Tanequil

Three

Tagwen crossed his arms, tucked his bearded chin into his chest, and gave a frustrated growl.

«If this isn't the most ill–considered idea 1 have ever come across, I can't think what is!» He was losing what little remained of his patience. «Why do we think there's even the possibility of making it work? How long have we been at it now? Three hours, Penderrin! And we still haven't a clue about what to do.»

The boy listened to him wearily, admitted to himself that Tag–wen was right, and promptly continued talking it through.

«Khyber is right about not relying on the Elfstones. We can't do that unless we're certain that this creature has the use of magic, as well, magic that the Elfstones can react to. I haven't seen anything that suggests it does. It might not be human, but that doesn't mean it relies on magic. If it does, and we find that out, then Khyber can use the Elfstones to disable it. But otherwise, we need to find a different way to gain an advantage.»

«Well, we have seen how fast it can move," the Elven girl said. «It's much quicker and more agile than we are, so we can't expect to gain an advantage there.»

«What if we could find a way to slow it down?»

The Dwarf grunted disdainfully. «Now, there is a brilliant idea! Maybe we could hobble it with ropes or chains. Maybe we could drop it into quicksand or mud. Maybe we could lure it into a bottomless pit or off a cliff. There must be dozens of each in these mountains. All we need do is catch it napping and take it prisoner!»

«Stop, Tagwen," Khyber said quietly. «This isn't helping.»

They stared at each other in uneasy silence, brows furrowed in a mix of concentration and frustration, a little more of the latter revealed on Tagwen's bluff face than on the those of the other two. The night before, theSkatelow had appeared in the sky above the foothills west of the Charnals. Twelve hours had passed since the horrifying discovery that the creature from Anatcherae had commandeered the airship, killed Gar Hatch and his Rovers, and taken Cinnaminson prisoner. No one had slept since, though they had pretended at it. Now that daylight had returned, they were sitting in the sunshine on a mountainside trying to decide what to do next. Mostly, they were arguing about how best to help Cinnaminson. Pen might have persuaded his companions that they should not abandon her, but that didn't mean he'd persuaded them there was a way to save her.

«It would be less mobile if we could lead it into a confined space,"

Khyber suggested.

«Or force it to climb a tree or a cliff face," Pen added, «where it couldn't use its speed or agility.»

«A ledge or defile, narrow and slippery.»

«Why don't we find a way to force it to swim out to us!» Tagwen snapped irritably. «It probably doesn't swim very well. Then we could drown it when it got close. Bash it over the head with an oar or something. Where's the nearest big lake?» He blew out his breath in a huff. «Haven't we covered this ground already? What are the chances of making this happen? What in the world is going to persuade this creature to go anywhere we want it to go!»

«We have to find a way to lure it off the ship," Pen declared, looking from the Dwarf to the Elf and back again. «Off the ship and away from Cinnaminson. We have to separate them if we are to free her.»

«Oh, that shouldn't be so hard," Tagwen mumbled. «All we need is the right bait.»

His face changed instantly as he realized the territory he had mistakenly entered. «I didn't mean that! I didn't! Don't even think about it, Penderrin. Whatever else happens, you have to keep safe. If anything happens to you, the Ard Rhys has no chance of being saved. I know how you feel about this girl, but you should feel more strongly still about what you have been sent to do. You can't risk yourself!»

«Tagwen, calm down," the boy told him. «Who said anything about risking myself? I'm just looking for a way to tip the balance in our favor long enough to free Cinnaminson and make an escape. In order to do the former, we need to separate her from her captor. In order to do the latter, we need to get control of the ship.»

«Get him off the ship and away from Cinnaminson, then get us on the ship and safely away," Khyber summarized. She stared at him. «That doesn't seem like something that is likely to happen in the ordinary course of events.»

«Well then, we will change the course of events," Pen declared. «This thing might be faster and stronger than we are, but it isn't necessarily smarter. We can outthink it. We can find a way to trick it into making a mistake.»

Tagwen got to his feet, making a rude noise that left no doubt about his opinion of this proclamation. «I've had enough of this. I need to take a walk, young Penderrin, young Khyber. I need to leave this conversation behind and clear my head. I was secretary and personal assistant to the Ard Rhys when we began this odyssey and I haven't left that life far enough behind to feel comfortable with this one. I applaud your efforts in trying to save Cinnaminson, but I cannot think how they will lead to anything. If, while I am gone, you come up with the solution to this dilemma, I will be happy to hear all about it on my return.»

He gave them a perfunctory bow, one stiff with impatience and dismay, and walked away.

They watched him go in silence, and it wasn't until he was well out of sight and hearing that Khyber said, «He may be looking at this with clearer eyes than we are.»

Pen bristled instantly. «I suppose you think we should give up, too? Just leave her to that monster and go on our way?»

The Elven girl shook her head. «I don't think that at all. When I told you I would help, I meant it. But I'm beginning to wonder what sort of help we can provide. Maybe we would be smarter to continue on to Taupo Rough and ask help from Kermadec and his Trolls. Whatever this thing is, the Rock Trolls are likely a better match for it than we are.»

«You might be right," Pen agreed. «But in order to find out, we have to go all the way to Taupo Rough, then persuade Kermadec to help, then come back this way again and find theSkatelow, which is flying while we're on the ground. I don't much care for our chances there, either. If we don't do something right now, it will probably be too late. This creature won't bother keeping Cinnaminson around if it's not to its own advantage.»

He was remembering how Cinnaminson, blind but privy to a sort of inner mind–vision that sighted people did not possess, had deliberately led her captor away from the spot where Pen and his companions were hiding in the rocks. He could not be certain that she had known he was there, but Pen felt in his heart that she had. Her courage astonished him, and he was terrified that it might have cost her life.

«All right.» Khyber straightened and leaned forward. «Let's try it again. We know what we need to do. We need to get this thing off theSkatelow and away from Cinnaminson. We need to keep it off long enough to take over the airship, get airborne, and escape. How much time would that take if you were piloting?»

Pen thought, running his hand through his red hair. «A few minutes, no more, if the power lines haven't been disconnected. Even then, not long. A reconnect from any draw to any parse tube would be enough to get off the ground. Cut the ropes, engage the thrusters, open the draws, and you're away. We wouldn't have to worry about Cinnaminson until after we were airborne.»

«All we need to figure out, then, is what it will take to get our cloaked friend off the ship.» She considered. «Besides you.»

«But 1 am exactly what itwill take, Khyber," he said quietly. «You know that. I'm what it's after. We know that much from Anatcherae. We don't know the reason, but we know I'm what it's come for.» He took a deep breath. «Don't look at me that way. I know what I told Tagwen.»

«Good. That means you know as well that you are talking nonsense. Tagwen was right to warn you against latching on to any plan that exposed you to risk. That isn't why you came on this journey, Pen. You are the reason for everything that's happened, and you don't have the right to put yourself in a position where you could be killed.»

«That isn't what I'm suggesting!» He couldn't keep the irritation from his voice. «The trick is to make sure that by becoming bait, I can still get away when I need to. The trick is in getting the monster off the

Skatelow and me on, all at the same time. But I don't see any other way of making that happen if we can't deceive this thing into thinking it has a chance to get its hands on me.»

Khyber sighed. «You assume that getting its hands on you is its goal. What if it simply wants to kill you? It came close to doing that in Anatcherae.»

Pen looked down and rubbed his eyes. «I've been thinking about that. I don't think itwas trying to kill me. I think it was trying to scare me. I think it was hoping I would freeze in place and it would be on me before anyone could help. It wants me for its prisoner, to take me to whoever sent it.»

He saw the look of doubt that crossed her face and went on hurriedly. «All right, maybe it was trying to injure me or slow me down. It's possible.»

She shook her head. «What's possible is that you are no longer in touch with reality. Your feelings for this girl have muddled your thinking. You're starting to invent possibilities that have no basis in fact or common sense. You have to stop this, Pen.»

He suppressed the sharp reply that struggled to break free and looked off across the mountainside. They were wasting time, going nowhere, and it was his fault. What they were supposed to be doing was traveling to Taupo Rough to find Kermadec, so that he could reach the ruins of Stridegate and the island of the tanequil, gain possession of a limb from the tree, fashion it into a darkwand, return to Paranor, get through the Forbidding, and somehow rescue his aunt, Grianne Ohmsford, the Ard Rhys! Even without speaking the words aloud, he was left breathless—and left with a feeling of urgency for getting on with what he was supposed to do.

Yet here he was, doing none of it. Instead, he was insisting on rescuing Cinnaminson, and it was admittedly for selfish reasons. He looked up at the clear blue sky, then down at the foothills that banked and leveled to the shores of the Rabb. He felt a momentary stab of panic as he realized that Khyber was right in her analysis: hewas grasping at straws.

But he couldn't bear to think of leaving Cinnaminson in the hands of that spidery creature, not feeling as he did about her.

There has to be a way.

Why couldn't he think of what it was?

Why couldn't he think ofsomething?

Shouldn't his magic be able to help him? He had been chosen for this journey expressly because his magic would give him a way to communicate with the tanequil. If it would allow him to do that, shouldn't he be able to find a way to use it here? It had possibilities he had never dreamed of;the King of the Silver River had revealed as much. One of those possibilities ought to be available for use here. If he could think of it. If he could get past the feeling that his magic was small and insignificant, no matter what anyone said—spirit creature or human. If he could persuade himself that it was good for something more than drawing the interest of moor cats like Bandit and reading the danger signs in the flight of cliff birds. If he could just do that, he ought to be able to use it to help Cinnaminson.

He was looking for a place to restart the conversation with Khyber when Tagwen walked back out of the rocks, brushing off his hands and looking less owlish than earlier.

«You can't imagine what I just found," he said. Pen and Khyber exchanged a quizzical glance. «Broad–leaf rampion. Hardly ever find it in low country. Prefers higher elevations, cooler climates. No snow, mind you, but a hint of frost seems to favor it.»

Both the boy and the Elf girl stared at him. He looked quickly from one to the other. «Never heard of it? It's a plant. Not very big, but fibrous. It secretes a sticky resin from splits in its skin. You break off stalks, crush them up, fire the whole mess to release the resin, separate it from the plant material, mix it with wort moss and albus root, cook it all until it thickens, and you know what you get?»

He grinned through his beard with such glee that it was almost frightening. «Tar, my young friends. Very sticky tar.»

Do now they had a means, of sorts, of gaining an advantage over their enemy. If they could manage to lure it into a patch of that tar, everything it touched would stick to it, including the ground itself, and it would quickly become so bogged down with debris that it would have great difficulty functioning. Better still, if they could find a way to bring it into contact with something as immovable as a tree, it wouldn't be able to function at all.

They spent the remainder of the morning distilling resin from the plant and turning it into a small batch of tar. They were able to find the albus root and wort moss needed to make the mix, and they cooked it over a smokeless fire using an indented stone for a bowl. When it was ready, they formed it into a ball, allowed it to cool, and wrapped it in young broad leaves tied together with strips of leather. The tar smelled awful, and they had to consider the problem of disguising its presence as well as tricking the creature on theSkatelow into stepping into it.

«This won't work," Khyber declared, wrinkling her nose against the stench as the three of them stared down at the steaming pouch. 'The creature will spot this in a heartbeat and go right around it.»

Pen was inclined to agree, but he didn't say so. At least the leaf–wrap was holding together, although it didn't look any too secure.

«If it's distracted, it might not notice the smell," he said.

«There's not very much of it to work with, either," the Elven girl continued doubtfully. «Not enough to cover more than maybe two square feet, and that's stretching it. How are we going to get it to step into a space that small?»

«Why worry about it?» Tagwen asked, throwing up his hands. «We don't know how to find this thing anyway, so the matter of applying the tar unobtrusively and in sufficient amounts to render the creature helpless is of very little consequence!»

«We'll find it," Pen declared grimly.

They started walking north, the direction theSkatelow had flown. Pen reasoned that the creature knew Cinnaminson's talent was most effective in the dark. It probably preferred to hunt at night anyway, since that was the only time they had ever seen it. They had been keeping watch for theSkatelow since sunrise, but hadn't seen anything other than birds and clouds. Pen felt pretty certain that the airship wouldn't reappear until nightfall.

As they traveled, they discussed how they were going to lure their hunter into the tar once they found it and attracted its attention. There were all sorts of problems about accomplishing this. In order to get it into the tar, they would have to spread the tar around, then lead the creature to it and hope it stepped blindly in. It didn't seem too likely that this would happen, — the thing hunting them was smart enough to avoid such an obvious trap. More to the point, one of them was going to have to act as bait, and the only one who would do was Pen. But neither Khyber nor Tagwen would hear of that, so another way had to be found.

It was midafternoon, and they were high on the slopes leading up to the Charnals, when they finally began to put a workable plan together. By then they were beginning to think about food again, remembering how good the rabbit Pen had caught two days before had tasted and wishing they had saved a bit of it. They had water from the mountain streams and had found roots and berries to chew on, but none of it was as satisfying as that rabbit.

«We can build a fire," Khyber said. «That will attract attention from a long distance. The creature on the Skatelow won't miss it. But we won't be there. We'll bundle up some sticks and leaves to look like sleepers, but we'll be hiding back in the rocks.»

Pen nodded. «We need to find the right place, one where the creature will have to land in a certain spot and approach in a certain way. It has to seem to the creature that we think we are protected but really aren't. It has to think it's smarter than we are.»

«That shouldn't be too hard," Tagwen declared with a snort. «Itis smarter than we are.»

«An open space leading to a gap in the rocks would be ideal," Pen went on, ignoring him. «We can coat the ground and rock sides with the tar. Even if it just brushes up against it, that would help.» He looked over at Tagwen. «Does this stuff stay sticky when it gets cold?»

The Dwarf shook his head. «It stiffens up. We have to keep it warm. Frost is a problem, too. If it frosts, the tar will harden and lose its stickiness.»

There were so many variables in the plan that it was tough to keep them all straight, and Pen was growing increasingly worried that he was going to miss at least one of them. But there was nothing he could do about it except to continue talking the scheme over with Khyber and Tagwen, hoping that, together, they could keep everything straight.

The afternoon slipped away, and the shadows were beginning to lengthen when Khyber suddenly gripped Pen's arm and said, «There! That's what we're looking for.»

She was pointing across a sparsely wooded valley to a meadow that fronted a heavy cluster of rocks leading up into the mountains. The rocks were threaded by a tangle of passages that gave the cluster the look of a complicated maze. The maze lifted toward the base of a cliff face that dropped sharply for several hundred feet from a high plateau.

«You're right," Pen agreed. «Let's have a closer look before it gets dark.»

They went down through the valley, into the trees, and along a series of ravines and gullies that rains and snowmelt had carved into the slope, watching the sun slide steadily lower on the horizon. East, the sky was already dark behind the mountains, and a three–quarter moon was on the rise. Night birds were winging through the growing gloom, and night sounds were beginning to surface. A wind had picked up, bitter and chill as it blew down out of the higher elevations.

They were almost through the trees when Pen drew up short and pointed back the way they had come.

«Did you see something move just then?» he asked.

The Dwarf and the girl peered through the dark wall of trunks and the pooling shadows. «I didn't see anything," Khyber said.

Tagwen shook his head as well. «Shadows, maybe. The wind.»

Pen nodded. «Maybe.»

They went on quickly and were out of the trees and across the meadow in moments, heading for the rocks. Pen saw at once that it was exactly what they had hoped to find. The meadow sloped gently upward into a jumble of boulders too high and too deep to see over. There were passages leading into the rocks, but most of them ended within a dozen yards. Only one led all the way through, traversing small clearings in which sparse stands of evergreens and scrub blocked clear passage. It was possible to get through, but not without maneuvering over and around various obstacles and making the correct choices from among the narrow defiles. Best of all, one of the choices led to an outcropping at the edge of the woods they had just come through—and it was elevated enough to allow them to see over the rim of the maze to the meadow below.

«We build our fire in one of these clearings, make our sleeping dummies, and hide out here.» Pen had it all worked out. «An airship can spot our fire if she comes anywhere within miles, but we can spot the airship, too. We can tell if she's theSkatelow. We can see her land, we can watch what happens. Once the creature comes into the rocks, we slip down off the outcropping, skirt the trees, and come at the ship from outside. It's perfect.»

Neither the girl nor the Dwarf cared to comment on that bold declaration, so it was left hanging in the stillness of the twilight, where, even to Pen, it sounded a bit ridiculous.

I hey went back through the maze to a clearing where the opening from the meadow was so narrow it was necessary to turn sideways to squeeze through. Pen looked around speculatively, then found what he was looking for. On the other side of the clearing, deeper in, was a rocky alcove where someone could hide and watch the opening.

«One of us will hide here," he said, facing them. «When our friend from theSkatelow comes through that opening, the tar gets thrown at it. The leaves will split on impact, so the tar will go all over. It will take the creature a moment or two at least to figure out what happened. By then, we'll be heading for the airship.»

Tagwen actually laughed. «That is a terrible plan, young Pender–rin. I suppose you believe that you should be the one who throws the tar, don't you?»

«Tagwen has a point," Khyber agreed quickly. «Your plan won't work.»

Pen glowered at her. «Why not? What's wrong with it?»

The Elven girl held his angry gaze. «In the first place, we have already established that you are the one individual who is indispensable to the success of the search for the Ard Rhys. So you can't be put at risk. In the second place, you are the only one who can fly the airship. So you have to get aboard if we're to fly out of here. In the third place, we still don't know what this thing is. We don't know if it's human or not. We don't know if it has the use of magic. That's too many variables for you to deal with. I'm the one who has the Elf–stones. I also have a modicum of magic I can call upon if I need to. I'm faster than you are on foot. I'm expendable. I have to be the one who confronts it.»

«If you miss," Tagwen said darkly, «you had better be fast indeed.»

«All the more reason why you and Pen have to be moving toward theSkatelow the moment it enters the rocks. You have to be airborne before it can recover and decide it has been tricked, whatever the result of my efforts. If it gets back through that maze and out into the meadow before you board and cut the lines, we're dead.»

There was a long silence as they considered the chances of this happening. Pen shook his head «What if it brings Cinnaminson into the rocks with it?»

Khyber stared at him without answering. She didn't need to tell him what he already knew.

«I don't like it," Tagwen growled. «I don't like any of it. But the matter was decided.