Ben met his eyes. “I know. I could not have had better friends than you have been.” He paused. “But this is where it all ends, Questor. You have done for me all that you can. Time and choices are running out. I have to make something happen if I wish to be Landover’s King. I have that responsibility — to you, to the land, and to myself.”
Questor said nothing. Ben glanced briefly at the others. No one spoke. He nodded and reached for Willow’s hand. He fought back against the chill that had suddenly settled through him.
“Lead on,” he ordered Fillip and Sot.
Together, they started down into the pit.
Nightshade
It was like stepping off into a pool of blackened, fouled water. The mist rose to greet them, lapping anxiously at their boots. It climbed to their thighs and curled to their waists. It tugged at their shoulders and finally their necks. A moment later, they were submerged in it completely. Ben had to suppress a sudden urge to hold his breath against its suffocating tide.
His hand gripped Willow’s tightly.
The mist was an impenetrable screen, closing about them as if a blanket that would smother them. It clung to their skin with fingers of damp insistence, and its touch was an itch that scratching would not cure. The smell of rotting wood and earth filled the air, permeating the mist, giving it the texture of toxic liquid splashed upon the skin. An unpleasant warmth issued out of it, as if something huge were trapped within the murk and sweating in terror as its lifeblood was sucked steadily away.
Ben sensed the terror to be his own, and he fought back against it. The back and underarms of his tunic were damp, and his breathing was ragged. He had never been so frightened. It was worse than when the Mark had come for him in the time passage. It was worse than his encounter with the dragon. It was a fear of something felt and not seen. His feet picked their way mechanically down the scrub-choked slope; he was barely aware of their movement. He could see the stocky forms of the gnomes a few feet ahead of him as they doggedly worked their way forward. He could see Willow beside him, her green-skinned form ghostlike, the corn-silk hair on her head, calves and forearms trailing out behind her as if stirred by the mist. He could see bits and pieces of the scrub and rock about him, and of trees and ridges somewhere far ahead. He saw them and was blind to them. It was what he could not see and could only feel that commanded the focus of his attention. It was what was hidden that he seemed suddenly to see best.
His free hand searched for the medallion tucked within his tunic, and he fingered it reassuringly through the cloth. The minutes dragged on as the four companions groped their way through the haze, eyes searching sightlessly. Then the slope leveled out, the mist thinned, and scrub turned to brush and forest. They had reached a plateau several dozen feet above the hollows floor. Ben blinked. He could see again. Trees spread away before him in a tangle of trunks, limbs, and vines, and ridges thrust upward sharply into their mass, cresting against a skyline that was canopied in roiling mist. The hollows rim had disappeared. Everything beyond was gone.
Ben pushed past the gnomes to stand on a small promontory that jutted out from the slope, and he stared into the wilderness. His breath caught sharply in his throat.
“Oh, my God!” he whispered.
The hollows spread away for as far as the eye could see farther than was conceivably possible. The Deep Fell had mushroomed into something so vast that its walls could no longer contain it. The Deep Fell had grown as big as all of Landover!
“Willow!” he whispered urgently.
She was beside him at once. He pointed out into the forest, into the vast, endless tract of it, terror reflected in his eyes as he struggled to comprehend what he was looking at. She understood at once. Her hands closed about his, squeezing. “It is only illusion, Ben,” she said quickly. “What you see is not really there. It is only Nightshade’s magic at work. She has mirrored back a thousand times the whole of the hollows to frighten us away.”