They saw caves in the cliffs from time to time, dark openings that yawned silent and empty. Stresa pointedly steered his charges away from them. When Wren questioned him about what lay within, the Splinterscat hissed and declared rather pointedly that she didn’t want to know.
Midafternoon finally brought them to the bottom of the fissure and the narrow defile that lay beyond. They stood on flat, solid ground again, aching and worn, and looked back across the south end of the island to where it dropped away in a rolling, misted carpet of green jungle and black lava rock to the azure-blue sweep of the ocean. Blackledge rose above them to either side, craggy and misted, stretching in an unbroken wall until it disappeared into the horizon. Seabirds circled against the sky. Sunlight appeared momentarily through a break in the clouds, blinding in its intensity, turning the muted colors of the land below vibrant and bright. Wren and Garth squinted against its glare, enjoying the warmth of it against their faces. Then it faded, gone as suddenly as it had appeared; the chill and damp returned, and the island’s colors became dull again.
Turning away into the shadow of the fissure, they began to climb toward the mouth of the narrow pass. Then they were inside. The cliff rock rose all about them, a hulking, brooding presence, and wind blew down out of Killeshan’s heights in rough, quick gusts like the sound of something breathing. It was cold in the pass, and the Rovers wrapped themselves tightly in their cloaks. Rain descended in sudden bursts and was gone again, and the vog spilled down off the rocks in opaque waves.
Twilight had descended by the time they reached the fissure’s end. They stood at the rim of a valley that stretched away toward the final rise of Killeshan, a green-etched bowl settled beneath a distant stretch of forestline that lifted to the barren lava rock of the high slopes beyond. The valley was broad and misted, and it was difficult to see what lay within. The faint shimmer of a ribbon of water was visible east, winding through stands of acacia-dotted hills and ridgelines laced with black streamers of pitted rock. Across the sweep of the valley, all was still.
They made camp in the shelter of the pass under an overhang that fronted the valley. Night fell quickly, and with the sky so completely screened away the world about them turned frighteningly black. The silence of dusk slowly gave way to a jumble of rough sounds—the intermittent, barely perceptible rumble of Killeshan, the hiss of steam from cracks in the earth where the heat of the volcano’s core broke through, the grunts and growls of hunting things, the sudden screams as something died, and the frantic whispers as something else fled. Stresa curled into a ball and lay facing out at the blackness, less quick to sleep this night. Wren and Garth sat next to him, anxious, uneasy, wondering what lay ahead. They were close now; the Rover girl could sense it. The Elves were not far. She would find them soon. Sometimes, through the black and the haze, she thought she could catch the glimmer of fires like eyes winking in the night. The fires were distant, across the valley, high on the slopes below the treeline’s final stretch. They looked lonely and isolated, and she wondered if the perception was an accurate one. How far had the Elves come in their move away from the Four Lands? Too far, perhaps? So far that they could not get back again?
She fell asleep finally with the questions still on her mind.
They set out again at daybreak. Morrowindl had become a gray, misted world of shadows and sounds. The valley fell away sharply below them as they walked, and it was as if they were descending into a pit. The trail was rocky and slick with damp, and the green that had seemed so predominant in the previous night’s uncertain light revealed itself now as nothing more than small patches of beleaguered moss and grass crouched amid long stretches of barren rock. Tendrils of steam laced with the stench of sulfur rose skyward to blend with the vog, and pockets of intense heat burned through the soles of their boots and seared the skin of their faces. Stresa set a slow pace, picking his way carefully, lumbering from side to side amid the rocks and their islands of green. Several times he stopped and turned back again altogether, choosing a different way. Wren could not tell what it was that the Splinterscat saw,—everything was invisible to her. She felt bereft of her skills once more, a stranger in a hostile, secretive world. She tried to relax herself. Ahead, Stresa’s bulky form rolled with the motion of his walk, daggerlike quills rising and falling rhythmically. Behind, Garth stalked as if at hunt, dark face intense, unreadable, hard. How very alike they were, she thought in surprise.
They had come down off a small rise into a stand of brush when the thing attacked. It launched itself out of the haze with a shriek, a bristling horror with claws and teeth bared, slashing in a desperate frenzy. It had legs and a body and a head—there was no time to tell more. It bypassed Stresa and came for Wren, who barely managed to bring her arms up before it was upon her. Instinctively she rolled, taking the weight of the thing as she did and then thrusting it away. It slashed and bit, but the heavy gloves and cloak protected her. She saw its eyes, yellow and maddened; she felt its fetid breath. Shaking free, she scrambled to her feet, seeing the thing wheel back again out of the corner of her eye.
Then Garth was there, short sword cutting. A glitter of iron and the creature’s arm was gone. It fell, screaming, tearing at the earth. Garth stepped in swiftly and severed its head, and it went still.
Wren stood there shaking, still uncertain what the thing was. A demon? Something else? She looked down at the bloodied, shapeless husk. It had all happened so fast.
“Phfftt! Listen!” Stresa sharply hissed. “Others come! Ssstttfttp. This way! Hurry!”
He lumbered swiftly off. Wren and Garth were quick to follow, tunneling after him into the gloom.
Already they could hear the sounds of pursuit.
Chapter Eight
The chase began slowly, gathering momentum as it careened downward into the valley. Wren, Carth, and the Splinterscat were alone at first, sought after but not yet found, and their hunters were nothing more than scattered bits of noise still distant and indistinct They slipped ahead swiftly, watchfully, without panic or fear. The landscape about them was dreamlike, by turns barren and empty where black lava had buried the foliage beneath its glistening rocky carpet and lush where patches of acacia and heavy grass fought from small islands within the wilderness to reclaim what had been taken. Vog hung over everything, a vast, loosely woven shroud, swirling and shifting, creating the illusion that everything it touched was alive. Overhead, visible in small patches through the haze, the skies were iron-gray and sunless.
Stresa chose a rambling, circuitous route, taking them first one way and then the other, his thick quilled body rolling and lurching so that it constantly seemed as if he were about to tip over. He favored neither the open sweep of the lava rock nor the canopied cover of the brush-grown forest, veering from one to the other impartially, whether selecting his path from intuition or experience, it was impossible to tell. Wren could hear his heavy breathing, a growl in his throat that turned to a hiss when he came across something he didn’t like. Once or twice he looked back at them as if to make certain they were still there. He did not speak, and they kept silent as well.
It was chance alone that led to their discovery. They had come upon a stretch of open rock, and the creature was lying in wait. It rose up almost in front of them, thrusting out of the earth where it had burrowed, hissing and shrieking, a sort of birdlike thing on legs with a great hooked beak and claws at its wing tips. Talons swept downward to rip at Stresa, but the Splinterscat’s backside hunched and rippled instantly and a flurry of razor-sharp quills flew into the attacker. The creature screamed in pain and tumbled back, tearing at its face.