As if by the turning of a cogwheel, Halloween ratcheted closer. After retiring all the original documents to the valise in its under-the-bed hiding place in her room, Cadence and Osley went to his room and reviewed his day’s output of scribbled translations. She consumed the revelations silently, her mind running as fast as possible to catch up with Ara. Somewhere far ahead, the hob-bitess was already ensnared by her fate. The first page confirmed the danger:
With the approach of the Black Army, the feast at Thornland Keep ended in torch-lit disorder. Stunned guests, at once well-drunk, well-fed, and fearful, upset laden tables and overturned sloshing flagons as they panicked toward the exits.
The prince’s leave was neither asked nor given. He stood atop a table, feet astride, in dazed wonder. Had his policies now utterly failed? The jests and mockery lay at the very foot of the Evil One. Had they finally yielded intolerance? Doom was marching with iron tread into his tiny realm. Should he escape with his court? His jocund counselor, besotted with wine and ill-advising, was nowhere to be seen. His thespians alone stood like he on the other table tops, balanced as if walking on the choppy waters of pandemonium, each awaiting direction for their play-acting.
He marked the simultaneous appearance of a halfling and the coming of this fate.
Ara was ushered by the princess to a side door. “Descend here. Stay true to the main steps. Come at length to the outer walls and strike southwest for the steep hills. These found the deep mountains you will see. Trust your skills and luck. To stay or chance other direction is folly. I fear our small sovereignty is now closed on all sides save the black wall of the mountains themselves. Now, flee!”
Within the hour Ara was afoot on the rough night road. It was painted in the dim starlight that silhouetted soaring barriers of black that seemed to her not unlike rotten tooth stumps. One sound only she dared, a high, quick whistle as she exited the keep. The signal summoned the hawk, which had been awaiting her call on the battlement.
By morning a descending swirl of clouds obscured the approaching mountains.
What substituted for Ara’s day was a failed sun that never fully dispelled the darkness. A deepening fog shuttered away all sense of time, so that the moving sun, perhaps dancing merrily on the cloudtops far above, was but a guttering candle in the icy drizzle. She felt the water seep through the wool of her cloak and wriggle down her neck. She stumbled on as the road once again fell to disrepair. It labored on, and then cut straight down into a dell.
It led straight into a camp of guards, as surprised as she. They were sodden, disheveled and reticent, as if no one should be on this sorry road to interrupt the laxness of their vigilance. They were men pressed into service by fear, looking always for a truce before trouble. Their look was unusually troubled, as if they weren’t sure who they were guarding for or from. Now they were unsure whether Ara was not an emissary of their command. They stood uneasily, off-balance, without weapons at hand, as uncertain as men standing on thin ice far from shore.
Ara put her hand beneath her cloak as if to the hilt of a weapon, and said, “Forget your swords! Place that food here and retreat to the far side of the stream. Now!’
Without a word the nearest one, straw-haired and jack-o-lantern-toothed, placed a sack on the trail and the three of them backed away. Their swords and bodkins lay haphazard on the rocks.
She grabbed the food sack and a scabbard knife, amenable as a sword, and marched up the bank on the far side.
The hawk flew in short segments, a bellwether for her in the fine mist. Soon a huge black squirrel began to follow her, tree to tree, chiding endlessly. It was the only sound in the saturated stillness.
She wondered if it was in league with her enemies, a scout of some vast, innumerable legion that had spread forth to find her and her kind. Its excitement on such a day as this did not bode well. Any other squirrel would be busy counting nuts and adding to its stores.
The squirrel looked down at her from a high limb, switching and sweeping a proud black tail silvered at the tip. Its eyes were dark pearls of hatred. It chided once more, hurling personal and angry squirrel insults from its impregnable perch.
Suddenly it was gone. Multicolored leaves exploded in the air as a tumult of talons and fur and flapping wings disturbed the treetops. The hawk had seized it and was now swooping low and away, its wings beating full and loud and strong, gaining altitude with each sweep. The obnoxious squirrel was clutched head forward, as raptors will, with its long bushy tail trailing behind.
She continued on the road. With luck the squirrel had not relayed to others a message of this diminutive stranger on this unlikely path.
Through a long night that became a frost-rimmed dawn, Ara fled southwest along an ascending forest road.
For a brief moment the horizon cleared and an almost full moon, its prow cutting waves of glowing cloud, announced that little time remained to find her Amon.
The road degraded to oakbrush path, then rocky track, and finally to intertwined, twisting trails of high mountain sheep. Even this tenuous way she abandoned in her fear of pursuit. She trusted her instincts and so left little mark to show her route, and moved all but unseen.
Unaided by magic cloak or spell, Ara possessed facility for stealth that had allowed her in times past to observe undetected the passage of elves and even once to watch their secret council.
From treacherous screes to shady defiles to barren stone expanse, she moved haltingly, so that no sentinel’s glance from above would detect her movement. Autumn-dried highbush berries served for food, drip- springs for water.
Three days carried her to a ledge just below the summit. At its top, a hundred steps above, sat the hawk, its wings splayed for balance and its feathers rustling in the cold gusts rushing over the crest.
Looking back and far below, she saw, vibrant in the streaks of new dawn’s light, smoke coiling up from the sacked keep of Thornland.
She rested and then clambered to the top.
The hawk faced west and her eyes, weeping from the ripping cold of the West Wind, followed its gaze to a valley of ghostly ruin. Laid out steeply below her and spreading to the mountain walls bordering dimly in the distance, writhed a land in agony. Fumaroles, smoke holes, fissures of steam, slag heaps, burning pyres, all was pustuled and packed in a miserable expanse bisected by a long road. On that path scurried the ant-like commerce of war. Encampments scattered randomly. Great battle flags of purple and green and sickly yellow undulated slowly in the smoke-thick air. Dead center smoldered a volcanic cone. A road zigzagged up to a black maw that glowed and pulsed like a questing eye. A land of ruin feeding an empire of the enemy on the march.
Whether it be the first step or the last, all journeys are defined by a moment when one can go forward or retreat. Ara studied the land until the thin soup of light failed and she beheld an expanse of black velvet dotted with tiny fires more numerous than the stars she knew she would never see again.
She stepped forward and entered the land of the Dark Lord.
Chapter 35
OCTOBER 31. 12:42 A.M
Cadence put down the last yellow sheet and looked at the bedstand clock. It rationed out barely audible tocks, struggling to hold back what now seemed a breackneck, falling-forward stumble of time.
She looked over at Osley and he nodded back to her. Each knew what day it was. Each could sense in the quiet of early morning a coming change that compressed all the trick or treats, jack-o-lanterns, and Batman and Sarah Palin costumes into the crude ox-horn funnel of an ancient time. A time that might spill forth shadows capering in silhouette before a roaring night fire high and wild, sparks intermingling with stars, fed by the rich fat of a meat-harvest bonepile. A time when walls dissolved and secret gates swung open, creaking and untouched. A moment of passage and peril.
The tocks slowed and stopped for a full second.
