1 The Outstretched Shadow.3 (94 page)

 "How long until your medicine wears off?" Vestakia asked Shalkan in a quavering voice.

 "Not long now," the unicorn said gently. "You'd better make as much distance as you can while it still has some effect."

 Kellen picked up his gauntlets and locked them into place as Jermayan scuffed out the small fire. And then there were no preparations left to make.

 He turned away and followed Vestakia and Shalkan over the crest of the hill, across the shallow ravine, and on toward the rock face. Behind him, he saw Jermayan turn back to Valdien, and stand with his arms around the storm-grey destrier's neck for a long moment. Only then did Kellen truly realize that Jermayan was being forced to abandon someone who loved him and depended on him, and whom Jermayan loved in return—and worse, someone who probably could not survive without him. If they did not come back…

 Kellen gritted his teeth, forcing the thought from his mind: the image of Valdien, starving, alone, desperately and hopelessly seeking his dead master in this wilderness. They had to go on. There was no choice. More lives than Valdien's were at stake. Many more.

 He glanced behind him, in the direction of the sun. A few hours more of light at most, and then they would be in darkness. At least they had sun, though it had to fight with the clouds. The way this place felt, it should properly be shrouded in shadows, under a grim, grey, lowering sky, with clouds too thick to actually see the sun.

 There was a faint, peculiar, bitter smell to the wind. He couldn't put a name to it. He wondered if the others noticed, and glanced at Shalkan. The unicorn's expressive nostrils were held pinched shut.

 I guess he's noticed.

 His hand went to the pouch at his belt, where Idalia's keystone waited, cocooned in layers of magical Elven silk, and examined the steep rock slope.

 Shalkan crouched on his haunches and then sprang strongly upward. The unicorn's unshod hooves scrabbled for a hold against the rock for a few moments, then Shalkan found his footing and began to climb.

 "You're next," Kellen said to Vestakia.

 She gave him an effortful smile and followed Shalkan up the steep incline. Kellen waited until he was sure she wouldn't slip back, then got ready to start after her. He glanced back at Jermayan, standing stiff and forbidding behind him. He wished there was something he could say to close the gap that had opened up between them, something that could repair their easy fellowship, but he couldn't think of anything. Jermayan was as stubborn as all the Elves, and wasn't going to change his mind about Vestakia, or be pleased with Kellen for taking her part.

 But if Jermayan hated Vestakia, it was because he hated all Demons, and Kellen had no doubt that destroying the Barrier was his highest priority. Jermayan would do what he had come to do.

 "It will be over soon—one way or another," he said to Jermayan.

 "One way or another," the Elven Knight echoed grimly. "And I hope your human heart has not betrayed you, Wildmage."

 Kellen supposed that this was as good as he was going to get in the way of a reconciliation. He turned away and began to climb.

 The half-dome was steep, and it was also absolutely bare rock. There was a sort of furrow in it that gave purchase to his hands and feet, and Kellen used it to pull himself up to where the incline was less steep and he could actually move forward in a sort of crablike crouch over the pale stone. Without Vestakia, he and Jermayan would never have found this route to the Barrier, not in weeks of searching.

 As he caught up to Vestakia, he could see her shuddering. She would shake for a moment, clinging desperately to some invisible cracks in the rock, then the spell would pass and she would creep forward a pace or two before the shivering started again.

 "It is wearing off," she said glumly. She pointed, ahead and to the left. "Whatever it is, it's that way."

 Kellen looked where she was pointing. They still had to climb a good distance to reach the top of the dome of rock they were on, and he could see nothing beyond that, but what he saw around and behind him suggested more of the same kind of terrain—mountains and high hills, the only vegetation a little moss and lichen at most, the rock scoured clean by the battles of that long-ago war. Once they got to the top here, they might have some serious climbing ahead, and none of them had brought so much as a coil of rope. And worst of all, there was no more than an hour or two of good light left at best.

 But they were close to their goal—close enough that they had to press on immediately, because they were already within the pall of Shadow Mountain's influence, and Kellen was coming to suspect that spending very much time here wasn't very healthy for living things. He followed Vestakia and Shalkan. He was relieved to see that the unicorn was staying close to her, but Vestakia seemed to be completely recovered from her earlier beating, and was moving without difficulty.

 And they were close to their goal—

 Now he sensed it; the despair and the bitter ache at his bones had a source, close enough that they had to press on immediately.

 When they reached the top of the rock dome, it proved to be no more than the foothill of a true mountain, and Vestakia was miserable for other reasons. She'd thrown back the hood of her cloak, and her ruby skin was beaded with sick-sweat. She was breathing hard, almost panting, holding her stomach as if she were in pain. Kellen wondered if she could go on.

 "Still want to take the lead?" he asked. "Or do you need to rest a little?"

 "I'm fine," she said irritably, in answer to his query. "It's far worse than this when there's a Demon around."

 "There's a path up the mountain," Jermayan said, as if speaking pained him. "Look, there, where that shadow starts, see? It's narrow, and you can barely see it, but it's there." He looked right at Kellen, obviously waiting for a decision.

 Kellen looked in the direction that he had indicated, and made out the beginning of a goat track in the shadows around the curve of the cliff. It didn't look very wide, and it climbed rather steeply. If it got any narrower, they'd be edging their way to the top with their backs plastered against the stone wall.

 "Then that's the way we go," Kellen said reluctantly. Vestakia nodded, very slightly, confirming his guess that that was the direction of the strongest Demon-taint. It looked like a long climb. Once they reached the top, it would be too dark to return safely. Kellen touched the pouch with the keystone, more to reassure himself than anything else. In his half-formed imaginings of the moment when he reached the Barrier, he'd always supposed it would be full daylight, that he'd be rested and ready for the final fight, not arriving after a long day of brawls, petty squabbles, and climbing up the side of a mountain. His bruises ached, he was tired, and he hated being at odds with Jermayan. Depression weighed him down as if he were carrying a full pack. Despair whispered that he was about to fail. The bitter air burned his throat and made him horribly thirsty. It seemed that Reality always managed to play tricks with your dreams and imagination, turning your fantasies inside out when it made them come true.

 Jermayan drew his sword with a hiss of steel. As Kellen turned toward him, the Elven Knight met his eyes and inclined his head ever-so-slightly. Despite his misgivings, Jermayan would follow where he led.

 Kellen turned back toward the mountain, and pointed. "Let's go. The sun won't wait for us."

 Shalkan led the way, his white fur glowing almost as brightly as it had the first time Kellen had seen him. So short a time, measured in sennights, but it held a lifetime of experiences. Now Kellen was gambling—with all their lives—that he'd learned the right lessons from them, and was making the right choices now.

 Vestakia followed immediately after Shalkan. If the trace of Demon-taint shifted, she would be the one who would know first and be able to alert them to retrace their steps. She would also be the first to know if there were any actual Demons in the vicinity.

 That's one certainty, anyway. She might betray us inadvertently, but she won't do it deliberately. If I can't trust a unicorn's judgment, I might as well just throw myself off this rock and be done with it.

 Kellen followed her. Jermayan came last, his sword drawn and ready in his gauntleted hand.

 When they reached the trail, they saw it was both steep and narrow, a double-handspan cut into the side of the mountain, with a sheer drop on one side and the sheer cliff on the other. There was no way to hurry. Of the four of them, only Shalkan found it even halfway easy going, and that only because he had four feet, not two, to apply to the trail. The wind blew harder the higher they climbed, and seemed to turn colder with every step, until Kellen could feel the ache of cold right through the padding beneath his armor. The sunlight weakened, not that it had ever had much strength in the first place, but it seemed now as if what light there was came to them past a dark veil over the sun's face.

 Kellen concentrated every fiber of his being on just managing to take the next step—finding the place he would put his foot, moving it there, testing it with half his weight, trusting it with his full weight, moving on to the next step. He drove every other thought to the back of his mind.

 At last they gained the top. It was a relief to step out onto secure footing at last, and no longer have to fear that the slightest misstep would plunge one or all of them hundreds of feet down the side of the mountain. Kellen eased his way past the others and looked around.

 All during his long journey to reach his goal, Kellen's greatest fear had been that he wouldn't know the place he was looking for when he reached it, but now he realized that had been foolish. There was no mistaking it. He'd seen this place before. He'd been here in dreams and visions. This was the place of all his nightmares. This was the place he had seen that time he'd tried to scry in the forest pool, the hilltop covered with warring Demons.

 The top of the mountain was broad and flat, as if some impossible power long ago had sliced its peak off with a knife. The flatness was scattered with the same huge tumbled boulders that Kellen had seen at the ancient battlefield where he and Jermayan had once camped, and now Kellen imagined an assassin lurking behind every one, ready to ambush them. The wind whimpered and moaned around the stones, stirring up dust, the source of the bitter smell. Nothing grew here, not even lichen. Sand and stone, grey and black, a landscape of sterility.

 In the center of the wasteland was an enormous conical cairn built of dull grey-black stone, larger than the Great Library of Armethalieh and as tall as a four-story building, with a set of stairs spiraling around it to the top. Its base was ringed with more of the boulders that were scattered about the mountaintop, as if someone were trying to fence it in. At its apex stood a glittering black obelisk, the top half of it just visible from this angle.

 But in all of this deadness, the obelisk was alive.

 All of the obelisk that Kellen could see from where he stood was covered with tendrils of greenish energy like miniature lightning bolts. They spat and hissed along the surface, licking out at the wind. They ran over the sides of it like some terrible fountain, constantly spewing from the crown and running down the sides in an endless cascade like some hideous toxic wellspring of all that was bad and unholy in the world.

 This, without a doubt, was the source of the disruption to the natural order of the world, the Barrier that he had come to destroy.

 Kellen glanced up toward the sky. Though the day had been overcast when they started and the clouds had not lifted, the sky directly above the point of the obelisk was clear, a huge unnatural ring of cloudless sky that was now the white of mountain twilight.

 This was the place he'd seen in his dreams, or as close to it as Kellen ever wanted to come while he was awake. And there was a wrongness about it that wasn't subtle at all.

 "Here," Vestakia groaned. "This place."

 Kellen turned back to see Vestakia sink to her knees, her face contorted with nausea.

 Shalkan managed a few steps toward her and nuzzled her sympathetically, but Kellen could see that the unicorn wasn't in much better shape. The place reeked of Evil.

 Now, that particular phrase had occurred in many a wondertale that Kellen had read, and it happened to be a conceit he thought both trite and overwrought. He hadn't really understood until this moment that there was usually some truth behind even the most overused of metaphors. The place stank. Not in a physical way, but it was just wrong.

 It wasn't really something he was perceiving through his normal physical senses, Kellen realized. Each time he tried to focus one of his senses upon the pervasive sense of utter wrongness, he realized he wasn't really sensing what he thought he was, but it didn't help. When he concentrated, he could tell there was no particular odor to the place, but the moment he did that, the wind took on a discordant, jangling, keening note that was a subtle torment. When he concentrated on the fact that he wasn't really hearing anything out of the ordinary, the horrible smells returned, and when he could shut out both the scent and sound of the place, his eyes insisted that everything around him was tilting and wavering, moving and yet standing still in a way that made him ill to see it. At least he could pick which sense he wanted to have abused, more or less.

 But obviously neither Shalkan nor Vestakia were able to do even that much. It was simplest to say that the place reeked of evil, and to be honest, Kellen couldn't imagine how the unicorn could bear it. Now that he could feel the wrongness of the structure just as Vestakia did, the presence of the obelisk was agony to him and to Shalkan as well as to her. He didn't think either of the others would be able to get much closer to the Shadow keystone.