The Dreaming Hunt (59 page)

“Please, my lord. Let the boy go,” Raina gasped. “Kill me instead.”

Rynn tried to throw himself in front of her, but two big, burly Dominion guards held him back by his arms.

Goldeneye's fist opened. The messenger boy dropped to the ground, gasping, and maybe dying, anyway. It sounded as if his throat might be crushed.

“If I let you go and send you to track down Moonrunner, you will recover my change water and bring it back to me.” A long pause from Goldeneye. “If you do this, I will remove your enslavement from you, gypsy.”

“Done!” Will declared from behind her. Anything to free her from the clutches of this creature.

Rosana half turned to throw him a quelling look. He supposed she was right. The last thing they needed was for two of them to get themselves enslaved to the Dominion leader. She turned back to Goldeneye. “Done. We will do this thing for you. You have our word of honor upon it.”

“All of your words of honor?” the cobra changeling demanded.

Rynn placed a fist over his heart and bowed his head. Will followed suit, thinking better of speaking aloud again, given what doing so had earned Rosana. All the others followed suit.

“Done. Turn them loose. Take them to the last trail of Moonrunner, and release them.”

“Our gear!” Will whispered to Rosana.

“My lord!” Rosana said to Goldeneye's back. “We'll need our gear and weapons to find Moonrunner and take your water back.”

Goldeneye's stride paused mid-step. He ordered to no one in particular, “Give them their equipment.” He strode away without looking back.

 

CHAPTER

29

Gabrielle expected that they would take the river until they were safely away from the island and then go back to the surface and proceed overland. But their dwarven guide had other ideas. It was impossible to tell exactly how much time passed, underground as they were, but she estimated that they sailed down the river for most of the night and a day.

She saw villages and forests float by, fields with some small breed of cow, and goats and chickens, farms and homesteads. It was an entire world down here. Some places were as dimly lit as a forest populated only by lightning bugs. Other places were filled with a dim blue glow from phosphorescent fungi lining the cave ceiling far overhead. And yet other areas were nearly as bright as a sunlit day.

Upon query, their guide explained that they used solar tubes, long shafts carved all the way to the surface and lined with highly reflective materials to convey sunshine downward. In these areas, crops were planted and villages clustered.

They docked in one such village as the sunlight failed and was replaced by a pale green glow rising from moss growing on the ground. Gabrielle, Dafydd, and his parents ate in a cramped tavern, served by a silent dwarven woman with a long, intricately braided beard, while their guide disappeared. By the time they'd finished eating, he had returned. Their hostess wrapped food in a napkin, and the guide grunted for them to go.

The thrill of the journey had worn thin for the boy seer, and he drooped as they returned to the dock. This time they climbed aboard a wide, square vessel that floated more ponderously down the river.

“Make thyselves comfortable,” their guide told them. “We'll be a while on the water.”

A while turned out to be days. Gabrielle was stunned at the extent of this underwater network. Did the Eight know about this other world under the earth?

She lost track of day and night as they floated ever onward, a sluggish current carrying them inexorably away from the Imperial hounds hunting Dafydd. At least she hoped they were getting away. Although the boat did not move quickly, it did move continuously with only brief stops to drop off barrels, pick up new ones, and grab a bite of hot food.

After what she'd estimated to be five days, they finally docked in yet another nondescript village huddled next to the shore. “This be our stop,” their guide announced to Gabrielle's vast relief.

If she did not see a boat again for a good long while, that would be fine with her. They followed a path through the village and into a forest of trees covered in narrow, silvery leaves. It dawned on her that the leaves were utterly still, with no breeze to ruffle them.

At length, they came to a stone stairway, broad and shallow, that turned out to be deceptive for the steps went on seemingly forever. Her legs burned with effort, and each step was agony before she finally spied a door in front of them. They stepped through it and into blindingly bright sunlight. Her body felt abrupt disorientation, accustomed as it was to the eternal twilight of Under Urth.

“Where is this?” she asked their guide.

“Heartland. That's where you wanted to go, right?”

Her jaw dropped. They'd just made a journey of
weeks
in a matter of days. The terrain was radically different, dry and rocky. The forests of Kel had been replaced by layered red stone worn into fantastic shapes by wind and time.

“Which way to the Citadel of the Heart?” she asked.

“It's the citadel you be wantin'? Well, now. She be thataway.” He took off walking to what she guessed to be the south. He seemed prepared to take them to their final destination, for which she was grateful.

They hiked for several hours, and the day heated up with each passing mile. When she thought she was on the verge of melting outright, they came to a building by itself in the strange landscape and ducked inside its thick, stone walls. She should not have been surprised to discover that it was a Heart chapter house, she supposed.

In the common room, which looked like so many others she'd seen before, they sat at benches and were served a simple, bracing meal. They napped in bunks for several hours while the heat of the afternoon passed. Then, as the sun set, they resumed their journey.

The next few days passed the same way. They walked through the night and until it became too hot to continue, then retreated indoors to wait out the blistering afternoons. On the morning of the third day, they came upon a broad expanse of table-flat land, and in the distance a wondrous structure came into view. It looked tiny at first, but the longer they walked, the larger it grew.

It looked like a regular mountain from a distance. But as they drew nearer to it, Gabrielle made out façades and windows, great doorways and decorations all carved from red-and-gold-streaked stone. A gigantic palace had been carved out of the mountain itself. The
entire
mountain. The scale of the citadel was unbelievable.

At length, they finally reached the enormous structure rising out of the surrounding plain. A huge open portcullis beckoned, and they passed underneath it into a grand passageway leading into the mountain. A guard, wearing the white, red, and yellow of the Heart, greeted them politely.

“I am Gabrielle of Haraland,” she announced. “Please tell Lady Sasha that I have arrived.”

While Dafydd's parents stared in dismay at her, the man bowed deeply. “Welcome, Your Majesty. She's been expecting you.” A flurry of activity accompanied the formal greeting, and a bevy of people, all wearing Heart colors, bustled around showing them into an elaborately carved antechamber. In just a few minutes, a familiar voice cried out her name.

“Sasha!” she replied joyfully. “I have brought you a talented young man and his family for safekeeping. Dafydd, this is my friend Lady Sasha. She will look out for you and keep you safe.”

“Indeed we will,” Sasha said kindly to both boy and parents. The next hour was spent in introductions to various Heart functionaries and settling Dafydd and his parents in quarters. But eventually, Sasha murmured, “A moment, Gabby, for a private word?”

“Of course.”

They strolled down a long corridor lined with portraits of various high Heart officials based on the garb they wore in the paintings.

“I have received word from a mutual friend.” Sasha fingered her own Octavium Pendant, and Gabrielle nodded in understanding. “There is a White Heart member, a man, who needs to be escorted into Groenn's Rest. The guide he will need is in Kel. I have sent for that guide to join us here.”

“To what end?” Gabrielle asked low after checking that no one was within earshot.

“We search for a statue.”

“A statue?”

“Of an ancient dwarf. Thought to be the personal guard of a dwarven king of old.”

“To what end?”

“You and I are to find a means of releasing the guard from the stone prison he has been encased in.”

Gabrielle frowned. “Do you know how to do such a thing?”

“A few trusted Heart historians research it for me as we speak.”

“Am I to gather, then, that you go with us?” she asked hopefully.

“Indeed I shall.”

Gabrielle smiled joyfully. “That will make the time pass much more pleasantly.”

Sasha laughed. “You do not know the half of it. The White Heart initiate we will be traveling with is called the Shaggy Father. He is thought to be mad.”

“Thought to be?”

Sasha shrugged. “He believes that yeren are not mindless monsters but rather are intelligent beings deserving of recognition as a sentient race.”

“Yeren? The snow monsters who eat little children?”

“The Shaggy Father swears that the hearth tales of them as fearsome beasts are wrong. Apparently, we will get to find out one way or the other. We will have to pass through yeren territory to find the statue we have been told to seek out.”

And she'd thought fleeing Imperial hounds had been scary.

*   *   *

Rosana followed their Dominion guide warily, half-afraid that somehow her enslavement to the snake changeling had been transferred to this fellow. He was joined by a pair of Dominion trackers who were shockingly efficient at following Kerryl Moonrunner's trail. Sha'Li spent most of the time with them, watching and learning.

For her part, Rosana spent most of the time trying to ascertain how Goldeneye's enslavement had affected her. They couldn't try to remove the curse as long as the Dominion scouts were with them, but Rynn promised under his breath to give it a try as soon as the scouts left.

The trail took them south and east to roughly follow the coast. Then it plunged south once more through the Quills. They moved at breakneck speed, rising before dawn each morning and hiking until long after dark each night. The changelings set a grueling pace that left Rosana exhausted every time they stopped to rest. It took them less than a week to pass through the towering stands of pine forest that formed the Quills and to emerge into lower hills that gave way to flatter and wetter terrain.

They reached the edge of a great expanse of forest growing out of shallow, standing water. It was there that the Dominion scouts abruptly lost the trail. They nodded their farewells and without ceremony turned away and headed back to the north. Rosana was immensely relieved to be quit of the black-and-red tabards.

“Learned much from them I did,” Sha'Li declared. “But on my turf are we now.” She turned back eagerly to face the swamp. “Track in this terrain can I, as easily as breathing.”

“Umm, Sha'Li,” Rosana said hesitantly, “I'm not exactly proficient at traversing swamps. Is it possible you could find us a dry path through this?”

The lizardman girl rolled her eyes.

“Your kind call us land walkers for a reason,” Raina added wryly.

“Fine. Solid ways shall I follow.”

It might be solid, but the path they trod was far from dry. The stagnant pools all around them were black and menacing, and Rosana shuddered to imagine what creatures might be lurking below the surfaces. The good news was their pace slowed as they headed deeper into the swamp.

“What is this place?” Rosana asked Sha'Li on one of the occasions when the lizardman girl circled back from having scouted ahead to join them.

“The edge of Angor's Swamp this is. A dark and dangerous place, not unlike my home.”

No wonder Sha'Li seemed to be in such a jovial mood.

“A clear trail Tarryn leaves for us. Follow it any child could.”

Rosana highly doubted she would have been able to see the trail sign on her own. Now and then she spotted a broken reed or foot-sized puddle that Sha'Li declared to be tracks, but for the most part, she managed only to watch her footing and not stray off the narrow trails Kerryl seemed to be following.

They made an uncomfortable camp at night by climbing into trees and tying themselves against the trunks to sleep. Not only was it the sole way to remain dry while sleeping, but Sha'Li declared it wise for safety reasons based on the creatures who roamed this place. The night sounds consisted of growls and screeches, clicks, chirps, and the occasional scream that was entirely unnerving. Rosana climbed down in the mornings stiff and sore, sure that she had not slept a wink all night.

Several days' walk led them deeper into the swamp. Long stretches of murky water covered by a film of lime green slime lurked beneath black-spined trees hung with vines and moss. It was as if death and decay lay over all of this blighted land. The paths they followed became narrow trails atop thin humps that the black water lapped at hungrily. The entire place gave her the creeps.

As the sun shone anemically overhead through a scudding layer of clouds, Sha'Li paused at an intersection between two crossing humps of raised ground. “A problem have we. Split has Kerryl's party.”

“Can you tell which way Kendrick and Tarryn went?” Eben asked.

“Actual footprints do I see showing the humans going that way.” She pointed off to her right. “But Tarryn's trail sign that way points.” She pointed straight ahead.

“You're sure you're not mistaken?” Will asked.

Sha'Li threw him a withering look. “For yourself read the trail.”

Even Rosana could see the trampled grass and broken reeds pointing down the left-hand path. There was even a clear boot print.