“This seems flat enough here,” Elkarath announced from the far limits of the firelight. “And that way is north.”
He shook out a cloth, which flashed and gleamed, and spread surprisingly large. It floated to the ground, then seemed to wriggle and squirm of its own accord, until it was lying flat—completely flat, although it was obviously extremely thin.
Almost dragging her aunt, Inos hurried over.
“I’ve seen this before! Rasha called it a welcome mat.” Inos also recalled that the mat had been dangerously hypnotic in the palace. Here in the starlit dark of the forest it lay like black water, displaying faint shimmers of light that seemed to come from deep within it, as from goldfish moving in a shadowed pond. She tried not to look at it.
“Indeed?” The old man beamed briefly. He seemed to be reveling in some secret anticipation, like a child expecting a treat. “It is a magic carpet. Her Majesty gave it to me for just such an emergency as this. It may be the very one you saw.”
Avoiding Inos, Azak paced over to the edge of the mat and glared down at it.
Elkarath studied the sky again for a moment. “Yes, that is north . . . To make return journeys, of course, one needs three of them. We have only two; but then we do not plan to return to Thume, do we?” He chuckled and rubbed his hands.
Then he glanced thoughtfully downriver.
“Where is the other, then?” Inos asked, feeling prickles of apprehension. She tried to catch Azak’s eye, but he was watching the sheik.
“If Skarash did as he was told, it is now laid out in my house in Ullacarn. If he didn’t . . . then we may shortly be in some difficulty. Ready?”
“What do we have to do?” she asked, feeling Kade’s grip tighten.
“Just stand together on the carpet. I shall come on last, as it is prespelled to my person.”
“And then?” Azak growled, fingering the hilt of his scimitar. ”Then it will position itself upon the one in Ullacarn. That is how they work.”
Azak was suspicious. “You told me you dared not use much power near Ullacarn, yet now you work a major sorcery like this?”
“Be silent!” the mage said sharply. “Silence beseems the ignorant. The whole point of magical devices is that they are much harder to detect than brute power. Now—must I coerce you?”
Azak shrugged and took two long strides, which put him in the center of the mat, but it did not flex or dimple under his weight. Inos glanced at her aunt, and they advanced gingerly together, holding hands. The surface felt rigid, and rather slippery.
“There!” Elkarath said. “I suggest you stoop a little, Lionslayer—the ceiling may be a trifle low. Right! Now me.”
He took two fast steps onto the mat, causing it to twist, and lurch. Kade cried out, and Inos steadied her. Then they found their balance again, blinking in the sudden brightness of lamps hung on crumbling plaster walls.
Azak cautiously raised his head and scowled at the sloping rafters just above him. Street noises of hooves and voices and wheels drifted in from the dark beyond the open window. The scent of grass and trees was replaced by smells of candles and spices and old cooking.
“Welcome to Ullacarn,” said Elkarath.
Life and death:
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,
Quiet breath;
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and river,
Life and death.
— Stevenson, In the Highlands
SEVEN
The splendour falls
1
Befuddled with exhaustion, Rap stared blankly at a hole in a cliff. The night was bright with stars, and the air pleasantly cool on his skin, but for a while he did not understand what he was doing. Then he remembered the last part: darkness and picking his way through the tangled and shattered rocks with his farsight. His feet were slashed bloody, his ankles and knees swollen like dropsy, even his arms all gashed and bruised. In the foggy nightmare that was what he recalled of the journey, he could vaguely remember carrying Gathmor for an hour or two, but now he was alone, and at the end of his powers. His companions were long lost behind him, their mundane strength broken by efforts to obey a sorcereus command.
The gnome boy had vanished, last seen still skipping as freshly as ever. So this cave must be Rap’s destination. It was perfectly circular, bored by sorcery through draperies of black rock where a cliff had been melted. Dragons had been at work here, obviously, and his farsight was blocked; which likely meant that he was close to a sorcerer’s lair. But it could be anything’s lair—leopards or bears might lurk inside.
For a moment he leaned wearily against the rock. He ought to be terrified. He ought to be fighting the compulsion that he could feel growing in him again. Perhaps he was merely too exhausted to think straight, and yet some strange inner hunch was telling him that the summoning had been a good thing, an opportunity—that fortune was favoring him by bringing him here. That crazy illusion must be part of the summoning itself. Unable to resist longer, he dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the pipe. The wind blowing through it was cool with the chill of ancient stone and long-forgotten caverns. The barrier was thicker than any mundane castle wall, but he emerged eventually into a deep crevice, open to the stars. Rugged rocky walls towered up on either hand, close enough that he could touch them. The floor was smooth and level, but speckled with unpleasantly sharp pebbles. Here and there giant blocks had fallen from the peaks and jammed in the gorge to make archways; any smaller debris must have been removed. He hobbled along, following its turns and twists into the mountain for ten or fifteen minutes, recognizing that this cryptic entrance had been designed to be dragonproof; he could guess at its immense antiquity. Finally the furrow was blocked by a wall of rough masonry. Faint, spectral light spilled out through a kennel—size door.
He crouched down and recoiled before the familiar stench of gnome. Gnomes were scavengers and carrion eaters, tolerated in many places because they removed every scrap of garbage. They were certainly better than alternative vermin such as rats, but never pleasant companions. No one but a gnome would ever enter a gnome burrow—except that Rap now seemed to have no choice. Even a moment of hesitation was bringing back his compulsion to chase after the little boy.
Very reluctantly, and holding his nose, he ducked through and straightened up at once, gagging and retching. His eyes watered.
This was no burrow. He was inside a huge hall, whose walls soared up like great cliffs of masonry to an indistinct luminous fog that hid the ceiling and shed a dim bluish light over the rest of the vast space. There were many deep shadows, though, not all of which seemed readily explainable.
The floor was carved from the living rock, buried now below an oozing carpet of corruption—gnomes did unpleasant things at their front doors to discourage visitors. Here and there his farsight was blocked, or at least blurred, as if by ancient, forgotten barriers. He could see shapes that didn’t feel quite solid, including gigantic rings of stone set in the walls; other shapes he could sense and not see in the dimness. The whole place had a sinister, sorcerous feel to it. And it stank worse than any pig farm he could imagine.
On a low stone wall at the far side of this enormous chamber sat his elusive quarry, the little boy. He, at least, was real. He was watching Rap with an understandably satisfied grin, while again stirring the inside of his nose with a finger.
Water! That parapet enclosed a circular pool of water! Holding a hand just below his nostrils in the hope.that the smell of his own skin would overcome the other smells—it didn’t—Rap limped carefully across the vast room. There was no way he could avoid treading in filth, but he hoped not to slip and sit down in it. The water, when he reached it, proved to be coated with green slime, but he brushed that aside with his hand and knelt to drink. Although it tasted about the way he had always suspected stable washings would taste, he was dried out like a raisin, and he sucked up bucketfuls of the odious brew. At least he could be sure that gnomes would not have been using it for bathwater.
Then he sank down on his buttocks and wiped his face with his hand, and realized that he was sitting in the mire after all. What the Evil did it matter?