The Reluctant Champion

10. The Road to Hell

The next day dawned clear and cold. The blizzard had blown itself out and blown the clouds away to dump rain on some country to the west. The sky was a clear, merciless blue, the air crackling cold. Cold pressed in from the shutters and crowded with them around the fire.

They went again to the horses, and found them well as before. They visited the tree, and found her as unmoved by the cold as by the blizzard. She listened disapprovingly to the story they told, and declined again to come indoors.

"I do not like walls," she said. "I do not like these stones. And I do not like your plan. This is a place that keeps its secrets." After a moment she added, "I saw the ravens fly again from the topmost tower this morning."

Madoc squinted up at the tower. "How would it be if we climbed up there?" he suggested. "We might get some sense of where we are."

Finding their way to the tower was not easy. The stairs and corridors wound in confusing ways, and Madoc took every opportunity to explore. Every corridor was bare, every room they looked into abandoned. Eventually the sheer weight of the empty fortress, the scale of loss, began to weigh on them. Here, kitchens on a mammoth scale—here a suite of apartments—here a hall built for feasting—all empty, all abandoned, all lifeless.

"Where are the wizards?" hissed Madoc after a time.

"Nowhere we've come to yet," said Galen. They kept climbing.

Exploring a corridor choked with crumbled mortar, they found a winding stair that led them up and up until finally they stepped into a high round chamber with open window-holes on every wall. They crossed the empty floor to look out.

There was a stunned silence.

"I thought there would be a view," Madoc murmured.

They looked west, toward the tattered skirts of the retreating storm. There a deep mountain valley fell away, widening into wooded dales. Somewhere back there, before the range of foothills at the edge of sight, lay a ruined village. They moved to the next window quickly.

To the north they looked across a rocky waste to mountains that piled higher and higher yet, until their snowy peaks looked like thunderheads against the sky. It was a beautiful sight, but struck them with such cold that once again, they moved on.

To the east, the hills fell away in jagged and tumbled cliffs, the kind of country that eats men and horses, where a traveler might spend days climbing down into a rift only to discover that there is no way out the other side, and that there is no option but to return the same way and try again. They moved on.

To the south there was an opening in the hills. Here the pass they had been climbing crested and then fell away in rounded curves, hills and downs falling away to the sea. The sea! It lay at the edge of vision, hazy like the sky laid across the edge of the earth. A green land lay between their height and that far water.

"That's the way our brigands went," said Madoc grimly.

"Will we catch them?" asked Jaspar.

Madoc shook the boy's shoulder. "We'll catch them," he said.

Galen turned his back on the view.

The room they stood in was high and barren. A vaulted ceiling high above them offered perhaps some protection from snow and rain, but the window embrasures around them seemed never to have held shutters or glass. An aerie at the top of the pass, well suited to tracking movement between two lands. Again Galen wondered who built the place, and for what purpose. Then he frowned.

"Madoc, look," he said. "This place is clean."

Madoc looked around. "No bird-trash you mean."

"If those ravens have been using it for a rookery, you'd expect to find a mess up here."