Something about Gnash, something about armies, something about Pax Tharkas, but they weren't talking about getting in there the quick way. They were talking about throwing themselves against the walls in crashing battle waves.
Idiots. Like his cousins, idiots.
Ithk ran. Sometimes he had to hold onto the tether to keep from falling, but he ran. When they stopped at night, still far short of their goal, the elves untied him and let him collapse where he stood. They made camp around him. The maimed elf, the prince, and the warrior set their fires, tended their horses, and talked about great armies in the south. Ithk listened, pretending to sleep, and he heard what he needed to know.
In the darkest hour of night, when the two scythe-thin moons had set and a scud of clouds obscured the stars, he rose. Two of the elves slept, the fire between them, wrapped in their cloaks. The other, the prince, stood looking south. Ithk glanced his way and saw past him to where a thin glittering line of campfires gleamed. One army or another.
A shadow, he slipped away, but not before he took the little knife from his belt that he used for eating and skinning. He slid it between the ribs of one of the elves with such deft swiftness that the sleeper made no sound as he died between one breath and the next.
A horse snorted, another stamped. Not one of the elves who lived so much as looked around as Ithk slid away into the night, a dark ghost savoring the smell of blood as he wiped his blade clean on his and ran away south to find his way around two armies.
He knew ways into the Fortress of Ghosts. He had been long around these mountains. He knew the way in, and it didn't involve running into walls. He had friends waiting, and maybe he would be a little late, but he didn't doubt they'd wait.
O blessed light!
It rained down into the spacious bed chamber off the Hall of Thanes like gold pouring in, leaping through tall windows whose iron shutters were thrown wide. The sunbeams danced with glittering dust motes.
O blessed air, unfettered by tunnels of stone!
Elansa breathed it as though it were blown down to her from alpine meadows. To her, it smelled not of a musty closed room, not of the woven wall hangings falling to rot beneath a burden of mildew, nor did it smell of gully dwarf, that rank odor of filth and sweat that would have warned of the presence of the vermin if little footprints on the dusty floors had not. Others swore the place smelled of this, but Elansa smelled only air, free and clear and moving.
They had left the smelting caverns and walked out into a purple twilight, the first star pricking the sky, the moons but little crescents above the two tall towers of Pax Tharkas. Ley stopped to stare, his face turned up to marvel at the towers. hi the courtyard stretching between, they were a dozen, and they felt small as sparrows before the great wall spanning the towers.
"I’ve never seen anything like it," Tianna whispered. She was a child of the stoneland and the mountains but had not dreamed that such a wonder as this could exist.
"It’s called the Tharkadan," her father said, "and it’s seen better days."
It was so. Even as she marveled, Elansa admitted that. Time had not dealt kindly with the fortress. The courtyard stone was cracked and heaved, the towers themselves had felt the digging fingers of frost. The broad high gate in the wall had slipped on its great hinges.
"We'll get in through there," Brand had said, nodding to the gap between gate and wall.
After the low cramped tunnels, after caves whose ceilings were not always high, whose way in and out were seldom broad, the space between the unhinged gate and the stone wall seemed broad as the door to a king’s feast hall. They went in single file from habit, but they need not have. Once inside they found that the state of the inner court was the same as the outer-heaved stone, cracked stone, broken stone.
In good time Char found a way into the eastern tower, out of the wind and cold, but not out of the light. Once inside he did not hesitate, nor did Elansa question him. From legend, the elf woman and the dwarf had learned much about this place. They knew, the two of them, where they'd find the best place to keep from the night and the cold. Outlaws and their prisoner, wind-whipped and filthy, ragged in broken boots, they went to the Hall of Thanes and felt they had made a good choice.
"Used to be someone’s bedroom," Dell said, turning from the window.
Elansa nodded. "A king's-elf or dwarf or one of the human kings from Ergoth. Now and then, even the Ergothian emperor. In the old times one or another of them came here often."
Arawn stood alone at a far window, his eyes on the sky or the tower across the courtyard. He had his back to the room, his back to his friends. Outside, far below, Brand and Char were scouting the broad courtyard. Within this chamber, this place where dwarven thanes had entertained kings, the rest of the outlaws had staked out their places, much as if they were setting camp in a cold cave.
They have drawn a line, Elansa thought, seeing what Brand had hoped to prevent. In the far part of the chamber, away from the dais where a bed had once stood, Arawn looked out. Bruin, Loris, Ballu, and Pragol had spread out their sleeping furs close by. The clack of the bones, shaken in Pragol's hand, sounded familiar to her now, as familiar as their rough voices, their conversations couched in cursing and hard laughter.
Near the window, the one with the shutters flung wide, Dell stood. Nigh-toothless Kerin crouched nearby, his back to the stone and his head on his chest, asleep. Ley stood not far from him, draped in the long shadows, and sighted down the length of an arrow’s shaft. He turned it this way and that, judging whether it was straight and true or if it must be abandoned. Tianna lay wrapped in her cloak, the ragged hem of it muddy and so discolored that the original hue could not be guessed. She had her back to the wall, and Elansa didn't think she was sleeping.
"They sleep, but they must be hungry," she said to Dell.
Dell nodded. "I think there must be hares in the hills. Failing that, we could scare up some rats. I'll take a few men and see what we can find." She looked around at her companions, head cocked as she listened to their voices. "Char says this fortress was always manned. That means there must be armories in one of these towers."
Elansa nodded. "But nothing you find will be in very good condition."
"Don’t doubt that. Still, I'd like to see. I can't get into much trouble. It’s just us and the gully dwarves, after all."
At the door leading out from this mined chamber that once hosted kings, Char's voice and Brand's mingled in echo, low and earnest. They came into the chamber with two helms filled with water, talking about a well in the courtyard with a spring still bubbling up pure and cold.
"Got to use old helmets for buckets," Char said, "but that's not too hard. The water's high enough for reaching down."
He said more, but Elansa didn't hear. She closed her eyes and sank down to the floor. She was thirsty, but she knew better than to look for a drink before anyone else. In the dark silence, she nodded, almost sleeping. A hand touched her arm, she jerked, startled, and Brand stood with an old helm in his two hands. He took a long drink, and offered the rest to her.
"Go on," he said. "You did good, girl. You did all right against the ogres. You held up on the way." He moved closer. In the dimming light, she saw the silver links of the chain around his neck. The sapphire phoenix slid against his chest.
She reached to touch it. He let her, and the pulse of power against her fingertips beat as the pulse of blood beneath her own skin. "I… I was going to Bianost with that phoenix. I was going to heal…"
Brand shrugged, and he repeated his offer. "Have a drink."
He didn't smile. He never did, but he looked at her with a kind of earnestness that made her throat close up with tears.