answer. Pe Ell’s smile turned cold as he leaned back into the shadows.
There was a moment of strained silence, and then Morgan said to Horner Dees, “What about this Creeper you mentioned?”
Dees was looking sullen as well. He leaned forward ponderously, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Maybe the girl can tell you more about it than me,” he answered quietly. “I’ve a feeling there’s a great deal she knows and isn’t telling.”
Quickening’s face was devoid of expression, coldly perfect as she faced the old Tracker. “I know what my father told me, Horner Dees—nothing more.”
“King of the Silver River, Lord of the Gardens of Life,” Pe Ell growled from tic shadows. “Keeper of dark secrets.”
“As you say, there is a Creeper in the city of Eldwist,” Quickening went on, ignoring Pe Ell, her eyes on Dees. “Uhl Belk calls it the Rake. The Rake has been there for many years, a scavenger of living things serving the needs of its master. It comes out after dark and sweeps the streets and walkways of the city clean. We will have to be careful to avoid it when we go in.”
“I’ve seen it at work,” Dees grunted. “It took half a dozen of us on the first pass ten years ago; another two shortly after. It’s big and quick.” He was remembering now, and his anger at Quickening seemed to dissipate. He shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know. It hunts you out, finds you, finishes you. Goes into the buildings if it needs to. Did then, anyway.”
“So it would be wise for us to find the Black Elfstone quickly, wouldn’t it?” Pe Ell whispered.
They fell silent then, and after a few moments drifted away from each other into the shadows. They spent the remainder of the night attempting to sleep. Morgan dozed, but never for long. Walker was seated at the edge of the rocks watching the city when the Highlander nodded off and was still there when he woke. They were all tired and disheveled—all but Quickening. She stood fresh and new in the weak light of the morning sunrise, as beautiful as in the moment of their first meeting. Morgan found himself disturbed by the fact. In that way, certainly, she was something more than ordinary. He watched her, then looked quickly away when she turned toward him, afraid she would see. It bothered him to think that there might be differences between them after all and, worse, that those differences might be substantial.
They ate breakfast with the same lack of interest with which they had eaten dinner the night before. The land was a stark and ominous presence that watched them through hidden eyes. Fog hung across the peninsula, rising from the cliffs on which the city rested to the peaks of the tallest towers, giving the impression that Eldwist sat within the clouds. The seabirds had returned, gulls, puffins, and terns, wheeling and calling out above the dark waters of the Tiderace. A dampness hart settled into the air with dawn’s coming, and the water beaded on the faces of the six.
Having been warned by Dees of what lay ahead, they gathered rainwater from pools high in the rocks, wrapped what little food they still possessed against the wet, and set out to cross the isthmus.
It took them longer than they expected. The distance was short, but the path was treacherous. The rock was crisscrossed with crevices, its surface broken apart by ancient upheavals, damp and slick beneath their feet from the ocean’s constant pounding. The wind gusted sharply, blowing spray in their faces, chilling their skin. Progress was slow. The sun remained a hazy white ball behind the low-hanging clouds, and the land ahead was filled with shadows. Eldwist rose before them, a cluster of vague shapes, dark and forbidding and silent. They watched it grow larger as they neared, rising steadily into the bleak skies, the sound of the wind echoing mournfully through its canyons.
Sometimes, as they walked, they could feel a rumbling beneath their feet, far distant, but ominously familiar. Apparently the Maw Grint didn’t always sleep during the daylight hours.
Midday neared. The isthmus, which had been so narrow at points that the rock dropped away to either side of where they walked into dark cauldrons and whirlpools, broadened finally onto the peninsula and the outskirts of the city. The cliffs on which Eldwist had been built lifted before them, and the company was forced to climb a broad escarpment. Winding through a jumble of monstrous boulders along a pathway littered with loose stone, with their feet constantly sliding out from under them, they struggled resolutely ahead.
It took them the better part of two hours to gain the heights. By then the sun was already arcing west.
They paused to catch their breath at the city’s edge, standing together at the end of a stone street that ran between rows of towering, vacant-windowed buildings and narrowed steadily until it disappeared into mist and shadow. Morgan Leah had never seen a city such as this one, the buildings flat and smooth, all constructed of stone, all symmetrically arranged like squares on a checkerboard. Broken rock littered the street, but beneath the rubble he could see the hard, even surface. It seemed as if it ran on forever, as if it had no end, a long, narrow corridor that disappeared only when the mist grew too thick for the eye to penetrate.
They began to walk it, a slow and cautious passage, spreading out along its corridor, listening and watching like cats at hunt. Other streets bisected it from out of the maze of tall buildings, these in turn disappearing right and left into shadow. There were no protective walls about Eldwist, no watchtowers or battlements or gates, only the buildings and the streets that fronted them. There appeared to be nothing living there. The streets and buildings came and went as the company pressed deeper, and the only sounds were those of the ocean and the wind and the seabirds. The birds flew overhead, the only sign of movement, winging their way past the caps of the buildings, down into the streets, across intersections and catwalks. Some roosted on the window ledges high overhead. After a time, Morgan saw that some of those he had believed roosting had been turned to stone.
Much of the debris that lay strewn about had once been something other than stone although most of it was not unrecognizable. Odd-looking poles stood at every street corner, and it was possible to surmise that these might have once been some form of lamps. The carcass of a monstrous carriage lay on its side against one building, a machine whose bones had been stripped of their flesh. Scattered pieces of engines had survived time and weather, gear wheels and cylinders, flywheels and tanks. All had turned to stone. There were no growing things, no trees or shrubs, or even the smallest blade of grass.
They looked inside a few of the buildings and found the rooms cavernous and empty. Stairways ran upward into the stone shells, and they climbed one set all the way to the top so that they could look out across Eldwist and orient themselves. It was impossible to tell much, even as little as where the city began and ended. Clouds and mist obscured everything, revealing only glimpses of facings and roofs in a sea of swirling gray.
They did sight an odd dome at Eldwist’s center, a structure unlike the tall obelisks that formed the balance of the city, and they chose to explore it next.
But coming down again into the streets they lost their sense of
direction and turned the wrong way. They walked for the better part of an hour before deciding they had made a mistake; then they were forced to climb the stairs of another building in order to regain their bearings.
While they were doing so, the sun set. None of them had been paying any attention to how quickly the daylight had been fading.
When they emerged from their climb they were stunned to find the city in darkness.
“We’d better find a place to hide right now,” Horner Dees admonished, glancing around uneasily. “The Rake will be out soon if it isn’t already. It if finds us unprotected…”
He didn’t have to finish the thought. For a moment they stared wordlessly at one another. None of them had bothered looking for a nighttime shelter.
Then Walker Boh said, “There was a small building several streets back with no windows on the lower levels, a small entry, a maze of corridors and rooms inside—like a warren.”
“Safe enough for the moment,” Pe Ell muttered, already heading down the street.
They began to backtrack through the city. It was so dark by now that they could barely find their way. The buildings loomed to either side in a wall made more solid by the thickening of the mist. The seabirds had again gone to roost, and the sound of ocean and wind had faded into a distant lull. The city was uncomfortably still.
Beneath them, the stone shell of the earth rumbled and shook.
“Something’s awake and hungry,” Pe Ell murmured and smiled coldly at Carisman.
The tunesmith laughed nervously, his handsome face white and drawn.
He sang:
“Slip away, slip away, slip away home,
Run for your bedcovers, no more to roam,
Steal away quick from the things of the night,
Keep yourself hidden and well out of sight.”
They crossed an intersection that was flooded with pale moonlight that had found a break in the clouds and was streaming down in a splash of white fire. Pe Ell stopped abruptly, bringing the rest of them up short as well, listened for a moment, shook his head, and moved on. The rumbling beneath them came and went, sometimes close, sometimes far, never in one spot at any given time, seemingly all around. Morgan Leah peered ahead through mist and shadows. Was this the same street they had been on before? It didn’t look quite the same…