Ara put her hand beneath her cloak as if to the hilt of a weapon, and said, “Forget your swords! Place that food here and retreat to the far side of the stream. Now!’
Without a word the nearest one, straw-haired and jack-o-lantern-toothed, placed a sack on the trail and the three of them backed away. Their swords and bodkins lay haphazard on the rocks.
She grabbed the food sack and a scabbard knife, amenable as a sword, and marched up the bank on the far side.
The hawk flew in short segments, a bellwether for her in the fine mist. Soon a huge black squirrel began to follow her, tree to tree, chiding endlessly. It was the only sound in the saturated stillness.
She wondered if it was in league with her enemies, a scout of some vast, innumerable legion that had spread forth to find her and her kind. Its excitement on such a day as this did not bode well. Any other squirrel would be busy counting nuts and adding to its stores.
The squirrel looked down at her from a high limb, switching and sweeping a proud black tail silvered at the tip. Its eyes were dark pearls of hatred. It chided once more, hurling personal and angry squirrel insults from its impregnable perch.
Suddenly it was gone. Multicolored leaves exploded in the air as a tumult of talons and fur and flapping wings disturbed the treetops. The hawk had seized it and was now swooping low and away, its wings beating full and loud and strong, gaining altitude with each sweep. The obnoxious squirrel was clutched head forward, as raptors will, with its long bushy tail trailing behind.
She continued on the road. With luck the squirrel had not relayed to others a message of this diminutive stranger on this unlikely path.
Through a long night that became a frost-rimmed dawn, Ara fled southwest along an ascending forest road.
For a brief moment the horizon cleared and an almost full moon, its prow cutting waves of glowing cloud, announced that little time remained to find her Amon.
The road degraded to oakbrush path, then rocky track, and finally to intertwined, twisting trails of high mountain sheep. Even this tenuous way she abandoned in her fear of pursuit. She trusted her instincts and so left little mark to show her route, and moved all but unseen.
Unaided by magic cloak or spell, Ara possessed facility for stealth that had allowed her in times past to observe undetected the passage of elves and even once to watch their secret council.
From treacherous screes to shady defiles to barren stone expanse, she moved haltingly, so that no sentinel’s glance from above would detect her movement. Autumn-dried highbush berries served for food, drip-springs for water.
Three days carried her to a ledge just below the summit. At its top, a hundred steps above, sat the hawk, its wings splayed for balance and its feathers rustling in the cold gusts rushing over the crest.
Looking back and far below, she saw, vibrant in the streaks of new dawn’s light, smoke coiling up from the sacked keep of Thornland.
She rested and then clambered to the top.
The hawk faced west and her eyes, weeping from the ripping cold of the West Wind, followed its gaze to a valley of ghostly ruin. Laid out steeply below her and spreading to the mountain walls bordering dimly in the distance, writhed a land in agony. Fumaroles, smoke holes, fissures of steam, slag heaps, burning pyres, all was pustuled and packed in a miserable expanse bisected by a long road. On that path scurried the ant-like commerce of war. Encampments scattered randomly. Great battle flags of purple and green and sickly yellow undulated slowly in the smoke-thick air. Dead center smoldered a volcanic cone. A road zigzagged up to a black maw that glowed and pulsed like a questing eye. A land of ruin feeding an empire of the enemy on the march.
Whether it be the first step or the last, all journeys are defined by a moment when one can go forward or retreat. Ara studied the land until the thin soup of light failed and she beheld an expanse of black velvet dotted with tiny fires more numerous than the stars she knew she would never see again.
She stepped forward and entered the land of the Dark Lord.
Chapter 35
OCTOBER 31. 12:42 A.M
Cadence put down the last yellow sheet and looked at the bedstand clock. It rationed out barely audible tocks, struggling to hold back what now seemed a breackneck, falling-forward stumble of time.
She looked over at Osley and he nodded back to her. Each knew what day it was. Each could sense in the quiet of early morning a coming change that compressed all the trick or treats, jack-o-lanterns, and Batman and Sarah Palin costumes into the crude ox-horn funnel of an ancient time. A time that might spill forth shadows capering in silhouette before a roaring night fire high and wild, sparks intermingling with stars, fed by the rich fat of a meat-harvest bonepile. A time when walls dissolved and secret gates swung open, creaking and untouched. A moment of passage and peril.
The tocks slowed and stopped for a full second.
Ca-ching!
The both jumped. Ching! … ca-chi— Cadence pounced on the room phone and ripped the receiver from its cradle.
“Hello!”
She listened, then spoke. “Yes. That’s me. … What? … What! … Yes! I’ll be right there.”
Osley stood up, his hands out, palms up. A big “what?” expression on his face.
“Someone broke into my room!”
She stopped mid-stride and they both yelled out loud, “The valise!”
She ran for the door, closing it with a muffled “Osley, don’t go anywhere!”
Sixty seconds earlier, Barren had stood, deeply frustrated. He regarded with a calm and deadly focus the entirety of an overturned hotel room. It has to be here! Pillow feathers still floated in the air. A few graced his shoulders and mohawked hair. A set of drawers from the dresser lay in a shambled heap. The dresser itself was tipped over on its back. Mattresses were askew on the bed frame. Perhaps he had been too intense in his search, too noisy. Too careless, he thought. The insistent knocks on the door continued. “Ms. Grande? Hello, Ms. Grande?” The meddlesome authority of this inn was now present and interference— unwanted, unsought but here — had to be reckoned with. If he could not find the documents he would take care of them otherwise. As for their troublesome steward, Cadence, well, he had tarried too long. There were other emissaries here he could call on, oh yes.
He took from his pocket a simple little box, the size of a coffee cup. In it was a crumple of paper, well soaked in a foul incendiary brew of Barren’s own devising. He put it on the floor of the closet, then put a small candle on it and lit the wick. He walked to the door, released the security latch and waited. The key card lock clicked to green and the door swept open even as he hid behind it.
Framed in the doorway was the officious manager of the Algonquin, his hand poised to knock and his eyes like saucers. To his side hovered his sidekick, the hotel detective. “Ms. Grande?” the manager muttered as his neck craned forward and side to side to better see the destruction.
They stepped into the room, stunned by the disaster, as if an angry tornado had compressed its entire energy into the suite. The manager picked up the phone up off the floor. His eyes wide, cataloging the destruction, he handed the phone to the detective. “Call her other room, 608, and tell her this room has been broken into.” They were oblivious to the barely audible swish of Barren departing the room.