“Let’s not get paranoid,” he muttered to himself. They pressed on into the jungle. They had gone only a short distance further when Fillip and Sot became suddenly excited. Ben pushed quickly forward and found that the gnomes had discovered a nest of forest mice and flushed the family out. Fillip slipped into the brush on his belly, snaked through it soundlessly and emerged with one of the unfortunates firmly in hand. He bit off its head and gave the body to Sot. Ben grimaced, kicked Sot in the backside, and angrily ordered them both to get moving. But the memory of the headless mouse stayed with him.
He forgot about the mouse when they came up against the wall of brambles. The brambles lifted better than a dozen feet into the air, mingling with the trees and vines of the forest, stretching away into the distance. Again, Ben glanced at Willow.
“The brambles are real, too,” she announced.
Fillip and Sot tested the air, walked up and down the wall both ways, then turned right. They had gone about fifty feet when Ben saw the crow. It was sitting on the crest of the wall of brambles just above them and staring down. Sharp eyes fixed on Ben. He stared back momentarily and could have sworn the bird winked.
“Here, High Lord,” Fillip called.
“A passage, High Lord,” Sot announced.
The gnomes pushed through the brambles as if they didn’t exist, and Ben and Willow followed. The brambles parted easily. Ben straightened on the other side and glanced back. The crow was gone.
He saw the crow several times after that, sitting in trees or perching on logs, motionless as it watched him with those same secretive eyes. He never saw it fly and he never heard it call. Once he asked Willow if she saw it, too — none too certain that this wasn’t just another illusion. She said that she did see it, but that she had no idea what it was doing there.
“It seems to be the only bird in the hollows,” he pointed out doubtfully.
She nodded. “Perhaps it belongs to Nightshade.”
That was not a very reassuring thought, but there was nothing Ben could do about it, so he put the matter out of his mind. The jungle had begun to thin, the trunks, limbs, and vines giving way to small clearings in which pockets of mist hung like tethered clouds. There was a lightening in the sky ahead, and a hint of the jungle’s end. But there was no sign of the walls of the hollow as there should have been, and the Deep Fell was as sprawling and endless as it had first seemed.
“Can you tell where we are or how far we’ve come?” he asked the others, but they shook their heads wordlessly. Then abruptly the jungle gave way and the four companions stood on the threshold of a castle fortress that dwarfed anything Ben had ever seen or even imagined could exist. The castle rose up before them like a mountain, its towers lifting into the clouds and mist so that they were screened from view, its walls receding into the distant horizon for miles. Turrets, battlements, parapets, and ramparts were constructed one upon the other in dazzling geometrical designs, the whole so vast in scope that it might have enclosed an entire city within its stone-block shell. It sat upon a great plateau with the jungle grown thick at its base. A rock-strewn trail led from where they stood to the open castle gates and a raised portcullis.
Ben stared at the castle in disbelief. Nothing could be this huge, his instincts told him. Nothing could be of such monstrous size. It had to be an illusion — a trick of magic, like his vision of the hollows and the things they had encountered….
“What is this place, Willow?” he blurted out, cutting short his speculation, and the disbelief and awe he felt were apparent in his voice.
“I do not know, Ben,” She stood with him, her own gaze fixed on the monstrosity. She shook her head slowly. “I do not understand it. This is not an illusion, Ben — and yet it is. There is magic at work, but the magic accounts for only part of what we see.”