“I don’t remember you,” he said finally. “Not that it matters.” The hatchet face inclined away from the light. “Just so we understand each other, Rimmer Dall’s plans for me didn’t workout quite as he expected either. I do what I choose. I always have.”
Dees rugged face nodded. “You kill people.”
Pe Ell shrugged. “Sometimes. Are you frightened?”
The other man shook his head. “Not of you.”
“Good. Then if we’ve finished with that topic of conversation, let’s move back to the other. I need a little help. Care to lend me some?”
Horner Dees stood mute a moment, then moved over to seat himself. He settled down with a grunt and stared at Pe Ell without speaking, apparently assessing the offer. That was fine with Pe Ell. He had thought the matter through carefully before coming back, weighing the pros and cons of abandoning his plan of entering the Rake’s shelter alone, of seeking assistance in determining whether or not the Stone King hid within. He had nothing to hide, no intention to deceive. It was always best to take a straightforward approach when you could.
Dees stirred. “I don’t trust you.”
Pe Ell laughed tonelessly. “I once told the Highlander he was a fool if he did. I don’t care if you trust me; I’m not asking for your trust. I’m asking for your help.”
Dees was intrigued despite himself. “What sort of help?”
Pe Ell hid his satisfaction. “Last night I tracked the Rake to its lair. I watched it enter, saw where it hides. I believe it likely that where the Rake hides, the Stone King hides as well. When the Rake goes out tonight to patrol the streets of the city, I intend to go in for a look.”
He shifted forward, bringing Dees into the circle of his confidence. “There is a catch that releases a door through which the Rake passes. If I trip it, I should be able to go in. The trouble is, what if the door closes behind me? How will I get out?”
Dees rubbed his bearded chin, digging at the thick whiskers as though they itched. “So you want someone to watch your back for you.”
“It seems like a good idea. I had planned to go in alone, to confront the Stone King, kill him if need be, and take the Stone. That’s still my plan, but I don’t want to have to worry about the Rake crawling up my back when I’m not watching.”
“So you want me to watch for you.”
“Afraid?”
“You keep asking that. Fact is, I should be asking you. Why should you trust me? I don’t like you, Pe Ell. I’d be just as happy if the Rake would get you. That makes me a poor choice for this job, don’t you think?”
Pe Ell unfolded his legs and stretched his lean body back against the wall. “Not necessarily. You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. And I don’t. But we both want the same thing—the Black Elfstone. We want to help the girl. Doesn’t seem likely either of us can do much alone—although I have a better chance than you do. The point is, if you give your word that you will keep watch for me, I think that’s what you’ll do. Because your word means something to you, doesn’t it?”
Dees laughed dryly. “Don’t tell me you’re about to make a plea to my sense of honor. I don’t think I could stomach that.”
Pe Ell quit smiling. “I have my own code of honor, old man, and it means every bit as much to me as yours does to you. If I give my word, I keep it. That’s more than most can say. I’m telling you I’ll watch out for you if you watch out for me—just until this business is finished. After that, we each go back to watching out for ourselves.” He cocked his head. “Time is slipping away. We have to be in place by sunset. Are you coming or not?”
Horner Dees took a long time to answer. Pe Ell would have been surprised and suspicious if he had not. Whatever else Dees was, he was an honest man, and Pe Ell was certain he would not enter into an arrangement he did not think he could abide by. Pe Ell trusted Dees; he wouldn’t have asked the old man to watch his back if he didn’t. Moreover, he thought Dees capable, the best choice of all, in some ways, not inexperienced like the Highlander or flighty like Carisman. Nor was he unpredictable like Walker Boh. Dees was nothing more nor less than what he appeared to be.
“I told the Highlander about you,” Dees announced, watching. “He’s told the others by now.”
Pe Ell shrugged once more. “I don’t care about that.” And he didn’t.
Dees hunched his heavy frame forward, squinting into the faint gray light. “If we get possession of the Stone, either of us, we bring it back to the girl. Your word.”
Pe Ell smiled in spite of himself. “You would accept my word, old man?”
Dees’ features were hard and certain. “If you try to break it, I’ll find a way to make you sorry you did.”
Pe Ell believed him. Horner Dees, for all of being old and used up, for the weathered look of him and the wear of the years, would be a dangerous adversary. A Tracker, a woodsman, and a hunter, Dees had kept himself alive for a long time. He might not be Pe Ell’s equal in a face-to-face confrontation, but there were other ways to kill a man. Pe Ell smiled inwardly. Who should know better than he?
Pe Ell reached out his hand and waited for the old man to take it. “We have a bargain,” he said. Their hands tightened, held momentarily and broke. Pe Ell came to his feet like a cat. “Now let’s be off.”
They went out the door of the room and down the stairs again, Pe Ell leading. The gloom without had thickened, the darkness growing steadily as nightfall approached. They hunched their cloaked shoulders against the rain and started away. Pe Ell’s thoughts drifted to his bargain. It had been an easy one to make. He would return the Elfstone to the girl because not to do so would be to risk losing her completely and to face an eternity of being tracked by all of them.
Never leave your enemies alive to follow after you, he thought.
Better to kill them when you had the chance.
Daylight was fading rapidly by the time Walker, Morgan, and Quickening approached the building Pe Ell and Horner Dees had vacated less than an hour earlier. The rain was falling steadily, a dark curtain that shaded the tall, somber buildings of the city, that masked away the skies and the mountains and the sea. Morgan walked with his arm protectively encircling the girl’s shoulders, his head lowered to hers, two shadowed and hooded figures against the mist. Walker stayed apart, leaving them to each other. He saw how Quickening leaned into the Highlander. She seemed to welcome his embrace, an uncharacteristic response. Something had happened to her during the confrontation with the Stone King that he had missed, and he was only now beginning to make sense of what it was.
A thick stream of rainwater clogged the gutter ahead, blocking the walkway’s end like a moat, and he was forced to move outside and around it. He was leading still, choosing their path, his cloaked form darkened by rain and gloom. A wraith, perhaps, he thought. A Grimpond, he corrected. He had not thought of the Grimpond for a long time, the memory too painful to retrieve from the corner of his mind to which he had confined it. It was the Grimpond with its twisted riddles who had led him to the Hall of Kings and his encounter with the Asphinx. It was the Grimpond who had cost him his arm, his spirit, and something of what he had been. Wounded in body and spirit—that was how he saw himself. It would make the Grimpond glad if it knew.
He lifted his face momentarily and let the rain wash over it, cooling his skin. He hadn’t thought it possible to be so hot in such dank weather.
It was the Grimpond’s visions, of course, that haunted him—the three dark and enigmatic glimpses of the future, not accurate necessarily, lies twisted into half-truths, truths shaded by lies, but real. The first had already come to pass; he had sworn he would cut off his hand before he would take up the Druid cause and that was exactly what he had done. Then he had taken up the cause anyway. Ironic, poetic, terrifying.
The second vision was of Quickening. The third…
His good hand clenched. The truth was, he never got beyond thinking about the second. Quickening. In some way, he would fail her. She wo
uld reach out to him for help, he would have the chance to save her from falling, and he would let her die. He would stand there and watch her tumble away into some dark abyss. That was the Grimpond’s vision. That was what would come to pass unless he could find a way to prevent it.
He had not, of course, been able to prevent the first.
Disgust filled him, and he banished his memory of the Grimpond back to the distant corner from which it had been set loose. The Grimpond, he reminded himself, was itself a lie. But, then, wasn’t he a lie as well? Wasn’t that what he had become, so determined to keep himself clear of Druid machinations, so ready to disdain all use of the magic except that which served to sustain his own narrow beliefs, and so certain that he could be master of his own destiny? He had lied to himself repeatedly, deceived himself knowingly, pretended all things, and made his life a travesty. He was mired in his misconceptions and pretenses. He was doing what he had sworn he would never do—the work of the Druids, the recovery of their magic, the undertaking of their will. Worse, he was committed to a course of action which could only result in his destruction—a confrontation with the Stone King to take back the Black Elfstone. Why? He was clinging to this course of action as if it were the only thing that would stop his drifting, as if it were all that was left that would keep him from drowning, the only choice that remained.
Surely it was not.
He peered through the damp at the city and realized again how much he missed the forestlands of Hearthstone. It was more than the city’s stone, its harsh and oppressive feel, its constant mist and rain. There was no color in Eldwist, nothing to wash clean his sight, to brighten and warm his spirit. There were only shadings of gray, a blurring of shadows layered one upon another. He felt himself in some way a mirror of the city. Perhaps Uhl Belk was changing him just as he changed the land, draining off the colors of his life, reducing him to something as hard and lifeless as stone. How far could the Stone King reach? he wondered. How deep into your soul? Was there any limit? Could he stretch his arms out all the way to Darklin Reach and Hearthstone? Could he find a human heart? In time, probably. And time was nothing to a creature that had lived so long.
They crossed to the front entry of their after-dark refuge and began to climb the stairs. Because Walker led, he saw the stains of rainwater preceding him on the stone steps that his own trailing dampness masked to those following. Someone had entered and gone out again recently. Horner Dees? But Dees was supposedly already there and waiting for their return.
They moved down the maze of hallways to the room which served as their base of operations. The room was empty. Walker’s eyes swept the trail of dampness to the shadows of the doors exiting through each wall; his ears probed the quiet. He crossed to where someone had seated himself and eaten.
His instincts triggered unexpectedly.
He could almost smell Pe Ell.
“Horner? Where are you?” Morgan was peering into other rooms and corridors, calling for the old Tracker. Walker met Quickening’s gaze and said nothing. The Highlander ducked out momentarily, then back in again. “He said he would wait right here. I don’t understand.”
“He must have changed his mind,” Walker offered quietly.
Morgan looked unconvinced. “I think I’ll take a look around.”
He went out the door they had come through, leaving the Dark Uncle and the daughter of the King of the Silver River staring at each other in the gloom.
“Pe Ell was here,” she said, her black eyes locked on his.
He let the fire of her gaze warm him; he felt that familiar sense of kinship, of shared magics. “I don’t sense a struggle,” he said. “There is no blood, no disruption.”
Quickening nodded soberly and waited. When he didn’t speak further, she crossed to stand before him. “What are you thinking, Walker Boh?” she asked, discomfort in her eyes. “What have you been thinking all the way back, so lost within yourself?”
Her hands reached out to take his arm, to hold it tight. Her face lifted and the silver hair tumbled back, bathed in the weak gray light. “Tell me.”
He felt himself laid bare, a thin, rumpled, battered life with barely enough strength remaining to keep from crumbling entirely. The ache in him stretched from his severed limb to his heart, physical and emotional both, an all-encompassing wave that threatened to sweep him away.
“Quickening.” He spoke her name softly, and the sound of it seemed to steady him. “I was thinking you are more human than you would admit.”
Puzzlement flashed across her perfect features.
He smiled, sad, ironic. “I might be a poor judge of such things, less responsive than I should be, a refugee from years of growing up a boy with no friends and few companions, of living alone too much. But I see something of myself in you. You are frightened by the feelings you have discovered in yourself. You admit to possessing the human emotions your father endowed you with when he created you, but you disdain to accept what you perceive to be their consequences. You love the Highlander—yet you try to mask it. You shut it away. You despise Pe Ell—yet you play with him as a lure would a fish. You grapple with your emotions, yet refuse to acknowledge them. You work so hard to hide from your feelings.”
Her eyes searched his. “I am still learning.”
“Reluctantly. When you confronted the Stone King, you were quick to state what had brought you. You told him everything; you hid nothing. There was no attempt at deception or ruse. Yet when Uhl Belk refused your demand—as you surely knew he would—you grew angry, almost…” He searched for the word. “Almost frantic,” he finished. “It was the first time I can remember when you allowed your feelings to surface openly, without concern for who might witness them.”
He saw a flicker of understanding in her eyes. “Your anger was real, Quickening. It was a measure of your pain. I think you wanted Uhl Belk to give you the Black Elfstone because of something you believe will happen if he does not. Is that so?”
She hesitated, torn, then let her breath escape slowly, wearily. “Yes.”
“You believe that we will gain the Elfstone. I know that you do. You believe it because your father told you it would be so.”
“Yes.”
“But you also believe, as he told you, that it will require the magics of those you brought with you to secure it. No amount of talking, no manner of persuasion, will convince Uhl Belk to give it up. Yet you felt you had to try.”
Her eyes were stricken. “I am frightened…” Her voice caught.
He bent close. “Of what? Tell me.”
Morgan Leah appeared in the doorway. He slowed, watched Walker Boh draw back from Quickening, and completed his entrance. “Nothing,” he said. “No sign of Horner. It’s dark out now; the Rake will be about. I’ll have to postpone any search until tomorrow.” He came up to them and stopped. “Is something wrong?” he asked quietly.
“No,” said Quickening.
“Yes,” said Walker.
Morgan stared. “Which is it?”
Walker Boh felt the shadows of the room close about, as if darkness had descended all at once, intending to trap them there. They stood facing one another across a void, the Highlander, the Dark Uncle, and the girl. There was a sense of having reached an expected crossroads, of now having to choose a path which offered no return, of having to make a decision from which there was no retreat.
“The Stone King…” Quickening began in a whisper.
“We’re going back for the Black Elfstone,” Walker Boh finished.
Barely a mile away, at a window two floors up in a building fronting the lair of the Rake, Pe Ell and Horner Dees waited for the Creeper to emerge. They had been in position for some time, settled carefully back in the shadows with the patience of experienced hunters. The rain had stopped finally, turned to mist as the air cooled and stilled. A thin vapor rose off the stone of the streets in wisps that curled upward like snakes. From somewhere deep underground came the faint rumble of the Maw Grint awakening.
r /> Pe Ell was thinking of the men he had killed. It was strange, but he could no longer remember who they were. For a time he had kept count, first out of curiosity, later out of habit, but eventually the number had grown so large and the passing of time so great that he simply lost track. Faces that had been clear in the beginning began to merge and then to fade altogether. Now it seemed he could remember only the first and the last clearly.
The fact that his victims had lost all sense of identity was disconcerting. It suggested that he was losing the sharpness of mind that his work required. It suggested that he was losing interest.
He stared into the blackness of the night and felt an unfamiliar weariness engulf him.
He forced the weariness away irritably. It would be different, he promised himself, when he killed the girl. He might forget the faces of these others from Rampling Steep, the one-armed man, the Highlander, the tunesmith, and the old Tracker; after all, killing them was nothing more than a matter of necessity. But he would never forget Quickening. Killing her was a matter of pride. Even now he could visualize her as clearly as if she were seated next to him, the soft curve and sweep of the skin over her bones, the tilting of her face when she spoke, the way her eyes drew you in, the weave and sway of her hands when they moved. Surely she was the most wondrous of creatures, spellbinding in a way that defied explanation. Hers was the magic of the King of the Silver River and therefore as old as the beginning of life. He wanted to drink in that magic when he killed her, he believed he could. Once he had done so, she would be a part of him, living inside, a presence stronger than even the most indelible memory, stirring within him as nothing else could.
Horner Dees shifted softly beside him, relieving cramped muscles. Still wrapped in his private thoughts, Pe Ell did not glance over. He kept his eyes fixed on the flat surface of the hidden entry across the street. The shadows that cloaked it remained still and unmoving.