Rod glanced up. The castle walls blended into the rock without the slightest trace of an overhang, but they were only thirty feet away, and the chances of a sentry looking straight down from the battlements were small. "It's worth the risk." Rod drew his dagger, twisted the pommel, and pointed it at the crack.
Nothing happened.
"Why dost thou wait?"
"I'd, uh, like to be a lot closer before I show a light," Rod improvised, wondering frantically what had gone wrong. He was sure he had recharged the batteries.
Batteries.
He was in a magical realm, and batteries weren't magic. They didn't work here.
However, his own magic did. He cupped a palm and frowned at it, imagining a ball of light in his hand.
The fox fire glowed to life.
Modwis caught his breath, and Beaubras murmured in wonder, "Thou art a wizard."
"More than I know, apparently." Rod turned the will-o'-the-wisp toward the crack, cupping his other hand behind it to keep the back-glow from dazzling his eyes.
He wondered why Fess made no comment. Ordinarily, any new phenomenon was enough to send the robot into a tizzy. But the great black horse only paced slowly toward the gouge in the rock, and Rod thrust the ball of light in, looking about.
The crack was about three feet wide, and perhaps ten feet deep.
"That's why the builders didn't worry," Rod murmured. "It doesn't go deep enough to weaken the support."
" Tis not a knight's view," Beaubras pointed out.
"No." But Rod was peering downward, his attention caught by the lower depths. "I, uh, don't see any bottom here…"
Fess looked down, too, opening his mouth. A bat suddenly fell spinning down the shaft, its ears dazzled by the supersonic the robot had just emitted. "Sonar indicates bottom at fifty feet, Rod."
"Don't the riverboat captains wish they'd had you," Rod muttered. To Beaubras, he said, "It goes down for another fifty feet. Think the face is rough enough to climb?"
The knight, with a full load of armor, looked up into the gloom, frowning.
"There is a stairway," Modwis rumbled.
Rod looked—and, sure enough, what he had mistaken for natural irregularities were indeed a set of rough-hewn, uneven steps. He felt his scalp prickle. "What is this, an invitation to dinner?" He wondered who was supposed to be the main course.
But Beaubras shook his head, smiling again. "Nay, Lord Gallowglass. 'Tis the postern gate. No knight would build a castle that had only one door.''
Rod relaxed a little. "But if the castle-builder knew about it, it will be strongly defended."
"Aye, yet only with such wards as he could render harmless—and what one man can knit, another can unravel. My misgivings are answered; it is naught that valor and courage cannot meet." He swung down from his horse and clanked toward the cliff. "Come, gentles! Let us walk!"
Rod stared. Then he glanced back at the knight's horse, jumped down, and caught up with Beaubras. "Aren't you going to tether your mount?"
"Nay. He will hide himself, and come at my whistle."
Talk about training.
Beaubras smiled. "Wherefore dost thou not tether thy beast, Lord Gallowglass?"
"Oh, he'll, uh, come at my whistle, too." Rod took time for a quick glance back at Fess.
"I shall, Rod," the robot assured him, "and the portcullis cannot keep me out. Call at the first indication of need."
"Thanks, Old Iron." Rod turned back to Beaubras with a grin, just as Modwis caught up. "Shall we go?"
They stepped onto the rock face, lit by Rod's will-o'-the wisp. He tried to ignore the flat denial his stomach was giving him—it felt as though he were trying to walk up the side of the cliff like a fly, stairway or no. His skin crawled at the thought of the fifty-foot drop just an inch away—it might not look all that bad, but it was enough to kill. It would be more than enough, as they climbed higher. "Uh, you might want to look for handholds, gentlemen." He suited the action to the word, finding a narrow cleft with his fingertips. "Just in case."
"In which case, Lord Gallowglass?" Modwis called up.
Black on black, leathery wings and putrid smell, flapping in Rod's face. He swallowed a cry of fright, emitting only a choked yelp as his body swung back, and he clawed frantically at the cliff face. Then it was gone, and he had to haul himself in while his stomach did backflips.
"Thou hadst but to say," Modwis rumbled. "We do comprehend words."
"Well, you know how it is, actions speak louder, and all that." Rod drew a trembling hand across his brow, removed a fine sheen of sweat, and trudged on up, clawing for fingerholds as he went.
Then it was all over his face, clutching at his arms and chest, unseen but grasping. The ghost light revealed a vast many-legged monster running toward his eyes. Rod gasped and jerked back. " 'Ware!"
Metal hissed behind him, and Beaubras's sword tip probed past his shoulder. Cobwebs gathered in faint traceries on the metal, and the monster jolted, then swung aside. Perspective returned, and the vast obscenity was suddenly reduced to an ordinary spider, though a very large one, the size of Rod's palm. It scuttled away toward the top of its web, but the sword tip slashed through it, and it tumbled into the abyss.
"It was just a spider," Rod said in faint protest.
" 'Twas as deadly as the greatest dragon," Modwis answered. " 'Twas a Death's-Scythe spider, with venom that can fell an ox in a minute."
Rod went limp with aftereffects. Apparently there were a lot of things about Grandfather's kingdom that he hadn't known.
He wondered if Grandfather had.
"We must press on," Beaubras murmured. "Yet 'ware these beasts, Master Gallowglass—if there is one, there may be many."
"Inspiring thought." Rod hoped he'd hidden the quaver in his voice. He pulled himself together and groped on up the stair, holding his fox fire higher.
They were halfway up when the kobold hit.
It came hopping and leaping down the stair toward them, whooping and giggling with glee, a bat-eared, snub-nosed, fang-toothed obscenity with gorilla's arms and talons for fingers.
" 'Tis a thing of evil!" Beaubras gasped, and his sword snickered out. Rod braced himself to keep from falling back against the knight, fervently reminding himself that anything in here, the lord of the keep must have known a way to guard against!
Then the kobold was on him, all teeth and claws, ripping a huge gash in Rod's cheek, another in his side. Rod cried out as fear flared though him, and the knight's sword thrust past him, skewering the kobold neatly—but it only gibbered and cackled, and clawed up Rod's chest as it strove to reach Beaubras.
Anger followed the fright, a searing anger that revealed, in sudden clarity, the impossibility that a member of the elfin kind could be pierced with Cold Iron and not even feel it—and could have claws that could rend but, now that Rod thought of it, brought no pain, nor blood. Suddenly, Rod knew what he was facing, though how it had been made, he couldn't guess.
Beaubras bellowed, slashing, and Rod just barely managed to grab the knight's arm, throwing his own weight back against the cliff, as Beaubras thrust too hard and jolted toward the drop. His weight hauled at Rod, then swung back, while Rod glared at the kobold, willing it away, willing it to appear as it really was…
And a huge moth battered Modwis with its wings, upon which were two great ovals suggesting evil-looking eyes. But only the moth was there; the kobold was gone.
With an oath, the dwarf swatted the insect away. It bumbled on down the rock face, bouncing off the cliff, then turned, arrowing back toward the will-o'-the-wisp that floated where Rod had left it.
"I thank thee, Lord Gallowglass," the dwarf gasped, "though how thou didst banish that fell sprite, I know not."