His injured arm was missing. Or rather, beyond the point where he had cut himself with the sword of Elshield, a forearm, wrist, and hand still existed. But they were made of aura. The fingers were wispy ghosts. Prim could see right through the palm of his hand. She came very close to crying out. What stilled her was not the fear of being heard by Dug. It was the way Mard looked into her eyes: altogether steady and calm. He had known, of course, and had been hiding it under his cloak.
She naturally had a great many questions as to the prognosis, but hiding from Dug patrols during a mountain hailstorm was not a good situation for that kind of talk. They huddled together as they had done at other such times. But on this occasion Prim chose to lie next to Mard so that the two of them could share the warmth of their bodies with each other.
They waited until it was full dark and then began to ascend. “I shall go last,” Edda offered, “as I may touch off avalanches.”
Despite their earlier efforts at memorizing landmarks, had it not been for Mab they’d have been hopelessly lost. Corvus had adopted his human shape again. The occasional lightning bolt lit up the entire mountainside as bright as day, but not long enough for the eye to seek out and fix the location of the cave’s entrance. They learned to cringe and tense themselves in anticipation of the thunderclap that would always follow a fraction of a second later.
“Thingor’s Aura!” Fern called, after it seemed they had been blundering around for an hour. Prim, who had been staring fixedly at the ground in an effort to make out where she ought to plant her feet, looked about to see that the rocks around her were limned in green fire. Before she could feel any sense of wonder or awe at this, Fern followed up with, “Lie flat!” So she tried to do so and learned that the very idea of lying down had no clear meaning on ground as stony as this. A bolt struck very close, the light and the sound penetrating her skull at the same instant. Querc screamed. Prim craned her neck to gaze up the slope. Pulsing rivers of the green fire ran up and down it as fast as thought. Something extraordinarily brilliant could be seen high above, as if suspended in the sky; it had the dazzling brilliance of a lightning bolt, but it persisted, like the sword Burr had taken from the angel. And yet it moved about like a thing alive, sometimes down on all fours and other times rearing up to stand on its hind legs.
It was a bear. A Lightning Bear. It was on the top of the ridge high above them, far beyond where they had any thought of going; but it had seen them and it was not happy that they were coming up its mountain.
It was a short while later that rocks began to tumble down out of the darkness. One came straight for Prim, moving so fast she could not possibly dodge it; but it caromed off another and brushed past her.
It was just like being down beneath the Overstrike with Beedles up above rolling rocks down onto them. But this time, she felt certain, it was Dug who had been alerted to their presence, perhaps by the vigilant bears.
The sun came out, illuminating the whole slope above. She could see alclass="underline" In the near ground, boulders tumbling toward them. Above that, less than a bow-shot distant, the entrance to the cave. And on the higher ground above that, pale figures with the squat asymmetrical forms of Beedles. Perhaps a dozen of them. The sudden light had caught them in the act of prying rocks loose from the slope. Their work stopped as they were blinded by it: the light of the angel sword, which Burr had drawn full out of its scabbard. Seeing now the way and the enemy, Burr sprang forward with a roar. The rest followed as best they could. Prim shielded her eyes from the glare so that she could take advantage of the light in picking her way up. She turned back to look once or twice and got fragmented glimpses of other members of the Quest, arms flailing for balance on shifting and ice-covered ground. Fern and Lyne were coming up fast with weapons drawn. The light of the angel sword flashed and swept. Lightning struck. A furious roaring came down from on high: bears. The ground leveled. A dark hole was before her. She stumbled into it, carried more by momentum than any plan or desire. Others piled in behind her, blocking the way out. She had a mind to go back out of the cave and be of help in the fighting, but before she could do so, the mountain was plunged back into darkness. The sword had gone back into its sheath. Rocks scrabbled and chattered as they slid down from above. Lightning flashed and outlined the silhouettes of Burr, Fern, and Lyne. They stepped into the cave.
With that the Quest concluded its traversal of the Stormland, and entered into the underpinnings of the Knot.
54
“Come on,” Corvus said. “Pick, we need to seal the entrance.”
“I thought you said the Dug would not follow us in here,” Lyne said.
“They won’t,” Corvus answered vaguely. “Pick? Sound off! Can we have more light?”
Mab brightened. They had gathered a few strides in from the cave’s entrance. Burr had stationed himself nearest it, spear at the ready, and Fern and Lyne were still backing him up. Next was Edda, standing still as a mountain in her cloak, which glistened with ice. Querc was crumpled near the giantess, weeping. Mard, Prim, and Corvus had advanced deepest into the cave, but Corvus was now stalking back toward the entrance as Mab flitted to and fro in the style of one who has lost something. “Where is Pick?” Corvus asked. “We need to send out a search party!” He seemed of a mind to go and look down the slope.
Edda brought him up short by withdrawing from her cloak a small gleaming object. Its nature wasn’t clear until Mab cast greater light on it. Then it could be seen that this was the bird-shaped head of Pick’s stick, somewhat deformed, as if it had partly melted. The eyes were now blind sockets, as the lenses were missing. A blackened shard of wood still dangled from the hole where the shaft had been affixed.
It was the rare moment when Corvus was not well ahead of everyone else. That combined with the fact that he was in his human form, and closely illuminated by Mab, made it possible to see emotions in his face that Prim—who had known him since he was a new soul in the Land—had never seen there before. He was completely astonished. It was that kind of surprise so total that one’s first reflex, be it never so out of place, is to laugh. Which he did in a faltering and nervous way. Then he became serious and thoughtful.
Querc’s grief was total, as was her shock at what she had witnessed. Prim remembered the scream Querc had made after a certain close lightning strike and knew it was true. Corvus knew it too: Pick was gone.
“Well!” he said. “That certainly changes a few things about the Quest. We can’t do this without a Lithoplast.”
There was a brief silence as this sank in, and then everyone looked at Querc.
They went deeper in, just to put more distance between them and any Dug who might have the audacity to come in after them. Sealing the entrance through Lithoplasty, which had been Corvus’s original plan, was no longer possible. But as this was a natural cave, it had twists and bottlenecks that they were able to chock up behind them with rocks. Edda had the strength to shift boulders, and Burr’s angel sword could cut stone. So they were able to make going difficult for any who might pursue them into the depths of the Knot.