Straken

Twenty–Four

She had intended to close her eyes for only a few moments, but Khyber Elessedil knew she must have fallen asleep for much longer: When she woke her thinking was fuzzy and lethargic and her mouth dry. She was slumped down against the railing where she had taken the reading with the Elfstones some time earlier, and the Stones were still clutched in her hand. She looked around, trying to get her bearings, trying to clear her head, and slowly her memory returned.

The Ard Rhys. Penderrin.

She reached down and touched her wounded side gingerly. The bleeding had stopped, but the entire area burned and throbbed. She tried not to think about what that meant, and instead shoved the Elfstones back in her pocket. Then, using the railing for support, she hauled herself to her feet. She had no idea how much time had passed, inside the furnace room of the Druid’s Keep, there was no change of daylight for night from which to tell. At least no one had discovered her. Perhaps, if she was lucky, no one even knew she had escaped.

But time was slipping away.

She closed her eyes and in her mind retraced the hidden passageway that led to the sleeping chambers of the Ard Rhys. She had to get there quickly if she was to find a way to help Pen and Grianne Ohmsford before they attempted their return from the Forbidding.

Whether by warning them or by damaging the triagenel, she must give them a chance to escape the Druids waiting for them.

She looked down at herself and saw rags and dirt and blood. She saw that her hands were shaking. It had taken almost all her energy to get so far. She didn’t have much strength left, and there was still a long way to go. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she knew that if she did, she might not wake up.

She had to get out of there. She had to keep moving.

She looked around the room. Her journey began at the door at the top of the stone stairway behind her. She took a deep breath, tottered from the pit railing to the steps, and began to climb, leaning against the wall on her left as she did so. Climbing made her feel even dizzier, and she was constantly in danger of losing her balance. She stopped at one point and shut her eyes, trying to muster her strength. But closing her eyes just made her feel worse, so she opened them quickly and forced herself to continue on.

At the door, she pulled downward on the handle, but it wouldn’t move. The door was locked.

She paused a moment, then summoned a small bit of her magic to force the lock. A little pressure, carefully applied, would release it from the catch. She heard it open with a sharpsnick, pulled down on the handle again to be sure, and was through.

The passageway beyond was dark and musty and narrow. She had to go back out to retrieve a pair of torches from the hallway leading into the furnace room, one to light the way, one to serve as a backup. It took an enormous effort just to do that, and she began to wonder how in the world she was going to muster enough strength to make the climb into the Keep. She wished she had some food and water, but there would be nothing to eat or drink inside these walls.

She lit the first of the torches with her magic and started ahead.

The passageway wound through a series of short, disjoined segments that ended at a stairway. The stairway took her upward in a series of switchbacks for several hundred steps to a door. The door opened, and a second passageway continued from there. At first, there were no choices to be made about which way to go, there were only forward and back. But when she had successfully navigated the second passageway and climbed another set of stairs to a third passageway, things changed. That passageway and those that followed branched out repeatedly, and the stairways she passed led both upward and downward. She still knew where she was meant to go, but she had to stop and think about it more than once.

When finally she reached a branch in the maze of corridors about which she was uncertain, the temptation to use the Elfstones was almost overpowering. She was afraid that if she didn’t and made the wrong choice, she would become hopelessly lost. Her feverish mind made her frightened of doing so, eroding what little confidence remained to her, and for a moment she was sure that she was about to make a mistake. But she forced herself to stay calm, gave herself a moment to think, and resisted the impulse to act in haste. When she started walking again, she felt that she was going the right way.

Soon enough, the first of her two torches sputtered out. If the second one gave out as well, she would be left in blackness. By then, she was deep inside the upper reaches of Paranor, passing doors in the walls whose seams were outlined by light from the other side. She had no idea what rooms these secret doors opened into and did not care to find out. The passageways branched off in dozens of directions at each level she passed through. It was a disquieting discovery. Paranor’s walls, like her occupants, were rife with secrets.

She stopped several times to rest, to give her head a few moments to clear and her fever and pain time to diminish. Her body ached, and she was so tired that she half believed she might simply collapse at some point.

She wished she knew more about healing magic. She had used what little she did know to cleanse her body of infection and to restore some of her rapidly diminishing strength. But it was hard going. Her injuries were eroding both her strength and her concentration. Determination and adrenaline would get her only so far. If she didn’t reach her destination soon, she would not reach it at all.

Time dragged on, and she continued through the darkness, the smoky light of the torch illuminating her way. She felt as if she were entombed, buried in the earth beneath tons of rock. The blackness of the passageways and stairwells never changed. Her torch was all she had for light. In her head, she was seeing movement and hearing noises everywhere.

I can do this,she kept telling herself.

She encountered the first strands of Druid magic not long after the passageway narrowed so far that there was only room for a single person to pass through. She detected them at once, the skills that Ahren Elessedil had imparted warning her they were in place. But in fact the strands were just that: bits and pieces of webbing that had been severed and were hanging loose and forgotten, remnants of some more elaborate magic from an earlier time. She was careful to study them only with her senses, touching them might still serve to alert the one who had placed them. She could not yet tell who that was.

She discovered soon enough that more than one set of magic users had left imprints in those wormholes. One had visited more recently than the other and had severed the others earlier efforts all along the route she was following. That suggested that the second user was Shadea or one of her minions, while the earlier was Grianne Ohmsford. If magic had been used to transport the Ard Rhys into the Forbidding from her sleeping chamber, that was the way it would have happened. To reach her victim undetected, Shadea would have broken down the protective barriers Grianne had installed.

Khyber moved ahead cautiously, keeping close watch for traps, but it appeared that Shadea’s efforts to reach the Ard Rhys had been her sole concern. None of the earlier snares and warning webs had been reset.

Khyber slowed further as she realized she was getting close to her goal. The last part of the Elfstones’ vision was playing itself out in her mind, and she knew that the corridor she was following would twist and turn through the Keep’s walls a bit more before ending just ahead at the secret door leading into the sleeping chamber. She breathed a long sigh of relief, grateful to have reached her destination, even if she wasn’t sure yet what she was going to do about it.

Then she sensed the clipps.

She stopped at once, holding herself perfectly still as she sought out their hiding places. Clipps were little bits of reactive magic that magic users embedded in walls and floors and, sometimes, even in ceilings to give warning of intruders. They were not as powerful or as difficult to bypass as strands of webbing, but they were effective enough. She could tell they had been placed quite recently, a new form of magic layered over the old. Apparently Shadea had decided to protect this approach to the sleeping chamber as well.

She would have to remove or disable the clipps, and that would take time she didn’t have. But there was no help for it.

On hands and knees she edged forward and, one by one, began searching them out.

Bek Ohmsford crouched at the edge of the forest abutting the rocky promontory on which Paranor rested, studying its steep walls through the screen of trees and scrub. The walls were cleft in a dozen visible places and many dozens more beyond his plane of view. Any of them could be the secret entrance they were looking for, but they all looked pretty much the same.

He glanced over at Tagwen, who knelt next to him, his bearded face screwed up in a knot of indecision. «Any idea which one it is?» he asked softly.

The Dwarf sighed. «It was only once she took me there, and it was several years ago. I wasn’t really paying much attention to the location.» He shook his head. «But there was something about it…»

He trailed off, lips compressing into a tight line. «I know it was right around here.»

Bek wasn’t sure Tagwen knew anything at all, that he hadn’t forgotten everything. But he didn’t have much else to work with. Rue, the young Druids, and the Rock Trolls were all crouched farther back in the trees, hiding until they were summoned to go in. They had arrived at dawn, and after anchoringSwift Sure in a place of deep concealment they had made their way in through the shadowed forest to Paranor. The day was gray and hazy, and mist snaked through the trees in long trailers, giving the woods an otherworldly feel that threatened to make them lose their way. But it was Pen who was in the other world and in need of finding.

« I don’t think this is exactly right,” Tagwen said after a moment’s further thought. «Let’s try left a bit.»

They moved silently through the trees, Bek determined to give the Dwarf whatever leeway he needed to find the entrance. As a last resort, he might try his own magic, although that was a stretch at best. His magic couldn’t locate hidden entrances. It might track traces of magic, but there was little chance that such could be found down there. Worse, if the Keep was protected by Druid magic, his own use might give them away. It was an untenable situation at best, and unless they found the entry quickly, it was only going to get worse.

« This looks familiar,” Tagwen was saying, muttering to himself as he worked his way through the heavy undergrowth.

It looks familiar because it is familiar,Bek was thinking. They had been that way less than half an hour ago. He exhaled softly. How much longer could he afford to let Tagwen wander about?

« Wait!» The Dwarf grabbed his arm tightly. «This is it! This is the way in!»

He pointed at a rift in the cliff wall that was barely visible through a heavy screen of undergrowth, just a slantwise break in the rocks. «Through that opening?» Bek asked.

« No, through the wall next to it!» Tagwen grinned. «That was why I couldn’t find it! I kept thinking it had to be a split in the rocks, but the entrance is through a section of the rock that swings open when you do something to it!»

Bek stared. «Do something to it?»

« Yes, you have to touch it in a certain way. That was exactly what the Ard Rhys did when she opened it!»

He looked so pleased that Bek could not bring himself to point out that without knowing where and how Grianne touched the rock, they were no better off than they had been. Thinking about what to do to find where it was, he glanced at the section of rock where the entrance was concealed.

Then he had a sudden flash of inspiration and got to his feet hurriedly. «Wait here,” he said.

He crept forward, keeping to the shadows and the concealment of the tree branches until he was at the cliff wall. Looking back at the Dwarf, he pointed to the section of the wall he thought the other had indicated, and received a firm nod. Turning back again, he worked his way forward through the undergrowth to where the wall blocked his way.

Carefully, he ran his hands over the rock, using just a shading of the wishsong’s magic to test for Grianne’s presence. His connection to her was so strong that any usage in the immediate past would reveal where she had touched the stone. Because she came and went secretly from the Keep all the time, he thought it reasonable to expect that she had come and gone that way at least once.

He was right. He found her invisible fingerprints on the stone right away. Placing his own fingers over the four places where he sensed Grianne, he tried different combinations of touching, one right after the other, little presses against the rock.

On his ninth try, the concealed door swung open and the entrance was revealed.

He looked back at Tagwen, who was already moving from his hiding place to fetch the others. Bek stayed where he was in the opening, waiting impatiently. No one else had seen him find the entrance, of that he was fairly sure. The cliff wall hid him from the Keep above and from any within it. Nor did there seem to be any protective measures in place below the Keep. He had detected no foreign magic at the entrance, just the lingering presence of the magic used by his sister. He suspected that while the walls of Paranor were carefully warded, the rock on which it rested was not. It was likely that no one other than Grianne and Tagwen even knew about this entrance.

Tagwen was back quickly with Rue, the young Druids, and the Rock Trolls. All of them bristled with weapons and protective leathers, and the Trolls wore chain mail. No one thought they would escape what lay ahead without a fight. Bek herded them through the opening quickly, found torches stacked against one wall, waited long enough for Kermadec to light several using flint and tinder, then touched the rock facing of the secret door a second time in the same combination as before and ducked inside as it swung silently shut.

They moved into the tunnels quickly, Tagwen in the lead with one of the torches, Atalan bringing up the rear with the other. Bek stayed close to Tagwen, worried that he might lose his way if he was left to his own devices. But the passageway burrowed straight ahead until it reached a stairway leading up. They climbed the stairs cautiously, and even the footsteps of the ponderous Rock Trolls were barely audible in the silence.

But as they ascended, the silence was slowly replaced by a deep thrumming sound, and the air grew steadily warmer. Bek unsheathed his long knife and held it ready.

At the head of the stairs, they came up against a huge, ironbound wooden door that looked to have been in place for centuries. When Tagwen pulled down on the handle, though, the door swung open easily.

They stood inside Paranor’s furnace room, a cavernous chamber with a pit at its center that opened down into the earth’s core. Firelight flickered within the pit walls, thrown from the burning magma deep within. The slow ooze and bubbling of the magma accounted for the thrumming sound. A walkway ringed by an iron railing encircled the pit. Conduits for the heat given off by the fire looked like black wormholes in the stone ceiling.

Bek looked around quickly. The chamber was empty. They had to act quickly.

He turned to the others. «This is what I think we should do. Rue and I will go with Tagwen to find the sleeping chamber of the Ard Rhys and set up watch for her return. Kermadec, you and your men will go with Trefen Morys and Bellizen and wait for the rest of your army to arrive.» He paused. «I don’t know what to tell you to do after that, whether you should lie in wait or come right through the gates. We won’t have any way to communicate with each other. You won’t know how things are going with us.»

Kermadec nodded, his impassive face crimson in the light from the pit. «It doesn’t matter, Bek Ohmsford. Our course is decided. The Trolls owe something to Shadea and her Druids for what they did to us at Taupo Rough. I don’t think we will bother waiting on anything. 1 think we will do what Atalan has already suggested—pull the walls down about their ears. We will force the gates and take the Keep. Then we will come in search of you.»

« That won’t be easy,” Bek pointed out. «The Druids will fight back.»

Kermadec laughed softly. «Some of them will fight, but most of them will do what they have wanted to do all along—let Shadea and her bunch of vipers suffer the fate they deserve.»

He came forward and put his hand on Bek’s shoulder. «Yours is the task that matters most. If we can reach you in time to be of help, that will make any sacrifice worthwhile.» He squeezed gently. «We’ve come a long way to reach this point, Bek Ohmsford. Your son will have come even farther, once he returns. And the Ard Rhys farther still. Let’s make certain that our efforts are not wasted. Let’s put things back where they belong.»

« Let’s do that!» Bek said. He put his own hand over the Troll’s. «Good luck to you, Kermadec.»

The Maturen stepped back. «And to you.»

In a knot of huge bodies, the Rock Trolls trundled away along the catwalk, following the smaller forms of Trefen Morys and Bellizen. When they had disappeared into the dark mouth of the passageway, Bek turned to Tagwen once more.

« I guess we’re ready,” he said. «Where are the secret passageways that lead to my sister’s sleeping chamber?»

Tagwen stared at him with a stricken look. «1 have no idea. She never showed me.» He glanced helplessly at Rue and back again to Bek. «Can’t you find them with your magic?»

Rue Meridian rolled her eyes.

Shadea a’Ru sat at a desk in her new quarters, which were not far down the hallway from the sleeping chamber she had abandoned when she and Traunt Rowan and Pyson Wence had set the triagenel in place. At the sound of the knock on her door, she looked up guardedly.

Who is it?she started to ask, and then simply said, «Come.»

The door opened and Traunt Rowan stepped through. «We may have a new problem, Shadea.»

She stared at him in a way that suggested she did not want to hear about it. He met her gaze squarely. He had always been better able to do so than the others. «What sort of problem?» she said.

He stood deferentially to one side, knowing his place. «The Gnome Hunters we sent to dispose of the Elessedil girl have disappeared. All of them. Without a trace.»

She turned in her chair to face him. «And the girl?»

« Disappeared, as well. The Elfstones, too. We wouldn’t have found out at all except that Pyson went back to check with the man he had chosen to lead the squad. He couldn’t be found. Further inquiries revealed that the entire squad was gone. It’s impossible at this point to say what’s happened. Pyson is conducting a search of the Keep, combing all of its passageways and courtyards, every inch. He enlisted more than a hundred of his Gnome Hunters to help.»

She thought it through. «But there is no sign of the girl?» She paused. «Has there been any unexplained usage of magic within these walls?»

« Nothing that’s been reported.»

« Go up to the cold room and see if there has been any disturbance of the scrye waters. Anything at all. Especially here at Paranor. Anything. Make sure you speak with everyone who has kept watch for the last twenty–four hours.» Her finger came up, pointing at him. «Don’t let them lie to you.»

She got to her feet. «If that girl escaped, she might try to go back to the sleeping chamber.»

But Traunt Rowan was already shaking his head. «No, I’ve been there already. I stood outside the door and checked to see if the triagenel was still in place. It was. It has not been disturbed in any way. If she’s alive, I don’t think that is where she is.»

« Perhaps she’s gone to Arborlon for help. But how did she escape a squad of Gnome Hunters when she was bound and gagged? She doesn’t have the magic for that! She’s just a girl!»

« Well, maybe she didn’t escape. Maybe there’s another explanation.»

She looked at him as if he were an idiot. «If the Gnomes are missing, she’s escaped. But we can deal with that.» She gestured toward the door. «Go. See what the watch in the cold room has to say. Then come tell me.»

He went out the door without a word. She stood looking after him a moment, considering what she should do. She would check the triagenel herself, of course. She would not rely on him. Her own magic was the more powerful and the more capable, it would give a more sensitive reading. In any case, she no longer cared to rely on anyone else in matters of importance—even her confederates. Maybe especially her confederates. They hadn’t shown her anything yet that suggested she should rely on them.

Nor had anyone else, she reminded herself, thinking suddenly of Iridia.

She paused a moment to ponder the disappearance of the assassins she had dispatched to Arishaig to dispose of the sorceress. Those Gnomes had vanished as well, which would suggest that they had failed. Iridia was dangerous, the most capable of those who had conspired with her to lock Grianne Ohmsford within the Forbidding, but the men sent to kill her should have been equal to the task.

She shook her head. Sooner or later, she would have to deal with Iridia herself. Perhaps Sen Dunsidan, too. It might be better if she rid herself of both of them. Let the Federation choose a new Prime Minister. She would take her chances. Sen Dunsidan was becoming more trouble than he was worth.

For the moment, however, she needed to find out if the Elessedil girl was still inside Paranor’s walls.

Pulling her dark robes close about her, she went out the door and down the hall toward the Ard Rhys’s sleeping chambers.

It took Khyber a while to figure out how to disable the clipps, but in the end she managed. She did so by masking them with her own magic, a small covering that closed down their ability to read the presence of intruders in the passageway and left them useless. The magic she used was small, but sufficiently strong to last for several days. That should be long enough, she decided. It would have to be.

She fell asleep again after that, not meaning to, unable to help herself, she was so exhausted that just resting her eyes for a moment was sufficient to send her off. She awoke feeling a little better, although her wound still throbbed and her face felt hot and tight. She couldn’t risk using any further magic to heal herself, couldn’t risk anything that might give her away unless it had to do with helping Pen and Grianne, and so she did her best to turn her thoughts away from the pain and to the task at hand.

She slipped the rest of the way down the passage, checking carefully as she went for traps, and reached the doorway at the end. She saw the faint glow of the triagenel’s magic as it seeped through the cracks in the doorway from the chamber beyond, a wicked green light that cut through the darkness like a razor’s edge. She crouched down in the gloom and studied the doorway for a moment, then inched forward until she was close enough to touch the light seeping through. She kept herself from doing so, some magic could convey disturbances even from something as minuscule as the brush of fingertips. Sitting to one side of the doorway, she tried to plan her next actions.

Warning Pen and the Ard Rhys after they had reentered Paranor would do no good. The trap would be sprung by then, and they would be prisoners. She could try to help them, but she knew she lacked the kind of magic that could break them free. Whatever she was going to do, she had to do it before they attempted their return.

Which meant that she couldn’t afford to wait since she didn’t know how long she had. Which meant that she had to do something soon.

But what?

The only real magic she possessed was the Elfstones. But if she used them, she would give herself away in a heartbeat. She would be captured anew, and Shadea a’Ru and her allies would simply rebuild the triagenel. Besides, the Elfstones could only serve two purposes— to discover what was hidden and to defend against enemy magic. Neither usage seemed right for what was needed.

She leaned back against the passage wall, thinking. She was still thinking when she heard a noise in the darkness behind her. The hair at the back of her neck prickled and her throat tightened in fear.

Someone was coming.