"I saw it. What does it mean?"
'14one knows for sure," the voice said. "But all the omens point to a great darkness from the north. Evil has its pawns a'play, and moves across the gaming board. Beware."
The pool darkened, cleared, and was simply a pool of ice. Glenshadow shivered, drew his bison cloak more tightly around his shoulders, and again touched the ice with his staff. This time the image that appeared was of the valley from which he had come. Chane Feldstone and the kender stood at the edge of a patterned ice-field and looked eastward.
"Toward shattered Zhaman," the mage whispered. "He follows Grallen's path, toward the resting place of Grallen's helm."
He started to turn away from the pool, then stopped. Another vision had formed there, coming without call. In inky blackness swirled indistinct shapes, coalescing at the center in a pattern that become a face… or not quite a face, just the ghostly outline of one; but one that Glenshadow had seen before, long years ago.
And a voice as dry as dust – a voice that seemed shriveled with hatred and age – hissed from the image. "He seeks me, does he?" it said. "The puny red-robe would try again to do what he thought he had done before'
Hee-hee. He asks the ice whether I know there is an obstacle in my way. A puny obstacle it is, too. A dwarf. Only a dwarf. Did I know before, he wonders? No matter. I know now." Giggling, the dry voice faded and the ice cleared. Long after the vision was gone, Glenshadow knelt by the ice, shaken and unsure.
"Caliban," he muttered. "Caliban."
Viewed from the south, the valley was a long, deep cut among towering mountains. Miles wide and many more miles long, deep enough that fall foliage still livened the forests below, it swept away to the north. The valley was straighter than most Wingover had explored, and interesting to his explorer's mind because, while its sides were crested by precipitous cliffs, its approach from due south was a long, fairly gentle slope.
It seemed to almost offer itself as a route, and Wingover found that irritating. He had seen the great cats who lived in this valley, and he knew the valley was a trap. He wondered if any who had entered there had ever come out again.
The man was moody and irritable as the hours passed, tired of waiting for a crazy gnome in a sailing contrivance, who probably would never return anyway. He brooded upon the fates that had brought him to be here, back out in the wilderness again, pursuing an impossible quest – to find one lost dwarf in ten thousand square miles of barely explored territory.
It didn't help Wingover's attitude that Jilian Firestoke seemed to have decided that it was her responsibility to fill the idle hours with constant chatter. He had heard a dozen times now about Chane Feldstone's dream, and at least a half-dozen times about the perfidy and downright churlishness of Jilian's father, Slag Firestoke. He had been belabored by gossip – most of it meaningless to him – about the feud between the
Tinturner and Ironstrike families, which had kept the fifth level downshaft neighborhood of Daewar in an uproar for months; about how
Silicia Orebrand's sister was not on speaking terms with any of the
Silverfest Society members; about the uncouth mannerisms of Daergar dwarves who seemed to think they owned the Fourteenth Road; and about the scandal that had risen when Furth Undermine accused the East Warren overseers of bribing the executor of the Council of Thanes.
"Far stars, Button," Wingover finally erupted, "doesn't anybody get along with anybody in Thorbardin? To hear you talk, I'd think the intrigues and hostilities outnumber the population by five to one."
She blinked in surprise. "Oh, it isn't like that at all," she said.
"Thorbardin is the nicest place imaginable. Really. I've just been telling you the juicy stuff because that's what most people prefer to hear. But then, most people – at least most people I know – are dwarves. What do humans like to hear?"
"Silence, occasionally," he snapped.
For long minutes, he had his wish. Jilian sat facing away from him, her sturdy little back arrow-straight. She had tried to entertain him. Now she made a point of ignoring him, which, for his part, Wingover liked better.
Soon, though, she asked, "Do you mind if I tell you one other thing?"
"I knew it was too good to last," he said. "What?"
She pointed. 'The gnome is coming back."
He saw it, then – the gliding, erratic flight of the gnome's machine, coming toward them, low over the valley's forested floor.
"It's about time," Wingover snorted.
The white kite came closer, rising as it neared the climbing slope, seeming to shoot upward on wind currents until it was a tiny thing far overhead. Then it dipped its wing and began the wide circling that they had seen before. It seemed that, once up, the only way the gnome could come down again was by this tedious procedure.
The soarwagon circled and descended, circled and descended, and finally crept to a halt hovering just a few yards up – but in the wrong place. It was a quarter of a mile from them, above a jagged cliff where the valley's west wall began.
"What is he doing?" Wingover growled. "Why doesn't he come over here?"
"He's probably trying to," Jilian said. "I don't think his machine really works all that well."
"It's a wonder it works at all," Wingover pointed out.
For a moment, the soarwagon hovered where it was. Then with a shudder it shot upward again, and the circling began all over. This time the gnome seemed to have corrected his navigation, and when next the thing hovered it was just above Wingover and Jilian.
Bobbin leaned out, his face pinched with irritation. He looked from one to another of them, then settled on Wingover. "I'm back," he announced,
"It's me… Bobbin. I'm here."
"I know you're here," Wingover called back. "I can see you. Did you find anything?"
"Quite a lot of valley, with various things in it. Several miles north, there's a ring of stones with a thing in the center that looks like a really big thermodynamic inflector, though I'm sure it isn't that. There's a sort of little, broken statue on top of it, and paving all around. Then there's a hut, though if anyone lives there he wasn't at home, and there is a winding black path that goes off in both directions from it. I saw a river and enough trees to make a woodnymph think she'd gone to paradise, and several nice meadows that I could have landed in… if I could land.
And an ice field covered with lumpy shapes, and what's left of an old wall
– older than I can calculate from up here, but I imagine it was old before anybody I know was old enough to understand old -"
"How about cats?" Wingover called.
"How about what?"
"Cats! That's what you went to look for. Cats!"
"No. No cats. One kender, but no cats. Though I did see someone wearing a bunny suit made out of cathide, if you can believe anything a kender tells you. What do you want cats for?"
"I don't want cats! I just wanted to know if you saw any!"
"Well, I didn't. Some bison, here and there, and a few elk, though…"
"How about Chane Feldstone?" Jilian called. "Did you see him?"
"Does he wear a bunny suit?"
Jilian had started to shout something else at the gnome, but suddenly his invention was off again, shooting away in a sharp climb that carried it toward the distant peaks to the west.
The girl sighed, then slung her pack and her sword. "I guess that settles that," she said. "We'll just have to look for ourselves. Are you ready?"
"Hold on, there, Button," Wingover snapped. "I'm in charge here, remembers I decide where and when we go."