The soft clatter of his leg brace seemed as loud as the banshees' keening as Ganelon made his way up the now-silent hill. He reached the spot in the road where Soth had stood. The air still smelled of heated steel and something else, a salt tang far stronger than the usual fetor that hung over the mine. Ganelon reached forward with one hand. He expected to encounter whatever invisible wall had barred Soth's way. Instead he found a minor resistance, as if the air had been transmuted to cold, still water. He closed his eyes and stepped through.
As he crossed the barrier, a line appeared on the ground below him. It was the uneven, dark splash made by water spilled onto dry earth, and it encircled the entire hilltop. When Ganelon reached down to touch the dark line, it retreated from his fingers. The thin black band squirmed like a serpent, the ripples flowing along its length in both directions until they disappeared. Finally, when it could retreat no farther, the line broke. It flared blue-white for an instant before dissipating.
"A fine trick," someone called from up the hill. "You must teach it to me."
Ganelon recognized that melodious voice and hurried to find the speaker. In the shadow of the Engine House, in a small circle cleared amongst the debris of the shattered wall, he found him.
The Bloody Cobbler struggled in vain to push himself up from the dirt. Gore spattered his ripped and tattered clothes. Most of it now was from his own wounds. His fingers had been broken, the flesh stripped from his chest. Clumps of his fair hair lay upon the ground alongside the blood-soaked tools of his trade. The silver snips and needles and knives had all been bent or broken.
As the Cobbler looked up at Ganelon, it appeared for an instant as if he had no face, only a mass of pulped flesh.
Tm here to stop him," Ganelon said simply.
"I know the path you walk," the Cobbler replied through swollen lips.
"Of course you do," Ganelon said. He reached out to help the Cobbler to his feet and felt that same sensation of cold, still water. There were wards here, too, tight around the Cobbler to keep him from escaping. When the line appeared in the dirt, he reached down and broke it.
" 'No one who has died may cross it,' " the Cobbler repeated in a singsong voice. " 'No one who is merely alive may break it,' Azrael used to taunt me with that during our little… chats. He set up the wards so not even he could break them." He wiped the gore from his face with his cloak. The damage was not as great as it had seemed. "I'm certain he never imagined there was someone who could."
Ganelon looked down at his feet. The dead man's soles made him more than "merely" alive but not truly dead.
The Cobbler sat up. "I'd stitch myself up if I had time," he said absently. He lifted one of his needles from the ground, frowned at its sorry state. "There's little of that left for any of us, though."
"Then, it's over," Ganelon said.
The Cobbler gestured toward the late afternoon sky, just beginning to dim with the first hints of twilight. "No," he said. "We are finally ready to begin."
Ganelon followed the Cobbler's crooked finger with his eyes. There, marring the boundless blue overhead, hung a small crimson smudge. A red moon, Ganelon realized after a moment.
"They made it back to the Rose," the Cobbler offered. "Helain and the others."
"Is she-?"
"The Beast kept his word." The Cobbler laughed brightly. "As if he could even imagine breaking it! No, Helain's madness has been lifted."
As the Cobbler stood, it was clear to Ganelon that his wounds were already healing. Even his clothes seemed to be mending themselves. The pale-clad man extended a hand to Ganelon. In it he held a silver knife, the least damaged of his tools. "Take it," he said. "I would stay to help you, but-"
"Your path leads elsewhere," Ganelon concluded. He gratefully took the blade and tucked it into the small duffel he carried slung over one shoulder. "After all," the young man added cryptically, "he needs you."
The comment baffled the Cobbler for an instant. Then he nodded gravely; the Invidian spy had asked him his identity just before he died. Ganelon share that knowledge.
With a smile and a flourish of his broad-brimmed hat, the Bloody Cobbler disappeared into the Engine House's lengthening shadow.
As he made his way to the mine entrance, Ganelon thought about the reunion that awaited the Cobbler, about the reunion he imagined for himself and Helain. It seemed unlikely, but then, so many impossibilities had come true in the past few weeks he could not let the hope die. Even now, a second new moon struggled to be seen in the sky overhead, one as red as the rose Helain had given him when last they parted.
Ganelon carefully dug the bloom from his duffel. He'd armored it in a tin cup to keep it safe, but he saw now that the effort was wasted. The crimson petals had, like all others of their kind kept too long on Sithican soil, turned black.
He let the wilted rose slip from his grasp. After a moment, he followed it into the pit.
Sixteen
Ganelon knew by the screams that he was headed in the right direction.
The shrieks and moans welled up from deep in the pit, much farther down that he'd ever gone. There were scores of abandoned tunnels in the depths of Veidrava, some that had been flooded, others that had stopped yielding enough salt to be worthwhile. One of those deserted shafts supposedly housed a chapel. Ganelon knew almost from the moment he'd begun the long, tedious process of lowering himself from level to level with emergency ropes that the chapel was his destination.
He came at last to the tunnel from which the unearthly sounds originated. Human voices were not making the clamor, of that Ganelon was certain. He'd heard the cries of the dead and damned enough in the past few days to recognize them now. He was not surprised to find the uncanny sounds so close to the place he'd called home. Rather, he marveled that he'd been so blind to it before.
Cautiously, he started down the tunnel. Before long, a faint blue glow suffused the rubble-strewn passage, and Ganelon extinguished the lantern he'd taken from the surface. He left it, still smoking, in an empty niche hewn into the wall.
Ganelon did not notice the flowers carved around the niche, barely recognized the elaborate statuary of hounds and harts and other creatures that stood to either side of him as the tunnel opened into a broad hallway. The ceiling, which reflected the light of the torches in the hall as a sky-blue glow, scarcely drew his eye. Once the workmanship of these objects would have filled him with wonder. Now he only saw them as places to conceal himself from his enemies or places from which those enemies might strike at him.
The weird cries echoed all around Ganelon as he crept from statue to statue, ever closer to the fire-lit room at the hallway's end. Through the open arch, he glimpsed shadows wheeling across the walls. He expected to find a hundred men in there, all dancing in anticipation of the grim rite Azrael intended to perform. When he got close enough to get a better look at the room itself, though, at the melted benches and the scarred altar, Ganelon realized that these shadows had no mortal anchors. They were darkness incarnate, salt shadows, and they were celebrating the strife to come.
It was only their sheer number, the combined clamor of hiss upon hiss that made the shadows' voices heard. That same quality made it impossible for any of them to speak above the din or to raise a discernible alarm when Ganelon stepped into the Black Chapel.
The floor was dark with massing salt shadows, but Ganelon's footfalls sent them splashing back like so much fetid water. As in the Vistani camp, the lost souls recoiled from the dead flesh on his feet. They whirled about the vaulted room, curling over the repulsive statues lurking in the corners. In some places the most agitated shadows forced their bodies off the floor. They scurried toward Ganelon like misshapen spiders. Yet they could not bring themselves to envelop his death-tainted flesh.