Once more the shadowy presence warding the Druid’s Keep surfaced, just as Aphenglow had hoped it would, as ready to protect the Inner Wall as it had been the Outer. Its dark, amorphous presence coiled like a serpent—a venomous, hissing creature. In the blink of an eye, it swatted away the flits, sending them spinning out of control into the woods from which they had emerged, effortlessly shattering their attempt to penetrate the plane of the walls. Then it sank into the stonework of the Inner Wall and reemerged as a suffocating black cloud extending outward from the stonework’s vertical plane to knock away the scaling ladders and the men hanging on them and blow the rest of the soldiers back across the courtyard with a giant’s breath that sent men and equipment whirling and spinning like so many autumn leaves caught in a north wind.

Everyone broke and ran after that, soldiers and unit commanders alike, fleeing the battleground for the comparative safety of the Outer Wall, where they huddled in shock and terror.

From behind his shelter on the ramparts where he knelt beside Stoon, Drust Chazhul signaled for the attack to be broken off. He slumped back against the stone barrier, enraged. “We’re being made fools of!” he hissed.

But his watchful companion had remembered something he had heard the unfortunate Deek Trink mention while he was still upright. “Maybe,” he mused quietly, giving Drust a careful look, “there’s another way.”

25

THE BLEAK EXPANSE OF THE BREAKLINE STRETCHED AWAY in front of her as the Walker Boh emerged from the peaks of the Kensrowe and turned west toward the miles of unsettled wilderness that would eventually end at the shores of the Blue Divide. They were removed from anything resembling civilization, flying over country uninhabited save for the hardiest and most primal denizens of the Four Lands. A thousand feet up and well clear of what dwelled below, they had only the landscape to suggest the savage existence of those creatures. Farshaun might know a little of them from his travels, and the Speakman surely knew a good deal more, but the rest of the expedition had heard only stories.

Still, just looking at the vast, rugged emptiness—the blasted earth that seemed to have been torn up and thrown back down again in clumps, the ragged, gaping fissures that ran for thousands of yards, the upheaval of rocks that had become razor-sharp and weather-pitted, the smooth flat surfaces of sinkholes said to be bottomless and burrows that tunneled beneath the ruined surface and were said to house giant insects—made Khyber Elessedil wonder if perhaps the Speakman’s prediction that none of them would return from this expedition was an accurate foretelling.