Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (12 page)

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Marbleheart followed the river for a few hundred yards, looking for something to eat. A tiny, hesitant trickle fed in from the north, between clay banks only dimly visible when the fog shifted for a moment.

He followed the streamlet but lost it when it disappeared into the ground in a low and damp place.

“A spring, I guess,” he said aloud to himself. “Wonder what
that
is?”

“That” was a spark of bluish light that flashed once and disappeared, as if someone had opened a door late at night and light from a room had spilled out for just a moment before the door was quickly slammed to.

A relative of the Firefly we talked to on the other side of the forest,
Marbleheart decided.
I’d like to ask him a few questions about the way ahead, if I can find him.

He hunkered along, Otter fashion, covering considerable ground quickly despite his ungainly land gait. The steady trot, if that is what you’d want to call it, lulled his mind until he was almost asleep on his feet.

He was barely aware when he passed between two low, steep-sided hills covered with dry grass that rustled uneasily. He thought it rather queer that the grass here was sere and bleached almost white. Everywhere else about, things had been green and new budding with early spring. There was no wind at all now.

He came upon a low, wide-open, timber-framed doorway in the side of the hill on his right. A dim light—a bluish flickering only—showed from deep within. The air seemed to vibrate with ...?

“Uh, time to go back, I think,” Marbleheart thought aloud, shivering despite his warm coat.

A harsh, whispering voice from inside the door said, “No, come in, Sea Otter! You are to be King of the Hill here, very shortly. Let me prepare you for your coronation!”

The Otter shook his head groggily and tried to turn away, but an unseen hand, rough and hard as horn, reached out and plucked him from his feet by the scruff of his neck.

“Oh, I say, now!” protested Marbleheart, trying to twist about to sink his sharp teeth into the unseen fingers. His jaws snapped closed on nothing!

The blue light crackled angrily and went out, plunging the doorway into ebony blackness. Another invisible hand clutched the Otter’s snout, choking off his air supply. Almost at once, the blackness became even darker. Marbleheart lost consciousness.

Somewhere a nightjar rasped into the thickening fog. Somewhere there was brief, evil laughter, softly, slightly un-sane. But there was no one to hear it.

Chapter Eight

Barrow Wights

Douglas was awakened by the distant pound of hoof-beats.

When he sat up and looked cautiously about he found the fog was thicker than ever, an impenetrable wall all about him. The sounds rang clear but somehow changed, magnified and carried by the mist. The hoofbeats were coming rapidly nearer.

A chill of fear touched his spine when he remembered where he was and the terrible things that had been done two centuries past on this very spot.

He shook himself, much as did Black Flame, straightened his posture, and rose to his feet, facing the approaching horsemen—if that was what they were—coming at a muffled gallop along the grassy bank of Bloody Brook. He could now hear the soft jingling of harnesses and the occasional creak of saddles under the weight of a rider, or a soft strike of metal against metal.

Out of the fog a dark figure on a tall, pale horse loomed before him and reined suddenly to a halt. Douglas recognized him as a Faerie Rider, although he’d never seen one before that moment.

“I thought you ought to know,” the Rider said in a fair, polite baritone, speaking in Faerie tongue, “that the Otter Marbleheart has been trapped in one of the barrows. He will be reft of soul at midnight, if not sooner rescued.”

“Marbleheart!” cried Douglas, for the first time realizing the Otter was still nowhere to be seen. “Where?”

“The first group of barrows to the north of here,” said the Rider, pointing with the lance he carried in his right hand. “I can tell you no more, Fire Wizard.”

“So the rascal’s curiosity has gotten him into trouble, eh?” said Douglas somewhat grimly. “Thank you! I’ll rescue him. Who is it holds a friend of Brightglade in thrall?”

“Goblins—who have profaned these ancient and sacred places,” said the Faerie knight. “Barrow-Wights, Men call their sort. Will you ask for our assistance? We know you to be a Faerie friend, beloved by Brightwing, and under our protection, if you seek it.”

“Where are you bound in the night, and at whose behest?”

The knight considered this question briefly before he answered.

“We are Wanderers, a Faerie Rade,” the knight said, somewhat sadly. “Marget and Aedh have called us home. We ride to the Great Gate in Craylor Wendys. I cannot say what their purpose is but we consider it imperative that we answer the call at greatest haste. We have ridden day and night from where we were camped in Emptylands.”

Douglas was aware of dozens more Faerie riders as shapes just beyond his vision in the fog.

“If Marget of Faerie calls, you must go as quickly as possible, of course,” he said. “I’ll not detain you. I’ll take care of friend Otter. Give my best wishes to your Queen, Sir Knight. Go in peace as well as in haste!”

“Thank you, Douglas Brightglade. You are a gentleman as well as a Wizard,” said the Knight, turning his horse away. The sounds of hooves, galloping again, quickly faded away.

“Goblins, this time!” sighed Douglas. “Not Hobgoblins! And if they have taken over an Enemy barrow, they’ll have acquired much evil power, the books say, drawn from the unease of the anciently dead warriors of the Dark Enemy!”

He sat beside his fire for a few minutes, thinking before acting as Flarman had taught him, and then held up his right hand, forefinger extended, and spoke a Word of Power.

A bright orange glow sprang up above his head, piercing the mist to a hundred or more feet. By the light he began searching the ground nearby on his knees, crawling in the wet grass along the top of the riverbank. After a short while he found what he sought and, plucking it up, stowed it in his wide left sleeve.

Next, I’ll need a special kind of light to find my way in evil places,
he thought. “Ah, here!”

He picked an orange globe-shaped seed pod from a vine that grew among the thorny bushes bordering the river. Placing the pod on his left palm, he made a simple gesture with his right hand, starting with his fingers clenched, lifting his hand and spreading the fingers wide at the same time.

The papery pod rapidly swelled until it was the size of a man’s head, then even larger. Taking out his jackknife, Douglas carved large, round, cheerful eyes, a triangular nose, and a wide, smiling mouth into the dry pod skin, now as thick as a pumpkin’s rind.

The bright flame over his head flowed down to rest within the pod and shine steadily through the carved eyes, nose, and mouth and glow softly through translucent skin.

“A good, old jack-o’-lantern!” Douglas exclaimed with satisfaction. “Fit to frighten away even the most horrific haunts. Now to find their borrowed barrow.”

Trusting his instincts as much as reason, he found a tiny rill not far upstream and recognized at once the marks of the Otter’s webbed feet in the soft clay beside it. The marks led away from the river.

Following swiftly, he came in a few minutes to the oozing spring. From there his lantern showed him the loom of the first pair of burial mounds. The fog was still thick, but the jack-o’-lantern’s gleam, golden yellow and cheerful, cut through the worst of it, revealing everything almost as if it were day.

Circling the right-hand mound, then the one on the left, Douglas searched for signs of the Otter’s passage. At length he found the place where Marbleheart’s footprints ended abruptly at a steeper-than-usual hillside.

“There’s a door here,” he murmured to himself. “And Marbleheart must be within.”

“And,” he added, “I’d better hurry. It’s almost midnight!”

He stepped forward, placing his left hand against what seemed to be a steep slope of rough gravel and sere, matted grass. His hand passed right through, followed by the rest of his body. The entry had been hidden by a simple illusion.

He was in a straight, roughly paved, dirt-walled passage angling down into the very heart of the mound. The tunnel was empty, except for a spear, a ten-foot shaft from which hung a moldered gray pennant, caught in a rusty bracket on one wall. No way to tell what color it had once been. It fell to dry shreds and dust when he reached out to touch it.

“That style of spear was used by the Enemy. And I doubt a Light pennant would disintegrate like that, even after two centuries,” he told himself. “Our flags were woven of noble metals. This is one of the Nixies’ mounds for
Enemy
dead!”

The jack-o’-lantern lighted his way down into a great, low-ceilinged, oval room perhaps sixty feet long, twenty feet wide, and six feet high in the center. It was empty except for a single flat block of jet black stone, roughly rectangular and three feet high, at the far end.

On its rough surface lay the unconscious Sea Otter!

“No time for being dainty,” said Douglas aloud, awakening tumbled echoes. He heard the distant sound of footsteps approaching from outside the barrow, shuffling in the dry grass. The jack-o’-lantern flickered wildly for a moment.

“Marbleheart! Marbleheart!” Douglas called out sharply. “Forsake those wretched dreams! Awake and follow me out of here. It’s in your own tomb you are sleeping.”

The sleek water mammal stirred, muttered something Douglas didn’t catch, then rolled on his back and put his four feet in the air, obviously intending to continue his deep slumber.

The footsteps paused at the barrow doorway, as if listening—or sniffing. Douglas reached out to pull the Otter’s left front foot. Marbleheart shook the foot irritably and opened his eyes to glare at his friend in the flickering light of the orange jack-o’-lantern.

“Come on! Get up, Marbleheart. If you ever want to swim again in Sea, or chase a tasty trout for your dinner, or crack a clam on your marble disk, now you must arise and follow!”

The sound of Douglas’s voice—and the words he chose as well—roused the groggy Otter. Marbleheart rolled over the edge of the altar stone and landed on his feet.

“W-what is this place?” he asked in sudden horror, fully awake.

“A Goblin brought you to this barrow to take your life.”

“G-g-g-goblin?” asked Marbleheart, shuddering. “Let’s g-g-g-go!”

Before they could reach the tunnel ramp, it was filled with a vast, misshapen hulk of a black-furred beast with saucer-huge eyes and a gore-stained, knobby club in one fist. It stopped in the room’s entrance and threw up its other hand to protect its large eyes from the lantern’s bright rays.

“Who s-s-s-s-sneaks into our unholy place?” hissed the Goblin in a rasping, barrel-deep, echoing voice. “Who dares to waken the new King of Barrow Wights?”

But it hesitated to rush forward, bothered by the lantern’s now-steady gleam, which appeared to burn his eyes painfully.

“Is that it?” Marbleheart whispered hoarsely. “If I stayed, I’d be their King?”

“You want the job?” snapped Douglas, facing the monster in the doorway. “Stay behind if it beckons to you, but I’m leaving.”

“I’m with you! I don’t want to be King of anything, anywhere, especially if it doesn’t have deep running water. What do we do?”

“Follow me! Stay out of my way but stay close!” ordered the Journeyman Wizard. He stared the Goblin in the eye.

“I entered your stolen barrow mound, and I rescued the innocent creature you would enslave to be King of the Undead,” he announced boldly.

“And who, in the name of the ever-hating, blazing-eyed beasts of blackest Hades, are
you?”
the Goblin bellowed, amplifying his voice several times over so that it would be even more daunting.

“I am called Douglas Brightglade,” began Douglas. The Goblin roared with hysteric, maniacal laughter.

“Ha-ha-ho! A name like that! How can you bear it?”

“It’s my true and natural name,” insisted Douglas calmly. “And my title is Journeyman Wizard.”

“Oh, I am so
impressed,”
sneered the beast. “I’ve eaten a few Wizards in my time, and you are the puniest of them all. Most of them were at least a hundred years old and tough as old crows.”

“I greatly doubt that you could handle even an Apprentice,” scoffed Douglas, maneuvering himself into a position for a dash through the arch and up the ramp.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” screamed the Goblin, gnashing long, shark-sharp teeth and pushing his bloodstained club forward to block the way. “We aim to make the slippery little one Goblin King Underhill. We intend to make of
you
a foggy dawn breakfast! Hark! My beautiful, dutiful, flesh-hungry, bloodthirsty fellow fiends are coming for the rites and the meal!”

There was the sound of mumbling and harsh, derisive laughter from a distance outside the barrow.

“Oh, very well,” said Douglas, “if you don’t choose to behave properly, I’ll have to take
drastic
action!”

The black Goblin threw back his head and laughed even more loudly at this, but Douglas set down the lantern and reached into his sleeve for what he had picked in the grass near the river.

He held it aloft between forefinger and thumb for the Goblin to plainly see. The jack-o’-lantern’s light fell full upon it.

“F-f-f-f-four-leafed clover!”
screeched the filthy beast in sudden falsetto, flinging his overlong arms about his head.
“Put it away, put it away, put it
—”

“No, too late for that,” Douglas shouted, so that the Goblins above could hear every word. “I call upon you all to return to your former haunts! Go at once! By the power of this sweet clover with four leaves, I
demand
your obedience! Away! Away!”

The Goblin in the doorway squealed like ten pigs caught in a fence, and the shouts from above stopped abruptly and changed to cries of terror. Footsteps rapidly retreated. The Goblin before him swung his mace high, intending to strike at the Wizard blindly.