“Calm down, don’t panic!” an inner voice whispered to me. “Nothing terrible has happened, you can still go back. Try to keep calm. Look around!”
At long last Valder had given me a piece of useful advice! I took several deep breaths, trying to control my breathing and the thundering drums of my heart. It was true, I had already taken twenty paces across the forbidden hall and I was still alive and well, despite the ominous warnings at the entrance. Had the elves just been trying to give me a fright? I should just take a look around and decide whether to go back or go forward.
The hall wasn’t large (for Hrad Spein). Only the size of a jousting field. The walls were made of huge blocks of stone, each the size of a smallish carriage. The architecture was rather basic, especially bearing in mind that there were sixty-nine rulers of one of the light elves’ houses lying here.
This hall couldn’t compare with the beauty I’d seen on the earlier levels. It was strange. Were elfin kings really buried here, or was that just another fairy tale for the gullible? There was no way to check now—the niches between the stone blocks had been walled over ages ago, and there was no way to tell just from the bones if someone was a member of a royal house or some plain, boorish peasant.
The arrangement of the columns was totally chaotic. Three here, one there, and eight over that way. They were eight-sided, tall, and very slim—you couldn’t really hide behind one of them. But the strangest thing was the patches of light slowly wandering chaotically around the floor. As if there were rays of sunlight falling from the ceiling; but, naturally, there weren’t any rays and there wasn’t any sun, either.
This was a rather strange sight, and somehow ominous, too. The hall was in semidarkness, lit only by the pale light radiating from the walls, but every column threw a dense, inky shadow, and creeping around entirely at random were about forty patches of sunlight, each one a good yard and a half across. There weren’t any bright patches to be seen where I was standing, but up ahead …
You could call it an assembly, or a swarm. I turned toward the way out. Eight patches of sunlight had appeared out of nowhere and were blocking my way: If I wanted to leave the hall now, I would have to walk straight through them.
I didn’t have the slightest desire to tread on something when I didn’t even know what it was, and the only thing left for me to do now was jump through them—fortunately for me there were small black areas of floor between the patches that had lined up in front of me. As if they could read my thoughts, the patches started moving and fused together into a single large blob.
“Bastards!” I exclaimed.
There was something about these patches of sunlight and the way they wandered about that bothered me. I even shot a crossbow bolt at one, but it just clanged against the floor and nothing happened.
“I won’t walk on you, and that’s it. Slit my throat, but I won’t do it,” I muttered, and turned away from the door.
I’d have to get across the hall. There had to be some pathway through!
I stopped right at the edge of the patches and stood there. There had to be some system to this aimless wandering, some principle behind this movement, but I just couldn’t grasp it.
They crept around with all the speed of a paralyzed mammoth. Whatever they were, they were in no hurry and they moved at their own leisure.
Some patches decided it would be a good idea to go right, others decided to go left, some followed a diagonal from corner to corner, some went round in circles or spirals, and some followed jagged lines that only they could understand. Sometimes they crawled onto each other and for a moment fused into one big patch, then they separated again and went their own ways. But there were always fairly large gaps left between them, so if I was agile enough, I could simply run around these sluggish creepers. Here at the edge of the hall there weren’t very many of them, but the closer to the center, the more of them there were. And there was an especially large number beside some kind of heap lying about eighty yards ahead of me.
I strained my eyes hard, but I couldn’t make out what it was lying on the floor. And then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before—the places where the patches absolutely refused to crawl.
The shadows from the columns! They lay across the floor in long dark lines, and not a single bright patch dared to cross them.
The shadows were little islands in the pattern of movement that covered the floor. So I had a good chance of getting through the hall if I followed them and avoided the patches of light.
I stepped in just as soon as the next patch of light had crept past me. A long leap! Then another, and another! A halt. Two patches started moving toward me and I jumped back, almost stepping on a third one. Jump left! Jump right! Straight ahead! In three leaps I covered the distance between me and the first shadow and, once I was safe, I sighed in relief and caught my breath. Basically, it wasn’t all that complicated, the main thing was to keep your wits about you and make sure you didn’t step on a patch of light by accident.
The eight yards of space between me and the next shadow were empty. Forward! I ran like a hare, hoping to confuse my pursuers and avoid a long chase. Sometimes I had to stop to let a patch go by, jump over two patches at once, or run in the opposite direction. My arm began to throb with pain; I couldn’t understand why.
Either the patches realized I was skipping around between them like a drunken Doralissian, or they simply decided to have a bit of fun, but they started creeping a lot faster and more randomly, so I reached the fifth island of shadow puffing and panting. And apart from that, three times I almost blundered and only avoided stepping on a patch of “sunlight” by some miracle.
The pain in my left arm had started systematically gnawing into my bones. I had to lean back against a column, sit down on the floor, and rummage in my little bag to find the appropriate magical elixir. During the game of leapfrog across the hall everything in the section of the bag where I kept the vials had got jumbled up.
I swore and started sorting out the confusion. I had to stuff several unimportant vials in the pockets of my jacket—they could lie there until I found a free slot for them. It took me about two minutes to put everything back in order, and all that time the patches kept on stepping up the pace.
The patches seemed to have gone wild, and in one place my way was blocked by an unbroken stream of them. The pain in my arm was becoming unbearable now and I had to grit my teeth. My improvised route had come to an end. From here to the middle of the hall it was only ten yards at the most, but the next haven of shadow was thirty yards away. And the space between me and it was filled with creeping patches, so many of them that I could see virtually no black areas between them. This was a real challenge! How could I get across a space like that without touching a patch of “sunlight”?
Then I finally paid some attention to the heap lying about fifteen paces away from me. What I hadn’t been able to make out from a distance, turned out close up to be nothing other than a pile of human bodies. Balistan Pargaid’s men.
Of course, Lafresa and Paleface didn’t happen to be among the dead. There were seven corpses lying on the floor in poses that no normal person could possibly have imagined. “Grotesque” and “unnatural” are probably the most respectful words to describe what I saw. It looked as if the dead men had all been born without any bones in their bodies. One’s neck was twisted so that the back of his head looked forward and his face looked backward. And as well as that, his elbows and knees were bent in completely the wrong directions, not at all the way that Mother Nature intended, so that he looked like a strange parody of a spider. Another dead man had simply been tied in a knot and a third had his legs woven together in a way that looked very frightening. Lots of bloody streaks across the floor indicated that death had overtaken the unfortunate fellows at different points in the hall, and then the bodies had been dragged into a single heap.
This was bad. Very bad. As usual, Harold had got involved with something very, very nasty. The main thing now was to find out what this nasty thing was before it snipped my head off. Any information at all about the enemy would be a step toward victory.
And then it hit me …
“Why, you thickhead, brother Harold!” I swore, smacking myself on the forehead in annoyance.
That was the secret of it! May the darkness crush me—those words at the entrance: “Do not disturb those who guard the peace of the dead,” meant exactly what they said. And the statues weren’t watching, they were pretending to be eyeless or blind. Blind guards, eternally watching over the peace of the elfin lords! The rhyme riddle had a line about it, but I’d managed to forget it at just the wrong moment. And it was no accident that my arm was hurting, either—I was wearing the red copper bracelet that Egrassa had given me! It was protecting me against the guards of this hall, even if the protection was painful.
All these thoughts went rushing through my head like a storm wind. But now I didn’t know what to do—feel
