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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.
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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
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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...
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