They stood at the crest of a rise at midmorning and looked out over the desolation that stretched away before them.
“Shadowen,” Morgan Leah declared darkly.
But Quickening shook her silvery head and replied, “Uhl Belk.”
It grew worse by midday and worse still by nightfall. It was bad enough when the land was sickened; now it turned completely dead. All trace of grasses and leaves disappeared. Even the smallest bit of scrub disdained to grow. Trunks lifted their skeletal limbs skyward as if searching for protection, as if beseeching for it. The country appeared to have been so thoroughly ravaged that nothing dared grow back, a vast wilderness gone empty and stark and friendless. Dust rose in dry puffs from their boots as they stalked the dead ground, the earth’s poisoned breath. Nothing moved about them, above them, beneath them—not animals, not birds, not even insects. There was no water. The air had a flat, metallic taste and smell to it. Clouds began to gather again, small wisps at first, then a solid bank that hung above the earth like a shroud.
They camped that night in a forest of deadwood where the air was so still they could hear each other breathe. The wood would not burn, so they had no fire. Light from a mix of elements in the earth reflected off the ceiling of clouds and cast the shadows of the trees across their huddled forms in clinging webs.
“We’ll be there by nightfall tomorrow,” Horner Dees said as they sat facing each other in the stillness. “Eldwist.”
Dark stares were his only reply.
Uhl Belk’s presence became palpable after that. He huddled next to them there in the fading dusk, slept with them that night, and walked with them when they set out the following day. His breath was what they breathed, his silence their own. They could feel him beckoning, reaching out to gather them in. No one said so, but Uhl Belk was there.
By midday, the land had turned to stone. It was as if the whole of it, sickened and withered and gone lifeless, had been washed of every color but gray and in the process petrified. It was all preserved perfectly, like a giant piece of sculpture. Trunks and limbs, scrub and grasses, rocks and earth—everything as far as the eye could see had been turned to stone. It was a starkly chilling landscape that despite its coldness radiated an oddly compelling beauty. The company from Rampling Steep found itself entranced. Perhaps it was the solidity that drew them, the sense that here was something lasting and enduring and somehow perfectly wrought. The ravages of time, the changing of the seasons, the most determined efforts of man—it seemed as if none of these could affect what had been done here.
Horner Dees nodded and the members of the company went forward.
A haze hung about them as they walked across this tapestry of frozen time, and it was only with difficulty that they were able, after several hours, to distinguish something else shimmering in the distance. It was a vast body of water, as gray as the land they passed through, blending into its bleakness, a backdrop merging starkly into earth and sky as if the transition were meaningless.
They had reached the Tiderace.
Twin peaks came into view as well, jagged rock spirals that lifted starkly against the horizon. It was apparent that the peaks were their destination.
Now and again the earth beneath them rumbled ominously, tremors reverberating as if the land were a carpet that some giant had taken in his hands and shaken. There was nothing about the tremors to indicate their source. But Horner Dees knew something. Morgan saw it in the way his bearded face tightened down against his chest and fear slipped into his eyes.
After a time the land about them began to narrow on either side and the Tiderace to close about, and they were left with a shrinking corridor of rock upon which to walk. The corridor was taking them directly toward the peaks, a ramp that might at its end drop them into the sea. The temperature cooled, and there was moisture in the air that clung to their skin in faint droplets. Their booted feet were strangely noiseless as they trod the hard surface of the rock, climbing steadily into a haze. Soon they became a line of shadows in the approaching dusk. Dees led, ancient, massive, and steady. Morgan followed with Quickening, the tall Highlander’s face lined with wariness, the girl’s smooth and calm. Handsome Carisman hummed beneath his breath while his gaze shifted about him as rapidly as a bird’s. Walker Boh floated behind, pale and introspective within his long cloak. Pe Ell brought up the rear, his stalker’s eyes seeing everything.
The ramp began to break apart before them, an escarpment out of which strange rock formations rose against the light. They might have been carvings of some sort save for the fact that they lacked any recognizable form. Like pillars that had been hewn apart by weather’s angry hand over thousands of years, they jutted and angled in bizarre shapes and images, the mindless visions of a madman. The company passed between them, anxious in their shadow, and hurried on.
They arrived finally at the peaks. There was a rift between them, a break so deep and narrow that it appeared to have been formed by some cataclysm that had split apart what had once been a single peak to form the two. They loomed to either side, spirals of rock that thrust into the clouds as if to pin them fast. Beyond, the skies were murky and misted, and the waters of the Tiderace crashed and rumbled against the rocky shores.
Horner Dees moved ahead and the others followed until all had been enveloped in shadows. The air was chill and unmoving in the gap, and the distant shrieks of seabirds echoed shrilly. What sort of creatures besides those of the sea could possibly live here? Morgan Leah wondered uneasily. He drew his sword. His whole body was rigid with tension, and he strained to catch some sign of the danger he sensed threatening them. Dees was hunched forward like an animal at hunt, and the three behind the Highlander were ghosts without substance. Only Quickening seemed unaffected, her head held high, her eyes alert as she scanned the rock, the skies, the gray that shrouded everything.
Morgan swallowed against the dryness in his throat. What is it that waits for us?
The walls of the break seemed to join overhead, and they were left momentarily in utter blackness with only the thin line of the passageway ahead to give them reassurance that they had not been entombed. Then the walls receded again, and the light returned. The rift opened into a valley that lay cradled between the peaks. Shallow, rutted, choked with the husks of trees and brush and with boulders many times the size of any man, it was an ugly catchall for nature’s refuse and time’s discards. Skeletons lay everywhere, vast piles of them, all sizes and shapes, scattered without suggestion of what creatures they might once have been.
Horner Dees brought them to a halt. “This is Bone Hollow,” he said quietly. “This is the gateway to Eldwist. Over there, across the Hollow, through the gap in the peaks, Eldwist begins.”
The others crowded forward for a better look. Walker Boh stiffened. “There’s something down there.”
Dees nodded. “Found that out the hard way ten years ago,” he said. “It’s called a Koden. It’s the Stone King’s watchdog. You see it?”
They looked and saw nothing, even Pe Ell. Dees seated himself ponderously on a rock. “You won’t either. Not until it has you. And it won’t matter much by then, will it? You could ask any of those poor creatures down there if they still had tongues and the stuff of life to use them.”
Morgan scuffed his boot on a piece of deadwood as he listened. The deadwood was heavy and unyielding. Stone. Morgan looked at it as if understanding for the first time. Stone. Everything underfoot, everything surrounding them, everything for as far as the eye could see—it was all stone.