Shadowlands (52 page)

Fox wondered if the other doors in this building would prove to be as hard to open as this one.

Once again the rush of adrenaline settled my stomach and cleared my head. If only I could tell who, or what, had spoken, and from where, my happiness would have been complete.

“I am Stormwolf,” Wolf said, speaking slowly and distinctly. I was impressed that his voice didn’t shake. It was all I could do to draw in a steady breath. It was hard to tell where the inquiry had come from. “My mother was Rain at Sunset, and the Chimera guides me. My companion is a human from the Shadowlands, a Truthreader, and friend to the High Prince.”

“Did Truthsheart send you?”

Wolf hesitated, catching my eye before answering. “We are on a task she has set, which has brought us here.”

There was slow movement in front of us, as if the ground itself was heaving.
What kind of beast is
this
going to be?
I thought, trying to keep an open mind.
Ugly doesn’t mean evil.
A rasping sound, a flare of brightness, and I blinked at the sudden light.

It wasn’t a beast holding the torch, however, but a man. Sort of.
He wasn’t in the sandstorm’s league, but when he finished standing up, he was fully tall enough to play basketball anywhere in the world, though it was unlikely any professional team would have taken him, seeing that he was almost as wide as he was tall. No matter where you looked—hands, shoulders, face, nose—the word “massive” kept coming to mind. His hair was long enough to touch his shoulders, iron gray, and bound around his forehead with a black ring that shone like metal in the light of the torch. His beard was short, as if he hadn’t been growing it for very long. Rather than trousers, he was wearing what in the human world would have been called a kilt, though it wasn’t pleated, and had no tartan pattern to speak of.

“And your task is to me, Younger Brother?”

Wolf dipped his head in what was very close to a bow. “Elder Brother, I look for Ice Tor, where the old Songs tell that the Horn of the Hunt was once made.”

His laugh was loud enough to make the Cloud Horses snort. “I am the dwarf Ice Tor,” he said. “A ‘who’ and not a ‘where,’ Young One, so your task is indeed to me.”

“You’re a dwarf?” I swallowed hard when they both turned to look at me. “It’s just that dwarf means small where I come from.”

He laughed again, but this time I was prepared for it. “I must go there sometime, and see if I can change their minds. But what is it you require of me, Younger Brother?”

“The Horn of the Hunt.”

“The Hunting Horn?” He sat down on a nearby rock and I saw how it was we hadn’t seen him in the first place. Without the torch in his hand, he could easily be mistaken for one of the many boulders that surrounded us. “There was one made, nine Cycles ago, or more. I cannot make another, if that one still exists.”

“We believe that it does not,” Wolf said. “The Basilisk Prince was wearing it around his neck when he was killed on
Ma’at
, the Stone of Virtue.”

“Not very virtuous, then, was he?” The huge Solitary laughed again, but more quietly this time. My head thanked him. “But come, I will have to check what you say. It is convenient that you brought a Truthreader with you.”

He turned and led us away into the dark. I never realized before that a torch is not a very efficient lighting tool. You can’t aim it,
and you can’t focus it. This one was large enough to illuminate quite a piece of ground around us, but that’s all it illuminated, we were walking in a circle of light that moved with us, gaining ground to the front, while losing it in the rear. Finally, we seemed to be walking down a passage that may have seemed narrow to Ice Tor, but was nice and wide for Wolf and me, even with the horses. The rock walls grew higher and higher, but it wasn’t for quite some time that they roofed us overhead. Ice Tor doused the torch, though I didn’t see how, and walked on, using it now as if it were a walking stick.

I could still see, as the walls around us seemed to be covered with a kind of velvet moss that gave off a warm green glow. The light was restful, and my headache faded a bit. I was wondering what I was going to do when we got to where we were going and Ice Tor expected me to get down off the Cloud Horse. My thighs and lower back would have been quite happy to feel the ground under them, but I remembered how awful I’d felt the last time I tried it.

At last we arrived at what looked like a workshop for giants, or maybe the god Hephaestus’ foundry, take your pick. There was a half-finished statue of what might have been a Water Nymph, and a huge wooden wheel with the rim off and a spoke missing—and that was just what I could recognize as we swept past. He took us through doors at the far end into a room that was smaller only by comparison, and furnished, oddly, like a reading room in a library. Though the shelves seemed to be stocked with toys, not books.

“Bring your horses this way, Younger Brother, they will be happier waiting here, I think.” We followed him through yet another archway to the right of the entrance we’d come in by and found ourselves standing outside in a meadow in the early morning under an April sky. The air smelled pleasantly of a recent rain, and the Cloud Horses signaled their delight with head shaking, and pawing at the ground with their hooves.

I eyed the same ground with trepidation. Wolf explained my situation to our host. “Being on the Cloud Horse calms her condition.”

“Come, Young One.” The dwarf stood next to my Cloud Horse and held out his arms. “I will carry you back inside.”

“I’ll read you,” I said. “When you touch me.” I wasn’t sure who I was warning.

“I care not for that. We Dwarves are not frightened by the idea of truth.”

I swallowed, nodded, and reached out for him. He guided my arm around his neck and lifted me from the horse’s back. For a moment I was a small child again, in my father’s arms. Images swept over me, but slowly, as if I were being lowered into a warm bath.

[Great age. Great humor. Greater curiosity. Insatiable curiosity. The items on the shelves are copies, some of them miniature, of all the artifacts he’s made; armor, jewelry, houses, mountains, shoes that could Move, a comb that you only needed to use once and your hair would be perfect forever.]

I was nervous when he put me down, but the world stopped its yaw and spin. I actually had to put my hand to the back of a chair—a perfect size for me. I had become so used to the feeling of motion that now the stillness seemed strange. Welcome, but strange.

“Wow,” I said. “You fixed me.”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking. You are now fixed in place.”

“So, will I be all right from now on?” I was thrilled, not only that I felt comfortable for the first time in what seemed like days, but at the thought that now I would be able to come back and forth—but he was shaking his head.

“Stormwolf tells me it is the Lands themselves that give you this sickness, by their very nature. You are not Healed, rather this place is not, in the normal sense of the word, part of the Lands.”

Wolf paused halfway to sitting in his chair. “Where are we, then?”

Ice Tor tapped himself on the forehead. “In my home and workshop. It is the only place I can make you comfortable.”

Wolf shot a quick look at the doorway we’d come in by. “How is this possible?”

“We are the artificers of the People. We Dwarves and the Trolls. It is Dwarves and Trolls who make the
gra’if
you Riders bear, and your bowls and jars and baskets and containers. It is told, in Songs older even than I am myself, that it was Dwarves who made the Talismans—Sword, Spear, and Cauldron—from the rock of the Stone of Virtue.”

“You can bend space and time,” I said. I turned to Wolf. “Didn’t you say that the Hunt would answer the call of the Horn, no matter where they are? Even though they can’t Move? This is how, because
Ice Tor made it.” I turned back to our host. “You made the Portals,” I said. “Oh! And the Rings. Not you, personally, but someone close to you, like a parent or a grandparent. Someone like you.”

“You
are
a Truthreader, good. That will make my work much easier, then. What else did you see? What else have we made, my People and I?”

“You made—oh, no,” I almost couldn’t say it. “You made the
Shadowlands
?”

“Cassandra? What is it?” Max rolled over and a light came on over the bed. “Bad dreams?”

Cassandra shivered and allowed Max to draw her into his arms. “No. At least…you know that I told you I could feel Moon’s
dra’aj
, and Wolf’s, and even to some extent, Valory’s?”

“Sure.”

“Well, now I can’t. Wolf and Valory, they’re gone.”

Max sat up. “Back to the Shadowlands, maybe?”

“No, they’re just gone.”

“A
LEJANDRO, THERE’S A WATCH on the deck.” Frowning, Nik leaned closer to the window, squinting through glass and screening.

Alejandro appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in his hand.

“It wasn’t there a minute ago, when the cat wanted in.”

The Rider’s eyes narrowed, and he set the bottle down on the marble-topped table. There was the barest shush of air, and he was standing next to Nik again, this time with the watch in his hand. “It is not mine,” he said, as he set it down on Nik’s palm.

Nik turned it over. “This is a really old Seiko,” he said. “See the dark face?” The metal was cool. Nik weighed it in his hand before handing it back. “I think it’s Hawk’s.”

“How can that be?”

Nik shrugged. “I noticed it particularly. I used to have one like it, and when I saw Hawk wearing it, I was reminded.”

“Hawk would not have returned to leave this trinket and go again without a word.” Alejandro turned the watch over. There was engraving
on the back, but Nik couldn’t read it from where he stood. “It must have been taken from him.”

“And then brought here? What for?” Nik swallowed. “Some kind of message?”

“But from whom? Even if there had been a confrontation, if Hawk somehow enraged Sunset on Water and was killed, why would it be revealed to us in this way?”

Nik eyed the bottle of wine. He could use something stronger. “Could it be the Hunt? Maybe they captured him and this is some kind of message? Their way of letting us know?”

Alejandro, head tilted to one side, set the watch down and picked up the bottle of wine again. Nik followed him back into the kitchen, watched as he took a corkscrew from its hook among the other kitchen utensils. The cork was out, and the wine poured almost before Nik was ready to take the glass handed to him. Before he raised it, Alejandro had already tossed his back, and was pouring himself another.

“I hope this isn’t the good stuff,” Nik said.

Alejandro grimaced and refilled his glass. “The People have always thought of the Hunt only as unreasoning beasts, a living hunger.” Alejandro took a more careful sip of his second glass, and this time Nik joined him. “It is hard to keep in mind that we must think of them as rational creatures, capable of planning. But if leaving this watch here is somehow a message, an opening of negotiations, even if only for ransom, why would there not
be
a message?”