“There is safety in numbers, even with the dead. If you can speak with their spirits, so can we. We are Druids all, save the Borderman.”
“That you are Druids does not matter,” Bremen said at once. “It is too dangerous for you. This is something I must do alone. You will wait here. I want your promise, Risca.”
The Dwarf gave him a long, hard look and then nodded. Bremen turned to the others. Each nodded reluctantly in turn. Mareth’s eyes met his own and held them with secret understanding.
“You are convinced this is necessary?” Kinson pressed softly.
The lines of Bremen’s aged face crinkled slightly deeper with the furrowing of his brow. “If I could think of something else to do, something that would aid us, I would leave this place. I am no fool, Kinson. Nor hero. I know what corning here means. I know it damages me.”
“Then perhaps...”
“But the dead speak to me as the living cannot,” Bremen continued, cutting him short. “We need their wisdom and insight. We need their visions, flawed and bereft of understanding as they sometimes are.” He took a deep breath. “We need to see through their eyes. If I must give up something of myself to gain that insight, then so be it.”
They were silent then, lost in their separate thoughts, mulling over his words and the misgivings they generated. But there was no help for it. He had told them what was necessary, and there was nothing else to say. They would understand better, perhaps, when this matter was done.
So they sat in the darkness and glanced surreptitiously at the shimmering surface of the lake, their faces bathed in the weak light as they listened to the silence and waited for the dawn to draw closer.
And when at last it did, when it was time to go, Bremen rose and faced his companions with a small smile, then went past them wordlessly and down into the Valley of Shale.
Once more, his progress was slow. He had come this way before, but familiarity did not aid where the terrain was so treacherous. The rock underneath was slippery and loose at every point, and the edges were sharp enough to cut. He picked his way carefully, testing each step on the uncertain surface. His boots crunched and ground on the rock, the sound echoing in the deep silence. From west where the clouds massed thickest, thunder rumbled ominously, signaling the approach of a storm. Within the valley, there was no wind, but the smell of rain permeated the dead air. Bremen glanced up as a flicker of lightning splintered the black skies, then repeated its pattern farther north against the backdrop of the mountains. Dawn would bring more than the sunrise this day.
He reached the bottom of the valley and slogged forward at a more rapid pace, his footing steadier on the level ground. Ahead, the Hadeshorn glimmered with silvery incandescence, the light reflecting from somewhere below its flat, still surface. He could smell death here, an unmistakable mustiness, an arid and fetid decay. He was tempted to look back to where the others waited, but knew he must not distract himself even in that small way. He was already running through the ritual he must follow when he reached the lakeshore—the words, the signs, the conjuring acts that would bring the dead to speak with him. He was already hardening himself against their debilitating presence.
All too soon he stood upon the edge of the lake, a frail, small figure in a vast arena of rock and sky, all withered skin and old bones, the strongest part of him his determination, his stubborn will. Behind him, he could hear again the rumble of thunder from the approaching storm. Overhead, the clouds began to roil, stirred to movement by the winds that bore on their back the coming rain. Below, he could feel the earth shiver as the spirits sensed his presence.
He spoke to them softly, calling out his name, his history, his reason for coming to speak with them. He made the signs with his arms and hands, made the gestures that would summon them from the world of the dead to the world of the living. He saw the waters begin to stir in response, and he quickened his pace. He was confident and steady; he knew what would follow. First came the whispers, soft and distant, rising like invisible bubbles from the waters. Then came the cries, long and deep. The cries increased in volume, growing from a few to many, rising in tenor and impatience. The waters of the Hadeshorn hissed with dissatisfaction and need, and began to roil as rapidly as the clouds overhead, stirred by their own coming storm. Bremen gestured to them, bade them respond. The learning he had mastered in his studies with the Elves buttressed and enabled him, a bedrock on which to build the summoning magic. Answer me, he called to them. Open to me.
Spray flew out of the center of the now violent waters, rising in a fountain, collapsing back, rising again. A rumble sounded deep within the earth, a groan of dissatisfaction. Bremen felt the first trace of doubt steal into his heart, and it was with an effort that he forced himself to ignore it. He could feel a vacuum forming around him, spreading out from the lake to encompass the whole of the valley. Only the dead would be allowed within its perimeter—the dead, and the one who had summoned them.
Then the spirits began to rise from the lake: small, white filaments of light given vaguely human form, bodies bathed in a firefly radiance that glimmered against the blackness of the clouded night. The spirits spiraled out of the mist and spray snakelike, lifting from the dark, dead air of their afterlife home to visit briefly the world they had once inhabited. Bremen kept his arms raised in a warding gesture, feeling vulnerable and bereft of power, though he had done the summoning, though he had brought the spirits to life. Cold ran down his brittle limbs in a rush, ice water through his veins. He held himself firm against the fear that raced through him, against the whispers that asked accusingly: Who calls us? Who dares?
Then something huge broke the water’s surface at its exact center, a black-cloaked figure that dwarfed the smaller glowing forms, scattering them with its coming, soaking up their fragile light and leaving them whirling and twisting like leaves in the wind. The cloaked figure rose to stand upon the dark, churning waves of the Hadeshorn, only vaguely substantial, a wraith without flesh or bones, yet of firmer stuff than the smaller creatures it dominated.
Bremen held himself steady as the dark figure advanced. This was whom he had come to see; this was the one he had summoned. Yet he was no longer certain he had done the right thing.
The cloaked form slowed, so close now that it blotted out the sky above and the valley behind. Its hood lifted, and there was no face, no sign of anything within the dark robes.
It spoke, and its voice was a rumble of discontent.
—Do you know me—
Flat, dispassionate, and empty, a question without a question’s inflection, the words hung upon the silence in a lingering echo.
Bremen nodded slowly in response. “I do,” he whispered.
At the rim of the valley, the four he had left behind watched the drama unfold. They saw the old man stand upon the shores of the Hadeshorn and summon the spirits of the dead. They saw the spirits rise amid the roiling of the waters, saw their glowing forms, the movement of their arms and legs, the twisting of their bodies in a macabre dance of momentary freedom. They watched as the huge, black-robed form lifted from their midst, enveloping them in its wake, absorbing their light. They watched the figure advance to stand before Bremen.
But they could hear nothing of what they saw. Within the valley, all was silent. The sounds of the lake and the spirits were closed away. The voices of the Druid and the cloaked figure, if they spoke, were inaudible. They could hear only the wind that rushed past their ears and the beginning patter of raindrops on the crushed stone. The expected storm was breaking, rolling out of the west in a mass of dark clouds, descending on them with sheets of rain. It reached them at the same moment the cloaked figure reached Bremen, and it swallowed everything in an instant’s time.