“All right. Let’s do as you say, then.”
Twelve hours later, all but the last remnants of the army had abandoned the camp on the west bank of the Vingaard. The troops were advancing toward their planned crossings under the milky light of a full white moon. Jaymes stood alone in that same moonlight, and Coryn calculated the passage of time.
Finally, she cast the spell. Magic swirled around Jaymes Markham. He felt the pull of the magic, a world whooshing past. He saw the walls of Solanthus and recognized the Cleft Spires outlined in the cold moonlight. Disorienting sensations surrounded him, surging through his gut, dizzying him so much that he could barely see. He sensed the nearness of his obstacle and wanted to reach out and bring himself to ground in the city.
But there was a barrier! Strong magic reared before him, pushed him back, and screened the city from his sight, his reach. Finally the spell sizzled away, and he found himself standing on uneven, rocky ground. There was no source of light to illuminate the utter darkness, so for a few breaths he didn’t move. He groped with his other senses.
The air was cool, still, and very damp. It penetrated his sweaty tunic and chilled him to the bone. Somewhere nearby water dripped, a musical plink-plink amplified by the lack of any other noise, save for his own increasingly ragged breathing.
No wind. One eternal sound… and that penetrating cold. He knew at once:
Coryn had teleported him some place under the ground.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everywhere around him was pitch darkness, a cold and lightless void that utterly engulfed the lord marshal. Jaymes heard a terrible hissing in his ears and only vaguely realized it was the pulsation of his own blood, impelled by the heightened hammering of his heart. A sudden wave of vertigo swept over him, and he staggered, trying to regain his balance, but his foot stumbled over a jutting rock, and he fell to his hands and knees.
His fingers felt rough rocks, some of them loose and crumbling, as small as gravel, and others that seemed to be part of the bedrock of what was obviously some kind of cavern. His right knee throbbed where it had landed on a jagged stone, and he clutched the ground like a drowning man clinging to a raft. Bile surged in his throat, but the warrior forced it back down and clenched his jaws, forcing his breathing to slow.
“Where am I?” he demanded of the darkness, the words a bare whisper of sound passing through his parched lips.
“ I’m somewhere under the Garnet range,” a voice said. “The question is, how did you get here?”
The voice came from behind him and though the tone was friendly, the mere presence of the speaker was enough to startle Jaymes. He whirled around, pushed himself into a crouch, straining to see some sign-any sign-of the other person. Unfortunately, the rough ground proved his undoing again, and his feet slipped out from under him, dropping him unceremoniously onto his rump.
“Who’s there?”
This time the reply was only a sharp, scraping sound, followed immediately by a flaring of light. The brightness was a searingly painful sensation, blinding him every bit as effectively as had the previous darkness. Jaymes closed his eyes against a yellow brilliance that was like staring right into the sun. He raised his hand to screen his face.
But he quickly realized that there was no sensation of heat upon his skin, nothing to suggest that sunlight was actually spilling into this forsaken pit. Almost immediately he recalled the harsh sound that had accompanied that flash: it was merely the scraping of a match upon tinder! Opening his eyes again, keeping one hand raised to shade the spot of fire from his direct gaze, he began to discern more about his surroundings.
The match-holder’s feet were plainly visible; he was clad in moccasins that-like the voice-were strangely familiar. When those feet advanced closer, not in a stride, nor a charge, but with an almost childish skip, the warrior understood.
“Moptop?” he asked in amazement. It was the first time in his life that he was able to derive even a modicum of pleasure from the presence of a kender. “Is that you?”
“Sure is. This is the most amazing place! You should see it! Well, I guess you will see it, now that you’re here-unless you rush away as fast as you arrived. But tell me, confidentially of course, how did you do that? Get here so fast, I mean?”
“Wait. Let me collect my thoughts.” Jaymes turned his back to the light and inspected his surroundings. He found himself in a cave, an area that was very constricted. A cracked and broken wall loomed no more than four or five paces away, and-though the overhead ceiling was lost in shadow for the most part-he could see the tips of fanglike stalactites jutting down from above in all directions.
The floor was even rougher than he had imagined. A glance around showed that he would have been in for a nasty fall if he took more than a single step in any direction. It seemed the teleport spell had brought him to the top of some kind of square-edged boulder in the middle of a small cavern. The kender was standing on another rock nearby, and as Jaymes’s eyes adjusted, he perceived the opposite wall was not very far beyond his diminutive companion.
“Where did you say we are?” asked the warrior. “Under the Garnet range?”
“Yep. I just happen to be exploring through here. You know, working on my maps. I was thinking there might be a way to Solanthus through here. I wanted to go there and see that place-I’ve never been inside of a siege before! But the goblins wouldn’t let me walk through their camp when I tried to go the regular way. So I came down here. That’s what I was doing when I heard you come along. But you never told me how you-wait a moment! She sent you, didn’t she? The White Lady has magicked you here! Wow, that’s great! She must have figured I’d be needing a partner! Can’t have too many partners when you’re exploring. Real mind reader, the White Lady.”
“Hmm, it’s damned disorienting,” Jaymes retorted. “And confusing. I don’t think she was trying to send me here-we both thought I would arrive in Solanthus!”
“Oh, but you can’t go there by magic. Everyone knows that. There’s a spell that prevents such a thing. I’m surprised she didn’t know that. I should probably write her a note or something and advise her accordingly. You don’t happen to have a piece of paper on you?”
“No! And she does know about the magic barrier. She thought she had found a way to defeat it.”
The kender laughed merrily, the sound grating on the man’s nerves like a squeaking axle. “Well, she was wrong!” Moptop’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s annoying how, sometimes, she acts like she knows everything!”
“Yeah, annoying,” growled Jaymes. He checked over his gear, trying to think, to plan. His great sword, Giantsmiter, was secure upon his back, and his pair of small crossbows remained in their holsters at his waist. Fortunately the sensitive weapons were not loaded-he might easily have shot himself while stumbling around in the darkness here. He was wearing his ring, the little circlet of metal Coryn had imbued with one additional teleport spell. He briefly considered using that to escape this place but shook the idea away. No, Coryn must have some reason for sending him here with the kender. And it would be bitterly disappointing to simply return, without having accomplished anything.
“Ow, hey-that burns!” snapped the kender, dropping the consumed match and most likely popping his singed fingertips into his mouth as darkness surrounded them again.
“Do you have another one of those? Or maybe a torch?” asked Jaymes. He thought of Giantsmiter’s blade, the steely edge that could hiss with its own bright, bluish flame, but he was reluctant to use the legendary weapon for anything so mundane when he would soon need all its powers. He was also loathe to advertise the existence of the weapon, with all its ancient and potent magic, in a place he knew so little about. And it wouldn’t do, he reminded himself, to tell the kender anything he preferred to keep secret.