Curse of the Black Heron
Curse of the Black Heron
Chapter Four
The feeling that something watched me woke me.
The nantatsu stood near the doorway into the stone room, arms crossed and hidden within the deep folds of its sleeves, alternately studying Giraud and me. In a soft voice, it said, "Your scent fills my home, little morsel. Pray you are the ones who can break the bard's spell, and pray you can do it quickly, for my appetite grows with every instant that we linger here."
How wonderful, I thought, to wake and find myself considered in the role of breakfast snack. I did not wait for the nantatsu to suggest that I get up. Initiative was best, I thought. Instead, I jumped up and shook Giraud until he awoke. The momentary bewilderment in his eyes, before he remembered the terrible day that had brought the two of us to that place and that predicament, could have broken my heart. I wished I could give him back his father and his brothers, his home, his safe, quiet future as a historian-I wished I could give myself back the feeling that I knew what was going to happen next in my life, or that I had some control over it.
Well, I couldn't, and what's more, I didn't have the time to worry about it right then, either. I said, "Get up-fast. It's time to go."
He yawned and stretched, and half-way through his stretch, saw the nantatsu. He bounded to his feet, tucked his extra clothes into his pack, and said, "Well, I'm ready."
The monster watched us, head tipped to one side and jaws clicking out an unnerving, staccato beat. It sad nothing for the longest time, and then it giggled. My skin crawled. "Are you truly ready?" it asked.
And how were we to answer that?
I took a deep breath and stood straighter and said, "Yes. We are."
It handed each of us something wrapped in oilcloth and tied-clumsily-with thick string.
"Your rations," it said, and turned its back on the two of us. "Now follow me."
The monster hurried along its stony passage, and Giraud and I scrambled after it, not daring to let it get too far ahead, even though it seemed bent on losing us in the twisting labyrinth of its home.
It moved down into the darkness, away from tiny, cunningly concealed windows carved out of the rock face, to a place where no natural light touched. In that place, the corridors twisted steadily downward, and I felt, as I ran behind the nantatsu, the weight of the mountain growing over my shoulders and head, as if I were carrying them with me. The corridor walls glowed a sickly green-I could feel the touch of magic in the light, but it was magic of an ugly, twisted sort.
The ugliness got worse quickly, scraping against all my senses. I noticed a slight tickle of scent at the back of my throat. Something light but unnerving. It became denser as we descended, though, and at last became almost unbearable. Sweetness, cloying sweetness. And the stink of rotting meat. My eyes watered and I gagged, but I kept hurrying after the nantatsu. I held one edge of my cloak over my face and breathed through it, and was grateful that I'd taken the time and care to weave the material tightly.
I knew that I headed into something terrible, and with all my heart I wished I could retreat back up the way I'd come. But the monster seemed to be hoping for some sign that Giraud and I were not the people it needed to set it free, because if we gave that sign, it would devour us. It was hungry, we were its natural prey, and it restrained itself from killing us only with difficulty.
"Here," the nantatsu said at last. "Come in." It giggled again, that same mad sound that set my teeth on edge and made me want to flee. "Oh, do come in."
Only the faintest of lights illuminated the center of this room. The edges lay in darkness, and the darkness, like the smell, had its own frightful weight. The stink here lay so thick in the air it seemed to be the mother of the blackness that shrouded us; tears ran down my cheeks and I breathed through my cloak in little, shallow gasps and prayed that my nose would go numb. Beside me Giraud made muffled gagging noises through the folds of his cloak. We stepped together into the darkness at the edge of the sickly light, holding hands tightly. I drew courage from his presence. It would have been a terrible place to be alone.
The center of the room held a narrow pillar only a little shorter than me, and on the pillar lay a worn leather pack so old that I could see from where I was that the leather was rotting. The pack looked like the sort peddlers carry, or traveling priests, or some bards.
"There," the nantatsu said. "There's the bard's prize. Go get it."
I took a step forward, and Giraud moved with me, but a sudden crawly sensation at the back of my neck stopped me. Giraud started to take another step forward, but I tightened my grip on his hand until he said, "Ow," and tried to yank it free. He stopped and elbowed me in the ribs and muttered, "That hurt."
"Go ahead," the monster said. "Take it."
"No," I told it. "Something's wrong."
"Something's always wrong," it said. "Just as something's always right. The trick is to figure out which is which, isn't it?"
Neither Giraud nor I answered.
"Your prize is waiting."
I sensed Giraud turning to look at me in the darkness. I couldn't see his face. I couldn't see much of anything but that faint glow of light, and the pack atop the pillar, and the light that just barely reflected off of the nantatsu, enough to make it visible to me. It stood to my right, waiting, head cocked to one side, jaws again clicking.
"You've done something to it, or to the path to it," I said, suddenly certain this was the case.
Silence greeted that assertion, a lingering, uncomfortable silence in which I thought I could hear the monster imagining ways to cook me before it ate me. Then the nantatsu sighed. "Very well," it said. "You prove again that you are not my meat."
The light in the room's center grew brighter, intensifying from the ugly greenish light to one brighter and yellower and somehow healthier. And now I could see what I had not seen before-that thirty or more doors led into the room from every direction; and that the floor in front of each of them had been carved into a deep pit; and that long, exquisitely carved and polished spikes of stone rose out of the floor of that circular pit. No safe path led to the pillar. I could see, too, that others before me had been led into this room, and that many of them had tried to reach the pack and had failed. The fleshless skulls of some of my predecessors stared up at me with grinning jaws and empty eye-sockets; other more recent victims of the nantatsu still wore a few remnants of decaying flesh over the framework of their bones.
The monster giggled. "I've had my dawnmeal and duskmeal many times over in this place," it said. "I'd hoped the two of you would join me here for a quick bite, as well." Then it shrugged philosophically and snapped its fingers; the pack lifted itself off of the pillar and floated to the monster. "To daylight," the nantasu said, "before I grow weary of the novelty of letting you live. Perhaps if I killed and ate you, I would find some sort of pleasure in living forever or eventually the bard's spell would be broken anyway." It hissed. "No, no, that wouldn't work," it mumbled to itself. "I'll be forever in here unless the spell breaks; I become mortal when they go and take the bard's pack with them. If I kill them I will never die, but I will never mate, and if I never mate I will never have my young." It backed into the passageway while it mumbled to itself and began moving back upward through the tunnels and corridors again.
"It's crazy," Giraud said.
I nodded vigorously.
"We have to go with it though."
I nodded again.
He hurried after it as quickly as he could. I followed.
What were we supposed to do about the mad monster? Could we do anything? It had every advantage over us-at least every advantage I could see. So we followed it as it demanded we do, and we tried to be unobtrusive.
I wondered if all the nantatsu were mad, or if only this one was. Perhaps this one had lost its mind from having been alone so long, trapped in its lair. The stories of the nantatsu always said they were terrible creatures, but never mentioned that they were insane. I had time to wonder while I followed the monster up the passageway. I hoped, of course, that I would never make close enough acquaintance with another such horror that I could compare.
At last we reached a dead end.
"This is where we stop," the monster said.
The tunnel, lit with the same green light as all the rest of the windowless tunnels, simply stopped, as if someone had wearied of digging it. I glanced at Giraud. Had the nantatsu taken us all this way just so it could kill us here? But it said, "Now I must do the magic that will take us out of my home-if you are who you say you are."
Neither of us had said we were anything special. Still, faced with my imminent death, I found myself praying that we were, because either we were the heroes foretold by a dead bard's last prophecy, or we were doomed. I didn't like our odds.
The nantatsu wasn't paying attention to either of us right then, however. It stood behind us, blocking any hope of escape, and it tucked its long chin against its chest and began to mutter. As it mumbled words I couldn't understand, it began to glow, and quickly transformed from a solid, very real monster to a transparent, milky white specter. As it changed, so did its robes. When they became translucent, they began to whip around it like the tattered edges of a storm cloud, or like fog come to life. I gasped, and Giraud said, "The White Spirit."
The monster screamed-an ear-battering ululating wail that went on and on and on, as if the nantatsu didn't breathe like humans did, but used air only to fuel its mad screaming. As it screamed, my entire body began to tingle, and the air thickened and grew terribly cold, and I felt myself beginning to freeze solid. My eyesight blurred, and I grew lightheaded.
I woke face-down on cold, damp rock, aware first of the aching pain in every muscle of my body, and next of the thunderous roar of falling water nearby, and finally of the fact that something was trying to wake me. That something shook me and chittered at me, and suddenly pinched me. I came bolt upright with a shriek of pain, and jumped back as I looked into the grinning, attenuated death's-head face of the nantatsu.
"I thought I would have my meal for sure," it told me. "But, no. I don't want to eat you . . . yet. I'm not yet fully unbound. If you fail me, you'll be my meal."
I looked around for Giraud. He lay behind me, still not moving, though I could see him breathing.
"What did you do to us?" I asked the nantatsu.
It chuckled. "You cannot walk through the worldwalls as I can. You are weak, or untrained, or perhaps just stupid. A wizard or a bard would not have fainted."
Oh. It was my fault. It figured.
I started to try to wake up Giraud, but the nantatsu grabbed my shoulder with its claw the instant I turned away, and snarled, "You shall not leave."
"I'm not leaving. I'm going to get Giraud up so that we can do whatever you want us to do."
"Oh." Its claw released my shoulder. I could tell I was going to have a bruise there in a day or two. I didn't complain, though. I just went to Giraud, dropped to my knees at his side, and started shaking him. "Giraud. Giraud. Get up. You've got to get up."
He rolled over, stared up at me, and frowned. "I dreamed you already woke me-" and then his voice trailed off as he realized we were no longer in the nantatsu's house, but in a valley at the base of a huge, single mountain peak that stabbed up through the trees around us and pierced the black blanket of angry clouds that butted up against its higher reaches.
"That's Hearthold Mountain?" he said.
I followed his glance to the flashes of lightning that sparkled along the upper reaches and turned the roiling underbellies of the clouds momentarily gray before darkness returned. "Evidently. I haven't yet discussed it with our . . . companion."
He frowned and rose. "So now we all travel up there, do we?"
The nantatsu joined us. "No. As I told you, I will wait here. You will follow the path upward-you will not find it terribly difficult, for all that it is long and steep. You will have resting places along the way, and as long as you avoid meeting anyone who might be there, you should reach the top alive."
Giraud said, "Anyone . . . ? Like other nantatsu?"
"There are no nantatsu on Hearthold Mountain," the monster said. "Yet."
Sounded like a good place to be, as far as I was concerned. "So who are we likely to meet?"
"The Karger Magad dwarves."
"Dwarves are often allies of humans," I said. "They won't hurt us, in any case."
"I've touched you," the nantatsu said, and lowered its voice. "My touch and my magic will be as clear to any Karger Magad as if I had carved my name on your flesh. And no matter what the Hearthold Mountain dwarves might think of you, I guarantee you they do not harbor any warm feelings for me. Too many of them have found a resting place among my piles of bones, while their tough flesh served to abate my hunger for a little while."
So. The potential allies we might have found on the mountain, and the potential safe harbor we might have hoped for, would be denied us because we bore the monster's mark. We could not hope for any help or any kindness, nor for any supplies, either going up the mountain or coming down. Worse, if we were discovered, we could expect active resistance. More danger. More enemies.
I didn't feel I needed any more enemies in my life.
And then the monster said, "Come here. You must know what you are to be about," and beckoned the two of us nearer with a hooked claw.
Reluctantly, I went to it, and Giraud went with me.
"This is the destiny created for the two of you long before you were born," the nantatsu said. It opened the ancient pack and from it pulled forth a book that looked quite unusual to me. Its pages, creamy yellow and unevenly hand-cut from sheets of parchment, were bound in octavo by waxed twists of gut string knotted through the back. The pages were protected by thin wooden covers hinged along the left and kept in place by three wooden dowels driven through the binding. It appeared to be a sturdy book, but it also looked awfully heavy.
"One of the First Age books," Giraud said.
The monster studied him, and said, "Indeed, little scholar. Its type is quite recent in relation to the history of my people; quite ancient, no doubt, in relation to the history of yours. From what I could gather from the bard who . . . gave . . . it to me, it is a commonplace book, and was owned by a succession of bards before the one I ate."
The monster turned the pages carefully, and I could see that its claws were poorly designed for the task. When it arrived at the last entry, it pointed to the scrawling black letters written by a heavy, graceless hand and said, "This is the spell and the song that my dinner was trying to take to Hearthold Mountain. Before his demise, the bard told me that Hearthold Mountain resonates with karai, which he said was the basic and essential magic of the earth itself." The nantatsu chuckled. "His words, not mine. He also said the world's karai energy has been thrown out of tune by some sort of interference with the living rock, and the resulting magic is subtly warped. As a result, events in our world are turning ever darker and more evil."
"That would explain a lot," Giraud said.
I glanced at him. "If it were true, it might. But why would it be true?"
The nantatsu said, "Perhaps it isn't. But whether it's true or not doesn't concern you. Your only concern is to reach the Pillar of the Sun alive so you can sing this song."
Giraud said, "But maybe what the bard was telling you was important."
The nantatsu glanced at him. "Not to me, it wasn't. He went on at some length, discussing karai and synchronicity and the evil in the world; trying to tie them to my actions and me to evil. A lot of blather, really. Evil would be if people quit going overland via my path. The rest of what he talked about was what snacks do when they aren't being eaten, and who cares about that?"
We do, I thought. But being a relatively bright girl, and fond of my skin, I kept quiet.
"He thought he'd found a cure for this evil, of course. I don't doubt at all that's what the song is."
It handed the book to Giraud, who stuck it in his pack. "So go on. Up the mountain, both of you. Sing the song and free me, and you'll never see me again."
Giraud said, "Let's go."
"Don't fail," the nantatsu said as we hurried toward the path that led up the side of the mountain. "Because if you do, you will see me again. But not for long."
So we had an old book with a song in it that we were supposed to sing; we were under strict orders not to cross paths with any dwarves on fear of death either from them or from the nantatsu should we survive them; we didn't know where we were to go other than up; or what effect the song we were supposed to sing was intended to have; and on top of that, it started to rain. Light rain at first, but the further we climbed, the harder it got.
And we did climb. The smooth slope of the path became slick, and changed at some point to steps. We were too wet and tired to talk to each other. And I, at least, could think of nothing to say. I had a pleasant enough voice, but I knew only a little more of bardic magic than the average bogger, and that only from half-remembered conversations with my father when I was very young. How was I to do magic? How was Giraud? He was no more a bard than I.
I wish I could say that I felt somehow special-that the nantatsu's strange prophecy and murmurings of magic and bards and spells made me believe that I had a task in the world that set me apart-but it wasn't like that. I was cold, and I was wet, and I was scared. Under such circumstances, you don't feel touched by the gods. You don't feel courageous and invincible. You just feel the hard rock under your feet and the ache in your thighs and the rumbling in your gut, and you wish you were home in a warm bed, with someone to take care of you.
The steps we climbed grew steeper and narrower, and the rain began sluicing down them as if they were a riverbed readying itself to flood. The dwarves had carved gutters on both sides of them, and grooved channels into them to prevent such dangerous flooding. But the dwarves hadn't planned for the rain that suddenly dropped out of the sky like entire lakes upended.
And later still, I realized when I stopped to catch my breath that we had lost the clear, easy path the nantatsu had set us upon. We were still traveling upward, and we still had endless switchbacked steps, but these steps were worn and crudely cut. No rain channels, no neat gutters to either side.
Giraud came back down to me and shouted over the rain, "These aren't the same steps!"
"I know. I just realized that!"
"Do you want to go back?"
I thought about losing ground, only to have to turn around and climb again. I didn't want to climb anymore. The adventure of the day before had left me hurting and weary, and the endless climb in the rain had added to the pain and the exhaustion, and was giving me chills and an aching head besides.
"No. Up is up. All of them will take us to the top sooner or later. I want to keep going."
"Me too. But what if we can't get to where we need to be from here?"
"I don't care," I said. "I don't want to backtrack."
He gave me a quick hug. "Then what do you want to do?"
"Find shelter," I told him.
So half-blinded by the rain, scared bootless by the lightning that rattled the upper reaches of the mountain, buffeted by shrieking wind, we began to climb again.
We didn't climb far before we found the cave. I never would have guessed it was a cave; I would have mistaken it for a waterfall, the way the water poured off of it. But I'd been going forward and I took what would have been the logical next step up and forward and there was no step there, and I lost my balance, staggered forward even further, arms braced to catch myself on the rock wall ahead and to my left . . . and I kept right on falling, through a thin sheet of pouring water and into darkness and dryness.
My first instinct was to get Giraud. I lunged back out and screamed for him, and somehow he heard me over the wind and the thunder. He came back and we tumbled together into the wonderful, tiny cave. Considering that my situation at that moment resulted from a previous foray into a cave, I'm surprised I didn't listen to my second instinct, which was to rush back out into the cold and the wet, with the lightning and the wind.
The rain drowned my second instinct, though, so I stayed with the first one. Giraud and I sat together, our teeth chattering, trying to warm ourselves and each other.
"Have you . . . ever . . . been so wet?" he asked me.
"Not . . . not ever," I said. I felt the cold all the way into my bones, as if I were frozen clear through and my stupid heart simply didn't know enough to stop beating. I rubbed my hands over my arms as quickly as I could move them, but with wet clothes, wet skin, and cold hands, the warmth I managed to create for myself was little and less. "Do you think it will ever stop raining out there, or is it always like this?"
Giraud said, "It couldn't possibly rain like this all the time, or whoever carved all those steps never could have carved them."
"It rains this way more than you might imagine, though," a third voice said behind both of us, and as we both yelped and started to jump to our feet to flee, added, "Oh, don't move. I'd hate to have to kill you before I even found out who you were."