The Titan of Twilight Page 22

  Lanaxis set Brianna near Avner’s fallen body. “Gather up your son. I will see to our enemies.”

  The queen had no trouble finding her growling son. He lay on the lee side of a boulder, swaddled in blood-soaked wool. Brianna unwrapped the child and found him cold and hungry, but otherwise uninjured. She bundled him up and turned down the slope.

  Lanaxis was standing at timberline, glaring into the trees. As Brianna climbed down to Avner, the titan plucked a spruce out of the ground, then tossed it over the forest. Embers of violet fire danced among the boughs; then the tree burst into amethyst flame and shattered into a thousand blazing splinters. Wherever the slivers fell, geysers of purple fire shot high into the sky. All that lay beneath their light erupted into damson flame.

  Holding Kaedlaw beneath her arm, Brianna knelt beside Avner’s body. The young scout lay facedown in a pool of frothy blood, with his sheathed sword beneath his body. The tip lay over a hollow where a boulder had once rested.

  “No one could have done better, Avner—not even Tavis.” Brianna’s voice broke as she said the words. The queen touched the young scout’s neck, checking for a pulse that was not there. “I wish I could repay your courage, but even Hiatea’s magic cannot bring the dead back to life.”

  * * * * *

  Avner’s spirit lingered with his body long after the titan took the queen and left, until long after his flesh had frozen as solid as the stones it lay upon. He did not stay because duty demanded it—he had never been much for such folly and certainly did not feel bound by it now. Nor did he stay because unfinished business tied him to the world—he had died valiantly, and an honorable death always cuts such fetters.

  He stayed for vengeance. The fomorians had started to scream almost as soon as Lanaxis set the forest alight, and the agony in their voices had been music to Avner’s dead ears. They had continued to wail all through the night, some of them until long after the last tree had burned. Even now, the dead scout—he had lived more of his life as a thief, really, but he had died as a scout, and he wanted to be remembered that way—even now, with the gray dawn light revealing the charred and barren landscape of the canyon, he could still hear a few of them moaning. Avner would always remember Lanaxis kindly for this favor, at least.

  But the dead scout knew that he must soon forsake even this final pleasure. Already, he could feel the pale sunlight scorching his gossamer spirit, burning away the last airy threads by which he clung to his lifeless body. The time was fast approaching when he would have to let go and begin that terrifying journey every spirit makes alone. Avner saw no reason to wait. He loosened his hold, and his ethereal substance started to sink.

  Then he heard a familiar voice coming up the ridge. Avner grabbed hold of his body—with what, he was not exactly sure—and held tight.

  “Up here!” The voice belonged to Tavis Burdun, the firbolg who had changed him from a thief to a scout. “They came this way!”

  “I’m coming Tav—” The speaker suddenly fell silent. Avner recognized this voice as his friend Basil’s. “Stronmaus save me! What is that there?”

  “Avner.”

  A pair of large, hot hands—they felt as fiery as forge irons—slipped between the young scout and his body, then lifted the remains off the ground. Avner struggled to stay, but there was nothing for him to hold to and he began to sink.

  “Now will you listen to me?” Though Basil was screaming, his voice was fading fast. “Now will you use Sky Cleaver?”

  Avner did not hear the answer, for he had already settled into the emptiness between the stones.

  14

  Split Mountain

  Tavis skirted a monolith the size of a castle tower, then clambered up another as large as an entire keep. He and Galgadayle were following Basil through the swarthy depths of Annam’s Hallway, an icy gorge running straight as a lance through the heart of Split Mountain. A thousand feet of jumbled talus boulders, some as enormous as hills, covered the canyon’s floor. Its sheer granite walls soared more than a mile upward, narrowing into a pair of jagged, needle-tipped peaks that could have been mirror-images of each other. According to Basil, Annam the All Father had created the chasm a hundred centuries earlier, when, exasperated with Othea’s faithlessness, he had hurled Sky Cleaver into the mountain.

  The runecaster stopped atop a monolith, then slipped his divining rod from his belt and held it before him. The glowing tip bent downward at nearly a right angle.

  “We’ve found it!”

  “Not so loud!” Tavis urged. Though Orisino and the verbeegs still trailed a hundred paces behind, the high scout did not want his friend’s elated voice to carry to their ears. The last thing he needed was to let Orisino hear about Sky Cleaver. Tavis stopped next to Basil. “Put your rod away.”

  On the other side of the monolith, a boulder-lined pit corkscrewed a hundred feet down into the talus stones. The deep-worn channel of an ancient trail spiraled along the shaft’s jagged walls, jumping from one listing monolith to another like some sort of cockeyed fomorian staircase. At the bottom of the hole, the track slipped beneath a stone as large as Keep Hartwick and vanished into the crooked maw of a dark, yawning grotto.

  “I thought Sky Cleaver was a lost weapon,” Tavis said. Although he still felt the cold, the scout was well-enough rested that it no longer made him stutter. “How come it has a guardian? Lost weapons don’t have guardians.”

  Basil shrugged. “The stone giant histories don’t describe any guardians.”

  Tavis gave the runecaster a sidelong glance. “Have you read anywhere that the axe is guarded?” he asked. “Saying yes won’t stop me from trying.”

  Basil met his gaze squarely. “I’ve told you all I know.” The runecaster showed no irritation at Tavis’s mistrust. “This is for Avner. I wouldn’t hold back.”

  Tavis accepted the reassurance with a nod. Avner had been half grandson, half accomplice to Basil. The runecaster would never lie on the youth’s name.

  “Well, someone lives down there,” Tavis said.

  “And he must be as old as the mountains,” added Galgadayle. Though it had been two days since the storm giant battle, the seer remained hunched over in pain. Despite the death of his own shaman, he refused to allow Orisino’s healer to mend his cracked ribs. “To wear a trail that deep into solid granite must have taken ten centuries.”

  “At least ten centuries, but the path was not made by a single walker,” Tavis said. “The steps are too erratic. Everything from verbeegs to cloud giants has lived down there.”

  Galgadayle raised a brow. “Then the axe can’t be here. Someone would have claimed it by now.”

  “If they knew how to free it—which isn’t possible,” said Basil. “It took me three years and two new languages to learn the secret, and even I wouldn’t have succeeded without the library at Castle Hartwick.”

  “That still doesn’t explain the trail,” Tavis said. “If whoever’s down there can’t retrieve the axe, why do they stay here?”

  “Because a mortal doesn’t possess a weapon of the gods,” Galgadayle answered. “It possesses him. This is a bad idea, my friends. By recovering Sky Cleaver, we may do more harm than letting the titan keep the queen and her child.”

  “I’m still going after it.” Tavis spoke softly, for he heard Orisino and the verbeegs clattering toward their location. “It’s the only way I can kill Lanaxis.”

  “And after the titan is dead? What will you do then?” Galgadayle also spoke more quietly. “If you lack the strength to slay Brianna’s child, you have only unleashed two scourges on the world.”

  “Perhaps not,” Basil countered. “The titan’s death will certainly alter Kaedlaw’s future.”

  “You cannot change a person’s destiny,” Galgadayle warned. “You can only kill him before he fulfills it.”

  “If you’re right, we’ll know soon enough,” Basil said. “Sky Cleaver can cut to the heart of the matter. After that, Tavis will do the right thing.”

  “Assu
ming he can recognize it,” Galgadayle replied. “Sky Cleaver’s power will be a bright and shining thing. Even Tavis’s eyes may be dazzled by the glare.”

  “Then you and Basil will help me see.” Tavis glanced over his shoulder at the approaching verbeegs. “And now we will discuss the matter no more.”

  The three companions turned to await the exhausted verbeegs, who were laboriously pushing and pulling each other over the massive talus boulders. Only twenty-five of their number had survived the battle with the storm giants, and many of those suffered from wounds their shaman had not yet healed. Still, with the fomorians strewn in ashes over Cuthbert Pass and the firbolgs annihilated, even two dozen warriors were sufficient to give Orisino command of the war party. Tavis had tried to win back control by waiting for the two companies of royal footmen trailing them since the storm giant battle, but the crafty verbeeg chieftain had ordered his followers to keep moving, objecting that humans would only slow the company down.

  Leaving his warriors to assemble at the bottom of the monolith, Orisino climbed to Tavis’s side. “What’s … this?” he panted, peering into the pit. “The Twilight Vale?”

  “Does that hole look titan-sized to you?” Basil scoffed. “But it might be a shortcut through the talus field. Tavis will see, then come back for us.”

  Orisino’s eyes flashed with suspicion. “Why don’t we all go together?”

  Basil gestured at the pit. “Look at those steps. If the passage happens to be full of giants, or it’s a den instead of a shortcut, we’ll save a lot of trouble by letting Tavis scout ahead.”

  Orisino considered the explanation, then said, “It sounds reasonable, but I want Tavis to say it.”

  “I don’t have anything to add,” the high scout replied.

  “All the more reason to hear it from your mouth,” Orisino insisted. At the base of the boulder, his huffing warriors were straining to hear the conversation. “Tell me this is a shortcut.”

  “I don’t know that it is,” Tavis replied. “But if it’s full of giants, we all have a better chance of reaching the gorge’s far end if I’m alone.”

  Orisino narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know who you hope to fool, but it won’t be me! You’re not going alone.”

  “Fine,” said Basil. “You go with him. The rest of us will wait here until you two return.”

  Tavis shot the runecaster an angry glance. “He’ll be in the way!”

  “Perhaps, but Orisino’s suspicion is understandable,” said Galgadayle. “Take him along. It’s the only way to assure him you aren’t trying to desert us.”

  “The two of you will make less noise than the entire war party.” Basil glanced at the exhausted verbeegs gathered below. “And I’m ready to collapse as it is. The last thing I want is to follow you into some cavern, then find we’ve wasted our effort and retrace our steps.”

  This brought a hearty murmur of agreement from the verbeegs, and even Orisino looked as though he were having second thoughts.

  Tavis turned to Orisino. “You’d better keep those flat feet of yours quiet,” he growled. “And I won’t wait for you.”

  “You won’t have to,” Orisino sneered. “You’re not so strong anymore—or have you forgotten the price you paid for Munairoe’s healing?”

  “I’ve strength enough to take care of myself,” Tavis replied. “It’s you I can’t defend.”

  “I never thought you’d bother,” replied Orisino. “I certainly wouldn’t for you.”

  Orisino went off to gather a few things to eat and a torch to light his way. Tavis simply asked Basil to paint a rune of light on the blade his dagger. While he waited for his friend to finish, the high scout peered into the shaft, studying the spiraling trail and its awkward steps. It did not take him long to decide that it would be safer, and faster, not to trust the cockeyed staircase. He removed a short length of white rope from his satchel and dangled it over the shaft.

  “suordnowsilisaB.”

  A silver spider climbed from the cord’s end and dropped into the pit, trailing a single filament of white silk. The strand began to sparkle and grow steadily larger in diameter, becoming as thick and sturdy as any rope. Tavis waited until he could see several feet of line lying loose on the shaft floor, then looped his end of the cord around a small boulder and tied it off with a secure anchoring knot.

  Without waiting for Orisino to return, the high scout straddled the rope. He wrapped it around one hip and over the opposite shoulder, running the line parallel to his bow. He sat over the edge of the pit and rappelled down with slow, easy strides. As he touched bottom, the sweet, stale odor of old age wafted from the cavern mouth behind him. He kept a careful watch over his shoulder, but the grotto itself remained as silent and still as a crypt.

  Tavis untangled himself, then took a few minutes to examine the area. The floor was covered with six inches of glassy ice, so clear that he could see a pair of yard-long bootprints frozen in the mud underneath. The tracks had been old and weatherworn even before freezing. They revealed little now, save that the giant who had left them was not very large and seldom left the grotto. There was no sign that anyone else lived in the cave, and that troubled the high scout. Only ettins were solitary by nature, and the two-headed giants seldom viewed visitors as anything but a convenient meal.

  A loud rattle sounded from the rim of the pit, then Galgadayle cried out, “Watch yourself!”

  Tavis looked up, expecting to find a stone plummeting toward him. Instead, he saw several stones. Close behind came Orisino’s gangly figure, bouncing down the wall in great, barely controlled arcs. The verbeeg was clearly an inexperienced mountaineer. In addition to wrapping himself into the rappelling line backward, he was trying to slow himself by squeezing the rope with his guide hand, while his braking hand clutched at the cliff in a frantic effort to keep himself upright.

  Tavis retreated into the cavern, then grimaced as first the stones, then the verbeeg crashed to the bottom of the icy pit.

  “So much for being quiet!”

  “Karontor take this rope!” Orisino sat up and hurled the tangled line at the wall. “It did nothing to stop me from falling!”

  “It did too much,” Tavis retorted. “If it hadn’t slowed you down, I wouldn’t need to worry about all the witless things you’re bound to do inside the cavern.”

  Without waiting to see if Orisino could hoist his battered frame off the ice, Tavis drew his glowing dagger and started into the cave.

  The place was a confusing web of dark, jagged voids that shot off in all directions, with the sharp corners and broken edges of huge talus boulders jutting into the passages from every angle. In the distance, curtains of wayward sunbeams hung across the skewed corridors, like gray tapestries concealing the private halls of some madman’s castle. If not for the deep grooves of the ancient giant trail, the high scout would have been as lost as a child in a fen. Within the area lit by his glowing dagger alone, he saw at least fifty corridors, and off each of those there would be fifty more.

  Unlike true caverns, whose depths were kept above freezing by the mountain’s warm heart, this jumbled maze of angles and corners was as frigid as a glacial crevasse. The cold air seeped down from above like drizzle down a chimney, riming the granite with hoarfrost and leaving the listing, sloping path as slick and treacherous as a ribbon of frozen stream. Tavis moved slowly and carefully, leaving his sword sheathed and Mountain Crusher on his shoulder, never taking a step without first finding a secure hold for his free hand. In this tangle of monoliths, any fall could be a fatal one, shooting the victim down the jagged mouth of an impossibly deep pit, or lodging him forever between a pair of granite boulders.

  Orisino came up behind the high scout, clattering and groaning as he struggled to maintain his footing on the icy trail. The verbeeg had not bothered to light his torch, which left him both hands to maintain his balance. This was just as well. If the verbeeg happened to fall and injure himself, Tavis would feel compelled to offer help. Until the chieftai
n actually violated their agreement, the law demanded that he be treated as an ally, and allies did not leave wounded comrades to die in cold caverns.

  “Be quiet, fool,” Tavis growled. “The giant will hear you coming a thousand paces away.”

  “It hardly—ahhhh!” Orisino clutched Tavis’s arm, nearly falling and sending them both off the edge of a monolith. The verbeeg regained his balance, then said, “We can’t use this shortcut. We’d lose half our warriors on this ice.”

  Tavis disengaged himself from the chieftain’s grasp. “You go back if you want. The trail may dry out up ahead.”

  “Dry out? This whole place is one … big …” Orisino let his sentence trail off, then his voice grew sly. “What are you looking for? It’s no shortcut.”

  The high scout did not reply. He continued forward, finally stopping at the head of a steep chute where one boulder stood against another. The corner between their two faces formed a long, angular ravine that descended into inky darkness beyond Tavis’s light. Some ancient giant had cut a series of huge, zigzagging stairs down the trough, but the frost-rimed treads were spaced at eight-foot intervals. Anyone as small as Tavis or Orisino would have to jump from one icy platform to the next. The only alternative was to climb down the center, using the seam between the monoliths for fingerholds. If either of the ’kin slipped, there was no telling how far they would fall.

  “We’d better get our rope,” Orisino suggested.

  Tavis did not bother to remind the chieftain of the line’s true ownership. Verbeegs considered private property an uncivilized and archaic concept, claiming instead that all things belonged to all people.

  “If you want my rope, you fetch it,” Tavis said.

  “And I suppose you’ll wait here until I return?” the verbeeg scoffed. “You go down first. I’ll watch how you do it.”

  The wily chieftain was proving more difficult to scare off than Tavis had expected. The high scout sighed in exasperation. “If I don’t want you falling on me, I’d better teach you how to do this.”