Stresa lumbered outside, and the Rovers followed, crawling from the hollow trunk and pushing themselves to their feet, muscles cramped and aching. Daybreak was a faint gray haze seeping through the treetops, barely able to penetrate the darkness beneath. Vog swirled through the jungle as if soup stirred within a cooking pot, but the air at ground level was still and lifeless. Things moved in the fetid waters of the bogs and sinkholes and on the deadwood that bridged them, a shifting of shapes and forms against the gloom. Sounds wafted dully from the shadows and hung waiting in challenge.
They started walking through the half-light, Stresa in the lead, a shambling, rolling mass of spikes. They continued slowly, steadily through the morning hours, the vog enfolding them at every turn, a colorless damp wrapper smelling of death. The light brightened from gray to silver, but remained faint and diffuse as it hovered about the edges of the trees. Strands of the Wisteron’s webbing wrapped about branches and vines, and snares hung everywhere, waiting to fall. The monster itself did not appear, but its presence could be felt in the hush that lay over everything.
Wren’s discomfort increased as the morning wore on. She felt queasy now and she had begun to sweat. At times she could not see clearly. She knew she had contracted a fever, but she told herself it would pass. She walked on and said nothing.
The jungle began to break apart shortly after midday, the ground turning solid again, the swamp fading back into the earth, and the canopy of the trees opening up. Light shone in bold patches through sudden rifts in the screen of the vog. The hush faded in an undercurrent of buzzings and clicks. Stresa mumbled something, but Wren couldn’t make out what it was. She had been unable to focus her thoughts for some time now, and her vision was so clouded that even the Splinterscat and Garth were just shadows. She stopped, aware that someone was talking to her, turned to find out who, and collapsed.
She remembered little of what happened next. She was carried for a short time, barely conscious of the motion, burdened with a lethargy that threatened to suffocate her. The fever burned through her, and she knew somehow that she would not be able to shake it off. She fell asleep, woke to discover she was lying wrapped in blankets, and promptly fell asleep again. She came awake thrashing, and Garth held her and made her drink something bitter and thick. She vomited it up and was forced to drink it again. She heard Stresa say something about water, felt a cool cloth on her forehead, and slept once more.
She dreamed this time. Tiger Ty was there, standing next to Stresa, the two of them looking down on her, bluff and craggy Wing Rider and sharp-eyed Splinterscat. They spoke in a similar voice, rough and guttural, commenting on what they saw, speaking of things she didn’t understand at first, and then finally of her. She had the use of magic, they said to each other. It was clear she did. Yet she refused to acknowledge it, hiding it as if it were a scar, pretending it wasn’t there and that she didn’t need it. Foolish, they said. The magic was all she had. The magic was the only thing she could trust.
She awakened reluctantly, her body cool again, and the fever gone. She was weak, and so thirsty it felt as if all the liquids in her body bad been drained away. Pushing back the covers that wrapped her, she tried to rise. But Garth was there instantly, pressing her down again. He brought a cup to her lips. She drank a few swallows—it was all she could manage—and lay back. Her eyes closed.
When she came awake next, it was dark. She was stronger now, her vision unclouded, and her sense of what was happening about her clear and certain. Gingerly she pushed herself up on one elbow and found Garth staring into her eyes. He sat cross-legged beside her, his dark, bearded face creased and worn from lack of sleep. She glanced past him to where Stresa lay curled in a ball, then looked back again.
Are you better? he signed.
“I am,” she answered. “The fever is gone.”
He nodded. You have been asleep for almost two days.
“So long? I didn’t realize. Where are we?”
At the foot of Blackledge. He gestured into the darkness. We left the In Ju after you collapsed and made camp here. The Splinterscat recognized the sickness that infected you and found a root that would cure it. I think without his help, you might have died.
She grinned faintly. “I told you it was a good idea to have him come along.”
Go back to sleep. There are several hours still until dawn. If you are well enough, we’ll go on then.
She lay back obediently, thinking that Garth must have kept watch by himself for the entire time she was sick, that Stresa would not have bothered, comfortable within the protection of his own armor. A sense of gratitude filled her. Garth was always there for her. She resolved that her giant friend would have the sleep he deserved when it was night again.
She slept well and woke rested, anxious to resume their journey. She changed clothes, although nothing she carried was clean by now, washed, and ate breakfast. At Garth’s insistence, she took a few moments to exercise her muscles, testing her strength for what lay ahead. Stresa looked on, by turns curious and indifferent. She stopped long enough to thank the Splinterscat for his help in chasing the fever. He claimed not to know what she was talking about. The root he had provided for her did nothing more than to help her sleep. What had saved her was her Elven magic, he growled, and spread his quills and trundled off to find something to eat.
It took them all of that day and most of the next to climb Blackledge, and it would have taken them much longer—if indeed they could have done it at all—without Stresa. Blackledge was a towering wall of rock that ran along the Southwest slope of Killeshan. It lay midway up the ascent and appeared to have been formed when an entire section of the volcano had split away and then dropped several thousand feet into the jungle. The cliff face, once sheer, had eroded over the years, turned pitted and craggy, and grown thick with scrub and vines. There were only a few places where Blackledge could be scaled, and Stresa knew them all. The Splinterscat chose a section of the cliff where the rock wall had separated, and a fissure sliced down to less than a thousand feet above the jungle floor. Within the fissure lay a pass that ran back into a valley. It was there, across the Rowen, Stresa announced, that the Elves would be found.
Resolutely he led them up.
The climb was hard and slow and seemingly endless. There were no passes or trails. There were, in fact, very few places that presented any kind of purchase at all, none of them offering more than a brief respite. The lava rock was knife-edge sharp beneath their hands and feet and would break away without warning. The Rovers wore heavy gloves and cloaks to protect their skin and to keep the spiders from biting and the scorpions from stinging. The vog rolled down the rock face as if poured from its edge, thick and stinking of sulfur and soot. Most of what grew on the rock was thorny and tough and had to be cut away. Every inch of the climb was a struggle that drained their strength. Wren had felt rested when she began. Before it was even midday, she was exhausted. Even Garth’s incredible stamina was quickly depleted.
Stresa had no such problem. The Splinterscat was tireless, lumbering up the cliff face at a slow, steady pace, powerful claws finding adequate footing, digging into the rock, pulling the bulky body ahead. Spiders and scorpions did not seem to affect Stresa; if one got close enough, he simply ate it. He led the way, choosing the approaches that would be easiest for his human companions, frequently stopping to wait until they could catch up. He detoured briefly to bring back a branch laden with a sweet red berry that they quickly and gratefully consumed. When it was nightfall and they were still only halfway up the slope, he found a ledge on which they could spend the night, clearing it first of anything that might threaten them and then, to their utter astonishment, offering to keep watch while they slept. Garth, having spent the previous two nights standing guard over the feverish Wren, was too exhausted to argue. The girl slept the better portion of the night, then relieved the Splinterscat several hours before dawn, only to discover that Stresa preferred talk to sleep in any event. He wanted to know about
the Four Lands. He wanted to hear of the creatures that lived within them. He told Wren more about life on Morrowindl, a harrowing account of the daily struggle to survive in a world where everything was always hunting or being hunted, where there were no safe havens, and where life was usually short and bitter.
“Rrrwwll. Wasn’t like that in the beginning,” he growled softly. “Not until the Elves made the demons and everything turned bad. Phhhfft. Foolish Elves. They made their own prison.”
He sounded so bitter that she decided not to pursue the matter. She was still uncertain as to whether or not the Splinterscat knew what he was talking about. The Elves had always been healers and caretakers—never creators of monsters She found it hard to believe they could have turned a paradise into a quagmire. She kept thinking there must be more to this story than what Stresa knew and she must reserve judgment until she had learned it all.
They resumed their climb at daybreak, pulling themselves up the rocks, scrambling and clawing against the cliff face, and peering up through the swirling mist. It rained several times, and they were left drenched. The heat lessened as they worked their way higher, but the dampness persisted. Wren was still weak from her bout with the swamp fever, and it took all of her strength and concentration to continue putting one foot in front of the other and to reach out with her hand for one more pull up. Garth helped her when he could, but there was seldom room to maneuver, and they were forced to make the ascent one behind the other.
They saw caves in the cliffs from time to time, dark openings that yawned silent and empty. Stresa pointedly steered his charges away from them. When Wren questioned him about what lay within, the Splinterscat hissed and declared rather pointedly that she didn’t want to know.
Midafternoon finally brought them to the bottom of the fissure and the narrow defile that lay beyond. They stood on flat, solid ground again, aching and worn, and looked back across the south end of the island to where it dropped away in a rolling, misted carpet of green jungle and black lava rock to the azure-blue sweep of the ocean. Blackledge rose above them to either side, craggy and misted, stretching in an unbroken wall until it disappeared into the horizon. Seabirds circled against the sky. Sunlight appeared momentarily through a break in the clouds, blinding in its intensity, turning the muted colors of the land below vibrant and bright. Wren and Garth squinted against its glare, enjoying the warmth of it against their faces. Then it faded, gone as suddenly as it had appeared; the chill and damp returned, and the island’s colors became dull again.
Turning away into the shadow of the fissure, they began to climb toward the mouth of the narrow pass. Then they were inside. The cliff rock rose all about them, a hulking, brooding presence, and wind blew down out of Killeshan’s heights in rough, quick gusts like the sound of something breathing. It was cold in the pass, and the Rovers wrapped themselves tightly in their cloaks. Rain descended in sudden bursts and was gone again, and the vog spilled down off the rocks in opaque waves.
Twilight had descended by the time they reached the fissure’s end. They stood at the rim of a valley that stretched away toward the final rise of Killeshan, a green-etched bowl settled beneath a distant stretch of forestline that lifted to the barren lava rock of the high slopes beyond. The valley was broad and misted, and it was difficult to see what lay within. The faint shimmer of a ribbon of water was visible east, winding through stands of acacia-dotted hills and ridgelines laced with black streamers of pitted rock. Across the sweep of the valley, all was still.
They made camp in the shelter of the pass under an overhang that fronted the valley. Night fell quickly, and with the sky so completely screened away the world about them turned frighteningly black. The silence of dusk slowly gave way to a jumble of rough sounds—the intermittent, barely perceptible rumble of Killeshan, the hiss of steam from cracks in the earth where the heat of the volcano’s core broke through, the grunts and growls of hunting things, the sudden screams as something died, and the frantic whispers as something else fled. Stresa curled into a ball and lay facing out at the blackness, less quick to sleep this night. Wren and Garth sat next to him, anxious, uneasy, wondering what lay ahead. They were close now; the Rover girl could sense it. The Elves were not far. She would find them soon. Sometimes, through the black and the haze, she thought she could catch the glimmer of fires like eyes winking in the night. The fires were distant, across the valley, high on the slopes below the treeline’s final stretch. They looked lonely and isolated, and she wondered if the perception was an accurate one. How far had the Elves come in their move away from the Four Lands? Too far, perhaps? So far that they could not get back again?
She fell asleep finally with the questions still on her mind.
They set out again at daybreak. Morrowindl had become a gray, misted world of shadows and sounds. The valley fell away sharply below them as they walked, and it was as if they were descending into a pit. The trail was rocky and slick with damp, and the green that had seemed so predominant in the previous night’s uncertain light revealed itself now as nothing more than small patches of beleaguered moss and grass crouched amid long stretches of barren rock. Tendrils of steam laced with the stench of sulfur rose skyward to blend with the vog, and pockets of intense heat burned through the soles of their boots and seared the skin of their faces. Stresa set a slow pace, picking his way carefully, lumbering from side to side amid the rocks and their islands of green. Several times he stopped and turned back again altogether, choosing a different way. Wren could not tell what it was that the Splinterscat saw; everything was invisible to her. She felt bereft of her skills once more, a stranger in a hostile, secretive world. She tried to relax herself. Ahead, Stresa’s bulky form rolled with the motion of his walk, daggerlike quills rising and falling rhythmically. Behind, Garth stalked as if at hunt, dark face intense, unreadable, hard. How very alike they were, she thought in surprise.
They had come down off a small rise into a stand of brush when the thing attacked. It launched itself out of the haze with a shriek, a bristling horror with claws and teeth bared, slashing in a desperate frenzy. It had legs and a body and a head—there was no time to tell more. It bypassed Stresa and came for Wren, who barely managed to bring her arms up before it was upon her. Instinctively she rolled, taking the weight of the thing as she did and then thrusting it away. It slashed and bit, but the heavy gloves and cloak protected her. She saw its eyes, yellow and maddened; she felt its fetid breath. Shaking free, she scrambled to her feet, seeing the thing wheel back again out of the corner of her eye.
Then Garth was there, short sword cutting. A glitter of iron and the creature’s arm was gone. It fell, screaming, tearing at the earth. Garth stepped in swiftly and severed its head, and it went still.
Wren stood there shaking, still uncertain what the thing was. A demon? Something else? She looked down at the bloodied, shapeless husk. It had all happened so fast.
“Phfftt! Listen!” Stresa sharply hissed. “Others come! Ssstttfttp. This way! Hurry!”
He lumbered swiftly off. Wren and Garth were quick to follow, tunneling after him into the gloom.
Already they could hear the sounds of pursuit.
VIII
The chase began slowly, gathering momentum as it careened downward into the valley. Wren, Garth, and the Splinterscat were alone at first, sought after but not yet found, and their hunters were nothing more than scattered bits of noise still distant and indistinct. They slipped ahead swiftly, watchfully, without panic or fear. The landscape about them was dreamlike, by turns barren and empty where black lava had buried the foliage beneath its glistening rocky carpet and lush where patches of acacia and heavy grass fought from small islands within the wilderness to reclaim what had been taken. Vog hung over everything, a vast, loosely woven shroud, swirling and shifting, creating the illusion that everything it touched was alive. Overhead, visible in small patches through the haze, the skies were iron-gray and sunless.
Stresa chose a rambling, circuitous mute, taking
them first one way and then the other, his thick quilled body rolling and lurching so that it constantly seemed as if he were about to tip over. He favored neither the open sweep of the lava rock nor the canopied cover of the brush-grown forest, veering from one to the other impartially, whether selecting his path from intuition or experience, it was impossible to tell. Wren could hear his heavy breathing, a growl in his throat that turned to a hiss when he came across something he didn’t like. Once or twice he looked back at them as if to make certain they were still there. He did not speak, and they kept silent as well.
It was chance alone that led to their discovery. They had come upon a stretch of open rock, and the creature was lying in wait. It rose up almost in front of them, thrusting out of the earth where it had burrowed, hissing and shrieking, a sort of birdlike thing on legs with a great hooked beak and claws at its wing tips. Talons swept downward to rip at Stresa, but the Splinterscat’s backside hunched and rippled instantly and a flurry of razor-sharp quills flew into the attacker. The creature screamed in pain and tumbled back, tearing at its face.
“Sssttt! Quick!” the Splinterscat snapped, hurrying away.
They fled swiftly, the cries of their attacker fading behind them. But now others were alerted and began to close. The sounds were all about, snarls and growls and huffings slicing through the haze, out of the shadows. Garth drew his short sword. They slipped down a shallow ravine and something flung itself out of the brush. Wren ducked as the thing flew past and saw the glitter of Garth’s blade as it swept up. The thing fell away and was still. They climbed from the ravine onto a new stretch of lava rock, then raced for a cluster of trees. A flurry of small, four-legged creatures that resembled boars tore from the cover and bore down on them. Stresa crouched and shivered, and a shower of quills flew into the attackers. Squeals filled the air, and clawed forefeet tore at the earth. Stresa veered past them, quills lifting like spikes. One or two made a vain attempt to rise, but Garth kicked them aside.