Voyage of the Fox Rider (67 page)
Jinnarin sighed. “You’re probably right, Aylis. It’s just that we’ve come such a long way to find Farrix, and now that we’ve done so…well, I just want him back.”
“I know, Jinnarin. I know. And given that Fortune turns her smiling face our way, we will have him with us shortly.”
Jinnarin looked up and about at the room. “This light, Aylis, is there some way we can at least dampen it?”
“My father can, of that I am certain.”
“Well and good then, for I have some candles.” Jinnarin fished through one of the packs Rux had borne and drew out three tapers, each one nearly as tall as she.
Aylis gestured at the floor beside the altar. “When my father gets back and we begin, I will sit down here. You sit beside Farrix and when he starts to dream, signal me.”
As Aylis looked for a smooth place, of a sudden she cocked her head this way and that and stared at the roughly adzed crystal. Then she glanced up at the walls. “Hmm. Jinnarin, when I walked the sending with Ontah, we found ourselves flanking you in a fine crystal castle. But then the dream changed, the walls of the chamber becoming less finished, the floor rougher, as if we were being drawn into another dream. I note that here the floor is rough, the walls unfinished.”
Jinnarin’s face fell as she thought of Ontah—of White Owl—who had been killed by the very same dream they would perhaps walk once again, the Pysk remembering the look of terror frozen upon the slain elder’s face. She shook her head to dispel the horrid vision, and then looked about the room and finally at Aylis. “Yes, the walls and floor are rough, unfinished.” Then Jinnarin blenched. “It changed as the dreadful fear came upon us. What does it mean, Aylis?”
Aylis took a deep breath and then let it out. “I think it’s just one more indication that the sending comes from here.”
“From Farrix,” said Jinnarin.
Aylis looked at the enspelled sleeper. “Aye, from Farrix.”
The Pysk set her bow and quiver of arrows at Farrix’s side. Taking a deep breath she said, “Well, come what may, I’m ready.”
“So am I,” said Aylis.
A time passed, and Alamar at last came back into the temple, Aravan and Bokar with him.
“Nothing,” said the eld Mage. “No doors, panels, or anything else hidden by a casting.”
“Your warriors yet tap the walls,” said Aravan to Bokar, gesturing, “both back there and toward the quay. Mayhap they will find a hidden door.”
“Unlikely, Captain,” responded Bokar. “If their crafting is at all worthy, we will find nought. Even so,
we are looking for seams and splits, cracked crystals, hollow soundings—anything that would reveal a door, a hidden hall.”
Alamar strode ‘round the crystal chamber, a look of concentration on his face. At last he called out, “Nothing here as well, Bokar. You can stop worrying about a secret Troll hole.”
Bokar shook his head and gritted, “You jape me, Mage Alamar. Yet Trolls are nothing to gibe about. They are a terrible foe, their skins like stone, turning blades aside. Not even a crossbow bolt will penetrate, except in the eye or ear, and perhaps the throat, and that a shot guided by Fortune’s hand. And twenty-eight of such”—Bokar stabbed a finger in the direction of the Troll quarters—“would squash us like beetles under a heel.”
“Faugh!” Alamar dismissed the threat with a wave of his hand as he hobbled down toward the central dais. “Any Trolls come along, well, you just leave them to me.”
“Father,” Aylis said sharply, “Bokar is right. That many Trolls would be nearly unstoppable. I have not the training to thwart them, and although you do, you must remember your promise to me and not squander the
“All it would take is a bolt or two—”
“Father!”
Hissing in exasperation, Alamar clenched his jaw but remained silent otherwise. Aylis turned to Bokar. “Armsmaster, I would have you remove your warriors from this room, for Lady Jinnarin and I will need the chamber to be quiet to walk Farrix’s dream.”
“I would not leave you unwarded,” protested Bokar.
“Then leave one or two behind.”
Bokar shook his head. “One or two is not sufficient.”
“Fiddle-faddle!” exclaimed Alamar. “These caverns are deserted, Bokar. Where Durlok has gotten to, who can say? Regardless, if Aylis and Jinnarin need peace and quiet, then I say let be.”
“We will also need darkness, Father. Can you extinguish this blue light?”
“Ha!” barked the Mage, raising a hand, muttering,
“Exstingue omnino,”
and the chamber was plunged into total darkness.
“Father!” exclaimed Aylis.
The soft phosphorescent glow of a Dwarven lantern filled the chamber as Jatu raised the hood on the one he wore at his belt.
Jinnarin glanced at the lamp but still lighted one of her candles, and Jatu closed the lantern shield, the blue-green glow extinguished.
As the soft yellow light of the candle on the altar glittered and glimmered among the crystals, Aravan said, “Jatu, Bokar, Mage Alamar, and I will remain within the chamber while ye dreamwalk, Lady Aylis, Lady Jinnarin. All others will aid in the search for hidden doors.”
Bokar cocked an eyebrow but said nothing, as Aylis murmured her agreement, adding, “Caution them to quietness should they have need to enter the chamber, Bokar.”
In the flickering flame of the candle on the crystal altar, Jinnarin sat cross-legged at Farrix’s side, her thoughts drifting, her mind in a state of light meditation. Down beside the carven block, Aylis sat on the rough-cut floor, her back against the mass, her mind too in meditation. Spaced at wide intervals in the deep shadows ‘round the chamber sat Bokar and Jatu and Aravan and Alamar—Bokar at the entrance to the hallway, Alamar at the opening leading to Durlok’s laboratory, with Jatu against the crystal wall across from Bokar and Aravan opposite Alamar. And there drifted on the air distant echoes of faint murmurings and soft tappings as Men and Dwarves searched afar for hidden doors.
A time passed, and after a long while Alamar quietly stood and stretched, his elderly muscles stiffly protesting. He motioned to Jatu and when the black Man came to him he whispered in his ear. Jatu nodded, and Alamar turned and left the chamber, heading into the laboratory. Jatu softly stepped to Bokar, murmuring something, then came on to where Aravan sat. Squatting, Jatu whispered, “Mage Alamar has gone to search through Durlok’s papers to see if he can deduce what the Black Mage is up to.”
Aravan nodded, then murmured, “Take station at his
doorway then, where thou canst get to him quickly in case he needs help.”
“I had planned on that, Captain, for should aught happen then we in here may need Alamar’s aid as well.” Jatu rose and crept back to where Alamar had been sitting and positioned himself there.
And more time passed.
The candle had burned some halfway down when Farrix’s eyes began to twitch back and forth.
“
…before the hollow tree in Darda Glain that served as a home for her and Farrix. Sighing with memories of past days, Jinnarin called her bow and arrows to her. Then she formed a bridge to Aylis’s dream, and stepped onto…
…the afterdeck of the
Eroean
, where Aylis stood with Aravan, the Elf laughing freely while the seeress spun the wheel to heel the ship over in the wind. Aylis looked down at the Pysk and sighed, then turned and kissed Aravan. “I must go, love,” she said.
The air divided and Pysk and seeress together walked into the fissure, and out into…
…the shadowed marge of a sunlit garden.
The air was gentle, cool, a breeze softly blowing. A crystalline stream burbled nearby, running among the verdant growth, and grassy pathways wended through a riot of colors, blossoms of all hues nodding in the zephyr as humming bees coursed among clusters of flowers and over rill mosses and around stands of delicate grasses. Ornamental trees were scattered here and there, the garden itself set within the expanse of a broad forest glen, and the songs of unseen birds occasionally echoed from afar. A noontime Sun stood directly overhead in a clear blue sky and shown down into the glade, and in garden center grew a tall hedge, a green rectangular wall, some hundred feet from corner to corner, four hundred feet ‘round all.
“Oh my,” murmured Aylis, “how lovely.”
“Yes,” agreed Jinnarin, looking about, “but where’s Farrix?”
They stood in the shade of a great oak tree on the edge of an ancient forest. Aylis slowly turned in a complete circle, her gaze sweeping across the garden and then in among the huge-girthed boles down within green dappled shadows stirring in the gentle breeze. But when she had turned full ‘round, once again her eye rested upon the central hedge within the glade. “There,” she said and pointed. “There within the square bounded by the hedge, there I would think to find him.”
They followed one of the grassy pathways wending toward the hedgerow, the rill burbling alongside. They passed among the nodding flowers and sighing grasses and softly rustling trees as the breeze gently urged them onward, ruffling their unbound hair. Up across a tiny arched bridge they trod, and Aylis leaned over the railing to see golden fish swimming above a white sandy bottom and among fronds of green watercress wafting in the purling current, the auric fish darting under the water plants, fleeing from her shadow cast straight down.
At last Pysk and seeress came to the hedge, but when they walked all way ‘round, no entry did they find. Aylis smiled and took Jinnarin’s hand, and up and over they flew…to find…a garden within the garden, this one much the same…except in the very center, on a crystal block lay—
“Farrix!” Jinnarin shrieked, and flew down to land at his side.
He was asleep.
“Wake up, my love! Wake up!” she called, shaking him by the shoulder—to no avail.
Jinnarin laid her ear on his breast, and after a long while, “A heartbeat,” she said, and waited, and finally called out, “Another.”
Her eyes brimming with tears, Jinnarin glanced up at the Lady Mage. “Oh, Brightwing, it is the same. He is in an enchanted sleep here as well.”
Sadness filled Aylis’s eyes and she looked at Farrix, then startled, looked again, her eyes widening. “Sparrow, he dreams!”
Jinnarin jerked her head up from Farrix’s breast and
stared at Farrix’s eyes as they whipped back and forth beneath their closed lids.
Confusion filled Jinnarin’s face. “A dream within a dream?”
“Yes, Sparrow, that’s what it must be. We must hurry and enter this dream as well.”
“Can we do that?”
“I don’t know, but we must try. And quickly, for if he wakes, we’ll be trapped.”
“Even if he doesn’t wake, but merely stops dreaming, we’ll be trapped. Perhaps this is the snare that Durlok set, and no matter how many dreams we enter, we’ll always find him asleep. Oh, let’s hurry.”
Jinnarin formed another bridge, the air rippling apart. They stepped into the fissure and found…
…themselves in a crystal castle overlooking a pale green sea where a black ship with lightning-stroked masts plunged across the storm-tossed waves.
