She rose, a rustle of long hair and clothing in the mid-morning stillness. "Do not ever ask me to leave you again," she told him.
Then she walked quickly away. He stared after her wordlessly and knew that he would not.
The little company arrived at the Deep Fell shortly before midday. The rain had passed and the day brightened, though clouds still screened the whole of the sky. The smell of damp hung thick in the air, and the morning chill had sharpened.
Ben stood with his companions at the edge of the Deep Fell and stared downward. All but the rim of the bowl was screened away by a blanket of mist. The mist hung over everything, swirling sluggishly across a scattering of tree tops and ridges that poked through the haze like jagged bones from a broken corpse. Scrub choked the rim and upper slopes of the hollows, brambles and thickets that were wintry and stunted. Nothing moved in the pit. No sound came out of it. It was an open grave that waited for an occupant.
Ben eyed it uneasily. It was frightening to look upon-the more so from its edge than from the safety of the Landsview. It appeared monstrous to him, a sprawling, misshapen chasm carved from the earth and left to gather rot. He glanced momentarily at a stand of Bonnie Blues that grew close to the rim. They were blackened and withered.
"High Lord, it is not too late to rethink your decision," Questor advised softly, standing at his elbow.
He shook his head wordlessly. The decision had been made.
"Perhaps we should wait until morning," Abernathy muttered, glancing uneasily at the clouded sky.
Ben shook his head a second time. "No. No more delays. I'm going in now." He turned to them, glancing from one face to the next as he spoke. "I want you to listen carefully and I don't want any arguments. Fillip and Sot will go with me as guides. They say that they know the Deep Fell. I will take one other. The rest of you will wait here."
"High Lord, no!" Questor exclaimed in disbelief.
"You would trust yourself to those ... those cannibals!" Abernathy raged.
"You may have need of our protection!" Questor went on.
"It is madness for you to go alone!" Abernathy finished.
The kobolds hissed and bared their teeth in unmistakable disapproval, the G'home Gnomes chittered and shrank from the conflict, and the scribe and the wizard kept arguing, both at the same time. Only Willow said nothing, but she stared at Ben so hard that he could feel it.
He put up his hands to quiet them. "Enough, already! I told you that I didn't want any arguments, and I don't! I know what I'm doing. I've thought it through pretty carefully. We're not going to have a replay of what happened in the Melchor. If I don't come out when I should, I want someone free to come in after me."
"It may be far too late for you by then, High Lord," Abernathy pointed out bluntly.
"You said you were taking one other, High Lord," Questor interjected quickly. "I assume you meant me. You may have need of my magic."
"I may, indeed, Questor," he agreed. "But not unless I run into trouble with Nightshade and need my chestnuts pulled out of the fire. You're staying here with Abernathy and the kobolds. I'm taking Willow."
The sylph's hard stare turned to one of surprise.
"You would take the girl?" Questor exclaimed. "But what protection can she offer you?"
"None." Ben watched her eyes turn introspective. "I'm not looking for protection. I'm looking for common ground. I don't want the witch to think the King of Landover needs needs protection, and that is what she is likely to think if I descend on her with all of you. Willow is not so threatening. Willow is a fairy creature like the witch. They share a common background, and together Willow and I may be able to find the means to enlist Nightshade to our cause." protection, and that is what she is likely to think if I descend on her with all of you. Willow is not so threatening. Willow is a fairy creature like the witch. They share a common background, and together Willow and I may be able to find the means to enlist Nightshade to our cause."
"You do not know the witch, High Lord!" Questor insisted vehemently.
"You certainly do not!" Abernathy agreed.
Willow came forward then, and she took his arm gently. "They may be right, Ben. Nightshade is not likely to offer her help simply because of me. She cares nothing more for the lake country people than for the court at Sterling Silver. She cares nothing for anyone. This is very dangerous."
He noticed that she did not offer to remain behind. She had already stripped away boots and forest cloak and stood next to him, barefoot in a pair of short pants and sleeveless tunic. "I know," he answered her. "That is why Questor, Abernathy, and the kobolds will remain here-to come to our rescue if we need it. If we all go in at once, we all risk falling victim to the same treachery. But if the strongest of us remain behind, the chances of rescue are improved." He looked at the others. "Do you understand?"
There was a general grumbling of acknowledgment. "I respectfully submit that this whole idea is both dangerous and foolish, High Lord," Abernathy declared.
"I would prefer to be there to advise you," Questor argued.
Ben nodded patiently. "I respect your feelings, but I've made up my mind. Whatever risk there is, I don't want anyone sharing it with me who doesn't have to. If I could do this myself without endangering anyone, that's what I would do. Unfortunately, I can't."
"No one has ever asked you to, High Lord," Questor replied quietly.
Ben met his eyes. "I know. I could not have had better friends than you have been." He paused. "But this is where it all ends, Questor. You have done for me all that you can. Time and choices are running out. I have to make something happen if I wish to be Landover's King. I have that responsibility-to you, to the land, and to myself."
Questor said nothing. Ben glanced briefly at the others. No one spoke. He nodded and reached for Willow's hand. He fought back against the chill that had suddenly settled through him.
"Lead on," he ordered Fillip and Sot.
Together, they started down into the pit.
NIGHTSHADE.
It was like stepping off into a pool of blackened, fouled water. The mist rose to greet them, lapping anxiously at their boots. It climbed to their thighs and curled to their waists. It tugged at their shoulders and finally their necks. A moment later, they were submerged in it completely. Ben had to suppress a sudden urge to hold his breath against its suffocating tide.
His hand gripped Willow's tightly.
The mist was an impenetrable screen, closing about them as if a blanket that would smother them. It clung to their skin with fingers of damp insistence, and its touch was an itch that scratching would not cure. The smell of rotting wood and earth filled the air, permeating the mist, giving it the texture of toxic liquid splashed upon the skin. An unpleasant warmth issued out of it, as if something huge were trapped within the murk and sweating in terror as its lifeblood was sucked steadily away.
Ben sensed the terror to be his own, and he fought back against it. The back and underarms of his tunic were damp, and his breathing was ragged. He had never been so frightened. It was worse than when the Mark had come for him in the time passage. It was worse than his encounter with the dragon. It was a fear of something felt and not seen. His feet picked their way mechanically down the scrub-choked slope; he was barely aware of their movement. He could see the stocky forms of the gnomes a few feet ahead of him as they doggedly worked their way forward. He could see Willow beside him, her green-skinned form ghostlike, the cornsilk hair on her head, calves and forearms trailing out behind her as if stirred by the mist. He could see bits and pieces of the scrub and rock about him, and of trees and ridges somewhere far ahead. He saw them and was blind to them. It was what he could not see and could only feel that commanded the focus of his attention. It was what was hidden that he seemed suddenly to see best.
His free hand searched for the medallion tucked within his tunic, and he fingered it reassuringly through the cloth.
The minutes dragged on as the four companions groped their way through the haze, eyes searching sightlessly. Then the slope leveled out, the mist thinned, and scrub turned to brush and forest. They had reached a plateau several dozen feet above the hollows floor. Ben blinked. He could see again. Trees spread away before him in a tangle of trunks, limbs, and vines, and ridges thrust upward sharply into their mass, cresting against a skyline that was canopied in roiling mist. The hollows rim had disappeared. Everything beyond was gone.
Ben pushed past the gnomes to stand on a small promontory that jutted out from the slope, and he stared into the wilderness. His breath caught sharply in his throat.
"Oh, my God!" he whispered.
The hollows spread away for as far as the eye could see-farther than was conceivably possible. The Deep Fell had mushroomed into something so vast that its walls could no longer contain it. The Deep Fell had grown as big as all of Landover!
"Willow!" he whispered urgently.
She was beside him at once. He pointed out into the forest, into the vast, endless tract of it, terror reflected in his eyes as he struggled to comprehend what he was looking at. She understood at once. Her hands closed about his, squeezing. "It is only illusion, Ben," she said quickly. "What you see is not really there. It is only Nightshade's magic at work. She has mirrored back a thousand times the whole of the hollows to frighten us away."
Ben looked again. He saw nothing different, but he nodded as if he did anyway. "Sure-just a trick with magic to scare us off." He took a deep breath. He was calm again. "Want to know something, Willow? It works pretty well."
He gave her a quick smile. "How is it that you aren't fooled?"
She smiled a pixie grin back. "The fairy in me senses such tricks."
They continued their descent toward the hollows floor. Fillip and Sot seemed unbothered by the illusion. That was probably because their eyesight was so poor that they were unaware of the illusion, Ben decided. Sometimes ignorance was was bliss. bliss.
They reached the hollows floor and paused. The tangle of the wilderness spread away before them, seemingly endless. Gnarled trunks and limbs twisted like spiders' webs against the ceiling of mist, vines clung like snakes, and brush choked on itself in thick tangles. The earth was damp and yielding.
Fillip and Sot sniffed the air a moment, then started forward. Ben and Willow followed. They pushed ahead through the wilderness, finding paths where it seemed there could be none. The hollows wall disappeared behind them and the jungle closed about. It was eerily still. They neither saw nor heard another living thing. No animals called, no birds flew, no insects hummed. The light was weak, sunlight screened into a dim gray haze by the clouds of mist. Shadows lay over everything. There was a sense of having been swallowed whole. There was a feeling of having been snared.
They had not gone far when they encountered the lizards.
They were at the edge of a deep ravine and about to start down when Ben saw movement at the bottom. He brought the others to a hurried halt and peered cautiously into the shadows. Dozens of lizards clustered together in the pit of the ravine, their scaled, greenish black bodies slithering across one another, their wicked-looking tongues flicking at the misted air. They were all sizes, some as large as alligators, some as small as frogs. They blocked all passage forward.
Willow took Ben's hand and smiled. "Another illusion, Ben," she assured him.
"This way, High Lord," advised Fillip.
"Come, High Lord," invited Sot.
They descended into the pit and the lizards disappeared. Ben was sweating again and wishing he didn't feel like such a fool.
Other illusions awaited them, and Ben was fooled each time. There was a monstrous old ash tree clustered thick with giant bats. There was a stream filled with piranhalike fish. Worst of all, there was the clearing in which vaguely human limbs stretched from the broken earth, clawed fingers grasping at anything that sought to pass through. Each time Willow and the gnomes led him resolutely forward, and the imagined dangers evaporated into the mist.
More than an hour slipped by before they reached the swamp. It was past midday. A vast marsh of reeds and quicksand stretched across their path for as far as the eye could see. Steam lifted from the marsh, and the quicksand bubbled as if fed by gasses from the earth below.
Ben glanced quickly at Willow. "Illusion?" he asked, already prepared for the answer she would give.
But this time she shook her head. "No, the swamp is real."
The gnomes were sniffing the air again. Ben glanced out across the swamp. A crow sat on a branch of deadwood halfway across, a large, ugly bird with a streak of white cresting its head. It stared at him with its tiny, dark eyes, and its head cocked reflectively.
Ben glanced away. "What now?" he asked the others.
"There is a trail further on, High Lord," Fillip answered.
"A pathway across the marsh," Sot agreed.
They waddled ahead, following the line of the swamp, ferret faces lifted, testing the air with their noses. Ben and Willow trailed slowly after. A hundred feet further on, the gnomes turned into the swamp and proceeded to cross. The swamp looked no different here than anywhere else, but the ground was firm enough to hold them, and they were safely past in a few minutes' time. Ben glanced back at the crow. It was still watching him.
"Let's not get paranoid," he muttered to himself.
They pressed on into the jungle. They had gone only a short distance further when Fillip and Sot became suddenly excited. Ben pushed quickly forward and found that the gnomes had discovered a nest of forest mice and flushed the family out. Fillip slipped into the brush on his belly, snaked through it soundlessly and emerged with one of the unfortunates firmly in hand. He bit off its head and gave the body to Sot. Ben grimaced, kicked Sot in the backside, and angrily ordered them both to get moving. But the memory of the headless mouse stayed with him.
He forgot about the mouse when they came up against the wall of brambles. The brambles lifted better than a dozen feet into the air, mingling with the trees and vines of the forest, stretching away into the distance. Again, Ben glanced at Willow.
"The brambles are real, too," she announced.
Fillip and Sot tested the air, walked up and down the wall both ways, then turned right. They had gone about fifty feet when Ben saw the crow. It was sitting on the crest of the wall of brambles just above them and staring down. Sharp eyes fixed on Ben. He stared back momentarily and could have sworn the bird winked.
"Here, High Lord," Fillip called.
"A passage, High Lord," Sot announced.
The gnomes pushed through the brambles as if they didn't exist, and Ben and Willow followed. The brambles parted easily. Ben straightened on the other side and glanced back. The crow was gone.
He saw the crow several times after that, sitting in trees or perching on logs, motionless as it watched him with those same secretive eyes. He never saw it fly and he never heard it call. Once he asked Willow if she saw it, too-none too certain that this wasn't just another illusion. She said that she did see it, but that she had no idea what it was doing there.
"It seems to be the only bird in the hollows," he pointed out doubtfully.
She nodded. "Perhaps it belongs to Nightshade."
That was not a very reassuring thought, but there was nothing Ben could do about it, so he put the matter out of his mind. The jungle had begun to thin, the trunks, limbs, and vines giving way to small clearings in which pockets of mist hung like tethered clouds. There was a brightening in the sky ahead, and a hint of the jungle's end. But there was no sign of the walls of the hollow as there should have been, and the Deep Fell was as sprawling and endless as it had first seemed.
"Can you tell where we are or how far we've come?" he asked the others, but they shook their heads wordlessly.
Then abruptly the jungle gave way and the four companions stood on the threshold of a castle fortress that dwarfed anything Ben had ever seen or even imagined could exist. The castle rose up before them like a mountain, its towers lifting into the clouds and mist so that they were screened from view, its walls receding into the distant horizon for miles. Turrets, battlements, parapets, and ramparts were constructed one upon the other in dazzling geometrical designs, the whole so vast in scope that it might have enclosed an entire city within its stone-block shell. It sat upon a great plateau with the jungle grown thick at its base. A rock-strewn trail led from where they stood to the open castle gates and a raised portcullis.
Ben stared at the castle in disbelief. Nothing could be this huge, his instincts told him. Nothing could be of such monstrous size. It had to be an illusion-a trick of magic, like his vision of the hollows and the things they had encountered....
"What is this place, Willow?" he blurted out, cutting short his speculation, and the disbelief and awe he felt were apparent in his voice.
"I do not know, Ben." She stood with him, her own gaze fixed on the monstrosity. She shook her head slowly. "I do not understand it. This is not an illusion, Ben-and yet it is. There is magic at work, but the magic accounts for only part of what we see."
The G'home Gnomes, too, were confused. They shifted about uneasily, their ferretlike faces casting about for a scent they could rely upon. They failed to find one and began mumbling in guarded tones.
Ben forced his gaze away from the castle and looked carefully about for anything that would give him a clue as to its origin and purpose. He saw nothing at first, save for the jungle and the mist.
Then he saw the crow.
It was perched on a tree limb several dozen yards away, wings folded carefully in, eyes fixed on him. It was the same crow-glossy black feathers crested in white. Ben stared at it. He could not explain it, but he was certain that the crow knew what this was all about. It infuriated him that the bird was sitting there so placidly, as if waiting to see what they would do next.
"Come on," he told the others and started up the trail.
They walked cautiously ahead and the castle loomed closer. It didn't shimmer and disappear as Ben had expected it might. Instead, it took on an ominous, grim appearance as the weathered rock grew more detailed and the sound of wind whistling through towers and ramparts grew pronounced. Ben was leading now, with Willow a step behind. The gnomes had fallen back, their paws fastened to Ben's pants, their furry faces apprehensive as they peered out from behind his legs. Dry leaves and twigs rustled across the stone pathway, and the warmth of the jungle had faded to a chill.
The entrance to the castle gaped open before them, a black hole with iron teeth. Shadows wrapped everything beyond in an impenetrable shroud. Ben slowed at the gates and peered guardedly into the gloom. He could just make out what appeared to be a kind of courtyard with a few scattered benches and tables, a cluster of blackened stanchions and a weather-beaten throne covered with dust and spiderwebs. He could see nothing beyond that.
He went forward once more, the others trailing. They passed beneath the shadow of the portcullis and entered the courtyard. It was massive, unkempt, and empty. Their footsteps rang in hollow cadence through the stillness.
Ben was halfway across when he saw the crow. Somehow it had gotten there before them. It sat upon the throne, eyes fixed directly on him. He slowed and stopped.
The crow's eyes blinked and suddenly turned blood-red.
"Nightshade!" Willow whispered quickly in warning.
The crow began to change. It seemed to expand against the gloom, shimmering with an aura of crimson light, its shadow rising up against the throne like a wraith set free. Blackened stanchions flared and caught fire, and light exploded through the darkness. The G'home Gnomes gasped in dismay, bolted back through the gates of the castle, and were gone. Willow stood next to Ben, her hand gripping his as if it were a lifeline that kept her from drowning. Ben watched the crow transform into something darker still, and he was suddenly afraid that he had made an awful mistake.
Then the crimson aura died away and there was only the light from the fires that burned in the iron stanchions. The crow was gone. Nightshade sat upon the crumbling throne.