Goddess Worldweaver

12
Deathscape

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 of 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 through 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.

Even though they stopped frequently to rest, Miradel had reached the point of utter exhaustion by the time they had climbed no more than a third of the way up the massive slope. Furthermore, the climb had grown more hazardous as, far away, the distant sun had started to recede upward, away from Nayve and even farther from the Fifth Circle of Loamar.

“We’ll have to stop soon and get some sleep,” she said, whispering in the midst of the eerily silent world. Again she felt the absence of wind, of birds and bugs and rodents that gave a background of vitality to Nayve and to Earth. “Can you spot a flat place where we might be able to stretch out?”

“Not too far away,” Shandira said, pointing obliquely up the slope, toward the right. “The road curves back below a steep shoulder of the mountain. We can stop right there and be well out of sight of anything above.”

They moved away from the road, following the rough ground to remain screened from the gargoyle. A large rock jutted from the slope, and they skirted its base, then crawled upward across a face of cracked stone. A few minutes later, the black woman paused at a steep crossing, a slide of small rocks and gravel no more than ten feet in length. Just beyond was a wide ledge, nestled hard against the wall that bordered the roadway running past two dozen feet overhead. The spot was sheltered from above by an overhang and protected by a steep slope that curled around to cover three sides.

“Looks like a perfect place to rest. Just be careful here,” said Shandira, leaning against the rock, bracing her hands as she slid her booted feet across the loose, steep surface. She went another step, and a third, making it halfway across.

And then her traction gave way. With a gasp of surprise, the druid skidded downward, reaching for handholds but failing to find purchase. Miradel saw her slide twenty or thirty feet, balancing on her hip and left hand, then bounce sideways off an outcrop of rock. Shandira fell on her back, her head sharply striking the hard stone of the ground where she came to rest against a boulder, utterly still.

“Oh, by the goddess-no!” whispered Miradel, stunned and despairing. She froze for an instant, and then shucked out of her pack, dropping it, paying no attention as it tumbled away down the steep slope. Sitting, she slid toward her companion, using her hands to control her speed, ignoring the cuts and scrapes inflicted on her by the rough surface. She stopped by bracing her feet against the same jutting rock that had knocked Shandira to the side. Carefully, Miradel worked her way around the boulder, then slid the last few feet to her companion.

She found Shandira facedown on the steep slope, braced against another solid boulder, the tangle of black hair shiny with the thick sheen of fresh blood. Gingerly, Miradel probed through the wiry coils to touch the back of the injured woman’s skull. She felt torn skin and sticky wetness but was relieved that the bone seemed to be intact.

Next she rolled her friend onto her back, using Shandira’s pack to cushion her head. Miradel bowed for a moment of silent prayer, then reached forward to touch her hands to her companion’s temples, to invoke the healing power of her goddess to knit the torn flesh and restore the lost blood.

“Goddess Worldweaver, I beseech you to grant thy tender touch, to repair this woman’s hurts.” She said the prayer humbly, with all of the faith that she had always felt, anticipating without doubt the imminent tingle of magic, the generous spirit of her goddess flowing through Miradel’s flesh, in order to do good.

But this time there was no tingle, no healing, no magic. It was as if the Goddess Worldweaver was too far away to hear her plea.

Miradel felt a new stab of fear. Was the goddess in fact too far away, or was there a more dire explanation? Was the Worldweaver displeased by the impertinence of her druid, and in her displeasure did she choose to turn her back?

In any event, there was no help to be found there. She remembered her pack now with renewed despair. Though she scanned the slope below, she could not spot it. She guessed that it had tumbled beyond the ground visible for a hundred yards below her. Further view was blocked by a clump of jagged boulders.

“Shandira? Can you hear me?” There was no response, not even a flicker of eyelids. “I have to get my pack, but I’ll be right back,” Miradel promised.

She turned to pick the best route down to the pack, then glanced at her companion once more. Shandira simply lay there, still except for the slow rhythm of her breathing. Against that faint backdrop, the vast silence of Loamar seemed to press in even harder, terrifying in its scope, smothering in its omnipotent extent.

Zystyl had heard the command of his distant master, the immortal will carried to him by virtue of the dakali, the stone that he wore under his tunic, against the skin of his chest over his heart. That was the talisman of the Deathlord, he knew, and it had provided the power that brought his army from the First Circle to the Fourth Circle. Once they were here, it had bestowed upon the formerly blind dwarves the limited ability to see. It was a mighty tool, and it had helped him to do great things.

When the directions had come to him ten days earlier, they had been in his mind as he awakened, and he had acted immediately. The tens of thousands of Delvers had been arrayed along the edge of Riven Deep in their vast camps-camps that had become virtual cities in the five decades since the army had been here. He ordered them all to deploy, formed in ranks, armed and armored for battle. Their golems stood with them, one metal giant for each dwarf regiment of approximately four thousand warriors.

They had taken these positions within a couple of hours of receiving the order, and for all the next ten days they had stayed here. Food and water had been circulated through the ranks, and eventually the Delvers had even slept while they stood in place. None, of course, had questioned the commands of their arcane lord-it was well known that to question Zystyl was to die-but surely they had wondered about the purpose of this apparently irrational deployment.

Actually, Zystyl himself had done his share of wondering. The harpies had been keeping him informed of developments along the coast. He knew that the Deathlord’s invasion had come ashore, that the ghost warriors had seized the beach and won a great battle. Then they had advanced inland as far as the river that emptied into the gorge on the opposite rim, some twenty miles to Zystyl’s right. Ahead of him were the Hyaccan elves, numbering several thousand riders. How often he had fantasized about striking them with his compact, powerful army. Their only hope would be to mount their ponies and flee, since they would never be able to stand up to his offensive.

For fifty years, of course, the yawning gulf of Riven Deep had prevented that fantasy from even approaching fruition. But now there was a sense, carried through his dakali and also growing within his own mind, that the gulf might, somehow, cease to be an impassable obstacle. So he had stood with his dwarves and waited.

As the first tremors rumbled through the rock, he heard the panicked cries, sensed the fear of his dwarves. The ground shifted and pitched underfoot. He felt the rumbling in his belly, a terrifying sensation of disturbance. But he clenched his jaw and planted his feet a little bit farther apart, determined not to flinch.

“The world falls away! We are doomed!” All around him the troops were murmuring or shouting, but then they seemed to draw strength from their leader’s example. As the arcane remained still and aloof, the cries of distress lessened, until the troops were standing firm as well.

Zystyl remained silent as he felt the ground, solid bedrock, heave with the convulsion of a major quake. Indeed, the effect was quite unsettling, but he was determined to display no fear. He had faith in his god… faith in his dakali. He would stand still and show naught but courage.

More convulsions rocked the ground, and a slab at the edge of the Deep broke free and tumbled away, carrying twoscore dwarves to their doom. More discouraging, one of the beautiful iron giants was caught at the brink; the golem turned awkwardly, trying to take a step onto solid ground, but it, too, vanished.

Yet the mass of ground, despite the crumbling base, did not seem inclined to fall. Great fissures ripped through the ground, scoring more or less between the gathered regiments, though these gaps, too, were imprecise, and hundreds more Delvers plunged, screaming, into these seemingly bottomless crevasses. He could see daylight through the nearest gap, knew for certain that the ground supporting this bedrock was gone. It was as though the stone under his feet was a platform floating freely in the air.

But still he felt no fear, did not imagine that they would fall. He grinned, then laughed aloud as he felt the slab of stone begin to rise. The effect was gradual-it was easier to see than to feel-but when they moved out from the edge, drifting over the yawning space of the chasm, he knew that his god’s power had been made real and that his enemies were being delivered into his hands.

“Please, Shandira… wake up! Can you hear me?”

Miradel was close to utter despair. There was no healing magic in her touch, and nothing but cold fear in her heart. Her companion, this strong, proud woman who had come here at Miradel’s own suggestion, had not regained consciousness since her hard fall nearly an hour before.

The best Miradel had been able to do was to roll her companion onto a reasonably flat patch of ground, no larger than a small bed, that happened to be right next to where she had landed. She had folded the extra cloak from the other druid’s pack to serve as a pillow, replacing the bulky pack. Then she placed her cloak over the woolen garment Shandira was already wearing in the hopes of keeping the unconscious woman warm.

But there was no wood with which to build a fire, even if she would have dared to attract such attention; no way to give her hot broth or warm bread, anything but the dried trail rations they had brought with them. She had trickled a little water through Shandira’s lips, but the woman had not swallowed. The only encouraging sign, and it was a small one, was that she continued to draw long, deep breaths.

Finally Miradel returned her attention to her own pack, which had tumbled quite a ways down the slope when she had dropped it in the moments after Shandira’s fall. Her muscles rebelled at the thought of a long descent and a climb repeated over the steep incline, but there were too many valuables, objects that might mean the difference between life and death, in the heavy sack. So, after one last check of the black woman’s pulse and respiration, the elder druid started down the slope she had so laboriously climbed an hour earlier.

The descent, naturally, was a lot easier than the climb, and within ten minutes she had dropped so far that she couldn’t even see the place where she had left Shandira. Her legs were still cramping and sore, and she limped with each jolting step. Still, she tried to ignore her discomfort and despair, scanning the slope below her, looking for some indication of where her pack had ended up.

She spotted it shortly, saw that it had tumbled onto a flat shoulder of the mountainside, halting its tumble a foot short of the precipitous drop on the other side of the small, flat space. Casting aside her caution, she hastened downward, sending a cascade of loose pebbles skidding into the abyss. When she reached the backpack, she quickly saw that it had remained closed and that, in fact, if it had rolled a little farther it would have plummeted another five hundred feet.

Her first instinct was to thank the goddess for this small bit of good fortune, but when she lowered her head to murmur the small prayer, she found that the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she lifted the heavy satchel, balancing it on her hip as she pushed her arms through the straps.

It felt like the heaviest thing she had ever carried, and once again her despair seemed to double her burden. It would have been easy to simply collapse, to cry to the point of exhaustion, then to lie here until she died. Only the memory of Shandira and the guilty knowledge that it was Miradel who had brought her here forced her to turn her attention upward again.

She looked at the sweeping slope, remembered the pain of her initial ascent, and knew it would be doubled in this next stage of her journey. Her vision extended beyond the walled roadway that had been their goal, all the way to the top of the vast citadel, where the gargoyle was now visible on its lofty perch.

The sight of that beast sent a stab of fear through her, for the stony guardian had changed. It remained in the same place, the same pose as it had been before, but now its eyes were opened, red and glowing like fire, and they seemed to be fixed intently upon the lone druid so far below.

“Wake up!” shrieked Roodcleaver, delivering a sharp kick to Awfulbark’s belly.

“What you want?” growled the king of the forest trolls, instinctively squirming away to put the trunk of the oak tree between himself and his wife’s next attack.

“The world!” she cried, her stark terror penetrating the fog of Awfulbark’s ever-slow awakening.

“What about the world?” he grumbled, covering his own alarm with a veneer of irritation.

“It’s breaking!” Roodcleaver declared. “Breaking right around us! Here, under my feet, under you fat butt and thick head! It’s breaking!”

For the first time, the troll king realized that he was clutching the trunk of the oak tree simply to keep his balance. The ground heaved and pitched underfoot. Trees throughout the grove of oaks, which was just back from the Swansleep River, were whipping back and forth. Several venerable wooden giants cracked apart with lumber-ripping shrieks, massive trunks falling among trolls who were waking up to a world of chaos and panic.

“Go tell Natac!” Awfulbark blurted the first thought that came into his mind. Surely the general would know what to do!

Roodcleaver threw a chunk of wood at him, a near miss that bounced from the trunk a few inches from the king’s eye. “You think he knows, maybe?” she screamed. “Do something! Save trolls! Save me!”

“Okay,” Awfulbark agreed, groping for an idea, a plan. He seized upon the first thing that came to mind. “Everybody run!” he roared. “Get away from here!”

The river, with the numberless horde of the ghost warriors on the far side, formed a barrier in the direction of metal, but every other route seemed better to the terror-stricken trolls than staying where they were. Most of them instinctively started away from the river, from the enemy, from the war. Lurching and stumbling, Awfulbark let go of the tree, took Roodcleaver’s hand, and tugged her along with the fleeing horde of trolls.

A huge tree smashed down nearby, trapping a young troll beneath a splintered limb. The king reached down, pulled the howling victim free, and left him on the ground. With luck, the wretch’s shattered legs would knit before another oak came down on top of him. Awfulbark and his wife held each other up as the jolting ground pushed them this way and that. He was aware of other trolls all around-and in fact they frequently careened into him. But they were all moving in the same direction, and though many fell and others were trampled, the army of the forest trolls inevitably made a stumbling exodus from the position they had held for four days.