weapons poised. A thousand ghost warriors stood shoulder to shoulder within Natac’s field of view, while the number of spearheads and bayonets in view behind them was far beyond his ability to count.
“It won’t be long,” he predicted quietly. Cillia, who was watching, too, and waiting for his command, nodded as he held up a hand. He knew that windcasting required a lot of energy, and the druids’ ability to sustain the storm was limited, so he was anxious to conserve their power for as long as possible.
But within a few more minutes it became obvious that the lull was over. The rank of attackers was arrayed across the entire length of the river. Spears lowered, the first of them stepped forward, down the bank and into the water. Others followed closely, tightly packed ranks extending as far backward as Natac could see.
“Now!” he said, and in almost the same instant the druid matriarch sent her lightning signal blasting in both directions along the line. Once more the winds howled and the waters surged, and the ghost warriors marched headlong into the teeth of the gale.
“Surely we have been sent to Hell itself!” Shandira exclaimed, as soon as the flickering lights of the teleport spell had faded. She was shouting to make herself heard. Her ebony skin had paled to an ashen gray as she looked up at their looming surroundings, black stone cliffs rising like colossal walls to the right and the left.
Miradel found it hard to argue, but she tried. “Do you think there is such a waterfall in Hell?” she asked, more to hear the comforting sound of her own voice than from any real desire for an answer.
In fact, her words were all but drowned in the thunder of the lofty spume, the source of the whirling maelstrom in the stone-walled channel that had given focus to Belynda’s teleport spell. Never had she been in such a forbidding place, and her immediate thought was that she was a fool, had made a disastrous decision that would inevitably cost two lives for no good purpose.
The two women were standing on a flat-topped boulder no larger than a typical dining table. The base of the waterfall was up the channel a hundred yards or so, but the air was cold and penetratingly wet. The water, a white inferno of rapids and foam, churned past them, ten feet below the rock. On the other side of their precarious platform was a small eddy, where the stream spilled into a natural bowl in the rocky bed, spun through a rapid circle, then poured itself back into the main current. It was that minivortex that had caused her to select this location for their arrival.
When she had made that selection, she had identified what looked like a negotiable trail leading up a ravine and out of the gorge. Now that route seemed more like a narrow chute of loose scree, an invitation to a fatal fall. She had brought a rope, of course, but it suddenly occurred to her that at least one of them would have to be able to reach the top on her own before that rope would be any use to the other.
“It’s cold in here!” Shandira said, shouting again. There was a little light from the stars circling overhead, but the temperature was lower than anything one could experience on Nayve.
“We need our cloaks!” replied Miradel, shrugging out of her pack as Shandira nodded in agreement. Moments later they had pulled their woolen shawls around themselves, hoods pulled up and cinched around their faces.
“Now we have to get away from the river. We’re getting soaked, just by being in this air!” The African woman took the lead, lifting her pack onto her shoulders again, then hopping from the rock to the steeply sloping ground at the base of the ravine. A cascade of loose stones tumbled down, and she lurched forward, landing on her hands and knees. “Careful!” she shouted back.
Miradel didn’t need the warning. She was trembling, frightened to move, but Shandira’s decisiveness gave her the strength to follow. She, too, donned her backpack, then stepped after her companion, taking a strong black hand to keep her balance as she made the long step to the ravine.
Slowly the two women made their way up the steep, narrow passage. Miradel was grateful as the river fell farther and farther away below them, but she was acutely conscious of her scraped hands and knees, of the aches and cramps that were growing in muscles kept taut to prevent a fall. Again it was Shandira who served as a tireless example, pressing ahead with sure steps, then pausing to encourage Miradel, often to extend that helping hand.
Whether it was an hour or three hours later she could not tell, but at last they crawled from the top of the ravine to collapse on a flat and barren wasteland of dark rock. It was still cold, though the air was drier. Stars whirled and danced overhead, providing a minimal spray of light. For a long time the two druids simply lay still and rested, catching their breath, easing their sore limbs.
Finally Miradel sat up and looked around. She was facing the direction of center, and saw a vast sprawl of descending terrain, a series of shelflike terraces of stone dropping eventually to a dark, flat lowland. She could not see the Worldsea, a hundred or so miles away.
Only then did she look behind her, in the direction that was neither metal nor wood. She could barely suppress a gasp of horror as she saw the citadel rising there, like a grim and black-faced mountain of sheer cliff, vaulted parapet, and impossibly lofty summit. Black space yawned beyond, like an infinity of bleak hopelessness or an eternity of suffering.
“I told you,” Shandira said, sitting beside Miradel and following the direction of her gaze. “Nothing less than Hell itself.”
12
Deathscape
In the Third Direction rises
The End of all Beginnings,
The Proof of all Lies,
And the Virtue of every Sin.
The forces of the cosmos marshaled, summoned by the immortal will of a proud deity, deepened by the forces of frustration, boredom, and immortal anger. These powerful forces had been contained for a very long time, but as events on the Fourth Circle settled into a stasis of war, the need for change exploded, and the effects rippled outward, upward, downward, tearing through the fabric of six circles.
The storm was fierce near its epicenter, so that it wracked the very bedrock of creation. In the distant corners of the cosmos it was naturally less potent, but even there it was felt as much more than a ripple of distant thunder.
Waves of destructive energy concentrated at the source of the immortal one’s power, emanating outward in a great explosion, mighty and violent, though at first it made no sound, emitted no visual indication of its presence. Instead, it flowed as an invisible river of energy, palpable proof of the diety’s power as it crossed the middle of a world and took hold of the landscape in a physical grasp. For there was a god, and she desired entertainment.
The pony pranced anxiously, hooves skipping across the rocky ground. A loose pebble bounced away, tumbling over the rim of the canyon. Janitha Khandaughter heard it bounce several times, tumbling against the cliff wall as it vanished into Riven Deep.
“Easy, big boy. What’s got you so nervous today?” asked the elven rider, patting the stallion on his shoulder.
In fact, she felt the same agitation that seemed to be bothering her normally steady horse, as though the air itself was charged, ready to release some unimagined force. She scrutinized the dark mass gathered across the canyon, knowing that the Delvers had been arrayed there with their iron golems for an unusually long time now… not moving, just formed up as if for march or battle, but with no place to go.
It was not far past the Lighten Hour, and her elves were still in their bivouacs for the most part, though the usual scouts were posted. The Hyac patrolled the edge of Riven Deep for a distance of more than fifty miles, as far as the Swansleep Waterfall in the direction of metal. There, where the river of the same name plunged from the precipice into the misty well of the Deep, her elves had linked with the regiments from Barantha, who held the river line against the ghost warriors. Even with all the clans gathered here, the mounted Hyac were far too few to
