Past the rock and into the thickening maze of the forest the bandits continued. Their voices swirled around Verminaard in a navigator's nightmare as sound dropped into confusion and the lad moved blindly, fearfully, his only guidance his fast-fading hope of escape.
It is like the Abyss, he thought, where the soul is unraveled and eaten.
Nonsense, the Voice comforted, rising from the black rocks and bathing him in a cold and soothing flow of words. For there is no Abyss beyond the black recesses of the self, none but in your own imagining. Be a man! Be your father and steel yourself against these few! For the time will come…
"Where are you?" someone cried in front of him. The horses stopped around him.
See? I have already sent your help… your salvation…
"Where are you, Verminaard?" came the cry again.
Aglaca. Lost and wandering.
A bandit twenty feet in front of him rose in the saddle and sniffed the air. Breathing a low, harsh curse in Nerakan, he tugged at the man nearest him.
"Straight on the Jelek trail, I'll wager," the bandit hissed, gesturing dramatically at the wide path branching west through the trees ahead. "Whoever it is, the fog has turned the poor fool about, and he's set for the worst we can give."
His companion laughed wickedly, and from all points behind Verminaard, horses seemed to emerge from the labyrinth of fog and shadow, moving west toward the end of the pass and the desperate, vulnerable voice that drew them like hunting wolves.
Verminaard brought Orlog to a halt as the last of the bandits passed scarcely a dozen feet to his right. Breathing a prayer to Hiddukel and Sargonnas, the young man sat motionless until the horseman passed into the mist and vanished.
The Voice had brought Aglaca back to him. Verminaard was sure of that. And the cry of the Solamnic youth had drawn the bandits away, into the fog and forest.
Perhaps they would overtake Aglaca. Perhaps he would escape them. Well, Aglaca was clever, resourceful. Maybe he would survive.
Verminaard suppressed a malicious smile. And then, for a moment, Abelaard crossed his mind-his father's pact with Laca and the reprisals that would come if Aglaca did not return.
He tried not to think of those.
The horse-sized obsidian rock that had startled him so loomed close again on his left. Verminaard smiled again. Another hundred yards and he would be clear of the woods, back on the open foothills.
Suddenly what he had thought was the rock moved forward, lifted its gloved hand. Verminaard gasped, fumbled for his sword, and…
"Thank the gods it's you, Verminaard!" Aglaca exclaimed.
"Aglaca! What… how…"
The Solamnic lad laughed merrily, slapping Verminaard on the shoulder affectionately.
"When Orlog started and carried you off, I thought it might be days until we found each other. And then… by Paladine! The bandits! I guided the mare behind a stone about a hundred yards east of here and quieted her. She's a good horse-calm and amiable, with scarcely a sniff or a snort as the whole column passed within a stone's throw of me.
"I saw you in front of them, and it looked as if you needed some help. So when they all had gone by, I shouted for you into the forest, and… well, the peculiar echoes in there must have done even better than I'd hoped, because here you are, and they're-well, they're somewhere else."
He sat back in the saddle and beamed.
Wordlessly, his mind a jumble of guilt and anger and simple perplexity, Verminaard sniffed and nodded. Things were back as they had been before the fog, before the Voice's prophecy, before his attempt to leave Aglaca in the dark isolation of the Khalkists.
He was stuck with him, stuck with the annoying cheer and the even more annoying cleverness-and the road to Neraka was clearing before him.
At least for the time being.
Slowly the horses moved east up the rise, and a wind rose from the south, scattering the fog from their path.
"Look at the sky!" Aglaca noted, pointing to a gray gap in the clouds. "Here I thought it was only fog. But it's gloaming as well. We've passed a day back and forth, you and I. Thanks be to Paladine that we found one another by nightfall!"
Chapter 8
"What color are her eyes?" Verminaard pressed as he and Aglaca steered the horses up a narrow path along the rock face, searching for high shelter away from the night and its predators, animal and human.
"It's hard to explain, Verminaard," the boy replied. "Oh, look-it's a cave of some sort. I figured as much. There's drasil trees aplenty sprouted on the plateau up there, and I've never known a cut path to lead to outright nowhere."
"A cave, you say?" Verminaard forgot all eyes and colors in the prospect. "What kind of-"
"Bats for certain," Aglaca interrupted. "Spiders near the mouth, and those strange blind crickets in the darkness, if it goes back far enough past the entrance. Perhaps a bear." He stared at Verminaard in mock fear. "Though that's unlikely, with all the maneuvering he'd have to do in the rootmaze. But if a bear sets upon us, at least there are two of us this time."
This time? Verminaard thought, his mind racing guiltily back to the fight with the bandits on the bridge. What does he know? What does he suspect?
Were it not for the bats fluttering into the mountain evening, the cave would have seemed comfortable, even pleasant. Rushes were strewn at its mouth, and its occupant had left not long ago at all and intended to return, judging from the lack of dust and cobweb, the fresh, fragrant straw, and the brooms neatly stacked outside the opening.
"Let's go in," Verminaard urged, stepping toward the overhanging rock.
"It's someone's dwelling," Aglaca objected, squinting into the darkness.
"Then you can sleep outside," Verminaard replied coldly. He stepped inside and foraged for serviceable kindling. Aglaca stood hesitantly at the cave mouth, then climbed the rock face to higher ground and a lookout point.
As Verminaard rummaged through straw and stacked crockery, he picked up a pitcher and examined it with a growing, uneasy sense that he had been here, or had at least seen these very things before.
"Look, Verminaard!" Aglaca exclaimed from the cave mouth. "Carrots and radishes! There's a little garden just above here. Not a sunlit acre, what with the shade from the drasil trees, but surprisingly good soil for this rocky country! I don't know how they did it, not at this height. There are late tomatoes as well, and the whole plot is bordered in day lilies! Some of them are blooming! You really should come and see! One has a face in it-"
"Did you find anything to use for a fire?" Verminaard asked curtly, his attention drawn back to the rubble on the floor of the cave. Aglaca vexed him with all this knowledge of plants and weeds and flowers. It was unseemly, irregular to him. Gruffly he waved his companion away. Better to burn what wood he could find in the cavernchairs, perhaps, or the oaken bucket-than to wait while Aglaca dawdled, his nose again in the lilies.
His gaze returned to the bucket again. It was somehow the center of the cave, the focal point of the strange familiarity that seemed to inhabit the place. He approached it cautiously. A wizard might live here, and wizards were known to charge an item with fire, with venom, with destructive spells, so that when the unwary hand touched it, flame would course through the bones and poison through the veins. A thousand years after a wizard's departure or death, the spell could arise to ignite or corrupt.
This bucket had all the signs. A line of ragged marks along the rim-not weathering or chipping, but the intentional carvings of a knowing hand.
Verminaard listened for the Voice. Whatever it was that spoke to him no doubt had a storehouse of lore and magic.
But again the Voice was silent.
Verminaard swore softly and looked into the bottom of the pail. He blinked and looked again.