Quag Keep (15 page)

The black thing flapped as might a banner in a heavy wind—save there was no wind. It was well off the ground now, rising vertically. Once aloft, it made to dart after them, spreading an even stronger stench of evil.

But though it stretched out over the sand and gravel that bordered the water, it could not thrust the long tongue it now formed far enough to reach them. That tongue flailed the air, beat against an unseeable wall.

“It cannot pass water,” Deav Dyne observed with quiet satisfaction. “Therefore it is but a very inferior servant.”

“Maybe it can't pass water,” Wymarc broke in. “But what of that?”

He pointed north. Milo's horse was rearing and plunging. For a moment or two his attention was all to controlling the frightened animal. Then he had a chance to glance in the direction the bard had indicated.

A twin to that which still strove to reach them befouled the air, flapping along. But apparently that way of progress was difficult for it to maintain. Even as the swordsman caught sight of it, the mass ceased its flying and settled groundward.

It broke apart the instant it touched the earth, small patches seeping away like filthy water from an overturned, rotting tub. The light was good enough for them to watch this dispersal of
the creature—if it were a single creature able to loose itself into parts. Though the shadow bits moved, they did not turn toward their party, as Milo fully expected. Rather, like flattened slugs, they set a path parallel to the line of march but some distance away.

Naile spat at the ground beyond his horse's shoulder. “It goes its own way.” he commented. “Perhaps it is rightly wary.” He looked to the cleric. “What say you, priest? Do we hunt it?”

Deav Dyne had been leaning forward in his light saddle watching the flopping of the new set of shadows as they strung out.

“It is bold—”

Milo caught the inference of that. “What does such boldness mean?”

The cleric shook his head. “What can I say about any of Chaos's servants? If a man does not guard well against even the most simple appearing of such, he is three times a fool.”

“Let us test it then.” Before Deav Dyne could protest the berserker launched into the air the pseudo-dragon, who circled his head and then shot with the speed of a well-loosed arrow toward the nearest of the moving blobs. Having reached a position above it, Afreeta hovered, her supple neck arching downward, her jaws open as if she meant to dive straight into the thing and do battle.

The blob of darkness on the ground puddled, halting its advance. Toward it hastened another to join with it, then a third. From the center of that uniting there arose a tendril of darkness like the tentacles of a sea monster. But Afreeta was not to be so caught. She spiraled upward, keeping just above that arm of black. Other parts of the shadow-creature poured toward the
site. As they watched, these, too, joined with the first and the reaching whip grew longer, higher.

“So,” commented Naile, “it would do battle.”

Deav Dyne, who had kept his attention on the scene, his eyes narrowed with speculation, now swung his bead string in his hand. Milo, suddenly thinking that perhaps they did have something to give them warning of possible attack, glanced downward at the bracelet about his wrist. He was somehow certain that if this dark thing meant them harm, the bracelet would come to life. Yet it had not.

The cleric slid his beads back, cupping them in his hand. “Call back Afreeta, warrior. This thing is a spy and not a fighter. But whether it can summon that which
will
do battle, I cannot tell.”

“Let it watch us, since it would seem we have no real choice in the matter,” cut in the bard. “But let us also seek the mountains and speedily. Ingrge has knowledge of safe places thereabouts where there are defenses against Chaos—very old but known to his own people.”

So they rode on, while the shadow bits kept pace with them. Their hands were ever close to their weapons, and Naile kept Afreeta loose and flying. Now and again she fluttered down to ride upon the berserker's shoulder for a short distance, hissing into his ear as if reporting. But if she had anything of importance to say, Naile did not share it with the others.

Milo kept closing and unclosing his hand that had been so weak after the wound. His fingers could grip now with all their old vigor on the sword hilt when he put them to the test. There was a small ache beginning in his shoulders, as his tenseness
grew, and he continually searched the ground ahead for signs of danger. That these shadows which spied on them could summon some greater menace was only plain logic.

The pack ponies were no longer reluctant, dragging back on their lead ropes. Rather they crowded up until they trotted along between the riders, sometimes snorting uneasily, although they never swung their heads to watch the shadows. Perhaps it was the stench of ancient evil, which a rising wind brought, that spurred them so.

Again the riders found the trail markings the elf had set. Today they made no attempt to erase them. It was enough that they were companied by these representatives of Chaos. There was no longer reason to hope they might conceal their passing.

Twice they halted to water and rest the horses and to eat. The moisture of Gulth's cloak, dried out in the wind, had to be renewed from one of the water bags. As usual the lizardman made no comment. He rode ungracefully, for his kind did not take to any mounts except some scaled things one found in the Seven Swamps, which could not be used far away from those mudholes. His eyes, set so high above his snouted lower face, never even turned toward the shadow, Milo noted. It was as if the amphiban alien was concentrating all his strength of will and mind upon another matter.

The land began to rise. Now the grass thinned, the ground was broken here and there by shrubs and standing stones that were like pillars and seemed unnatural, as if they had been set so for some reason, save that their setting followed no pattern.

Milo, studying how they dotted the way before them, was mindful of something else. He did not need to see the shadows
suddenly surge forward to understand what might menace their party here.

“ 'Ware the stones!”

“Yes,” Deav Dyne made answer. “They are shadow bait. See—”

The shadows slipped ahead and dropped out of sight, though the pools they formed now must lie hidden about those pillars. Naile, who had taken the lead, plainly refusing to ride close to Gulth, did not even nod in reply. Rather he wove a zigzag way for them, keeping as far from each of the stones and the things that might lurk about them as he could. It was not easy to choose a way keeping them on their general course and yet avoiding close proximity to the standing stones.

So, as twilight began once more to close in, thus rendering more dangerous the route before them, they needs must slow from a steady trot to a walk. The animals of their company resisted and sullenly fought that curbing. Trees showed ahead, not the twisted stunted ones that had formed the thickets along the rivers, but tall standing ones. They too might give shelter to the enemy. Milo had not seen any movement of shadows since they had disappeared among the stones. He glanced now and then at his wrist. The bracelet showed no life. Was it true that it could warn?

Wymarc broke the silence.

“We are losing our guard.”

“How do you—” the swordsman began sharply, his tense weariness riding his voice.

“Use your nose, man,” returned Wymarc. “Or has it held the smell of evil so long that it reports falsely?”

Milo drew a deep breath. At first he could not be sure, then he was certain. The wind still blew in the same direction, from the north. But the taint it had carried earlier was indeed less strong. Instead there came a trace of the clean mountain air, the scent of pine.

The cleric faced his mount around.

“Be ready!” he warned.

They had nearly reached the end of the place of standing stones. The pack ponies, breathing laboredly, trotted on. Gulth, for the first time in many hours, cried aloud, in croaking words they did not know.

Milo edged his own mount around, the horse fighting his control.

From behind some of the stones stepped figures as solidly black as the shadows, but now standing tall. They were man-shaped if you counted the limbs that raised their bodies from the ground, the two arm appendages that each held high and wide, as if they were about to rush to embrace the travelers.

On Milo's wrist the bracelet came to life. Feverishly he fought to control the spin. But the shadow men were so alien to all he had known that what he saw interfered with his concentration. He knew without any words from his companions that this was the attack toward which the dark unknown had been building.

The shadow men glided toward them, even as their former substance had flowed across the earth. Milo did not reach for his sword. He knew within himself that against such as these the sharpest steel, even an enchanted blade, could not deliver any telling blow.

There came a trilling of sound. At first Milo thought it issued
from the enemy, yet there was something in the sound that strengthened his courage, instead of increasing his doubts.

Wymarc had unbagged his harp. Now, as he swept his fingers back and forth across the strings, their mounts stood rock still. Music—against
those?

The freshness of the air was once more overlaid with the stench of evil. Shadow men drew close—and before them spread not only the rotten scent, but also a cold, deep enough to strike a man as might the full breath of a blizzard.

Wymarc's chords rose higher and higher on the scale. It seemed to Milo that the shadows slowed. This music hurt his ears, rang in his head. He wanted to shut it out with his hands, but that terrible cold held him in thrall.

He could no longer really hear—yet Wymarc still swept the strings of the harp. Yevele cried out, swayed in her saddle. There was no sound, only pain within Milo's head, cutting out all else.

The swordsman's eyes blurred. Was this attack the work of the shadows, or what Wymarc wrought with his harp? For the bard continued to go through the motions of playing, even though there was nothing now to be heard.

Shudders ran through Milo's body in a rhythm matching the sweep of fingers across the strings. The shadows had halted—stood facing the riders only a little more than a sword length from Wymarc. The bard's hand moved faster and faster—or did it only seem so? Milo was sure of nothing save the pain beating in his head, passing downward through his body.

Then—

The shadows shivered—visibly. He was sure he saw that. They wavered back as their bodies shimmered, began to lose the
man form, dripped groundward bit by bit as might melting candles near the heat of an open fire. They stumbled on stumps of feet, trailing lines of oozing matter behind them as they strove to reach again the shelter of the stones. Wymarc played on.

Now there were no manlike bodies, only once more dark pools that heaved in a losing battle against what the bard had launched. Those pools flowed, joined. A single manifestation half arose. It formed no quasi-human body—rather suggested some monstrous shape. A toad head lifted for a moment, but could not hold, dissolving back into the mass. Yet the shadow thing continued to struggle, bringing forth a tentacle here—a taloned foot there. Then the heaving ceased. The pool of dark lay quiescent.

Wymarc lifted his hand from the harp strings. The pulsation of pain eased in his listeners. Milo heard Naile's voice.

“Well done, songsmith! And how long will
that
spell hold? Or is the thing dead?”

“Do not grant me too much power, comrade. Like any spell, this has its limitations. We had better ride.” He was slipping the harp into its bag. Once more their horses stirred.

Without having to rein their mounts, they turned toward the ridge beyond and began to move up it. There was a track to follow here, faint, as if it had been some seasons since it had been in use. One of Ingrge's markers pointed them into it. Up and up they went, the clean air washing from them the last of malaise brought on by the confrontation with the shadows.

As they had reached the top of the ridge, Ingrge appeared. He had rounded up the pack ponies who had gone before. Now he said to Wymarc, “You have been busy, bard. ‘The Song of Herckon' is not for playing by just any hand.”

“To each his own magic, ranger. This is my kind.” There was a halting in Wymarc's reply, as if what he had done had drawn out of him much of his energy.

“I have found an Old Place,” Ingrge said. “In it our magic is still firm. Nothing of Chaos—or, even, of Law—dare enter there unless made free to it by one of elven blood. You can all lie snug tonight without watch or warder.”

He led the party along the ridge to a second and steeper climb beyond. Here the trees stood taller, closed in. How long they rode Milo could not tell. He only knew that weariness rode pillion behind him, gripping him tightly.

Once more stones arose, not grim and gray, like age-darkened bones as the others lingered in his memory. These were set edge to edge, forming a wall that opened from the path. They were cloaked in the green velvet of moss, a moss that was patterned here and there by outcrops of small red cups, or brilliant, orange-headed, pin-sized growths.

As they passed between those rocks—which stretched out on either hand to form a continuous wall—there came a lift of spirit for the riders. The sound of the horses' shoes was muffled by another carpet of moss, and straight beyond them, was what Milo took first to be a mound overgrown with small bushes. Then he saw that it was a single tree whose leafed branches (the leaves as green and full as if the season were spring and not the beginning of autumn) grew downward to touch the ground.

Ingrge swept aside a mass of trailing vine, which formed the door cover, and ushered them in, leaving them to explore while he went to loose the ponies from their loads, their horses from the saddles.