garrison that entire length of canyon. Instead, they maintained fast-moving patrols, riding ceaselessly back and forth along their entire position.
In fact it had been her stallion, Khanwind, that had awakened her this morning. All the horses had been restive in the late-night hours, but he had been the loudest, most demanding. At the first signs of pale daylight he had whinnied and kicked in the corral, and as the Lighten Hour advanced, his agitation had correspondingly increased. Though she herself had been up till well past midnight, Janitha found herself unable to ignore the agitated animal. She had risen and saddled him, allowed him to canter along the rim of the canyon for several miles, finally turned back toward her encampment. They had just made their only stop, for both of them to drink from a shallow stream, but as the elfwoman regained her saddle, the pony once again began to dance and whicker in agitation.
Everything seemed normal on this side of the canyon, she thought. There were crows and ducks flying nearby, good indications that the harpies had not made a recent aerial foray. Of course, there was that oddity across Riven Deep, the formation that had lasted for a surprisingly long time, now. She could see them from here: the Delvers standing in those precise ranks that they had maintained without wavering for ten days. But they were miles away, across an unbridged gulf of space. They remained still, arrayed in blocklike formation, making no move to march, nor did they display any visible preparations for some kind of battle.
Even so, she was concerned. She knew that the great invasion had come ashore. Faeries continued to bring her twice-daily reports on the progress of that battle. Janitha had known the despair of the retreat from the shore and the encouragement of the stand at the river. Even though Natac’s army had held the ghost warriors up at the Swansleep-a stand that had lasted four days now, without a single breach in the position-she knew that Nayve was threatened in a new and lethal fashion. But there was nothing for her to do about that except to stay vigilant and keep the Hyac focused on guarding the Deep, the task they had maintained for fifty years.
Abruptly Khanwind whinnied and reared, surprise almost dropping Janitha from the saddle. She held on and whispered soothingly-until she, too, felt a stab of irrational terror. Some force was moving through… through everything. She could feel it in the ground, in the air, in her belly; a rumble of invisible strength had made her seem smaller than the most insignificant bug.
Next she heard a sound, a rumbling of the deepest basso, growing louder and louder as she worked to control her panicked, bucking pony. Khanwind staggered, went down to his knees, and Janitha flew from the saddle, smashing to the ground with a force that drove the breath from her lungs. The sturdy horse quickly stood again but staggered like a drunkard. Only then did the elfwoman realize that the ground itself was rippling and surging in the throes of a major quake.
She looked across Riven Deep, sensing that, as violent as it was here, the disturbance was actually focused over there. The first crack appeared quickly, as if a blade of cosmic proportions had torn through the fabric of the precipice, rapidly widening the breach. It looked to Janitha as though the opposite face of Riven Deep had been slashed in two, the gap growing wider and extending downward until it vanished into the misty depths.
Then other cracks appeared, great chunks of the landscape breaking away. The movement, miles away, was clearly visible to her. She stared in awe, waiting for the huge pieces of ground to tumble, even allowed herself a flash of dizzying hope: the Delver army was arrayed on those great platforms of rock; surely the hated invaders would be carried to their doom in Riven Deep! There, another piece broke free, and another. The whole shelf over there was obviously crumbling, broken apart by this quake that was affecting all the ground under the enemy army!
The rocky terrain cracked into great slabs of rock that teetered and wobbled precariously. Below, the face of the vast cliff broke and fell way, carrying downward the cliff that supported the far rim of the canyon. Now, the Delvers had to fall!
Janitha held her breath, waiting… and waiting. Finally she exhaled in slow, dull realization. The pieces of ground that had broken away from the opposite precipice were not going to fall, not going to carry the enemy army to its doom. Instead, those huge slabs began, very slowly, to rise into the air.
Miradel looked at the sun, low in the sky, faint of brightness, and impossibly far away. It was hard to imagine that it was full daylight on the world of Nayve, but she knew that the Lighten Hour had passed some time ago, that the sun was suspended above the world, directly in line with the loom rising from the temple of the Goddess Worldweaver. She could remember the power of that orb of warmth and heat, imagine the rays soaking into her skin.
But from here, in the remote recesses of the Fifth Circle, that distant light was a mere flicker, low on the horizon, struggling vainly to penetrate the gulf of space, to cast some semblance of life-giving heat toward the two druids in their lonely place. The black massif rose to the high horizon, a wall across the very path they needed to follow. It stood as if a barrier at the edge of the cosmos, the perfect refuge for a god who sought the dead of other worlds and turned them into his own pawns.
Against that backdrop Miradel felt like less than a tiny speck, a mere mote of vitality in a panorama of death-or not death, so much, as a lack of life. There was no grass to be seen on this whole vast mountainside of stone, not a tree or bush sprouting from the lands spreading out behind and below them. Even the course of the mighty river, as it emerged from its gorge, looked more like a crisp line carved into the ground than any naturally eroded waterway. There were other canyons and chasms cutting through this vast mountainside, but wherever she saw them, they reminded her of vast graves, full of shadow, yawning, and silent. Finally, there was that sun, so very far away, so faint.
“It’s like early dawn’s light on an autumn day, back on Earth,” Miradel mused, as she and Shandira paused to rest and eat a little of the trail bread, followed by a few sips of water. “Only the sun will never rise over us here.”
“And perhaps we’ll never be warm again,” Shandira said. “At least, we won’t if we don’t keep moving.”
“You’re right,” Miradel agreed, suppressing a shiver. Fortunately there was no wind, and their cloaks had dried since they had emerged from the misty gorge, yet the chill in the air remained a palpable if insidious enemy, constantly trying to penetrate through skin and flesh into the very substance of her bones. She pushed herself to her feet, noticing for the hundredth time how cruelly the straps of her heavy pack dug into her shoulders. She shifted the load around, but each bit of her upper back seemed to be bruised.
“I miss the river-at least it made some noise,” Shandira said. She lifted her pack easily and slung it onto her shoulders, standing tall, moving with easy grace as she turned.
Miradel felt small and weak by comparison, desperately dependent upon her companion. She felt the same about the river, feeling the vast and lifeless silence of this world as an oppressive force. “I think your notion of Hell is beginning to seem apt,” she admitted.
Shandira smiled wryly, then turned toward the ground rising before them and said, “Let’s go.”
As they started to walk, Miradel limped against the pain of a blister that was forming on her right foot. For a dozen steps she analyzed the pressure against her heel, trying with some success to shift the way she placed her foot. Satisfied, she noticed that they had climbed another steep section of trail while she worried about the sore on her foot. She chuckled aloud as she rationalized that at least one source of her pain-the blister-was bad enough to distract her from the nagging ache of her contusions.
“Do you see something funny up there?” Shandira asked.
“Just the opposite,” Miradel admitted, turning her attention to the vast and precipitous citadel rising before them. It was as big as a whole range of mountains and climbed toward the twilit sky in a series of massive cliffs and crenellated towers. They could pick a path freely along the relatively open slope, but every route toward the Deathlord’s citadel had one thing in common: it led steeply upward, an ascent greater than any mountain to be found upon Nayve.
Carefully they made their way around a shoulder of mountainside, a craggy knob of natural rock into which had been carved numerous platforms and ramparts. All of these seemed vacant now, at least to their visual inspection from below, but the elevation nevertheless presented a dour and forbidding aspect. Passing the foot of that height, they started moving upward again on an open slope that was crisscrossed by a wide road that cut back and forth through dozens of switchbacks.
“The armies marched down that road,” Miradel explained, “After they appeared in the hall of Karlath- Fayd.”
“So that is the way to his citadel?” asked Shandira.
Miradel nodded, her gaze rising toward the summit of the long slope. Abruptly she gasped and seized the
