“Yes,” he said. “I spoke to Tarn Bellowsgranite. Our meeting was fortuitous. I had not expected to find him in the tunnels. I had thought I would have to ride to Thorbardin to speak with him, but he has taken charge of the work himself, and thus we were able to settle the matter at once.”
“He knows that perhaps some of his own people may die defending elves?”
“He knows better than I can tell him what the cost will be to the dwarves. Yet they are willing to make the sacrifice. ‘If once the great green dragon swallows Qualinesti, she will next have an appetite for Thorbardin,’ he told me.”
“Where is the dwarven army?” the Lioness demanded. “Skulking underground, prepared to defend Thorbardin. An army of hundreds of thousands, doughty warriors. With them, we could withstand Beryl’s assault—”
“My dear,” said Gilthas, gently, “the dwarves have a right to defend their homeland. Would we elves rush to their aid if they were the ones attacked? They have done much for us. They have saved the lives of countless people, and they are prepared to sacrifice their lives for a cause that is not their own. They should be honored, not castigated.”
The Lioness glared at him, defiant for a moment, then she said with a shrug and a rueful smile. “You are right, of course. You see both sides, whereas I see only one. This is why I say again, you must be the one to lead our people.”
“I said we would speak of this later,” Gilthas returned, his voice cool.
“I wonder,” he said, changing the subject, “does that young girl cry when she is alone and wakeful in the night, her charges slumbering around her, trusting in her even when the darkness is deep?”
“No,” the Lioness answered. “She does not cry, for one of them might wake and see her tears and lose faith.”
Gilthas sighed deeply, held his wife close. “Beryl has crossed the border into our land. How many days before the army reaches Qualinost?”
“Four,” the Lioness replied.
20
The March into Nightlund
Mina’s small army, only a few hundred in number, made up of the group of Knights who had followed her from the ghastly valley of Neraka to Sanction to Silvanesti, and now to this strange land.
The dragons flew through darkness so deep that Galdar could not see Captain Samuval flying on the dragon next to him. Galdar could not even see his own dragon’s long tail or wings for the darkness that shrouded them. He saw one dragon only and that was the strange dragon Mina rode, the death dragon, for it shimmered with a ghostly iridescence that was both terrible and beautiful. Red, blue, green, white, red-blue, as two of the souls of the dead dragons combined, then white-green, constantly changing until he grew dizzy and was forced to look away.
But his gaze was drawn back to the death dragon, marveling, awed. He wondered how Mina found courage to ride a beast that seemed as insubstantial as the morning mist, for he could see through the dragon, see the darkness beyond it. Mina had no qualms apparently, and her faith was justified, for the dragon bore her safely through the skies of Ansalon and deposited her gently and reverently on the ground.
The other dragons landed on a vast plain, allowed their riders to dismount, then took to the air again.
“Listen for my call,” Mina told the dragons. “I will have need of you.”
The dragons—giant reds and fleet blues, sly blacks, aloof whites and cunning greens—bowed low their heads, spread their wings, and bent their proud necks before her. The death dragon circled once above her head and then vanished as if it had been absorbed into the darkness. The other dragons lifted their wings and flew away, heading different directions. Their departure created a great wind that nearly blew the men over. The dragons were gone, and they were left on foot, with no mounts, in a strange land, with no idea where they were.
It was then Mina told them.
“Nightlund,” she said.
Once this land had been ruled by a Solamnic Knight named Soth. Given the chance by the gods to halt the Cataclysm, Lord Soth had failed and brought down a curse upon himself and the land. Since the time of the Cataclysm, other doomed souls, both living and dead, had found in Nightlund a place of refuge and they had come to dwell within its deep shadows. Hearing that the land had become a hideout for those fleeing the law, the Solamnic Knights, who ruled this land, had made several attempts to clean them out. These proved futile, and soon the Knights quit entering the forest, leaving it to Soth, the accursed knight, to rule. Nightlund was a no-man’s-land, where none of the living came, if they could help it. This land had an evil reputation, even among the Dark Knights of Neraka, for the dead had no allegiances to any government of the living. Mina’s Knights and soldiers formed ranks and marched after her without a murmur of complaint. They were so confident of her now, they believed in her—and in the One God—so strongly, that they did not question her judgment.
Mina’s soldiers entered Nightlund with impunity. They encountered no enemy—living or dead. They marched beneath huge cypress trees that had been old at the time of the forging of the Graygem. They saw no living creature, no squirrel or bird, mouse or chipmunk, no deer or bear. They saw no dead, either, for none of them possessed magic, and thus the dead took no interest in them. But the soldiers and knights sensed the dead around them, sensed it as one senses he is being watched by unseen eyes. After several days of marching through the eerie forest, the men who had followed Mina into Nightlund without hesitation were starting to have second thoughts.
The fur on the back of Galdar’s neck prickled and twitched, and he was continually whipping his head around to see if something was creeping up on him. Captain Samuval complained—in low tones and only when Mina could not hear him—that he had “the horrors.” When asked what malady this might be, he could not explain, except to say that it made his feet and hands cold so that no fire could warm them and gave him an ache in his belly. The sharp crack of a falling branch sent men diving to the ground, to lie quivering in terror until someone told them what it was. Shamefaced, they would rise and carry on.
The men doubled the watch at night, though Mina told them that they had no need to set a watch at all. She did not explain why, but Galdar guessed that they were being guarded by those who had no more need of sleep. He did not find this particularly reassuring, and he often woke from a dream of hundreds of people standing around him, staring down at him with eyes that were empty of all except pain.
Mina was strangely silent during this march. She walked in the front of the line, refused all company, said no word to any man, yet Galdar could sometimes see her lips moving, as though she were speaking. When he once ventured to ask to whom she spoke, she replied, “To them,” and made a sweeping gesture with her hand that encompassed nothing.
“The dead, Mina?” Galdar asked hesitantly.
“The souls of the dead. They have no more need of the shells that once housed them.”
“You can see them?”
“The One God gives me that power.”
“But I can’t.”
“I could cause you to see them, Galdar,” Mina said to him, “but you would find it most unpleasant and disconcerting.”
“No, Mina, no, I don’t want to see them,” Galdar said hastily. “How . . . how many of them are there?”
“Thousands,” she replied. “Thousands upon thousands and thousands more after that. The souls of all who have died in this world since the Chaos War, Galdar. That is how many. And more join their ranks daily. Elves dying in Silvanesti and Qualinesti, soldiers dying defending Sanction, mothers dying in childbirth, children dying of sickness, the elderly dying in their beds—all these souls are flowing into Nightlund in a vast river. Brought here by the One God, prepared to do the bidding of the One God.”