Songreaver (33 page)

Suddenly, the sound of its hooves fell
silent, and Garrett stopped running to look upward at the underside
of the black steps above.

"Do you think he gave up?" he said.

The Girl in Brown looked at him, a desperate
hope in her eyes.

Then they saw a white shape launch out into
the air from the stairs above, and the white goat fluttered down
toward them on membranous wings that stretched between two spiny
protrusions, jutting from its back. It let out a tortured bleat as
it circled around and glided down to land with a glassy
click-clack
on the stairs below them.

"Oh, that's not fair!" the Girl in Brown
shouted.

The Guardian's hooves clicked on the black
glass as it mounted the steps upward toward them, driving them back
the way they had come.

"Marla, he's between us!" Garrett
shouted.

Garrett's weary legs threatened to give out
beneath him, as he climbed the steps to escape the advancing
Guardian.

"There!" the Girl in Brown shouted, and she
pointed down at another walkway below them.

Garrett did not hesitate this time but
jumped, landing hard on the cold black glass. The Girl in Brown
landed beside him and hauled him to his feet.

They made it down three more flights of steps
before the Guardian glided down to cut off their descent once
more.

"I really... wanna... punch him... in the...
nose," Garrett snarled as the Girl in Brown dragged him back up the
stairs.

"Bad idea," she said.

"Yeah... try magic?" he gasped.

"Anything's worth a try," she agreed.

Garrett reached into his pack and pulled out
a flask of essence. He turned to face the goat creature as it
climbed the stairs toward him.

"I'm tired of running from you!" he shouted.
Garrett thrust the canister above his head and pointed the fingers
of his right hand toward the coal-black eyes of the demon.

"
Veiarnna te noulleanna!
" he shouted,
and a burst of rainbow flame sizzled through the mist toward the
white goat.

The Guardian shrieked out an angry bleat and
pushed through the prismatic flames, undaunted.

Garrett said something that Uncle would have
grounded him for, and turned to run again.

Suddenly, a gray blur appeared on the stairs
behind the white goat, and it cried out in pain as Marla lashed her
belt across its back. It turned to face her, lunging forward with
its withered forelimbs outstretched. Marla danced clear of its
grasp, giving ground as it advanced on her in turn.

"Jump down again?" the Girl in Brown
whispered in Garrett's ear.

He gave her a fierce nod, and they hurried to
find a safe spot from which to leap.

They landed right behind Marla as she lead
the creature downward along the spiral.

"Hi," Garrett gasped.

Marla grinned at him.

"Keep moving," the Girl in Brown said.

"I don't know how much more of this I can
take," Garrett wheezed.

"It's only a little further now," Marla
promised.

"You really should get more exercise,
Garrett," the Girl in Brown said, "You're spending too much time in
the library these days."

Marla raised an eyebrow and gave her a hard
look.

"Nevermind," the girl whispered.

They descended three more flights of stairs
when they came to the door that Marla indicated.

"It's locked," Marla shouted, "from the
inside!"

Garrett felt for his tools, snatching the
hammer from his belt, but realizing that his chisel was lost. He
stripped off his backpack and began frantically rummaging through
it for something else to use.

"Let me try," the Girl in Brown said,
reaching into her belt pouch and pulling out a long, slender metal
ribbon with a hook on one end. She stepped up to the doors of the
tomb and slipped the metal tool between the crack in the center of
the obsidian doors.

Garrett and Marla watched the stairs, growing
more anxious by the moment as the
click-clack
of the
Guardian’s hooves grew louder.

The Girl in Brown grunted with effort as she
worked the slender bar of metal between the two doors. "It's too
heavy," she gasped, "Must be a beam of some sort."

Garrett looked at Marla, their eyes wide. The
clicking grew louder still as the white goat approached.

"Stand back!" Marla cried.

The Girl in Brown had just enough time to
step out of the way as Marla shouldered hard into the door with
blinding speed. The doors shook, throwing off a cloud of dust, but
did not yield to the vampire girl's charge. She stood there,
slumped against the doors, with a very stunned look on her
face.

"Ouch," Marla said.

Garrett's brain raced, searching for an
answer, but paralyzed with fear of the white demon who even now
staggered into view around the curve of the stairs. "I don't know
what to do," he said, "I'm sorry... I..."

Just then they heard the sound of Warren's
voice calling from somewhere high above. "Garrett! Are you in
here?"

"Warren!" Garrett shouted, "We're down
here!"

"On the stairs?"

"Yeah," he called, "but don't come down!
There's a demon here, and magic doesn't work on him!"

"What?" Warren yelled.

"A demon! Get out of here! Don't come down
the stairs!" Garrett screamed.

"Come down the stairs?"

"No!" Garrett cried, then sputtered with
frustration, "Warren, just leave!"

The hooting cackles of three ghouls echoed
through the tomb shaft.

"Not a chance!" Warren shouted, "Sit tight,
Garrett! We're coming!"

The Guardian cocked one of its long ears and
then turned to hobble back up the stairs, disappearing from
view.

"Oh, no," Garrett moaned.

"They'll try to fight it," the Girl in Brown
said.

"I'll go to them," Marla said, "They have to
be warned."

Garrett nodded, but Marla was already gone,
leaping up to catch the edge of the stairway above and pull herself
up. Garrett caught a glimpse of a dark blur headed upward around
the spiral toward the unsuspecting ghouls.

"They bought us some time," the Girl in Brown
said.

"Yeah... any ideas?" Garrett said.

The Girl in Brown ran her fingers through her
hair and sighed. "Somebody didn't want that door open again," she
said, "They must have rigged it to seal itself from within once
they buried the king inside."

Garrett ran his fingers along the edge where
the doors met the arched obsidian frame. "The hinges must be inside
too," he said, "and no gap beneath."

"We're here to loot all your dead guys,
demon!" Diggs shouted from somewhere above. A verdant flash of
light filled the shaft shortly thereafter.

"Diggs is into the essence," Garrett sighed.
He remembered how much the ghoul liked the flame spell, especially
the hot version. He stopped breathing for a second as a thought
struck him.

Garrett reached into his pack and pulled out
the canister he had used to cast the flame spell on the Guardian.
The metal was still cool to the touch from the casting of the
spell. He laughed.

"What is it?" the Girl in Brown asked.

"Essence gets really cold when you use it...
as it goes away," he said, pulling out the other canister as well,
"It kinda sucks all the heat out of everything around it as it
goes." He looked at the obsidian doors again and then pulled the
water skin from his backpack as well.

"So... what?" the girl asked.

"So, my uncle told me once how people used to
dig mines, before they had metal tools," Garrett said, "They would
build a big fire next to the rock and, once it got really hot, they
would throw cold water on it. Even the hardest stone would crack
apart when the water hit it." He tucked one of the canisters under
his arm and handed the waterskin to the Girl in Brown.

"What do I do with this?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. "All right," he
said, working the nozzle open on the half-full canister in his
hands, "Uh... uncork that water and pour half of it out."

She pulled the stopper out of the waterskin
and took a long drink before emptying half of the water over the
side of the platform. She held out the partially emptied skin
toward Garrett.

He tilted the essence flask and carefully
dribbled the glowing green ooze into the mouth of the waterskin.
When he was done, he tossed the empty flask over the edge and took
the skin from her. Corking it again, Garrett shook it up, mixing
the water and essence together. He handed it back to her.

"So, when I tell you, I want you to pour the
water out onto the door," he said, "and try to get as much into the
center crack as you can."

"All right," the Girl in Brown said, her eyes
narrowed.

"For now, uh... just... stand back a little,"
Garrett said.

The Girl in Brown stepped back, holding the
waterskin at the ready and eyeing the stairs nervously. More
flashes of green light came from above, but there was no sign of
the Guardian.

Garrett held the full essence canister in his
left hand and reached out with the fingers of his right, almost
touching the black doors of the Songreaver's tomb. He whispered the
words to the spell that Lampwicke had taught them, focusing his
intent on the very center where the two doors met.

A jet of white-hot flame shot from his
fingers, lancing through the crack in the center of the doors. He
held it there, channeling the arcane energy of the essence into a
single point of unimaginable heat. His left hand began to ache with
cold as the essence drained from his flask, and the glassy stone in
the center of the door began to glow a dull red.

Then the canister felt suddenly light, and
the flame flickered out.

"Now!" Garrett cried.

The Girl in Brown lifted the waterskin,
pressing its mouth against the center of the door, as high as she
could reach above the point where Garrett's fire had burned. The
glowing water and essence mixture poured down along the seam,
bursting into steam where it touched the red-hot glass.

The Girl in Brown screamed and turned her
face away as a cloud of steam billowed out, but Garrett dropped his
canister and thrust the palm of his left hand against the rapidly
cooling glass.

"
Ghe'haalan jheghaaro the'Uhla
," he
shouted, and the steam turned instantly to a cloud of jade green
butterflies. A shocking retort sounded from the door, and the water
froze suddenly into glittering ice as the essence within it
released the power of its magic. Large cracks spiderwebbed out from
the center of the door as Garrett snatched his scalded hand back
from its shattered surface.

The Girl in Brown lifted her foot and kicked
hard, directly in the center of the doors, and they exploded open
with a splintering crash as the obsidian bolt within disintegrated
into a thousand tiny shards.

A shrieking bleat erupted from somewhere high
above them, and the Girl in Brown seized Garrett by the collar and
shoved him inside the tomb.

"We're inside!" Garrett shouted, as the Girl
in Brown slammed the doors closed behind them, shielding them from
the Guardian's wrath.

Garrett reached into his pack to retrieve a
torch with his right hand. His left hand felt stiff and throbbed
with heat where he had touched the hot glass of the door. The torch
flared to life at his command, and he saw that they stood inside a
small antechamber between the outer doors and a stone wall with a
single door of white marble. Carved into the surface of the door
were the figures of a man and a woman embracing one another. The
man wore mail armor and a short beard. The top of the woman's head
reached only to the man's broad shoulders and her features were
undeniably elvish. The man looked down at her with an expression of
blissful adoration, and she gazed back with a sad sweet smile.

"Let me look at that," the Girl in Brown
said, taking Garrett's injured hand in her own.

He looked down at his hand in the witchfire
light and sucked air through his teeth. It was going to
blister.

The Girl in Brown undid the toggle fastener
on one of her belt pouches and retrieved a small jar of balm and a
roll of bandages. She smeared the white cream over the reddened
flesh of his palm and then bound it gently with the soft, stretchy
bandages.

"Spider silk," she said, "It makes great
dressings... only took me about fifty years to figure out how to
weave the stuff."

Garrett smiled at her. "Thanks," he said.

"Thanks for getting that door open," she
said.

Garrett nodded, turning his attention back to
the inner door.

"I suppose the elvish tomb wasn't cheerful
enough for Brahnek's tastes, so he added a little extra to it," the
Girl in Brown said.

"You mean the elves made this place?" Garrett
said, "I thought elves kinda lived forever, unless somebody killed
them."

"They did... until the moon fell out of the
sky," she said, "After that, the Masters went mad, and everything
started to change. It became more and more common for elves to lose
hope and
fade
."

"Like Lampwicke?" Garrett asked, then he
added, "You know who Lampwicke is, right?"

She laughed. "Yes, Garrett, I've talked to
her before... though she doesn't remember it."

Garrett shook his head. "This is really
strange for me... having a friend that I won't remember the next
time I see her."

"But you
do
remember... a little," she
said.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, "It's never
happened before... I think I like it."

Garrett smiled again.

"We'd better get to work on this door," she
said, putting away the unused bandages.

"Yeah," he said.

Garrett stood before the white door, running
his hand along the edges, trying to find a latch or hinge of some
sort. "I'm not sure how you open it," he said.