The Crystal Chalice (Book 1) (21 page)

 They came to the top of
the slope surrounding the hollow. Between the trees they could see the fire
still burning with cheerful incongruity. The log that had fallen out,
smouldered a little distance from the rest. Oyster shells scattered the ground
and the basket containing the oat cakes sat untouched.

 Signalling to her to
stay where she was, Celedorn descended the slope using the trees as cover.
Cautiously he stepped into the open space by the fire. Nothing stirred. He
looked up at Elorin questioningly and she silently pointed to the trees on the
far side of the camp. Warily he approached them and then to her alarm,
disappeared from sight between them. After what appeared to her to be an agony
of anxious waiting, he reappeared and beckoned to her to come down.

 “I can find nothing,”
he said. “No footprints, no broken twigs or branches. Nothing to indicate that
anyone has even been here. Are you sure you didn’t fall asleep and have a bad
dream?”

 “No!” she declared,
revolted by the suggestion. “I wasn’t asleep. It was amongst those trees just
where I showed you.”

 “Well come and see for
yourself. There is certainly nothing there now.”

 She stared at the trees
but didn’t move. “Come on,” he urged, taking her arm. “There’s nothing to be
afraid of.”

 Reluctantly she allowed
him to lead her to the trees.

 “I can see there is
nothing here now, but there was. There
was
.” She looked up at him
imploringly. “I didn’t imagine it, Celedorn, you must believe me.”

 Her eyes met his and
held for a long moment.

 He sighed. “Yes, I
believe you. The day we left the Meadowlands, I too thought I saw something but
I don’t know what it was. I, too, have had a sense of being followed but not,
admittedly, since we came to the Wood of Uldor. The feeling left me then and
has not returned.” A slight smile melted his serious expression. “It seems that
you have finally met something that is blacker than I am.”

 She shivered. “Don’t
joke about it. I have never felt such evil. It was as if those eyes could read
my very thoughts. If it hadn’t been for the log falling out of the fire and
burning me......”

 “.......you got burned?
Where? Let me see.”

 She showed him the
charred patch on the knee of her breeches.

 “This is quite a nasty
burn. I’ll need to attend to this - but not here.” Turning from her, he kicked
soil over the fire to put it out and picked up the basket. “We’ll go back to
the brook and deal with your injury there, then we must decide what must be
done next.”

  When they reached the
brook, he pressed her gently down on a stone and squatting in front of her,
unceremoniously tore open the knee of her trousers. Then using the remnants of
his shirt, which had been left behind at the stream, he bathed the burn with cold
water and bound wet strips torn from his shirt around it. She winced with pain
as he tightened the bandage and he looked up in time to catch the expression on
her face.

 “Burns are always
painful but it will heal provided we keep it clean.”

 “But now you have no
shirt,” she protested. “You’ll be cold tonight.”

 He grinned,
unrepentant. “I have a tough hide. It will take more than a little cold air to
finish me off.”

 She ran her hand over
the firm bandage round her knee. “Thank you. You do believe me, don’t you? You
are not just humouring me?”

 He shook his head,
still smiling. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not much given to humouring
people. No, I believe you saw something. I just wish I knew what. The Turog I
know and can deal with, but this......?” his voice trailed off. “Kerrea said
that the thing following you might be a creature of the darkness and shadows.
She thought it might not like the strong light of the open plain and in your
dream you said that it waited for darkness before crossing the plain, didn’t
you?”

 “Yes, but it was only a
dream.”

 “Perhaps, but it’s all
we have to go on at the moment.” He stood up. “We are most at risk tonight.
Somehow I don’t think that we will find anywhere safe in these woods.” He
turned and looked down to the estuary. “I think the best place would be one of
the sandbanks in the middle of the river. We will be surrounded by water, which
means that we cannot be taken unawares - as so easily could happen amongst the
trees. If these clouds clear and there is a moon tonight, the estuary will be
lit up like a mirror. Nothing could approach us undetected.”

 “What if it abandons
stealth and comes after us?”

 “Then we will see it
coming and must put to the test the question of whether it can be fought with
the sword or not.”

 Slowly, with Elorin
limping a little, they descended the wooded slope to the river. The sun, now
sinking fast towards the western horizon, slid from behind a heavy black bar of
cloud and cast a metallic, coppery light over the estuary. The gulls had gone
from the sandbar and the waves broke on it languidly, sending long ripples
across the still lagoon, making the bronze image of the sky quiver. Down at
sea-level the forest of reeds on the far shore looked tall and black. The
occasional piping trill of a moorhen echoed across the glassy water. The air
hung motionless, silent except for the distant whisper of the waves.

 “I was down here
earlier, gathering oysters,” Celedorn said softly. “The water is quite shallow
but it is tidal at this point and I don’t want that burn of yours to come into
contact with salt while it is still raw.” He pointed to a little islet in the
middle of the estuary. “There, the sandbank with the old willow growing on it.
Nothing can approach it without being seen, yet the willow will afford us some
cover from curious eyes.” He turned to her and handed her the basket. “Come,
I’ll have to carry you.”

 She began to protest,
not at all sure that she wanted to be carried by him, but he cut her short.

 “Don’t argue,” he
snapped irascibly.

 He lifted her easily in
his arms and began to wade into the water. She put her arm around his
shoulders, still a little uneasy by the close proximity to him. Even the
flattering light of the setting sun could not soften the cruel scars now so
close to her face. They cut through the ragged black beard as clearly as a
channel of the river through dense reeds.

 She was startled out of
her reverie by finding herself addressed.

 “If they bother you,
don’t look at them,” Celedorn said acidly.

 She suddenly realised
that she had been staring, and flushed with embarrassment that she had been
caught in an act of such insensitivity.

 “They don’t bother me,”
she quickly lied. “I was just thinking that I’d be glad to see the back of that
dreadful beard of yours.”

 He glanced at her
briefly, without halting his slow passage across the lagoon. His look gave
nothing away and she was unsure whether he had been deceived or not.

 When they reached the
tiny island, the sun had gone and a lavender-grey twilight had settled like a
soft blanket over the scene. The willow was old and gnarled, eking out a frugal
existence on the unpromising ridge of earth that capped the sand.

 “It must be just out of
reach of high tide,” Celedorn remarked. “Unfortunately its branches are too thin
to give us protection if it rains.”

 Elorin looked up at the
sky. “I don’t think it’s going to rain. Look, the sky is clearing.”

 A huge lake of deep
blue, studded with stars, had appeared between shores of grey cloud. Dew softly
began to settle, making the air a little chill.

 “If it continues to
clear, we should have a moon tonight,” Celedorn observed approvingly.

 “Come and have
something to eat,” Elorin invited, seating herself under the willow tree. “All
I have to offer is the last of the oatcakes you have become so fond of.”

 He gave a soft chuckle
and sat down beside her. “Keep your voice low,” he advised. “Sound travels a
great distance over water at night.” He broke the oatcake she had given him.
“If we ever get away from this God-forsaken coast, I promise you, I will never
touch another oatcake as long as I live.”

  She smiled slightly
and gently rubbed her throbbing knee. “There’s a dew falling,” she observed,
“and you have no shirt. You’ll be chilled to the bone.”

 “I’ll be all right. I
don’t intend to go to sleep tonight, so I’ll move around from time to time to
keep warm.”

 After a pause she said:
“What do you think it was that I saw?”

 “I don’t know. The
Forsaken Lands are reputed to be full of strange and mysterious things that one
would not encounter in more civilised regions. The place is shrouded in the
mists of legend, but there are few solid facts to go on.”

 “Do you remember in the
Chronicles of the Old Kingdom the story of Ilsa and Ferendo?”

 “The two lovers who
made the pact with the necromancer to help them escape?”

 “Yes. They escaped the
wrath of Ilsa’s father by hiding in the Great Forest but they became lost in
the forest and encountered a demon of darkness. Do you remember?”

 “I remember the
description of the demon.....
‘as dark as the abyss with eyes that burned the
soul within the body’
. You are not suggesting the description fits the
thing you saw today, are you?” He raised his brows disbelievingly. “The
Chronicles are legends, tales that have become distorted with the passage of
time, until they bear little resemblance to the truth. There are no such things
as demons,” he declared, then added ruefully, “except perhaps the ones we
invent ourselves.”

 “Then you don’t believe
me!”

 “I believe that you saw
something - but a demon? No, that’s ridiculous. It was perhaps a Great-turog.”

 “But the Turog have
yellow eyes and this thing had no body just......”

 “Very well then,” he
said irritably. “It was something that we have not encountered before but that
doesn’t make it a demon. Let’s try to keep a sense of proportion.”

 “If you had seen it,”
she replied acerbically, carefully controlling a surge of anger, “you would not
talk so blandly about keeping a sense of proportion.”

 “And if you would stop
letting your imagination run away with you, we would do much better.”

 “
Imagination!
Why you......”

 “Keep your voice down,”
he hissed. “Have you no sense!”

 Battle was now fairly
joined and a low-voiced but acrimonious argument followed, which ended by
Celedorn starting to his feet in annoyance and striding the few yards to the
end of the islet.

 He heard her grumbling
to herself beneath the willow tree. “I knew that being pleasant for two
consecutive days would be too much of a strain for him.”

 Suddenly he saw the
funny side and grinned to himself, his earlier irritation evaporating. However,
he had no intention of letting her know this, and as punishment, he did not
return to the willow tree but remained standing on the shore staring across the
water.

 Elorin was not the only
thing causing him irritation that night. The moon, too, was being aggravating,
refusing to shine steadily but instead playing a frustrating game of hide and
seek amongst the fast-moving clouds. At one moment it plunged the world into
darkness, the next, it burst forth, scattering dazzling silver light across the
glassy waters of the delta. Celedorn stood for a long time, listening intently,
smelling the cool night air and watching the beautiful, but unpredictable, play
of the moonlight on the mirrored estuary. As all had gone quiet under the
willow tree, he assumed that Elorin was asleep. The occasional fluting call of
a nightbird floated across the water to him over the soft whisper of the sea on
the sandbar.

 Suddenly, out of the
corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement on the shore. As he turned his
head to look more closely, the moon played him false and ducked behind a cloud,
plunging everything into darkness. It took his eyes several tense seconds to
re-adjust and he stood still as stone, straining his sight against the
darkness. He could make out the faint gleam of the brindled sky reflected in
the water. Dimly, across the still surface, something seemed to be moving.
Something darker than the darkness: blacker than the night. He could
distinguish no definite shape but he knew it was what he had seen before on the
Meadowlands - a small, dark cloud moving across the surface of the water. It
was coming directly towards the islet.

 
“It knows we are
here,”
Celedorn thought grimly and in one smooth movement drew his sword.
He almost jumped when something touched his arm. It was Elorin.

 “I couldn’t sleep,” she
whispered. “That old feeling of being watched has come upon me again.”

 “Your instincts are
correct. Whatever you saw, is approaching us now. It is crossing the water
towards us.”

 He felt her stiffen in
alarm. “Where is it?”

 He nodded towards the
dim waters of the delta.

 “What are we going to
do?” She asked, fear seeping into her voice. “We cannot run.”