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.
