down against his leg. The Elf toppled over with a scream of pain, and the Gnomes were on him.
For an instant it appeared as if they were all finished. But then Garet Jax was there once more, his black–clad form hurtling into the attackers and flinging them back. Down went the Gnome Hunters, dying in astonishment, dead almost before they knew what had killed them. The last of the Hunters fell, and the members of the little company were alone once more.
Foraker stumbled over to where Edain Elessedil writhed in pain, his gnarled hands reach down to feel the injured leg. «Smashed,” he breathed softly and exchanged a knowing look with Garet Jax.
He bound the leg with strips of his short cloak, using shattered arrows for splints. Slanter and Jair hastened down the steps. to rejoin them, and the Gnome forced some of the bitter ale he carried down the Elfs throat. Edain Elessedil’s face was white and drawn with the pain as Jair bent over him. The Valeman saw at once that the damaged leg was useless.
«Help me get him up,” Foraker ordered. With Slanter’s aid, they carried the Elf to the top of the stairs. There they propped him up against the balustrade and knelt before him.
«Leave me,” he whispered, grimacing as he shifted his weight. «You have to. Take Jair on to the Croagh. Go quickly.»
Jair looked hurriedly at the others. Their faces were grim and set. «No!» he cried out angrily.
«Jair.» The Elf s hand closed tightly about his arm. «It was agreed, Jair. We pledged it. Whatever happens to the rest of us, you must reach Heaven’s Well. I can no longer help you. You must leave me and go on.»
«What he says is true, Ohmsford — he can go no further.» Elb Foraker’s voice was oddly hushed. He put his hands on the Valeman’s shoulders, then slowly came to his feet, glancing in turn at Slanter and Garet Jax. «I think that maybe I’ve gone as far as I can go, too. That sword cut has left me too dizzy for long climbs. The three of you go on. I think I’ll stay here.»
«Elb, no, you can’t do that…» the injured man tried to object.
«My choice, Edain Elessedil,” the Dwarf cut him short. «My choice as it was yours when you chose to come to my aid. We have a bond, you and I — a bond shared by Elves and Dwarves as far back as anyone can remember. We always stand by each other. It’s time for me to honor that bond.»
He turned then to Garet Jax. «This time the matter of my staying is not open to argument, Garet.»
A scattering of Gnome Hunters appeared at the far end of the hall. They slowed guardedly, calling back to others that followed.
«Hurry, now,” Foraker whispered. «Take Ohmsford and go.»
Garet Jax hesitated only a moment, then nodded. His hand reached out to grip that of the Dwarf. «Luck, Foraker.»
«And you,” the other answered.
His dark eyes met those of the Gnome momentarily. Then wordlessly, he placed an ash bow, arrows, and the slender Elf blade by Edain Elessedil’s side. In his own hands, he gripped the double–edged axe.
«Go now!» he snapped without turning, his black–bearded countenance fierce and set.
Jair held his ground defiantly, eyes darting from the face of the Weapons Master to that of Slanter. «Come, boy,” the Gnome said quietly.
Rough hands fastened on the Valeman’s good arm and propelled him along the balcony. Garet Jax followed, gray eyes cold and fixed. Jair wanted to scream in protest, to say that they could not leave them, but he knew that it would do no good. The decision had been made. He glanced over his shoulder to where Foraker and the Elven Prince waited at the stairway’s edge. Neither looked toward him. Their eyes were on the advancing Gnome Hunters.
Then Slanter had them through a doorway into another hall and hastening down its length. Cries of pursuit sounded once more, scattered and distant save in the direction from which they had fled. Jair ran silently at Slanter’s side and fought to keep from looking back.
The hallway they followed ended at an arched opening. They passed through into gray, hazy daylight, and the walls of the keep were left behind. A broad courtyard spread out before them to a railing. Beyond, the cliffs and the fortress dropped away into a valley; out of the valley, a single thread of stone spiraled upward past the courtyard’s edge. High and then higher it rose, to wrap at last about a solitary peak far above.
The Croagh, with Heaven’s Well at its summit.
The three who remained of the little company from Culhaven hurried forward to where the stairway and the courtyard joined and began to climb.
Chapter Forty–Two
Hundreds of steps passed away beneath Brin’s feet as she descended the stone stairway of the Croagh into the pit of the Maelmord. The slender ribbon of stone spiraled downward, winding from Graymark’s leaden towers into the mist and steamy heat of the jungle below, a narrow and dizzying drop through space. The Valegirl traversed it with wooden steps, her mind numb with fear and weariness and wracked with whispers, of doubt. One hand rested lightly on the stone railing to give her some sense of support. In the west, the clouded sun continued to pass slowly behind the mountains.
Through the whole of her descent, her eyes remained fixed on the pit below. A dim and hazy mass when she began, the Maelmord sharpened in clarity with each step taken. Slowly, the life that lay rooted there took shape and form, lifting away from the broad backdrop of the valley. The trees were huge, bent, and hoary, warped somehow from the way that nature’s hand had shaped them. And within their midst were massive stalks of scrub and weed, grown to disproportionate size, and vines that wound and twisted over everything like snakes without heads or tails. The color of this jungle was not a vibrant, spring green, but a dull and grayish color that bore the cast of something dying with the freeze of winter.
Yet the heat was awesome. To Brin, the feel of the Maelmord was like a day in hottest summer when the ground had cracked, the grass browned, and the surface water dissipated to dust. The terrible stench of the sewers had its life–source here, rising from the earth and the jungle foliage in sickening waves, hanging in the still afternoon air, and gathering like fouled soup in the bowl of the mountain stone. At first, it was almost unbearable, even with Cogline’s salve still thick within her nostrils. But after a time, it grew less noticeable as her sense of smell was mercifully dulled. So, too, it was with the heat as her body temperature adjusted. Heat and stench lost the edge of their unpleasantness, and there was only the stark and blasted look of the pit that could not be blocked away.
There was the hissing, too, and there was the rise and fall of the foliage, as if it were a body breathing. There was the certainty that the whole of the valley was a thing alive, a solitary being for all of its disparate parts that could act and think and feel. And while it had no eyes, still the Valegirl could feel it looking at her, watching and waiting.
But she kept on. There could be no thought of turning back. It had been a long and arduous journey that had brought her to this place and time, and much had been sacrificed. Lives had been lost and the character of those saved was forever changed. She, herself, was no longer the girl she had been, for the magic had made her over into something new and terrible. She winced at the admission she could now freely make. She was changed, and the magic had wrought it. She shook her head. Well, perhaps it was not change, after all, that she had experienced, but merely insight. Perhaps learning of the frightening extent of the wishsong’s power had but shown her what had always been there and she was who she had always been and had not changed at all. Perhaps it was simply that now she understood.
The musings distracted her only slightly from the Maelmord’s bulk as it drew close now with the final twist in the stone stairway of the Croagh, marking the end of her descent. She slowed, staring fixedly downward into the mass of the jungle beneath, seeing the twisted maze of trunks, limbs, and vines shrouded in trailers of mist and the rise and fall of the life that rooted there, its breath hissing in steady cadence. Within the ravaged breast of the pit, no other life gave evidence of its existence.
Yet somewhere within that tangle, the Ildatch lay hidden.
How was she to find it?
She stood upon the Croagh two dozen steps from its lower end, with the Maelmord swelling softly all about
