“Wait!” yelped Moptop. “Maybe we should try talking to them or something. I mean, there are lots of them, and only one of you. I’m sure you could smash them up pretty good with your sword and all. Maybe break ten or twenty or, gosh, a hundred of them. But still-”
Jaymes hesitated, eyes narrowed. His aggressive advance had provoked no response. The spears remained pointed, rank after rank of them, at least a dozen deep standing before them. But once again, the guardians had stopped moving.
“Try talking, then,” the marshal growled. “See what happens.”
“Hey!” Moptop said cheerfully, stepping in front of one swordsman, fixing a beaming smile upon the stony countenances of the warriors. He spun on his heel, cheerfully making eye contact around the whole ring of them, those in front and those who had closed in from behind. “You guys must be really patient. I mean, to stand here all this time waiting for something. Were you really waiting for us? Because we didn’t even know we were coming here, ourselves, really. Of course, I am a professional guide and pathfinder extraordinaire, but-here’s a little secret-I was just a teensy bit lost, myself.”
He glanced sheepishly over his shoulder at Jaymes, who held his sword at the ready but made no move to attack. In his own way, the man was as impassive and unreadable as the rocky guardians. The kender seemed to feel the burden of being the only truly animated person in this place, and he resumed his pleasant chatter with a gesture that conspiratorially encompassed all the surrounding guardians.
“Well, geez. Can you guys back there even hear me? I mean, maybe you could back up just a little bit. Someone is going to get hurt on those pointy spears.” He touched one of the weapons and gingerly tried to push it aside. There was no movement.
With a sigh, Moptop looked around again, his shoulders slumping. Finally he turned back to Jaymes. “I give up. They don’t seem to want to talk. Makes me wonder what they’re thinking, looking at those rock faces. Are they afraid? Do they want to kill us? They were moving and marching just a little while ago, and now they might as well be statues again.”
“Could they be afraid?” Jaymes had been only vaguely paying attention to the kender’s prattle, but that phrase tickled his mind, wiggling around and churning up another conversation. “You’ll at least get a sense of its intentions, its fears.” Coryn had said to him, explaining the power of his sword, the power of mind reading!
Slowly, gradually, he raised Giantsmiter and pointed the blade, aligning the weapon with the face-with the blank, stony eyes-of one of the statue legion.
The first sensation was a warmth that was not uncomfortable, but almost immediately Jaymes began to hear murmurs. They were strange and muted, like hearing a crowd of people conversing some distance away-too far to make out individual words. The kender’s chirping background presence was also there, curious and bubbling. As if sensing the intrusion, Moptop glanced over his shoulder, his eyes meeting Jaymes’s for a moment-and the kender’s thoughts were suddenly articulated in the marshal’s mind.
… Goofy sword… kinda funny looking, even… but these guys aren’t the humorous sort… sort of thought he might try to do something useful instead…
Jaymes looked back at the statues and mercifully, the kender’s blathering ceased. The man looked directly into the face of the nearest statue, focusing on the stony warrior’s blank eyes. And as he did so, he heard a swelling of sound, and felt another creature’s feelings twisting around inside his own skin. He strained to make out the noises and couldn’t suppress a shiver as a powerful, raw emotion swept through him.
Fear!
He was sensing the thoughts and emotions of these guardians, Jaymes knew, and they were afraid-indeed, terrified of the menace that had woke them from their centuries-long slumber.
“Why do you fear us?” he said softly. “We mean you no harm.”
The answer did not come in words, but in pictures inside his mind. He experienced a torrent of images, felt a sense of horror and mystery. He perceived the image of a great, fiery giant and sensed that the guardians were most afraid of that extraordinary being. Feeling their terror, Jaymes wanted to look away but forced himself to hold firm, to continue to learn, to understand. He felt the statues accuse him, felt a swelling compulsion to harm him and the kender, a hostility coming from all directions.
They blamed Jaymes and Moptop for something, but for what?
He suddenly felt a strong sense of self within one of the statue creatures; this one spoke for the others. Adamites. The word came to him, whispered in his mind.
“They’re called adamites,” he said. Then he felt the accusation and understood the fear.
“They think that it is we who have freed the elemental king!” the marshal exclaimed. “They’re his jailers, and they failed to keep him secure. They blame us.”
“Hey, it wasn’t us that let him loose!” Moptop proclaimed in a wounded tone. “Why, we’re trying to stop him. Jaymes here-that is, my friend the Lord Marshal-is going to personally kill him, or put out his fire, or something.”
More jumbles of pictures swirled through the swordsman’s mind, and he realized that the creatures had actually understood the kender’s speech. Now their thoughts were questioning, demanding.
“The king was taken by my enemy,” Jaymes explained. “I am on a quest to stop him. I only seek to reach Solanthus. That’s where he’s gone-where he’s proving a danger to the whole world.”
Now a vivid image appeared in his mind, the Cleft Spires-the rocky landmark that dominated the besieged city. “Yes!” he cried. “That’s the place-that is where we are going, where we must go to find the elemental king.”
There came a shifting, a rattling of movement as the circle of warriors opened, several of them raising their spears and stepping away to open up a path. The route led toward the exit, the tall gap at the far end of the hall that had been Jaymes’s destination. The other guardians stood expectantly, weapons still poised, but made no move to attack.
“I think they want us to go that way,” Moptop said, starting toward the gap in the ring. He waved his torch, lighting the way. Jaymes didn’t hesitate to follow, for now sheathing his sword. It wouldn’t have mattered if they preferred a different route. The warriors formed twin ranks to either side that pretty much limited them to the one course.
The stone warriors channeled the two into a wide, high tunnel, a file of the guardians shuffling along beside them on both the right and the left sides. For more than a mile, the human the kender walked in this strange fashion, moving forward as quickly as they could, climbing a winding ramp between the silent, shifting ranks of stone warriors.
Finally they came to a flat stone wall, an apparently solid surface that blocked all further progress. Here the columns of warriors stood shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the pair, leading up to and merging against the wall. There was no other way forward.
Once more the marshal felt the tickle in his brain, and a picture that formed there showed him that the wall of stone was tenuous, more a gauzy curtain than a solid barrier. “Keep going,” he ordered the kender, and for once Moptop didn’t balk at his orders. The kender took another step, raised his hand as though to touch the stone, and yelped in surprise as the rock wall yielded to his push. His hand, his wrist, his whole arm sank out of sight, and with a delighted skip the kender sprang forward and vanished.
Jaymes, following more slowly, stepped behind, and also passed through the wall as if it didn’t exist. Then the cave was behind them, and a backward glance showed only a stone wall. He touched the gray surface and felt it was as hard as any granite face.
The next thing the lord marshal noticed was the sunlight, a crack of blue sky gleaming high above him, shining down between two sheer, smooth cliffs. To the right and the left, the floor between the cliffs was smooth, and some distance ahead he could spot the walls of a building and the spire of a temple.