Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) (30 page)

For a moment, the Hadrian’s colorless eyes met his, and the
Hadrian’s pale lips tightened.  Hallin expected him to speak, expected to hear
him disagree and somehow be able to convince him in spite of the full face of
granite he saw before him, but instead, Tawn turned away to see to his gear. 
Somehow, the old Hadrian had not yet managed to break out so much as a rope.

“Don’t mind him,” spoke another of the Hadrians.  He came up
and took Hallin by the elbow.  “Tawn hates to be wrong, is all.”

Hallin looked up the cliff to see the two men making great
progress up the face of the cliff, as if the crevices in the granite had been
placed just so to speed them along.  Already they were halfway to the top; at
this rate, all seven men would be up when the time came to face Dith.  He
turned to see the little Hadrian still staring at him. 

“Wrong?” he frowned, suddenly registering what the man had
said.  “What about?”

The other Hadrian, the one they called Pax, drew him aside
to speak under his breath, out of earshot of the others.  “Tawn told us we
would find no stone worth the climbing this near the falls, not if the stone in
the riverbed meant anything.  Argued the whole way no matter how I tried to
calm him, saying we were wasting our time to even consider it, that we should
be turning well to the west.”  He did not see the hunter turn his gaze toward
where Dith was climbing.  “And then, right ahead, right in the midst of his
arguing we see this perfect cliff.”  The Hadrian laughed self-consciously. 
“Well, can’t you see?  He’s a bit—”

A hideous scream ended in a thump before Hallin’s eyes could
turn back to the cliff to where his men were climbing, but even before he
looked, he knew what he would see.

One man hung high on the cliff, dangerously high on the
cliff, by his ax.  His feet scraped uselessly against the rock to try to get a
footing before the ax slipped out, but they seemed to be pushing him away from
the face, pushing the ax further out of its niche.  The other man lay like a
boneless sack of mush, broken and lifeless over the mound of rock at the base.

No one breathed. Their eyes only stared up the cliff in
horror.  Even over the roar of the falls nearby, they could hear the climber’s
boots scraping desperately on the wall, breaking away great sheets of the rock
that fell to cover the dead man below.  The ax slipped a bit more, and he
paused his panicked scrabbling to watch it slip from its berth in the rock.

Hallin raised his hands toward the rock to lift his man if
he could, but the rock gave no resistance to him, nothing to brace the lift. 
It was like lifting against pudding.  Beads of sweat broke out over Hallin’s
brow as he focused more and more of his power against the stone, pushed against
it to buoy the Hadrian upward, but the rock drank away his energy like a
sponge.  Too late he tried to use his power to lower the Hadrian to the ground
slowly, but by then, he was drained.

With a cry of despair, the Hadrian huffed and clawed at the
cliff wall with his free hand and his feet, pulling away chunks of it beneath
his bleeding nails, trying to carve away just a bit of the rock, just the
tiniest shelf to hold himself up by his fingertips.  But the stone beneath the
ax at last gave way, and the climber skidded and bumped his way down the cliff
on a broken mat of stone until at last he lay still at the bottom.

Tawn shut his eyes and turned away.  Without a word, he
wrapped the oilcloth around his pick ax, the only piece of his equipment he had
managed to uncover, and slowly tied it to his saddle.

Hallin moved toward where the two dead men lay, one buried
under a pile of the other’s broken stone, the second shattered and bleeding
atop it.  He had seen the man’s battle against the cliff; he had seen the
stone, the thick solid granite of the mountain, pull away like pastry crust
beneath the man’s hands, to fall and shatter below.  He had felt the emptiness
of the rock against his lift, even emptier than the open air, so it seemed to
him. He remembered the first steps of their climb up this very mound, how their
feet had slipped, and only now did he seem to recall how that slipping did not
seem to him the same motion as a man moving over ice or mossy stone but more of
a man climbing a hill of...

“Sand,” he murmured.  He looked up the tall cliff, wondering
just how far a man might climb a pillar of sand before he fell.

“Not sand,” sighed Tawn.  When Hallin looked at him, he
shrugged.  “This rock is rotten, or it should be.”  He reached into his pocket
and took from it a crumbly piece of rock.  “See this?  This is your cliff.”  He
crushed the strange rock in his hand, and it came apart in flakes.  “Found this
a quarter-mile downriver and along the way.  It’s been miles since I saw
granite, not since the river bent east.”

Miles.  Hallin looked up at the huge face of granite.  Every
stone in the riverbed, or at least most of them, should have been of the same
granite, especially this close to the falls.  So Tawn was right; this cliff
could not possibly be what it appeared.  Hallin narrowed his eyes over the
hillside again, looking for the telltale threads of magic over the stone. 

At first, he saw nothing, but when he looked closely enough,
he began to see them.  The threads danced and billowed over the impossible
granite face of the cliff like ancient cobwebs, dusty and fragile with the
passing of time; to his eye, the passing of millennia. A few more eyes, a few
more souls to pass this way and try its power, and the threads of this
particular illusion would come apart completely.  Or would it?  The threads
seemed to be growing, thickening, extending.  No, it was impossible.  But he
looked down at the two fresh bodies on the mound and wondered if those strands
of power might not have gained some tiny bit of strength from them. Or even
from the dead squirrel.  Impossible.  From the power he had spent here, then. 
As wispy as the illusion’s threads had been, he had not seen the true face of
the cliff beneath it, and now they were much stronger.

He had never seen anything like this before.

Illusions faded, quickly or slowly, depending on how often
they were tested, but inevitably, they faded away unless they were refreshed. 
But these defenses renewed themselves, just as the legends claimed.  The hair
on his arms rose.

Dith was looking for Galorin’s Keep; the mayor had told him
as much.  But he had had no idea that Dith might actually find it.

The Galorin myth had grown over time, seeded with his
victories against Byrandia in the Liberation and the spectacular sinking of the
Pyran landbridge, all accomplished with power of a magnitude unknown before or
since, but Hallin had a shrewd eye for finding the truth behind any rumor, any
overblown tale.  Distilled to its essentials, the legend held that Galorin had
exiled himself to his Keep in punishment for some unknown crime of his own
pride.  Had he murdered his mistress, killed an apprentice who had grown
ungovernable?  No one but Galorin himself knew for certain, though everyone had
his own ideas.  In any case, the mage had gone into hiding almost immediately
after the Liberation.

Undaunted, young mages had still sought him out, begging him
to teach them what he .  Some had even attacked his castle in rage when he
turned them away.  Over time, the castle fell, so it was said, all but the
keep, and he had built an enormous array of defenses throughout the surrounding
countryside to protect it.

That was all Hallin could accept from the legend, the only
portion with any sort of tangible proof about it.  But there was more;
millennia of telling and retelling had not left the legend unaugmented with
morality and virtue.  And so the legend went on.  For reasons known only to
himself, Galorin decided that his knowledge was indeed too precious to keep to
himself, but he was unwilling to dismantle his defenses completely and train
every half-wit mage who came to the keep.  So he created the River Stone, a
guide to lead a single worthy mage right to his door.  Worthy defined as only
Galorin could know, which rather left the whole business open to
interpretation.

Bah.  Children’s stories, legends, myths.  So much wishful
thinking that the mighty Galorin would take an apprentice.  That made of the
defenses mere tests, to try the strength and cunning of his would-be
apprentice, which bafflingly enough seemed to lessen their danger in some
eyes.  In any case, Syon had lost many of her most powerful mages over the
years to that quest, at least until the war against Kadak began, and the tyrant
had taken his own toll on them, so that now a man could go the better part of
his life without ever meeting one.  Now that the war was over, any fool who
could bend a spoon with his will would be in these mountains again to find the
legendary Galorin’s Keep, and Dith was just such another.

And then there was the River Stone.  He remembered the odd
footprints in the mud at the river’s edge, down where Dith’s trail first met
the river.  Rubbish.  Even if the thing existed, Dith was the least worthy mage
by anyone’s measure to find it.  Surely it had not answered his summons or
Hallin would have seen traces of his power.  Besides, Dith should have ported
straight to the keep when he found it.  Now Hallin himself was far more worthy;
if it would come to any mage, it would have come to him.  Except that he had
not called for it.  Not yet.

By now, the other two Hadrians, the pair who had been
waiting at the bottom to follow the first two up, were touching Tawn’s
collected bits of crumbly rock tentatively and listening to Tawn’s
explanation.  Hallin smiled.  They would not doubt Tawn’s knowledge of the
mountains again, although he wondered if they would be so lucky next time.  His
memory turned back to the thick strands of power he had seen near Dith, strands
left by Galorin.  They were virtually untried over all those years, and his
mouth bent into a wicked grin at the thought of the immense power still waiting
in whatever traps and illusions Galorin had placed there.  The unworthy Dith
could not hope to survive.

On the other hand, Hallin had five hundred crowns waiting in
Montor that bade him be certain of it.

“We’ll build the pyre at sunset,” spoke Pax gently, helping
to lift the first body from the heap of stone.  Already, the granite had
covered the other completely and appeared solid once more.

“We’ve no time for that,” barked Hallin, “we’re set behind
as it is.”  He glanced at the horses, took in the grass near the river and the
way toward the west.  “He’ll be near the top by now, and we must go on afoot if
we would cross this peak.  We’ve lost a day on him at least by now.”

“Besides,” added Tawn when the others glowered and grumbled
in protest, “we cannot afford the smoke.”  At his words, the men grudgingly
nodded and solemnly set the dead climber back atop the pile of stone.  There,
at least, he would be as safe from the scavengers as they could make him.

Once again, Hallin was grateful for Tawn’s presence and his
unshakable pragmatism.  He sincerely hoped the Montor selectmen would have his
payment for him; he would regret having to kill such a one.

“Geretous,” called Tawn, waving the thin Hadrian toward the
dead men.  “You’re the nearest thing to a priest we have.  Come, see to them,
will you?”

The young man lowered his head and spoke a few soft prayers
over the bodies.

Once the prayers were done, Tawn came forward and rested his
hand on the shoulder of the dead climber atop the hard pile of stone.  “Rest
assured; the mage will pay for these deaths as well as his crimes in Montor,”
he said, looking to Hallin for agreement, “and then we will put both our men in
the pyre.”

Having gathered what provisions they could carry from the
horses’ bags, the five men disappeared into the deep forest to the west,
leaving their mounts at the river to graze.  None of the Hadrians looked back
to see the casual gesture Hallin made over the animals that bent the light
around them, so none of them saw the horses vanish into the afternoon light.

Once Dith regained the soil of the hillside, he still had a
steep hike back to the top of the falls, steeper, so it seemed to him, than his
climb over the rocks had been.  He had to lean well over and pull himself along
by tree trunks and low branches as he went, stepping up along the roots and
deadfall and winding his way over strange boggy sinkholes until, at last, the
steeps gave way to more gradual climbs and, finally, to the promontory itself
overlooking the falls.

North of the falls, the way along the river was once again
passable, and after only a moment spent looking out over the lower mountains
below and back toward the open land he had left so many tendays past and back
further still toward Graymonde Hall and his beloved Gikka, he turned to continue
his path along the river, deeper into the heart of Galorin’s lands, only idly
wondering about the horses he saw grazing at the river’s edge.

H
allin’s
outstretched arms hung before him, still taut, still reaching helplessly into
the emptiness.  A shout, a name, still echoed through the trees and filled the
glade with a muzzy sound of panic.  His own panic.  The shout had been his.

The pretty little glade was only a few yards across, the
kind of place that bade the men stop and sit a moment in warm sunlight and on
level ground, a welcome respite from their steep and treacherous climb through
the cold of the high forests.  The floor still sparkled in the early sun with a
light dusting of frost, and the last of the autumn’s wildflowers were just
beginning to fade; everything was just as it had been a moment ago.

Except that Pax was gone.

By the time the hunter and his men had reached the top of
the falls, their quarry was at least half a day ahead by Hallin’s best guess
and had moved his path closer to the river, weaving his way through the most
absurd places, taking himself seemingly right through pits of bubbling hot mud
or around treacherous lips of stone that overlooked mist-hidden heights.  Over
the next several days, they had come close to him a few times—close enough that
Hallin had hoped to attack, but always some dratted bit of the terrain seemed
set against them, as if the very mountain would protect him from them.

The Hadrians had been of a mind to attack anyway and flush
Dith into the open, to force him into a defensive position right away.  During
the war they had been as adept at battle as anyone on Syon; such a strategy had
worked well for them then.  But this was to be a battle between mages, Hallin
had told them.  It would be no matter of weaponry, armor, nor even endurance. 
The first attack would decide the thing, so they’d best see to it that the
first attack was Hallin’s.

Time and again they fell back.  Meanwhile, Dith went
blithely on his way as if unaware of the dangers he had just passed or of the
hunters following him.  It was as if he saw a completely different path than
they, perhaps a completely different mountain.  Which was just as well.  Hallin
would choose the time and place, not Dith, and certainly not Galorin, if somehow
his hand was in this.

After they had regained Dith’s tracks near the river, Hallin
decided to outwit Galorin’s defenses by following Dith’s every footstep, even
going so far as to have each man fit his own foot within each of Dith’s
prints.  While following him this way was exhausting and rather harrowing at
times, they had managed to keep pace with him for a time.

Ultimately, even this approach failed.  They had watched
Dith walk right over an unusually open piece of ground only to find that by the
time they reached the same spot, the land had split itself apart and left an
impassable ravine.  If they had not been forced to the ground with the power of
the tremors, Hallin might have thought it an illusion.  Whether by Dith’s own
hand or not, the ground was changing behind him, destroying whatever path may
have been there, and they could not hope to follow, at least not directly.

Any path they took, whether in Dith’s footprints or not,
would be of their own carving in these woods, so Hallin took his men deeper
into the sound-damping safety of the trees to the west, there to make a new
path through the forest. They could do no worse traveling through the trees, he
reasoned, and perhaps they would fare better, knowing as they did that they
must watch each step.  The men had not been pleased, but in the end, what
choice did they have?

Tawn had been keeping a careful map, charting the mud pits,
the vents, the hot springs, freely adding new ones where he thought they might
be and crossing off those that made no sense, those that had to be illusory, so
that now his map looked nothing like the terrain they had followed.  Pax had
looked at it a while, as had Haan, but neither had the patience to hear Tawn’s
explanations of it, and they both eyed it with suspicion.  Only Geretous, the
one born to the religious caste, the failed priest, had studied it with
interest and understood.

So it was at sunset the night before when they had come upon
this little glen.  It was, more than anything else, blessedly flat, and it had struck
Hallin and the others as the perfect spot to camp.  But Tawn, after staring for
some time at his map, had insisted that they backtrack to a spot they knew was
safe, even at the risk of their own comfort, rather than sleep over untested
ground.  No exact reason did he give; by his own word, the glade was as welcome
to his eye as to any, and the map did not dispute it, but it was a bit too
attractive, and he would see it by daylight before he would trust it. 
Reluctantly, Hallin and the others had agreed.

Daylight this morning had found Tawn crouched at the edge of
the clearing, frowning over his map again.  Whether he had slept at all or
whether he had spent the whole night there, no one knew, but while the others
were eating and breaking camp a few hundred feet away, he was staring over the
thin sheet of ice covering the clearing floor.

He looked up suddenly to see Hallin standing beside him. 
Behind them, the others were making their way toward him, muttering between
themselves and carrying what few supplies they had brought up with them.  They
were ready to move on.  Tawn shrugged and rose to his feet.  “I don’t trust
it,” he said finally, folding his map carefully, not bothering to show it to
Hallin.  “Nothing says it can’t be here, but...”

“Nothing says it can.”  Hallin nodded grimly.  The clearing
was blanketed in thick strands of power, but then so was the rest of the
mountain this near the top; thus to his eye, the clearing was as likely to be
dangerous as the very ground where he stood, and while such dependence chafed,
he had had to trust Tawn’s instincts entirely for the last several days.

“It strikes me a bit too welcome to be just so, aye.”  He
squeezed Tawn’s arm.  “Your word’s enough.  Nothing presses us that way; we
move on.”

“Hallin.”  Pax pointed through the clearing toward the high
crest above.  “We could reach the top of the ridge well before Dith if we go
this way.”  He saw the look in Hallin’s eye, the dread in Tawn’s, and stepped
forward with the same diplomatic smile he had shown so many times before. 
“Tawn says he does not trust it, but he has no proof, not even for himself.” 
He looked at Tawn a moment, but the older man did not look away.  Then Pax
turned to Haan and Geretous for agreement.  “We know just where Dith is.  If we
mount that ridge ahead of him, I say that’s our best position for attack, the
best we’ve seen!  Tawn’s got a feeling, is all, Hallin—”

“His feeling’s been enough ere now.”

“Oh, aye,” Pax offered quickly, “and we’ve all felt the
same; by Limigar, the whole mountain’s witched and well we know it.  But
sometimes rocks are just rocks.”  Pax clasped his hands patiently and lowered
his voice.  “Beyond this, this meadow here, lies the best way to go, if we
can.  I only—”

“We can’t go that way,” barked the hunter, “so we’d best
move on.”  With that, Hallin turned and started off toward the east, thinking
to put them nearer the river, nearer the way Dith had gone.  Dith was no more
than a few hours ahead of them now—twice Hallin had seen the flash of gold from
his robes the day before—and with their early start they would have him within
striking distance again by sunset at the latest.  As Pax had pointed out, if
they could reach the ridge before him, they would have the advantage.

But at the back of the group, Pax had stepped away through
the clearing.  Whether to relieve himself or to feel the warm sun on his face
for a moment or to prove to the others that he was right, no one would ever
know.  Only a few feet from the trees that bordered the clearing he had
suddenly, horribly, found no ground beneath his feet. The realization had only
just struck him before his face disappeared beneath the unwavering surface of
stone.

Now Tawn stood woodenly from where he had hurled himself to
the ground to try to catch Pax’s clutching hand as it passed.  He had been just
a moment too late.  Pax had fallen through instantly.

Hallin looked up to see the other two Hadrians staring at
the frosty ground of the clearing with wide eyes.  Indeed, the ground looked
solid even while their minds told them it could not be, and the knowledge
filled them with vertigo.  Geretous picked up a few pebbles and tossed them
into the clearing.  Eerily, they rested on the ground where Pax had
disappeared, without falling through.  Haan only stared and shivered.

“It’s thick,” Tawn grumbled.  He picked up a single heavy
stone, one weighing about as much as a young boy, and heaved it with a grunt
from his shoulder.  That stone dropped through the ground with a soft thud and
disappeared, as if it were falling through clouds.  Right behind it, a small
rabbit paused for a moment at the sound, then bounded neatly, energetically,
over the same ground, over the pebbles, and into the underbrush at the opposite
edge.

Tawn touched Hallin’s shoulder and crouched at the edge of
the clearing to touch the ground beneath the melting frost.  Then he pointed
toward where the rabbit had come bounding across the meadow.  Tiny tracks
melted through the light frost at the edge of the clearing.  At first Hallin
did not see what Tawn found so interesting about it, but then Tawn directed his
attention toward the center, just beyond where he had thrown his rock.

Hallin shook his head and looked again, having seen nothing
that struck him as important.

“The tracks,” Tawn breathed.

Indeed, if the hunter forced himself to stare at them, he
could see that something was a bit odd about the tracks after all, but he had
to stare a good while longer before he understood what it was.  They distorted
and faded a few yards short of the clearing’s center, yet he had seen the
rabbit continue across.  Indeed the tracks faded back into existence just a few
feet away from where they had stopped and continued to the other side of the
clearing.  Now, having seen it, his eyes would not leave the incongruity alone
and kept staring at it, trying to use that as a wedge of reality to destroy the
illusion.

Hallin frowned.  Either a chasm lay beneath the illusory
ground or it did not, and a hidden chasm was as deadly to a rabbit as to a man
unless the rabbit saw the only true way across it, perhaps a narrow bridge of
rock.  But that did not explain the pebbles skittering evenly over the ground
where Pax had disappeared.

If there was no chasm, if instead it were only a trench full
of quicksand, then Pax might be just below, drowning within a hand’s reach of
them.  Hallin edged warily toward where he expected the edge to be, testing his
footing at every step.  “Pax,” he called, peering down at the ground as if his
gaze might cut through it.  But it did not.

“A volcanic vent,” observed Tawn who wiped a few drops of
sweat from his brow.  “See how the ground is stone all round?  That much is
real.”  He had unfolded his map again, and his eyes met Hallin’s.  “I’d say it
drops away a good thousand feet or more, right to the volcano’s heart.”  He
sketched at the map a moment.  “I’d expect to see more like this.”

Hallin shut his eyes against his dizziness.  In his mind, he
could hear Pax’s screams, could feel the blistering heat of the steam that
swallowed him up and carried him down into the liquid rock below.

Steam.

He opened his eyes again.  Could Galorin truly give steam
that kind of substance, that kind of density?   Could he control it so finely
as to make it thick enough to support a small animal, say, or a toss of
pebbles, enough to pass any simple test a man might think to make, but not
enough to support his full weight?  That kind of control was beyond anything
Hallin had ever seen, and he stared at the glade in awe.

To cover it, Galorin had only to extend the light from the
stone edges of the vent, except that in stretching the light so far, he
eventually distorted all but its color; the full depth of its texture and all
the minute details blurred and distorted toward the center.  At that point,
believability became more a matter of suggestion than of actual illusion,
having only to turn the mind’s assumptions against itself.  Such suggestion,
even for one of Hallin’s experience, was not easily overcome, and by the time
someone found himself far enough inside the clearing to see the flaws in the
illusion, it would be too late.

Dith had not had to pass this test; he had not come within a
thousand feet of this defense.  Hallin’s blood burned with rage.  Dith could
not have survived the temptation of this clearing any better than Pax; how
could he possibly be worthy?  Hallin cast one last look back at the clearing
before he rejoined the three Hadrian men in their slow climb toward the ridge. 
He would make Dith pay for this, for all of this, he vowed between grinding
teeth.

The river had diminished to an icy brook and finally to a
small slushy creek beside him, and Dith had made his way over countless fallen
logs and rocks to cross its many tributaries.  It forked one last time, just as
he had seen on the River Stone, and became two equal trickles from springs
whose hot water steamed out over the icicles building at the edges of their
stone beds.  The keep had to be just over this ridge.

Since his climb near the falls, the land had become steeper
and less accommodating, forcing him through narrow passages between cliff walls
and along ledges that fell away into the misty wintry clouds below, or over
crackling mud ice and rotting deadfall.  The way had grown colder for a time,
and a thin wind blew gusts of snow from the tops of the highest ridges.  Even
so, his fingers were not as stiff as they had been further down the mountain,
and he could feel a small amount of warmth rising from the ground itself.