Shadowland. Spider World 06 by Colin Wilson

The picture the old man transmitted was unappealing. The boca looked like a man whose skin has been flayed off, showing the muscles. It was very tall, and had a thin, cadaverous face and red-rimmed hollow eyes that looked menacing. To Niall’s unspoken thought, the troll replied: “Yes, they can be very dangerous. But the karvasid enjoys showing his power.”

“Where does your own globe come from?”

“My great-grandfather made it. It is not as powerful as yours because its crystal is less delicate.” The mental image seemed to suggest that the crystal lattice was like fine lacework.

“May I try it?”

“Certainly.” The old man removed Niall’s globe and replaced the other. As the energy of the crystal chair saved Niall the trouble of establishing a connection, he saw instantly what the old man meant. This globe was not capable of concentrating the same quantity of Earth-force; its spider web was smaller.

Another question occurred to Niall.

“If the cave dwellers were carried into captivity, why did they not tell the karvasid where the globe was hidden?”

“No one knew but the priest, and he was killed.”

Niall asked: “And did you never think of looking for it?”

The troll shook his head.

“I knew that if the karvasid could not find it, it must be very well hidden. Besides, if I had found it, I would have become the target of his greed.”

“Just one more question: can you show us the best route to Shadowland?”

The troll said: “That will be unnecessary. You can learn all you want to from that.” He pointed at the crystal globe. “So now I suggest we leave you alone, to learn how to use it.”

He removed his globe from the top of the pallen, and replaced it with Niall’s own. The light immediately became brighter, and Niall experienced a sense of inner contraction that was like the effect of the thought mirror.

A few moments later he had been left alone in the cave. He had a sense that the captain was glad to withdraw: its energies still made him uncomfortable.

Although Niall had been glad to be left to himself, he now found himself feeling oddly at a loose end, unsure of what to do next.

His first thought was to reestablish contact with his mother, to learn the latest news about Veig. He relaxed until he became aware of the threads of awareness that stretched around him, then repeated the mental trick he had learned in the tower of Sephardus, causing something to click in his brain, and envisaging his mother’s room.

It worked so quickly that he was taken unaware. Suddenly, he was standing in his mother’s room in the other wing of the palace. He was standing with his back to the door, and she was sitting in her chair, darning a child’s garment.

Sensing his presence, she looked up, and he saw that she was about to scream in alarm. He quickly shook his head and raised his finger to his lips.

She started to say: “What are you doing here. . .” then the question trailed off, and Niall realized she was trembling, and her sewing had fallen on the floor. Because he was transparent, and she could see through his body, she thought he was a ghost.

He said quickly: “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”

She looked out of the window, where the night sky was full of stars. “It’s the wrong time. . .”

“I have another way of coming to you. How is Veig?”

“He is the same — still very weak. But where are you now?”

Niall had a sudden desire to laugh. It seemed absurd to be in the same room with her, and for her to be asking where he was.

“In a cave in the Gray Mountains. But don’t worry. I’ll come again tomorrow.”

Then Niall found the scene fading; a moment later he was back in the cave. What had happened, he realized, was that he was not putting enough concentration into the mental act, but was relying too much on the power of the globe. It taught him an interesting lesson: that without the mental effort, the powers of the globe were greatly reduced.

Niall had no idea of how to even begin learning about Shadowland. But as soon as he entered the world of the crystal, he was aware that he was at the center of a web, and that, like a spider, he had to learn to read its vibrations. Not far from this center, where he was now sitting, there was the outside world, and the rock-strewn valley from which he had entered the underground world of the trolls. This valley was in darkness; but after a few moments, it lifted like a fog, and he could see the landscape as clearly as if in daylight.

This was not quite the daylight of normal perception. There was a strange quality about it that made things seem gray and unreal. In fact, he had noted something of the sort when he had been speaking to his mother, but had attributed it to the poor lighting in the room. Now he saw that it had to do with the energies of the crystal, which could penetrate solid matter, so that dense objects became almost transparent. It was not unlike the “double vision” he had experienced after speaking with the goddess of the Delta.

Like a spider, his mind used the energy threads as it climbed upward. Soon he was above the valley, following its course northward. It was, as he had feared, virtually impassable. To walk seven leagues — twenty-one miles — over such difficult terrain would take two hard days. As he gazed down on the valley that stretched north, he experienced a strong suspicion that these broken and piled rocks were not entirely the work of nature. True, they obviously had been swept down by a tremendous flood. In this case, why was there not even a stream in the valley? Moreover, there were many places where the cliffs had collapsed into the valley. What could have caused such landslides, when the cliffs were made of forms of granite?

The answer, he suspected, was that this road north was the main approach to Shadowland. Since it would be the obvious route for an army marching north, to make it impassable would be to block the main access to the Magician’s underground kingdom.

What, then, were the alternative routes? With a mental effort, Niall projected himself still farther above the landscape.

He was familiar with its outline, since he had seen it so clearly through Asmak’s imagination. Far ahead, where the mountains looked as if they had been carved into needles by wind and sleet, he recognized the plateau between two peaks where Skorbo had crashed. One of these peaks — probably the higher one on the right — was Skollen.

A river descended from the center of this plateau and ran south through a green valley, then flowed southwest to plunge in a spectacular waterfall over the cliffs of the Valley of the Dead and run westward to the sea. Obviously, then, the best approach to Skollen lay along the river valley. And this could be reached by returning the way they had come, then turning north somewhere above the cliff dwellings.

By this less direct route, the journey to Skollen was at least thirty miles — a long day’s march. So far on this journey he had covered only half that distance in a single day. His thoughts turned to the possibility of less arduous ways of travel — the oolus birds, or even summoning a spider balloon — only to reject both. Either would be too obvious and risky; any watchman on the top of Skollen would be aware of their approach from far off.

But were there sentinels? He projected himself across the intervening landscape until he could see that what looked like a river running from the plateau was actually a ribbonlike waterfall. Then he was looking down on the bleak, inhospitable plateau, and on the razorlike rocks where, according to Asmak, Skorbo’s balloon had come to grief. And again he found himself speculating how Skorbo had found himself so far north of the Great Wall. Even with gale-force winds, he should have been capable of flying in a slow arc that would have taken him south again — Niall himself had done something of the sort on his way back from the Delta, and so knew it could be done.

Hovering above the rocky summit of the eastern mountain, he could see that it was the crater of a dead volcano, with a lake a few hundred yards wide in its center. The mountain was far higher than it looked from afar. But as far as he could see, there was no sign of a lookout. He then projected himself a thousand feet above the summit, from which he could survey its steep, bramble-covered slopes, hoping to discover the cave where, according to the troll, Sathanas and his followers had taken shelter. From the east, it was possible to see why it was called “Skollen,” for hollows in the rocks near its summit gave it the appearance of a skull.