But after a quarter of an hour, they stood on the stone buttress at the bridge’s outer end. Guards kept watch there, archers with long bows, and halberdiers. The captain saluted as they approached the bridge. “Lady Astriana, when you didn’t return, Lord Themiranth decided to go anyway. Past midnight we brought some of them up again-another failure. Your two were the only survivors, though one has died since, I think.”
“And Themiranth?”
“He did not return.”
He was speaking to her, but he was looking at Haggar, his nostrils wide, his lips curled in disdain. “Is this orc your prisoner or your slave? I’ve got a cage full of his stinking kind.”
She smiled. “Captain, this is Archdruid Haggar, Magister of the Broken Pool, master of all druids in the mortal realm. He has agreed to help us. Is that not so, magister?”
At that moment, above them, the first rays of the morning sun touched the inside of the well, revealing tendrils of vegetation that hung down from its rim over the black stones. And as if touched by Kannoth’s flower, Haggar felt his strength return. Astriana faced him, and in the new light he noticed things he’d never seen before, either in the darkness at home when he had met her at the stone pool on the mountainside, or in Kannoth’s bewitching moonlight, which had covered everything it touched with a light as thick as paint, hiding as much as it revealed. She stood just his height, a fair-haired woman in ragged blue-green silk, barefoot, with muddy legs. Like all the eladrin, she appeared to have no pupils or whites to her eyes, which had a faintly yellow cast. Her wide mouth and forehead, her high cheekbones were beautiful to him-beyond beautiful-but at the same time he could see her flaws, the misshapen bridge of her nose, where it had been broken and reset, and the scar that ran over her cheekbone and her lips.
Suddenly embarrassed, he looked down at himself, the torn wedding shirt, which revealed his tattooed chest and shoulders, slick with sweat. “ ‘Magister’-that’s a new one,” chucked the captain. “Is this creature capable of speech?”
“It is you who should be silent,” Astriana said. She turned, and Haggar followed her over the bridge into the tower. And she whispered to him as she walked through the guard chambers and tapestried corridors, so that he had to follow close behind her. “Among my people, it is customary for a man and wife to trade requests. You asked a question, and I answered. Now it is my turn. I want you to close this gate with me, and kill whatever creatures have crawled through from the Far Realm. Then it will be time for you to ask again.”
“Anything I want?”
“Anything you want,” she conceded, eyes fixed straight ahead. A pair of soldiers saluted, then drew back in surprise when they saw Haggar. “One more thing,” she continued without turning around. “You are not to speak of Lord Kannoth, or refer in any way to the magic he cast over us, or of the promise I made. These obligations can only be dissolved by the Summer Queen at the Court of Stars, whom I will petition as soon as we have done our work. That will be enough of an opportunity for my humiliation, as if I needed to dissolve a marriage with a pig or a goat. No, be quiet,” she went on, as he tried to interrupt her. “Among my people, my ugliness is already a legend. The part of a seductress was a new one to me, not one I could accomplish here. Doubtless I enjoyed it. Doubtless that was part of Kannoth’s joke.”
They had come to the center of the tower, a circular chamber that also contained a well, the interior echo of the colossal architecture outside. And in the middle of the well was an iron cage suspended from a hook and pulley and reached by an iron ramp. Without pausing, Astriana climbed the ramp and stepped into the cage, where she stood holding the bars. Haggar entered behind her, and at a nod from her, a pair of soldiers pulled the ramp away, leaving the cage dangling. Then another pair let down the chain; the cage descended down the length of the shaft, whose bottom was in darkness, invisible to Haggar as he peered between his filthy feet.
They passed storey after storey of iron balustrades, lit by glimmering lanterns. In time, Haggar guessed, they had penetrated below the foundations of the tower, and down into the rock. The air became damp and thick. As they descended, he felt his mood darken also. Astriana said nothing during all this time, but only stood with her hands on the iron bars, embarrassed, he imagined, at having revealed so much. Now that they could talk freely without fear of being overheard, she was silent. Nor could he think of what to say. “This is my duty as your husband,” he ventured finally, “to close this gate?”
She shot him a look of agonized contempt. “If Themiranth is dead, it is a blessing. Not once has he followed my command.”
A bell clanged and the cage jerked to a halt, dangling and groaning at the end of its stupendous chain. They hung suspended in a natural cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites the length of a man. Down below, a platoon of soldiers labored to secure them with long grappling hooks, and then to pull them to the edge of a metal structure, a wheeled staircase; when the cage grated against its iron edge, Astriana leaped onto it as if relieved not to be with him any longer in such an enclosed space, and sprang down the stairway, among soldiers very different from the eladrin in the upper tower. These were men in black armor, with hunched shoulders and heavy faces, stunted legs, and powerful arms.
They were inhabitants of the Feydark, Haggar guessed, firbolgs and goblins. One looked up, and he saw it was missing an eye. They clustered around Astriana as she descended the stairs, and she held out her hands, whether to welcome them or keep them at a distance, Haggar couldn’t tell. They moved aside to let her pass, and she waited for him to catch up. “If the watch captain is right,” she said, “we don’t have time to lose. You will see.”
Then she turned to speak to the one-eyed soldier in a language Haggar didn’t know. “He says he’s laid them in the antechamber,” she summarized after a minute’s talk. “Come.”
They passed into a torchlit corridor, rough-hewn from the rock. And then through an iron door into a vaulted hall, at the far end of which two figures lay in nests of rags. Astriana hurried to them and went down on her knees.
One was alive and one was dead, as the captain of the watch had claimed. Astriana knelt over the living one, clasping one of her hands and pushing the hair back from her face. A smoking lantern hung from an iron stanchion above their heads, and by its light Haggar examined the corpse of the other, a tiefling, he saw, with bosses of bone along the crest of his scalp, and curling horns that rose up from his brow, one intact, the other lopped off at the base. The creature was dressed in jointed armor, and in his stiffened hand he still clutched a druid’s staff, decorated with carved runes and also sheared off short. He lay on his back, and the straw and rags beneath him were soaked in his black blood.
Fascinated, Haggar studied the man’s face, his curled, heavy beard, his red skin, paler now, he imagined, in death. He knew the history of this maligned and hated race, how ancient human families had sworn pacts with devils and corrupted their entire lines. “What did you promise him?” he asked.
Astriana didn’t answer. The other woman was a shifter from the look of her, with a flat, feline face and jagged teeth. Hair grew on her cheeks and down her neck, and she was dressed in fur and leather. Or rather she had been, for she had ripped most of her clothing away with her long claws, and lay with her hairy body exposed. Her totem stick had fallen away from her and lay forgotten on the ground, a black shaft of tibia bone studded with uncut tiger’s eyes.
She had raised herself onto one elbow and was talking to Astriana in low, urgent tones. Astriana scarcely seemed to listen, but instead she busied herself rearranging the bedding so the shifter could lie more comfortably. And when the firbolg captain strode in, she turned on him. “Didn’t I ask you to take care of them? Bring her to my guardroom, to my couch. Give her water mixed with wine.”