Witch Wraith

Twenty-seven

Their journey to reach the huge pit that occupied the center of the valley required Redden Ohmsford and his companions to proceed much more slowly than they wanted to. Huge cracks split the floor, some of them hidden by brush and rock until they were right on top of them. In daylight—or as much daylight as there ever was within the Forbidding—it would have been an acceptable risk. But with nightfall coming on and the already weakened light rapidly giving way to treacherous shadows, it became especially dangerous.

At the same time, none of them wanted to be caught out in the open after darkness where they would be exposed and vulnerable to predators.

If not for Tesla Dart, the boy and the shape-shifter would have been hopelessly handicapped by their unfamiliarity with the terrain and their inability to cover the distance demanded of them in time. But the Ulk Bog had no trouble finding her way even in the closing dark and kept them moving steadily across the valley floor toward their goal, urging them on with hisses and grunts and anxious movements of her head, all the while warning of unseen dangers and potential pitfalls. She scampered and darted as if possessed, a mirror image of the Chzyk Lada, who by now only appeared in flashes of muted color when coming back to speak with his mistress. The odd procession snaked its way across the blasted earth in short, choppy bursts and with constant shifts of direction, led mostly by the small lizard.

“It would help if we were Chzyks, too,” Oriantha observed at one point.

It was almost completely dark when they reached the edge of the pit, the skies overcast with high clouds and low-hanging layers of mist, the air dry and murky within the vast cup of the valley’s walls. On reaching their goal, Tesla brought them to a halt and pulled them close.

“Now we choose. Go down in dark or wait for light. Sleep until sun or use torch.”

“Which do you think?” Oriantha asked.

The Ulk Bog scrunched up her feral face. “Dangerous in dark. Many steps, deep down. Then tunnel and cavern where magic kept. Hard to see with only torch.” She shrugged. “But hard to see with only torch in daylight, too. Not so different. No sun in cavern.”

“Helpful,” Redden observed.

“So it doesn’t matter?” Oriantha pressed.

Tesla Dart thought about it. “Doesn’t.”

“Then we should go now. The quicker we go down there, the sooner we get back out. Besides, it’s dangerous everywhere in this country.”

She glanced at Redden, who immediately nodded. He was anxious to know if there really was anything of use down in that pit. Waiting until morning would be maddening. “We should go now,” he agreed.

So they moved ahead to the lip of the black hole, where they found a series of rough stairs leading down to a rock shelf some fifty feet below them. Beyond, the darkness was so thick and impenetrable there was nothing to be seen.

“Lada waits here,” Tesla Dart announced. “Keeps watch for us.”

Redden looked around doubtfully. “How will Lada find us if he needs to give warning?”

The Ulk Bog grinned, showing all her teeth. “Chzyks see in dark as well as in light. No difference for him.”

So with the little creature scurrying off into the rocks, the three started down the broad steps to the shelf. Once there, Tesla moved over to a deep niche in the rock wall and produced torches. She lit the first using sparks from flint and stone, handing the other two to her companions after lighting them as well. Then she walked them over to the edge of the platform where a very narrow, uneven set of stone steps carved into the rock walls wound downward into the blackness.

Tesla Dart gave them a look, gestured at the steps, and shook her head admonishingly. “We go very slow. Steps very slick. Fall very long way if you slip.”

The boy and the shape-shifter exchanged a brief glance. That was three uses of very in about a dozen words. They got the point. One mistake and you were dead.

They began their descent. Tesla Dart led the way, with Redden right behind and Oriantha bringing up the rear. They went slowly, just as the Ulk Bog has said they should, and it became apparent right away that haste on these stairs would be deadly. Twice in the first hundred steps the boy felt his feet skid and almost go out from under him. The chiseled-out stone was ridged and broken and dangerously uneven. Dampness coated the surface of the rock. There were no railings and no handholds should you start to fall. The steps themselves were less than two feet wide in most places and no more than three anywhere. Perversely, Redden found himself wondering what would happen if someone going down met someone coming up. He guessed that had probably never happened, but he couldn’t help picturing the dilemma it would present.

They continued downward for what seemed an eternity. Redden lost track of how long, but he guessed it was over an hour. They traversed hundreds of steps, maybe thousands—a torturously slow process that challenged their concentration and balance every step of the way. Tesla Dart let them stop and rest at regular intervals, although not as often as the boy would have liked.

In truth, his imprisonment had eroded his powers of concentration along with his strength. Although a measure of emotional resilience had been restored with his freedom, and the level of his excitement at the thought of recovering the lost Elfstones fed additional adrenaline through his body, he was still not in the condition he had been before entering the Forbidding. Sheer force of will kept him upright and on the treacherous steps, but his agility was suspect and his concentration weak. He kept his right shoulder pressed against the rock wall, rubbing along the roughened surface to reassure himself that he was still connected to something solid.

Ahead of him, Tesla Dart muttered and whistled soft incomprehensible sounds that apparently served a purpose, although he couldn’t think what it was. Behind him, Oriantha was a soundless ghost, a presence no stronger than his own shadow. He had to force himself not to look around and make sure she was still there. He had to keep reminding himself of what she was and what that allowed her to do. But it was still unnerving.

The stairs ended in a tunnel that curved away from the pit and downward ever deeper into the earth. The cavern had the look of a passageway that had been hollowed out over a long period of time, its surfaces rugged but its broad circumference even and unchanging. It called to mind a giant wormhole tunneled through tons of rock, but Redden could not imagine the size of the creature that would have made it.

Farther on, at a juncture of tunnels and caverns that opened off a central chamber thick with stalactites and stalagmites, their stone tips jutting up and pointing down in vast clusters, they found another set of narrow stairs carved out of the rock and began another descent. The sense of depth was suffocating, and Redden had to fight not to give in to a growing panic. He felt imprisoned in the same way he had while in the hands of the Straken Lord, and the old feelings of hopelessness were threading their way through him with steady insistence.

Once he stopped altogether and leaned back against the wall, torch sagging in his hand, eyes closing against a sudden onslaught of fear.

“What is it?” Oriantha asked at once. She put her chiseled face right next to his and stared into his eyes. “Tell me.”

“I’m feeling trapped in here.”

He could barely speak the words. Everything was pressing down on him. The air had grown so cold, he was shivering.

Oriantha took off her cloak and wrapped it around him, fastening it securely. “Wear this. Stay fixed on what you are doing. Don’t think about anything but that.”

“You’ll be cold,” he said.

“The cold doesn’t bother me.” She turned him back around by the shoulders and faced him toward Tesla Dart, who was waiting several steps below. “Just keep walking.”

Their descent ended when the tunnel flattened out and continued on in a lateral direction, winding ahead through the darkness. The air tasted of metal. Water dripped from the low ceiling and collected in depressions in the rock floor; they had to wade through pools that stretched from wall to wall. Redden did what Oriantha had told him, focusing on what they had come to do to avoid dwelling on his doubts and fears. He thought of the Elfstones and of how they might look when he found them. He thought of returning with them to the Four Lands and then at last going home.

He thought of Railing. He wondered how his brother was. He wondered, to his shame and horror, if he was still alive.

At last they arrived at a final chamber—another huge cavern that opened onto a vast store of darkness. Tesla Dart brought them to a halt and held up her torch. In the flicker of its light something huge and still caught their attention, and all three torches shifted at once.

It was a creature of some kind, massive and unmoving.

“A Graumth,” the Ulk Bog advised. “Dead.”

She moved them closer, taking them across the cavern floor to their left to where a huge worm-like creature lay curled up against one wall. Chains held it fast, but its unmoving bulk alone was terrifying. Redden drew up short, but as Tesla kept going.

“Are you sure it’s dead?” he whispered.

She turned and nodded. “Many years dead. So long it becomes hard.”

“Hard?”

“Hard. Like rock. Empty shell.”

Petrified. Preserved by nature’s elements. “What’s it doing here?”

“Used to make tunnels. Rock eater burrows out space for magic things. Long time ago. Very long.”

“Where did this magic come from?” Oriantha asked.

“Comes when Jarka Ruus imprisoned. Comes with them when they are exiled, gathered up, put down here. Happens quick.” She snapped her fingers. “Everyone, all at once.”

Redden saw it then. When the first Ellcrys was created and the Forbidding went up, the exodus of the Darkling creatures didn’t happen slowly. It happened all at once. Whatever they were doing, wherever they were found, those against whom the magic was directed were snatched up and carried away. It stood to reason that some of them would be in possession of magic when that happened. Aleia Omarosian’s Darkling boy must have been one of them. He must have had the container with the Elfstones in hand when the Forbidding had imprisoned him.

He took a moment to think about the consequences of the Forbidding’s creation. It would have been a swift, complete resolution of the war between the two factions—the implementation of a magic so powerful that any resistance was simply swept away. But it must have happened on a radical scale; entire species must have disappeared at once. There would have been no distinguishing between those creatures thought good or bad on an individual basis. No culling would have been involved; no objective measures would have been employed. It would have been decided on a species-by-species basis only, and those failing to measure up would have been extinguished. Aleia Omarosian’s Darkling boy would have suffered such a fate, caught up in the cleansing because of what he was, no matter if his intentions were evil or simply misguided.

Redden was horrified, imagining what that must have been like. He had never thought of the imprisoning in those terms. For him, as for so many, it had been an event where good had triumphed over evil in a time when the consequences would have been unimaginable if things had gone the other way. But it was much more than that. It was a severing of species without regard to guilt or innocence, without determination of purpose or intent. Some were saved, some were not. Who had made that determination? Who had decided who would stay in his world and who would be locked away in this one?

Oriantha was looking at him. “Are you all right?”

He nodded. But he wasn’t all right. Not by any measurable sense of the word.

“They stored magic for Faerie down here because they were afraid of it?” he asked, trying to shift his thinking away from any further consequences of the Forbidding’s creation. “Is that what happened, all those years ago?

Tesla Dart shrugged. “Magic not good. Belongs to those who put us here. Elves and such. Taken away by leaders and stored. No one wants it.”

Because they couldn’t make use of it. Because they lacked the ability to summon it. Because it was here by chance, and probably served as an unpleasant reminder of what had been done to them, so they stuck it away where it wouldn’t be seen. Where it wouldn’t offend by its mere presence. How would that have come about? What were things like in the beginning of the Forbidding, in its early days after everyone realized what had happened to them?

Anarchy. Chaos. Madness.

“Show us the Elfstones,” Oriantha ordered the Ulk Bog.

Tesla Dart hissed at her, then turned and beckoned them across the chamber. Redden and the shape-shifter followed, staying well clear of the chained worm. Dead or not, they had no interest in getting any closer to it than they had to. Casting about in the darkness of the huge cavern with sweeps of their torches, they kept close watch for other creatures.

It took them only a few minutes to get beyond the dead Graumth to an alcove set into the far side of the chamber—a deep niche in which all manner of strange implements were revealed. There were globes of metal and glass, staves intricately carved of wood and fashioned with silver tips, books of all sizes and shapes, iron boxes, flags emblazoned with emblems unrecognizable to the trio, weapons of all sizes and shapes, intricately shaped pieces of jewelry, and even a cauldron. Silk cloaks and scarves draped boxes and shelves on which many of the artifacts rested. A fine coating of rock dust covered everything. Motes hung in the air, swirling in an invisible breeze come from an unknown source.

Redden started forward, but Tesla Dart quickly put a hand out to stop him. “Traps,” she said.

Motioning for both the boy and Oriantha to stay where they were, she walked to one side of the wall and did something to the rock. After that, she seemed to count off steps toward the center before passing into the niche. Once there, she moved to the other side of the niche to release a series of trip wires. Finally, she retrieved a jar set close to the front of the opening, carried it over to a box set to one side, opened the jar, and set it inside the box.

Instantly dozens of tiny snakes emerged from the darkness, slithering quickly to reach the box and crawl inside.

The Ulk Bog spent a few moments more checking the darker places in the storage space, running hands over the surface of the walls and floor before beckoning them inside.

“Safe now,” she said. “Bad things put away. Traps disabled. You see?” She pointed to the box with the small snakes. “Poison. One bite?” She made a choking motion. “Dead fast.”

“You got all of them in that box?” Oriantha said. “You didn’t miss any?”

“All in box. Come here. Look.”

Tesla Dart took them over to a collection of boxes, cloths draped casually over a few of them. She went behind the pile, reached down beneath a heavy cloak, and pulled out a small metal box with an insignia stamped into it. The image was of crossed blades laid over a field of wheat with a bird that looked like a hawk circling overhead.

She handed it to Redden. “Stones inside. Pretty colors.” She cocked her head. “What do they do?”

Redden took the box from her, holding it out so that he could study it. “I don’t know. No one does.”

He experienced an emotional tightening in his chest. The missing Elfstones, lost for all these centuries, were now in his hands. He couldn’t quite believe it. Finding them now was so far removed from anything he had imagined possible that he was afraid to look inside for fear it was all a mistake.

He glanced at Oriantha and shook his head. “I don’t know if I can bear to open it.”

She smiled encouragingly. “You can. Go ahead.”

Still, he hesitated. This was what had brought the entire company into the Forbidding in the first place—what had led them to their destruction, what had swept most of them away and changed the lives of the rest forever. There had been no reason for weeks now to think that finding the Elfstones was any sort of possibility. In his own mind, the quest had been abandoned after the destruction of the Druid order.

Now here he was with the box that might contain the precious talismans in hand, and it was all he could do to make himself believe that it was real.

He knelt, balancing the metal box on one knee, and released the catch securing it. Slowly, he raised the lid and peered inside.

Soft black cloth layered the bottom of the box. Into it had been fashioned five molded depressions. Four contained sets of gemstones, each a different color—crimson, emerald, saffron, and white.

The last depression was empty.

Redden had never seen the blue Elfstones, but he knew instinctively they had come from the empty space, and these other stones were the ones that had been missing all these years. He stared down at them, studying the smooth facets and even, geometrical shapes. Save for their colors, all were exact duplicates. Even in the gloom and the swirl of rock dust, they glittered with brilliant insistence.

He looked up at Oriantha and Tesla Dart. “We’ve found them!”

Her companions crowded close, peering into the box, taking in the beauty of the gemstones. After a moment, Oriantha asked quietly, “Is that a piece of paper tucked underneath the edge of the cloth?”

She pointed to where something white poked out from the gathered velvet just above the nestled crimson stones. Redden bent close. She was right; something was there. He reached in and extracted a folded piece of paper, carefully opening it. There was writing, but he couldn’t make out what it said. It was in a form he had never seen before. He guessed it might be as ancient as the stones themselves—a language lost in the passage of time, abandoned as the world changed. The things of Faerie had mostly been forgotten over the centuries because so much of the past had been lost.

Oriantha took a look, as well, but shook her head. “I can’t read it, either.”

Redden started to put the paper back in the box, then changed his mind and slipped it into his pocket instead. He looked down at the Elfstones. “Should we see what they do?” he asked, suddenly eager to know.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, now that we’ve found them, shouldn’t we discover their powers? What if their magic could carry us back into the Four Lands with nothing more than a wish? Maybe it could let us fly? Don’t you want to know?”

But Oriantha shook her head. “You need an Elf to test them, Redden. A full-blooded Elf, if you want to be sure. You know the history.”

He did. Anyone other than a pureblood Elf risked injury or even death by attempting to make use of Elfstone magic. It was a part of the Ohmsford legacy, written down during the time of Wil Ohmsford, when he dared to use the seeking-Stones to save the life of Amberle Elessedil, the King’s daughter, so she could become the new Ellcrys. He had chosen to ignore the danger posed to someone who was of mixed Elven–human blood. As result, his body had been altered by the power of the magic, generating within him the seeds for the birth of the wishsong—a magic he had passed down to his children, Brin and Jair Ohmsford, and which had subsequently been discovered in other Ohmsford descendants ever since, including most recently Redden and Railing.

“We should go,” Tesla Dart said to them. She was looking about now, hopping from foot to foot. “Past time. Still dangerous here.”

Redden looked up from the box, realizing he had lost all track of time while he was admiring his find. He closed the lid and secured the catch. “Do we go back out tonight or wait for morning?”

“Not wait,” the Ulk Bog answered at once. She looked suddenly skittish, uneasy. “Takes time to climb back up. Morning light is close by then.”

They started back across the chamber and were almost to the passageway that had brought them in when a flash of movement appeared in the gloom and Lada shot into view. Tesla Dart bent down to greet the Chzyk, and the two chattered back and forth for brief moments before the Ulk Bog sprang up again.

“Tarwick comes! Has tracked us!” Her face was taut. “Comes down into this place. Traps us here!”

There was real fear in her dark eyes. “He brings Furies!”