The Malmillard Codex (21 page)

Val made no reply; he was engaged in rubbing
his sore ribs, where a flying mass of bony boy had struck him.

Just after Val passed through the portal, he
turned to watch it close behind him; he wanted a clear image of
just what he needed to look for, so that when he found Madryn and
brought her back here, he'd know exactly what it looked like when
it was time to go through the gate.

He gazed up, up, up. On this side of the
portal, the stones higher that the highest tower, and they
displayed a workmanship that far surpassed any Val had ever seen.
The stones fit together in jagged, uneven seams, though their edges
were smooth and sharp and there was no visible mortar. Each stone
section was of a different shade, gray, bluish, ruddy, and colors
that had no name.

The icy winds that buffeted Val on the other
side of the portal were nonexistent here; in some fashion, they'd
died away somewhere between this place and the desert from which
he'd come.

Val gazed up at the tall pylons, watching
the central spiral through which he'd leapt as it shrank away with
a soft, murmuring moan of whirling air.

It was at that exact instant that a flying
bundle, composed of little more than bony elbows and knees and
outstretched sharp fingers, slammed into Val's broad chest, with
the speed and accuracy of an arrow from a crossbow. Val fell
backward, his arms with unconscious concern clasping Garet to his
breast as they both tumbled into deep, sticky mud, just on the edge
of a murky, ice-rimmed pool that bubbled busily.

Garet jumped up, as unharmed and resilient
as a toy, and like a toy, he bounced around Val, all the while
making his aggravation known in a squeaky, offended voice.

"You tried to leave me behind! How dare you,
Master Val? Who would help you rescue the mistress?"

Val lay there gasping, unable to make an
intelligible reply as his catapulted servant knocked all the breath
from him.

Before Val could totally regain his breath,
Garet's strident voice died away into a mumble as the boy began to
notice the sights around them.

The two of them had just left desert steppes
and ravines clogged with sand, just departed a land of heat and dry
air. In the space of a few heartbeats, they had arrived in a damp
and somber landscape, composed of single rocks rising from pits and
pools of thick, viscous mud that was black as pitch. These pools
were scattered with a prodigal hand throughout their range of
visibility, and each one was as perfectly round as a master
navigator's glove, though varying in size from no more than a
puddle, to vast lakes. Each rock that rose from the glutinous mud
was of faultless geometric shape as well, ranging from soaring
pyramids with sleek, shimmering points, to tiny cylinders with
precisely rounded sides. Interspersed between these tarry bodies of
water were open, empty pits.

Garet pattered toward one of these, stared
down into its depth.

"Ah, Master Val?"

Val had nearly regained his errant breath at
last. He rose to his feet; the mud into which he'd landed made evil
sucking sounds as he pulled himself away from it. Val looked at the
boy.

"I don't believe that this…hole has a bottom
to it," Garet informed him.

"Then," Val panted, "you won't…hit the
bottom…when I throw you…into it."

Garet did not deign to dignify this comment
with a reply. The boy turned around in circles—staying far away
from any open pit in the area—and observed the uncanny landscape
that surrounded them.

With his hands on his hips, Garet said,
"Well, Master Val, what a place I have brought you to, have I not?
Wait until I tell the others back in Lakazsh about this." He
pattered towards Val, keeping a careful watch on his path. "But if
you're quite through resting, sir, I really believe we should get
on our way, you know," the boy continued testily. "I for one do not
wish to spend any longer than necessary in this cold place. We
should find the mistress and get back her, don't you agree?"

Val nodded in agreement. They opened their
packs and retrieved the heavy cloaks that Aanakun had insisted they
bring. The thick goatskin coverings felt good against the piercing
cold.

"Take careful notice of our position, Garet,
and of where we go," Val ordered as he buckled his swordbelt around
the outside of his cloak. "That tall stone pyramid there will be
our landmark; I don't see anything else around here like it. And
there," he pointed off into the distance, then rubbed his hands
together in the frigid air, "is the tower where Aanakun thinks they
may be holding Madryn. We must be there, retrieve her, and be back
here at the portal before the thirteen stars shine in the sky,
remember."

Garet shot a doubtful gaze at the heavens
above them. Instead of blue depths, a vast ruddy dome stretched
over them. What light there was apparently emanated from the very
air about them, a cold clear light that cast few shadows. "I
suppose there are stars? I suppose there is a night?" the boy
squeaked. "Aanakun told us about them, to be sure, but what if he
was wrong? Or mistaken? And is there a moon?"

Val shrugged. It didn't matter to him if
ships sailed across the night sky in this uncanny place, or flames
of burning vapors, or dancing fishes.

All he wanted was to find Madryn, and then
get all three of them out of there.

***

A sharp, agonized scream ripped through the
still air, then traveled upward in measured cadences from the
bowels of the tower.

"One guest is already here, brother, and the
other comes apace," laughed the cold voice; the laugh sounded like
breaking glass.

"But what of the small one?" complained the
dark voice. "I like not the feel of the small one. He has the smell
of…I do not know. But I do not like the feel of him."

A shower of tiny ice spicules rained down
inside the round study at the top of the tower, to bounce and
tumble on the chill stone floor. A mouse, daring a dash for a
crumble of dried cheese, was pierced by scores of the minute frozen
spears; the ice turned at once to a vivid crimson as they leached
away the animal's lifeblood. The mouse twisted and twitched for a
moment…then was still.

"What can such an insignificant thing as
that do to us, my brother?" asked the cold. "See what my magic does
to small, soft things? Why worry now, when our plans are almost
complete?"

"True," agreed the dark in a considering
tone.

True…true…true…ue…ue
…came the
whispering echoes, fighting for their transient lives against
another thin, reedy scream.

The floating globe, suspended in dark and
swirling mists, displayed deep in its depths a pair of tiny
figures, one towering over the other, as they trudged through an
eerie landscape.

"But the small one has a most familiar
smell," complained the dark. Skeletal fingers tapped against a flat
tabletop of cold white stone; they made a sound like the clicking
mandibles of a death beetle. "That smell offends me."

"I will remove it for you, brother," said
the cold in a conciliatory tone. "It will be my pleasure."

"See that it is so, and you shall have a
reward," promised dark in a syrupy voice.

"My reward is to see you happy, dear
brother, as always," said the cold. "Happy—and avenged."

***

Val regarded the tower that crowned the
outcropping of rock rearing above them—with a persistent, yet
vague, memory of having somewhere, some time, seen it before.

The tall cylinder of shining white stood out
like a beacon against the murky sky, and the background of misty,
parallel hills that rose behind it. The tower's construction was so
detailed and precise that there were no lines to show where one
stone left off and another began; it was almost as if the thing had
grown straight up like some uncanny mushroom from the rotting,
rancid soil.

But there were lines visible in the lustrous
surface. Again, Val was almost positive that he had seen something
very like them before. Pale gray lines, ever changing, ever
twisting into new and horrible shapes and patterns. Pictures would
form from those busy lines—clearly visible from Val's vantage
point—pictures that drew the eye and enthralled the questing mind,
pictures of hanged men and headless women and nightmare creatures
that writhed and turned upon and into each other.

Garet squatted beside Val, his teeth
chattering with the chill. The boy had kept up with the long legs
of his master all that morning—Had it been a morning? Did this
strange place have a morning?—his constant recriminations about
almost being left behind his only conversation. They had traversed
the alien landscape, skirting ice-coated pools of murky black. They
had been forced more than once to backtrack around impassable
upshot piles of smooth rocks, fearful all the while that they would
lose their way. They had crossed plains of glutinous mud that
sucked and squelched and threatened to pull the very boots from
their feet; the mud, if mud it was, reached up insinuating tendrils
of glossy black, wrapping around their legs like a living
thing.

Each and every difficult step that they took
toward the shimmering white tower appeared to thrust its shining
surface further and further from them. A trick of the eyes, of the
strange light? Val wondered if it was that…or something far less
canny. Whatever it was, they had taken far longer to reach their
goal that Val would have thought possible when they'd first begun
their trek.

But they had arrived at last. They crouched
at the bottom of a rise or hill, on the top of which rested the
enigmatic tower.

Unfortunately, there was a most unexpected
problem to add to their long list.

"Are you quite, quite sure that the mistress
is in that horrible place?" whispered Garet, blowing on his frozen
fingers in the vain attempt to bring some warmth back into
them.

"If she's not, then your bandit friends have
steered us wrong," Val replied, his voice gruff with concern for
the boy.

For them both.

He eyed the skinny, shivering form beside
him. How long a time had passed since the two of them—one, somewhat
more precipitately than the other—arrived through the portal into
this place? How long until the night appeared, thirteen stars as
its herald? How much longer could he, could the boy, last in this
insinuating cold that cut through their heavy cloaks like
razors?

Long enough to free Madryn and get back to
the portal, back to their own world.

Val offered up a prayer to any god that
might be listening.

"Aanakun didn't lie about the portal, did
he?" asked Garet with a flash of his usual spirit. "He didn't lie
about the tower, or the way this place looks, or what we must watch
out for, did he? Although I do admit, I was somewhat disappointed
that he tried to prevent me from accompanying you. Still, I hope
that all the time we spent last night, listening to him tell us all
he knows of this eerie place, is not going to be wasted."

"But he never mentioned those, now did he?"
countered Val, with a nod up the hill.

'Those' were the guardians of the tower, and
Aanakun had most assuredly not mentioned them at all.

Val was not entirely sure that he would have
mentioned them either—especially to anyone who had never seen them.
For he was positive that it would take seeing for anyone to believe
in such creatures.

And even then…

There were two of the creatures. One, the
one that stood on the right side of the wide-open doorway to the
tower, was the largest animal that either of them had ever seen. Or
so they'd thought; an instant later, it had shrunk down to the size
of a mewling puppy compared to its fellow guardian, which appeared
on the other side of the open door.

But, the longer Val stared at the beasts,
the more confused he became about their actual sizes and shapes.
Oh, there were clear impressions of scales and claws, of long tails
and more than the usual complement of legs, of gaping mouths full
of rows and rows—and rows—of long sharp teeth. But the things would
shift in and out of visibility, one moment clear and distinct in
the biting air, the next dim and hazy, as if hidden behind vapors
or the miasma that rose up in lazy waves from the icy ground.

"That looks to be the only entrance," Val
whispered, nodding at the well-guarded black maw that broke the
white expanse of the lofty spire. The opening lay just across a
bridge that appeared to be composed of mist, pale and
insubstantial. The vaporous bridge spanned a deep moat, in which
they could see, floating to the surface of inky liquid, segments of
bodies or limbs. These fragmented body parts would fly up from the
dark waters and attach themselves to the guardian beasts, with
audible and extremely unpleasant sucking sounds. Other chunks would
detach from one beast or the other and fall down into the murky
liquid with a repugnant splash.

"How are we going to get past those…things
and get inside?" Garet asked as uncontrollable shivers wracked his
scrawny frame.

Val had no idea. His heart was savagely
thumping and exhaustion threatened to overcome him at any moment.
He felt as if he'd lived on the edge of a precipice for years, and
was losing his footing and ready to tumble over the side.

And always, he felt the need for speed.

Follow Madryn, get her back from whoever,
whatever had taken her, get all three of them back to the portal,
in as short a time as possible, wandering through a strange and
savage land, thirteen stars in a darkening sky,
hurry,
hurry…

Damn the woman,
Val thought in
sudden, overwhelming anger.
Damn the woman.
Why had he ever
agreed to accompany her on this useless, hopeless quest? It would
have been better, far better, if he had died in the hunt that day,
now so long in the past, than to have ended up in this hideous
place, chasing after a woman who cared no more for him than she
would a pet, an animal...