“What are you talking about?” Tristan asked gently. He walked to the wizard and placed a hand on the old one’s quivering shoulder.
“It has to do with the stone,” Wigg whispered. Tristan was not sure when he had ever seen Wigg so distraught.
“The vein you see here, this abomination of the craft, is in some bastardized way the true physical embodiment of the power locked within the Paragon,” Wigg said sadly. “I’m sure of it! The power of the stone is somehow being drained off, attracted to the Caves, and captured within these walls. And as the vein grows, the stone weakens.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Do you see how the vein undulates, its power clearly evident?” he asked the prince. “When the process is complete and the stone is colorless, this vein will imprison all of the power that the Paragon once held. The power gleaned from the stone will then be at the disposal of the one who drew it here, and completely unavailable to us.”
“I still don’t understand,” Tristan answered. “How do you know all this?”
“There’s no way you could understand,” Wigg responded, slowly coming to his feet. He wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Faegan and I barely understand it ourselves. There is a passage in the Tome that mentions a method of drawing the power from the stone without removing it from its human host. It says that someone will eventually come who will be capable of such a feat. That person, however, would have to be of such immense power that we had always thought it could only be you, or your sister Shailiha. Therefore our concern regarding this issue was not great. But we were obviously very wrong.” He paused, lost in his thoughts.
“There is now one who walks the earth who has far more power than any of us,” the wizard continued slowly, half to himself. “The superiority of this being is without precedent, and his or her strength grows every day, just as the stone weakens. I need not tell you how dangerous this—”
He was interrupted by the eerie, grating scratchiness of stone on stone. As the prince spun around to see where the sound came from, another marble wall came shooting down, blocking the entrance to the stairway from which they had just come. Tristan instinctively turned to the door at the opposite side of the room. It remained unblocked, and on it glowed the sign of the lion and the broadsword.
Whoever is controlling these events does not want us to go back the way we came, Tristan thought.
Then the voice of Morganna filled the stone room. “Tristan, you must hurry. There may already be too little time.”
The prince looked to the wizard, who was also listening intently.
“Why must we hurry, Mother?” Tristan asked. “What is it we are to do?”
“There is not time to tell you why, my son,” the voice said, already starting to fade. “But take the wizard and go quickly through the other door, before it is too late.”
Wigg nodded, and they began to run.
As they approached the portal Tristan heard scratching, scrabbling sounds. He drew his dreggan with a swift pull, the ring of its blade bouncing off the stone walls. Tossing the heavy sword into his left hand, he reached back to his knives, loosening the first of them. Then he threw the dreggan back into his right palm again and looked down to where the sounds seemed to be coming from.
A pair of dark gray hands were beginning to dig their way out of the ground. First only the fingertips were visible. Then came the fingers themselves, and finally the entire hands and upper arms. They agonizingly twisted and turned their way up and out, loosened particles of dirt sprinkling eerily back down as they came. Their skin was gray and bleak, the folds of the knuckle joints black, the nails broken and torn. And then from the dirt came another pair, and then another and another.
Wigg came to stand cautiously next to Tristan as the things continued their inexorable climb from the earth. The wizard and the prince watched in horror as the ground before each of the pairs of hands seemed to obligingly open even wider, the rents created in the earth becoming deep, dark crevices.
Then bodies rose from the earth, heads and shoulders first, until they were standing directly before the wizard and the prince. Tristan stood aghast, not wanting to breathe, as if that simple act would somehow bring the awful things closer. They were consuls of the Redoubt.
It had taken the prince several moments to recognize them for what they were. It was only their dark blue robes, torn and covered with dirt, that gave a clue to their identity.
Their faces and hands appeared to be quite bloodless. Loose, sallow skin hung down from their bones in horrible, sagging folds. Their eye sockets were sunken and dark; the whites of their eyes were a sickly, bloodshot yellow, and the irises were inky spheres that seemed to be vacant, looking at nothing. Their gaping mouths were red and drooling, their teeth black, their expressions utterly empty.
Now other pairs of hands were beginning to claw their way to the surface. It was painfully clear to the prince that they would soon be surrounded. Then one of them spoke.
“You are to come with us,” it said. The lifeless consul’s voice seemed to crack with the strain of simply trying to speak. “Our master wishes it,” he rasped, his blank, doll-like eyes still looking at nothing.
Tristan turned to look at the wizard, and then back to the consuls. “I don’t think so,” he hissed. He raised his dreggan slightly.
“Who is your master?” Wigg asked, taking a step forward. “Why does your master wish to see us? Does he wish us harm?”
“You will not be killed,” the consul said emotionlessly. “Of that you may rest assured. But before you will be allowed to stand before him, you must first be prepared.”
“I do not understand,” Wigg said cautiously. “How is it that we must be prepared?”
Tristan looked around the room to see that several dozen more of the gruesome pairs of hands had broken through the dirt floor.
If we are to fight our way out of here we must start now, before we are completely overcome, he told himself urgently. Why is Wigg hesitating?
“Your preparation is to be completed by others,” the consul said. His arms outstretched, he began to walk slowly toward Tristan and Wigg. “You must come. It has been ordered.”
The lifeless thing opened its grotesque hands, attempting to grasp the wizard. Tristan had now withstood all that he was able.
Raising his dreggan, he slashed straight across the center of the thing’s body, cutting it in half. With a great scream it tumbled to the floor in two separate parts, gray matter spurting from the cleaved portions of its torso. Suddenly, the rest of the consuls were upon them.
Sensing several behind him, Tristan turned on his heel and swung the heavy sword in a great arc. The razor-sharp blade sang shoulder-high through the air, slicing cleanly through the necks two of the horrible things at the same time. Their heads rolled off their shoulders and onto the floor, and putrid gray matter shot into the air from their headless bodies, its stench coming to his nostrils for the first time. Some of it landed sickeningly upon his whirling arms as he completed the cut. For a brief moment the headless torsos staggered aimlessly about the chamber, walking crazily into the rock walls before finally falling to the earth.
Tristan turned frantically to Wigg to see that the wizard was finally employing the craft. Bolts of energy shot from his hands to strike many of the advancing consuls in the chest, burning them in agony, but another was approaching Wigg from the rear. Tristan tossed his sword over into his left hand and gripped one of his dirks with his right. The silver-bladed knife wheeled through the air almost before he was aware of throwing it, burying itself in the eye of one of the consuls and killing him instantly. More gray matter leapt from the gaping, destroyed eye socket. But there were too many of them, and Tristan knew it.