Straken (42 page)

Fool!

Hands grasped his head and held it firmly in place. The hands were scaly and clawed, and he shuddered at their touch. A face bent close, a face like none he had ever seen.

“Hold still,” the creature whispered. “Breathe deeply, and it will all go much easier for you.”

It leaned forward slowly, still holding Sen Dunsidan’s head firmly in place. The clawed fingers reached into the corners of his mouth and pried it open. Sen Dunsidan tried again to scream and again failed. The creature’s face was dissolving as it lowered toward his own, and he felt something bitter and sharp fill his mouth and worm its way down his throat. It was like inhaling a steaming mist thick with the taste of iron and sulfur. He gagged, but the mist continued down his throat and into his body, working its way all through him.

When the pain started, he began to shriek soundlessly, over and over again. His body heaved and bucked and twisted in a futile effort to gain relief. Nothing helped. The invasion continued until the pain became unbearable.

He never knew if his heart or his sanity gave out first, but either way, it was the end of him.

I
t was well after sunset, the sky beginning to fill with stars, a quarter moon rising in the east and the lights of the city of Arishaig glittering in the distance, when the Prime Minister reached the airfield. Accompanied by his personal guard and a wagon with its bed covered in a canvas, he arrived in his carriage. The Captain of the
Zolomach
was waiting for him, his airship ready and his crew trained as ordered to prevent against attacks on the vessel’s steering. All that was needed was the order to depart.

The Prime Minister strode over wordlessly, wrapped and hooded in a heavy travel cloak, his face concealed in shadow.

The Captain came to attention and saluted. “My lord.”

“Ready, Captain?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“The weapon is in the wagon. Carry it aboard and set it in place. Make sure it is properly tightened down and the swivel mechanism working as it should. Take as much time as you need. Our departure is at dawn. Any questions?”

His guards were already unloading the weapon from the wagon bed and setting it carefully on the ground. “No questions, my lord,” the Captain replied. “We will be ready at dawn.” He paused. “You will be sailing with us?”

“I will.”

“Engineer Orek?”

“Engineer Orek will not be coming back with us. He met with an accident. A fire. His workroom and all of his projects and plans were destroyed. A terrible loss. He was careless, and it cost him dearly. A good lesson for us all. Let’s remember it when we set sail tomorrow. We can’t afford any mistakes on the Prekkendorran.”

“No, Prime Minister, of course.” The Captain didn’t like the way the other’s eyes glinted from within the hood. “There will be no mistakes.”

“I will hold you to your word,” the Moric advised from within the skin of Sen Dunsidan, and turned away.

S
he 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 sharp
snick
, 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 other’s 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.

B
ek 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 …”