For an instant, no one standing close to Cymrian said a word. Then Bombax exhaled sharply. “Shades!”
“That was the greatest bow shot I’ve ever seen,” Aphenglow breathed.
“It was the luckiest,” Cymrian grumbled, lowering his bow. “I was just trying to scare him, not kill him.”
“I think I like this result better,” Bombax said.
Across the way, Drust Chazhul and his group had scattered in all directions and were now crouched behind anything that offered protection. The rows of Federation soldiers lined up below had turned to look and were milling about uneasily, breaking ranks and looking back at the Keep as if at any moment an arrow could strike each of them, too. Even the flits, which until now had been hovering impatiently at the perimeter of the Outer Wall, had backed off so far they were almost out of sight.
Deek Trink’s body lay abandoned on the ramparts. No one seemed willing to retrieve it.
Bombax nodded to himself. “Much better.”
For about thirty minutes it seemed as if the Federation would postpone any further action until the next day. But then Drust Chazhul and his commanders and sycophants rallied the attack from behind the series of protective barriers where they had sought shelter. The soldiers who had broken ranks and scattered were reassembled behind spears and shields and unit leaders, presumably with promises of what would happen if they fled a second time, and the flits eased back into position just outside Paranor’s walls.
Aphenglow watched in silent desperation. Arling was beside her. Both of them stood between Bombax and Cymrian. All of them were thinking the same thing. If the magic that had warded the Keep thus far did not repel this fresh assault, they were finished. Paranor would fall, and they would have no choice but to flee into the tunnels beneath and from there out into the countryside, fugitives from their own home. They might stand and fight, but even with their magic to aid them, they would be quickly overwhelmed and captured.
But so much worse was what would be lost to the Federation and to Drust Chazhul. All of their histories and records that had been so painstakingly compiled down through the centuries, all of their talismans and artifacts, the chambers that had never housed any but those who were Druids, the cold room and the scrye, the depthless, bottomless well at the tower’s heart that housed the dangerous and sometimes malevolent spirit of the Keep, the earth’s furnace that gave her heat and presence, the landing platform and the airships. And most damaging of all, the belief that Paranor was impenetrable and the Druids invincible in their own fortress would be shattered. It was a stomach-wrenching prospect, one that none of those who were Druids could accept and none who stood with them could conceive.
They had talked briefly about taking action to save what was threatened, about hiding those things that could be hidden, about adding wards and spells. But even Woostra had dismissed the idea. It was too late for that; the job was too overwhelming. The Druid Histories were already protected against intruders, and the talismans and artifacts were well concealed. Best to trust to what had kept them in one piece for this long. Best just to have a little faith.
But more than a little might be required, Aphenglow thought, standing with the others, the tension ramped up to where it was almost unbearable, her skin crawling with it.
She watched as the Federation lines steadied, men and airships both, and everything went unnaturally still.
Then the battle horn sounded and the Federation army attacked. Lines of armored soldiers and bowmen rushed the Inner Wall and threw up scaling ladders and grappling hooks. Flits shot forward to clear the Outer Wall in an airborne assault on the Inner. Shouts and cries and the clash of weapons rang through the afternoon air, and the combined strength of hundreds threw itself against Paranor and the handful of defenders who waited.
It was a disaster.
Once more the shadowy presence warding the Druid’s Keep surfaced, just as Aphenglow had hoped it would, as ready to protect the Inner Wall as it had been the Outer. Its dark, amorphous presence coiled like a serpent—a venomous, hissing creature. In the blink of an eye, it swatted away the flits, sending them spinning out of control into the woods from which they had emerged, effortlessly shattering their attempt to penetrate the plane of the walls. Then it sank into the stonework of the Inner Wall and reemerged as a suffocating black cloud extending outward from the stonework’s vertical plane to knock away the scaling ladders and the men hanging on them and blow the rest of the soldiers back across the courtyard with a giant’s breath that sent men and equipment whirling and spinning like so many autumn leaves caught in a north wind.
Everyone broke and ran after that, soldiers and unit commanders alike, fleeing the battleground for the comparative safety of the Outer Wall, where they huddled in shock and terror.
From behind his shelter on the ramparts where he knelt beside Stoon, Drust Chazhul signaled for the attack to be broken off. He slumped back against the stone barrier, enraged. “We’re being made fools of!” he hissed.
But his watchful companion had remembered something he had heard the unfortunate Deek Trink mention while he was still upright. “Maybe,” he mused quietly, giving Drust a careful look, “there’s another way.”
25
The bleak expanse of the Breakline stretched away in front of her as the Walker Boh emerged from the peaks of the Kensrowe and turned west toward the miles of unsettled wilderness that would eventually end at the shores of the Blue Divide. They were removed from anything resembling civilization, flying over country uninhabited save for the hardiest and most primal denizens of the Four Lands. A thousand feet up and well clear of what dwelled below, they had only the landscape to suggest the savage existence of those creatures. Farshaun might know a little of them from his travels, and the Speakman surely knew a good deal more, but the rest of the expedition had heard only stories.
Still, just looking at the vast, rugged emptiness—the blasted earth that seemed to have been torn up and thrown back down again in clumps, the ragged, gaping fissures that ran for thousands of yards, the upheaval of rocks that had become razor-sharp and weather-pitted, the smooth flat surfaces of sinkholes said to be bottomless and burrows that tunneled beneath the ruined surface and were said to house giant insects—made Khyber Elessedil wonder if perhaps the Speakman’s prediction that none of them would return from this expedition was an accurate foretelling.
But she had come this far and would not turn back no matter how forbidding the land appeared, no matter the nature of the dangers that waited there, no matter her personal reservations. The lure of the Elfstones was too strong, the chance to recover so great a treasure overriding any thoughts of abandoning her quest. The Druids were equal to the task. Their magic and their experience would protect them.
No one other than Farshaun and herself knew of the Speakman’s prediction. She had forbidden the old man from saying anything about it to the others and had instructed him to tell the Speakman the same. The musings of a seer were not always to be trusted, and even if his prediction were to come true it might do so in a way that was different from what it seemed on the surface. What mattered were his skills and experience as a guide, not his abilities as a seer.
So she told herself.
They had departed at sunrise. Before doing so, she had taken herself away from the others and, using her magic, called up anew the vision skived from Aphenglow’s memory, so she could be certain of the landmarks she had been shown. In a deep trance, she saw again the familiar pinnacles of the Kensrowe and the blasted emptiness of the Breakline stretching ahead, then saw the triad of rock columns and beyond that the giant fissure gape open like a mouth that would swallow them all.