Part 42 (1/2)

”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 pa.s.sed 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.

42.

Hundreds of steps pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 pa.s.s slowly behind the mountains.

Through the whole of her descent, her eyes remained fixed on the pit below. A dim and hazy ma.s.s 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 h.o.a.ry, warped somehow from the way that nature's hand had shaped them. And within their midst were ma.s.sive 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 gra.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 her. She looked out across it in confusion, fighting down the repulsion and fear that coursed through her and trying desperately to stay calm. She must use the wishsong now, she knew, as she had been told by Allanon that she could. The trees, brush, and vines of this jungle were like those trees twisted close about each other within the forests above the Rainbow Lake. The wishsong could be used to make them part. A pathway could be made.

But where should that pathway lead?

She hesitated. Something within her advised caution, whispering that the wishsong's power was to be used a different way this time-that strength alone would not be enough. The Maelmord was too large, too overpowering to be mastered in that way. Guile and cleverness must be employed. This thing was but a creation of the same magic that she wielded, all of it descended through the ages from the world of faerie, from a time when magic was the only power...

She cut short the thought, her eyes lifting toward the sky once again. The sunlight warmed her face in a way far different from that of the heat of the pit. There was life in its warmth and brightness. It called to her with such strength of purpose that, for an instant, she felt an inexplicable and frantic need to run back.

She jerked her eyes away, forcing her gaze to settle again upon the steamy depths of the jungle. Still she hesitated in her descent. The way was not yet clear to her, not yet certain. She could not proceed blindly into the maw of this thing. She must first discover where it was that she was going and where it was that the Ildatch lay concealed. Her dusky face tightened. She must understand the thing. She must look within it...

The words of the Grimpond mocked her, a whisper that teased slyly from the deep recesses of her memory: Look within, Brin of Shannara. Do you see?

And suddenly, startlingly, she saw everything. It had been told to her at the Valley of Shale, but she had not understood. Savior and destroyer, Bremen had named her, risen from the Hadeshorn to summon Allanon. Savior and destroyer.

She leaned weakly against the stone railing as the impact of it struck her. It was not within the Maelmord that she must look to find her answers-not within the pit.

It was within herself!

She straightened then, her dark face savage with the certainty of what she knew. How easy it was going to be for her to pa.s.s into the Maelmord and to find what she sought! There was no need for her to force a path within this being that kept watch over the Ildatch-no need, even, to search the Ildatch out. There would be no struggle here, no confrontation of magics.

There would instead be a joining!

She descended the final steps of the Croagh until she stood at last at its end. The roof of the jungle above her, seemed to close suddenly about, shutting away the sunlight, leaving her wrapped in shadows, heat, and the unbearable stench. But it no longer bothered her to be here.

She knew what it was that she had to do, and nothing else mattered.

Gently, she sang. The wishsong rolled forth, low, hard, and eager. The music flooded the ma.s.sive tangle of limbs, vines, rampant brush. It stroked and soothed with a deft touch, then wrapped about and cloaked with warm rea.s.surance. Accept me, Maelmord, it whispered. Accept me into you, for I am like you. For us, there is no difference of kind. We are the same, our magicsjoined. We are the same!

The words that whispered in the music should have horrified her, but they were strangely pleasing. Where once the wishsong had seemed but a marvelous toy with which she might amuse herself-a toy to play with color and shape and sound-the vastness of its use had at last revealed itself to her. It could be anything. Even here, where evil lay strongest, she could belong. The Maelmord was created to prevent anything from entering that was not in harmony with it. Even the strength inherent in the wishsong's magic could not overcome the basic purpose of its existence. But so versatile was the magic that it could forsake strength for cunning and make Brin Ohmsford appear kindred to whatever might stand against her. She could be in harmony with the life in this pit-and she could do so for as long as it might take to reach what it was she sought.

Exhilaration soared through her as she sang to the Maelmord and felt it respond. She was crying, so intense was the feeling that bound her to the music. The jungle swayed in response about her, its limbs bending and its vines and scrub curling like snakes. The music she sang whispered of the death and horror that gave life to the valley. She played a game with it, immersed within her self-creation so that she could be thought nothing less than what she wished to appear.

She drifted deep into herself, bound up in the song she sang. Allanon and the journey that had brought her were forgotten, as were Rone, Kimber, Cogline, and Whisper. Barely remembered was the task she had come to complete-to find and destroy the Ildatch. The release of the magic brought again the strange and frightening sense of glee. She could feel her control slipping away, just as had happened when she had used the wishsong against that Spider Gnome on Toffer Ridge and the black things in the sewers. She could feel the threads of herself unraveling. But she must risk it, she knew. It was necessary.

The breathing of the Maelmord rose and fell more quickly now and the hissing was more intense. It wanted her, had need for her. It found in her a vibrant piece of itself, the heart of the body that lay rooted there, missing for so long, but now returned. Come to me, it hissed. Come to me!

Her face alive with excitement and need, Brin pa.s.sed from the Croagh into the jungle beyond.

”There has got to be an end to these sewers, for cat's sake!” Rone was insisting to Kimber and Cogline as he stepped clear of the tunnel pa.s.sage into the cavern beyond. It seemed to him in his frustration that they had been stumbling about in the sewers of Graymark forever.

”There doesn't have to be anything of the sort!” Cogline snapped back, as disagreeable as ever.

But the highlander barely heard, his attention focused instead on the cavern into which they had pa.s.sed. It was a ma.s.sive chamber, its roof cracked so that hazy sunlight flooded downward in bright streamers and its floor split down the center by a monstrous chasm.

Wordlessly, Rone hurried forward along the chasm's edge, his eyes sweeping toward the stone bridge that spanned it. Beyond the bridge, the cavern stretched away to a high, arched alcove of polished stone, scrolled in some ancient markings and opening into daylight and the green of a misted valley.

The Maelmord, he thought at once.

And that's where Brin will be.He bounded onto the bridge and crossed, the old man and the girl hurrying after. He was moving toward the alcove when Kimber's sharp cry brought him about.

”Highlander, come look!”

He turned and walked quickly back. She waited for him at the center of the bridge, then pointed wordlessly as he came up. A great section of iron chain forming the bridge railing had snapped and broken. At her feet, streaks of blood lay drying on the stone.

The girl knelt and touched the blood with her fingers. ”Not very old,” she said softly. ”Not more than an hour.”

He stared at her in stricken silence, and the same unspoken thought pa.s.sed between them.

His hand came up quickly, as if to ward it off. ”No, it can't be hers...”

Then a scream rent the air, shrill and terrifying-the scream of an animal filled with rage and fear. It shattered the stillness and their thoughts and left them frozen. It came. from beyond the alcove.

”Whisper!” Kimber cried.