The Fifth Sorceress, page 48
Holding the reins tightly, Tristan tentatively stepped behind the rushing water, not knowing what to expect, a trusting and subdued Pilgrim following him obediently. It took a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness, but once they had, what he saw made him stop in his tracks.
The three of them were standing in a tunnel carved out of the rock. It seemed to go on for rather a long way, and he could not immediately discern any light coming from the opposite end. The only illumination was the sunlight that filtered in from behind the rushing water as it flowed down past the entrance. The dark gray walls were slick and glistening, and the sounds from the falls were muffled. The floor of the tunnel was flooded with dark, murky water.
Tristan waded forward a few steps to stand side by side with Wigg. The water was about two feet deep. ‘Where are we?’ he asked anxiously.
‘This tunnel was fashioned by the wizards just before the end of the war, as the final obstacle to reaching the settlement that exists on the other side of Shadowood,’ Wigg said almost absently as he glanced around at the walls and floor of the dark, empty cylinder in which they stood. Tristan guessed that the wizard, who no doubt had been one of the chief engineers of its construction, was examining the tunnel for signs of decay and stress. ‘I have not been here for more than three hundred years,’ Wigg said quietly, to no one in particular.
Tristan and Shannon watched as Wigg raised his hands above his head and closed his eyes. The tunnel began to fill with green light, and Tristan looked up to see that the entire length of the tunnel roof was lined by glowing stones. They were jagged and sharp, crystalline, and they glowed more and more brightly until, when Wigg finally dropped his hands back to his sides, the tunnel was shimmering in sage-colored light. Wigg smiled, the first grin that Tristan had seen on his face in days.
‘These are called radiance stones,’ he said simply. ‘We created them, and then brought them here over three hundred years ago, just as we were completing the tunnel. I am immensely glad to see that they are still just as powerful as the day we first activated them.’
Tristan moved forward a couple of paces, hoping to get a better look at some of the radiance stones, but his knee bumped into something in the murky water. He glanced down, only to jump back immediately, drawing his dreggan. The now-familiar clang of the blade as it leaped out the extra foot resounded down the length of the dark tunnel and echoed hollowly off its barren walls.
He was standing over a skeleton.
It was the full skeleton of a man, or at least he assumed it to have been a man, because of its size. The skull looked up at him with empty, yet somehow smirking eye sockets from just below the surface of the water, as if taunting him, laughing at him for being afraid. The bones were of the purest white; they seemed to shimmer in the light of the radiance stones.
He looked around in the strange, pale green light of the tunnel to find that the dank water in which they were standing was quite full of them. The various bones had been polished clean by the ever-moving water, and lay at impossible angles in the tunnel, sometimes missing limbs, sometimes not. It was Shannon who first broke the silence – with his laughter.
‘The prince frightens easily, does he not, considering that these poor fellows cannot fight back?’ He laughed, holding his stomach, at the same time craftily eyeing the ale jug that was still attached to the prince’s saddle. ‘Don’t worry, my prince.’ He snickered. ‘None of them can harm you. I would have thought that the old wizard might have told you about them before we entered the tunnel.’ He continued to grin at the prince, enjoying the moment.
‘I would have thought so as well,’ Tristan said, eyeing Wigg as he returned the dreggan to its scabbard. He reached down and plucked one of the skeletons from the water, examining it for a cause of death. Unsatisfied, he dropped it back into the wet darkness that was the floor of the tunnel and looked at Wigg. ‘How did they get here?’ he demanded. ‘What happened to them?’
Wigg took a long breath in through his nose and pursed his lips before answering. He clasped his hands in front of himself. ‘As to who they are, I really couldn’t say,’ he explained. ‘But if they are what we expected them to be when we built in the tunnel’s safeguards three hundred years ago, I imagine they are the usual rabble that was so prevalent in those times: grave robbers, looters, common criminals, and gnome hunters.’
At the mention of gnome hunters, Tristan watched the smile vanish from Shannon’s face.
‘The gnome hunters were most active near the end of the war, when there was very little control left over society,’ Wigg went on. ‘This passageway is the last defense before entering Shadowood proper, and if anyone of unendowed blood or without the benefit of time enchantments enters this tunnel, they are recognized by the incantations we left behind, and immediately killed. Only gnomes are exempt.’ Wigg looked down at the skeletons. ‘If these are gnome hunters, they were killed before the transformation of Shadowood, since their skeletons are still human. Obviously, a great many of them tried to get past and failed. I am glad to see that this trap, too, works as well as the day we left it here.’
As his eyes grew more adjusted to the light, Tristan could make out the skeletons of larger creatures that lay in the same watery graves as the remains of the humans. He saw the unmistakable skull and jaw of a horse, and then another, and then yet another. Beasts of burden for criminals and robbers, he thought. He stared incredulously at the sight before him. It’s like a ghastly, flooded cemetery with the lids of all the coffins removed.
Tristan looked back up at Wigg. ‘What killed them all?’
‘Oh, they drowned,’ the wizard said nonchalantly.
‘How?’
‘When the wrong person enters the tunnel, it immediately begins to fill with water from the falls. At such a fast rate, I might add, that escape is impossible,’ Wigg explained. ‘We thought it rather a good idea at the time, since these falls had been known to have been here for centuries, and had never run dry.’
‘How did they ever get this far?’ Tristan asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘How did they get across the canyon to reach this far?’
Wigg smiled. He is beginning to think like the Chosen One. ‘If you remember, I said that the tunnel was created near the end of the war, as a precaution. At that time, the canyon had not yet been created. Each of these skeletons came to rest here long before the canyon or bridge existed.’
‘Does this place have a name?’ Tristan asked. Whether it had a name or not, he would not soon forget it, he told himself.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Wigg murmured.
‘The Tunnel of Bones,’ Shannon quietly interjected. His voice sounded small and far away, as though some of the bravado of before had left him. ‘That’s what we started to call it after the skeletons began to pile up in here. Somehow, the name just stuck.’
Wigg nodded thoughtfully. ‘The Tunnel of Bones it is,’ he said. He looked at poor little Shannon, who was almost up to his neck in the cold, dank water.
‘By the way,’ the old wizard asked of the gnome. ‘How is it that you can traverse this tunnel without being of endowed blood?’
‘One does not have to be of endowed blood, provided he has a brave heart,’ Shannon answered, puffing out his chest. ‘I wade in the water in the dark, sometimes up to my chin, parting the bones as I go. It is not pleasant, but it is necessary. For Master Faegan, I would do anything.’
Wigg pursed his lips in thought. ‘Pick him up and put him on your horse, Tristan,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll see what I can do to make this passage a little easier.’
Smiling, the prince reached down and hoisted the little gnome up into the saddle. When Shannon immediately began to eye the ale jug, Tristan shook his head and waggled a finger back and forth.
Tristan then watched curiously as Wigg waded several steps back down the length of the Tunnel of Bones from which they had come. The wizard raised his hands in the air and bowed his head. At once, the skeletons, human and beast alike, began to move.
They were crawling out of the water and wading slowly toward the sides of the tunnel.
Tristan stared at them, astonished. This can’t be happening. They have all been dead for hundreds of years.
Like some kind of macabre army of the dead, they looked about with empty, unseeing eye sockets and then walked to the edges of the tunnel walls, where they stood in long, silent lines that seemed to stretch on forever. They looked like something from a bizarre nightmare as the water dripped from their bones, the pale green light illuminating their stark whiteness against the dark walls behind them. Even though they had perished hundreds of years ago, Tristan could almost smell the death in the air.
Their path now clear, Wigg turned around to look at the speechless prince and gnome, raising the familiar eyebrow as if he were displeased with them for some reason. ‘Don’t you think it time we left?’ he asked. Without waiting for a response, he collected the reins to his horse and began to lead the way down the tunnel.
They waded through the Tunnel of Bones for a good hour, the silent, white sentinels of the dead never moving from their positions against the walls as the three of them passed by. They walked in silence, even Shannon the Small’s voice having been repressed by the sight before him. It was almost like passing through an honor guard of death, the pale green light pointing up both the stark whiteness and murky shadows at once, the sound of the water dripping from the bones into the darkness of the tunnel strangely loud in the silence. There must have been hundreds of them.
Finally, blessedly, Wigg stopped at what appeared to be the far end of the tunnel. The entrance was blocked by a large, round stone, but from around the edges Tristan could see shafts of natural sunlight here and there, pricking their way through from the outside.
Wigg turned around and silently motioned for Tristan and Shannon to step behind him, their backs to the circular rock that blocked the tunnel. Then he stretched his arms out straight ahead, pointing down the tunnel, and closed his eyes. Almost immediately the skeletons began falling back into the dirty water of the passageway, bobbing oddly, almost as if they had just been freshly killed. One by one they fell, all the way down the dark tunnel, until their tumblings could only be heard and no longer seen.
When the splashing stopped, Wigg turned his attention back to the circular stone door. It was as if he were looking for something in particular. At last he cast his aquamarine eyes up toward the gnome, still perched atop Tristan’s horse. ‘I assume, since you come and go through here often, that you know where the lever is,’ he said without pretense. ‘I can only imagine that it has been moved in the interest of security at least once over the course of the last three centuries. The Faegan I knew would have insisted upon it.’
‘Of course,’ Shannon said confidently. It was obvious that the gnome enjoyed the fact that the wizard was now, finally, asking for his help. ‘It was moved from its original position to there, where I could more easily reach it.’ He pointed to a dark, square spot on the wall down near the surface of the water. ‘The panel can be slid away either manually or by the use of the craft. The lever you seek is behind it.’
Wigg pointed two of his long, ancient fingers at the dark spot, and the square retreated back into the wall and slid to one side. Peering into the resulting hole, Tristan could see a rather long stone lever that seemed to be hewn into the rock. He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Wigg.
‘Not everything is better left to the devices of magic, Tristan,’ Wigg said as if he were still reciting one of his lectures back at the Wizards’ Conservatory in Tammerland. ‘As I told you, gnomes are not gifted with the craft. Therefore, Shannon had to be given some way to move the stone manually.’ He thought to himself for a moment before speaking again. Finally, he said, ‘Would you care to do the honors?’
Tristan breathed in sharply, eyes widening. Then he handed the reins to Shannon, waded over to the lever in the wall, and looked up at Wigg.
The old wizard gazed deeply, seriously, into Tristan’s eyes. ‘What you are about to see, you are to tell to no one,’ he said, scowling slightly and looking down his nose for emphasis. ‘Too many lives are at stake.’
‘I understand,’ Tristan said. He pulled up on the lever, and the great stone blocking the end of the tunnel began to roll away to the right, allowing some of the water on the tunnel floor to begin to gush out. Squinting into the bright afternoon sun, Wigg and Tristan led their horses out and remounted, Tristan settling in front of Shannon on Pilgrim’s back.
As his eyes began to adjust to the brightness, Tristan looked down the long, gradual grassy slope upon which they were standing. At the bottom of the slope he could see a great many huge, gnarled trees, like those they had seen that morning. But at last he looked upward, at the branches of the trees, and he understood. The gnomes lived above ground, in the trees.
There were literally hundreds of tree houses. They were fashioned of the same kind of wood as the trees they were built in, and most of them had bridges that connected them to each other, not unlike the bridge over the canyon. There were windows, balconies, porches, and chimneys, and if the houses had been upon the ground instead of in the trees, no one would have given them a second glance, except, of course, for their smaller proportions, scaled to gnomes. Curiously, each of the houses had a large, flat platform constructed both above and beneath it that completely encircled both the house and the tree in which it was built. As they approached more closely, Tristan realized that something didn’t seem right about these woods.
Then it hit him. There is no one here! Their city in the trees is deserted.
Suddenly a group of gnomes, all male, rounded the corner of the village on foot, brandishing weapons such as longbows, crossbows, and spears. There must have been at least 200 of them, and Tristan could see that they were both angry and afraid. From what Shannon has told us, none of these little people have seen any man but Faegan for over 300 years, Tristan reflected. They probably think we are gnome hunters, come to kill them and take their women.
Reflexively, he pulled his dreggan from its scabbard, and just as quickly he saw Wigg turn toward him with a look that spoke volumes.
‘Put that away, right now,’ the wizard said through clenched teeth, ‘unless you want to lose Faegan forever. Besides, the gnomes may be small, but they can fight like lions. We would be forced to kill a great number of them before they finally backed off. We are here to see Faegan, not to start another war. There is a much better way to handle this.’
The wizard looked at Shannon, who was still sitting on Pilgrim, just behind Tristan. ‘Go to them,’ he ordered the gnome. ‘Now.’ He stiffened a little in his saddle as he contemplated his next words. ‘Make them understand that you brought us here to see their master, nothing more. I do not wish to cause any harm to them, but if I have to, I shall.’ He looked down the hill to see that the gnomes had begun to approach within longbow range. Wigg pushed his tongue against the inside of one of his cheeks, then let out a long breath as he scowled at the gnome. ‘I suggest you go now!’
Shannon jumped to the ground and began running toward his fellows as fast as his little legs could carry him. They began to crowd around him, shouting in strange, scratchy voices and pointing excitedly at Tristan and Wigg. Shannon was hopping around in desperation, obviously trying to make them understand that they had much more to lose by fighting the Lead Wizard and the prince than they did by letting them pass. After several minutes of commotion, they finally settled down and allowed Shannon to walk back up the slope to Tristan and Wigg.
The little gnome stuck his thumbs in his bibs and pushed them outward with pride. ‘I have arranged safe passage for you to see Master Faegan,’ he said, fairly bursting with himself. He waved a cautionary finger into the two faces that looked down on him from their horses. ‘It’s a good thing for you that I was here, or else you would have tasted their wrath. No one has successfully visited here for over three centuries.’ He looked at the ale jug that was tied to the back of Tristan’s saddle. ‘I need a drink,’ he said commandingly.
Wigg glanced at the gnome with a combination of disbelief and rather undisguised contempt. ‘Yes,’ the old one said slowly, as he scratched the back of his neck. ‘I don’t know how we could ever have done it without you.’ He glanced at Tristan, his infamous left eyebrow raised. The prince smiled knowingly back in return. Wigg looked at the prideful little gnome. ‘You may lead us through the village, Your Highness,’ the old one said.
Oblivious to the wizard’s sarcasm, Shannon began to lead them down the hill.
As the crowd of angry gnomes parted to allow them entrance to the village, Tristan had a chance to study the tree houses more closely. They were really quite extraordinary, each one unique in its craftsmanship, and looked to be as sturdily built as anything he had seen upon the ground. And then he began to see the gnomes’ wives and children as they popped their heads out of windows and emerged onto balconies to watch the strangely dressed giants riding past their homes. Occasionally he caught the scent of a freshly baked loaf of bread, or a pie that was resting on an open windowsill.
Tristan once again looked at the platforms that had been built above and below each of the houses, and understanding dawned. The platforms are a guard against the berserkers, he realized.
Tristan looked down to the gnome. ‘Shannon,’ he asked, ‘is there a name for this place?’
‘Of course,’ the little one said. ‘It is called Tree Town. Simple and to the point, don’t you think?’
