Troy Denning - The Sentinel

Still, Theamont led them onward. When the gray glow of false dawn began to filter through the hawthorn branches ahead, he urged them to move faster. Eventually, Kleef found himself almost carrying Arietta, and Joelle and Theamont had to resort to dragging Malik along by his armpits.

When even that did not seem fast enough for the satyr, Arietta cast her spell again. Theamont did not even slow his pace as he explained.

“He says the Forest Way’s magic ends at dawn,” Arietta said. “If we haven’t reached the end before then, we’ll be trapped inside.”

“Would that be so bad?” Malik asked. “I could sleep the entire day.”

Arietta hesitated, as though debating whether she wanted to answer Malik at all, then finally said, “He didn’t mean until nightfall. His actual words were ‘when the thorns close.’ ”

The threat of death-by-perforation was enough to reinvigorate the companions, at least temporarily. Malik no longer had to be dragged, and Arietta grabbed onto Kleef’s belt and insisted that he pull her along at whatever pace Theamont set.

The gray glow filtering through the branches became a pearly gleam. Leaves rustled in the morning breeze, and the sound of purling water arose somewhere beyond the thorny wall ahead. Theamont gestured more vigorously, at once urging them to hurry and beaming as though the end were in sight. The pearly gleam became a silver radiance, and the glow began to fade from the mossy ground.

Theamont waved them onward one last time, then broke into a sprint and raced down the path. The hawthorn branches continued to open ahead of him-but more slowly, and at times it seemed he would crash into the thorn wall before it divided.

Then there were no more branches ahead, just Theamont running up the Forest Way, silhouetted against a circle of silver sky. After a few steps, he stopped and stood panting for breath, his gaze fixed on the far horizon. Finally, he turned and pointed at the ground, beaming and nodding to indicate that they had reached the end.

Joelle arrived next, so exhausted that when she finally stopping running, she stumbled and nearly pitched over. Theamont grabbed her arm and pulled her back to her feet.

By then, the first golden rays of sunlight were shooting across the horizon beyond them. A soft hissing arose from the walls of the path, and the hawthorn branches crept inward.

“Hold on!” Kleef called.

He reached back and grabbed Malik by the arm, then sprinted the last dozen paces to the end of the path-and nearly ran over Joelle as she stepped in front of him, her palms raised.

“Kleef, wait!” she yelled. “It’s a chasm!”

Kleef jammed his front heel into the ground and threw his weight back, then felt his feet go out from beneath him. He released Malik’s arm and hurled himself away from Arietta-then felt Theamont’s big hoof land between his shoulder blades and stop his slide by pinning him face-down against the mossy ground.

Beneath his feet, Kleef felt nothing but air.

“All that running for this?” Malik cried out. He was a few steps to Kleef’s left, somewhere near Joelle. “It is nothing but a dead end.”

Once Theamont had removed his hoof, Kleef rolled over, sat up, and found himself looking across twenty paces of gorge. He couldn’t see the bottom from where he was, but from somewhere below came the purling sound he had started to hear earlier.

Theamont said something in his own language, and Kleef looked up to see the satyr pointing down the canyon.

“He says we can rest on that island,” Arietta translated. “The Shadovar won’t be able to find us, and the orcs are a hundred leagues behind.”

“A hundred leagues?” Kleef asked, rising. “How far did the Forest Way take us?”

Theamont studied Kleef with a blank expression for a moment, then turned back to Arietta. As the satyr spoke, Kleef peered down into the gorge and saw that they were forty feet above a dark, slow-moving river. The water filled the canyon from wall to wall.

After a moment, Theamont fell silent, and Arietta turned to her companions. “He says we’re free to make a raft, as long as we use only dead wood,” she said. “But the river empties into the Underchasm, so we should leave the water as soon as we hear the canyon roaring.”

“A raft is well and good,” Malik said, peering over the edge. “But how are we to reach the island-or the river, for that matter?”

Theamont smiled and used his fingers to make a running motion toward the river, then spoke a single word that needed no translation.

Jump .

They hit the water hard, and Malik felt the river rip him free of Kleef’s tight embrace and carry him away, and he saw what a fool he had been to place his fate in the hands of an oaf. Yet what choice had there been? Joelle and Arietta were in the water already, and the satyr had threatened to throw Malik in after them if he did not jump himself. In the end, it had seemed safer to trust Kleef than to test their guide’s resolve.

It was a mistake Malik feared would drown him. The water was as cold as it was dark, and it had seeped into his boots and soaked his robe, until he was caught in his own clothes like a fish in a net. The current dragged him down to the bottom of the river and sent him tumbling along the riverbed, bouncing off boulders and raking through gravel, sliding along sunken logs and scraping past shelves of bedrock. It dropped him into the narrow channel between two outcroppings and squeezed him out the other end, and his breath left him in a stream of bubbles.

And then Malik called out to Cyric in his thoughts. Do not abandon me now, Mighty One , he warned, or you will spend eternity serving as Shar’s toe-licker in the Tower of-

His boot soles struck the top of a boulder, and Malik knew his god had answered his prayers. He pushed off at once. His head broke the water’s surface in the same heartbeat, and he found himself in the center of a river that filled the gorge so completely that its waters ran tight against the canyon walls. The island they sought was but a blurry green dot on the downstream horizon, an impossible distance for Malik to swim in his sodden robes and water-filled boots.

Fortunately, Kleef was treading water off to the right, no more than three arm lengths away. But the oaf was looking downstream, his blocky head swiveling back and forth as he searched for his lost companion. Malik gulped down a few breaths and opened his mouth to call out to the oaf-and felt something wet grab his ankle.

Malik looked down and, through the dark water, he saw a crooked arm reaching out to hold his foot between a pair of scaly pincers.

“Kkk-”

He managed only a single sound before he was pulled under, and his cry for help became a gurgle. Fearing the worst, he reached for his sword with his good hand and felt himself being pulled deeper. He scraped along the rocky bottom for longer than he thought any man could bear, his weapon hand taking such a beating that at last he left his sword in its scabbard and drew his arm back.

His captor continued to pull, bringing him upstream, and up to the surface. At last, Malik was able to spin around to face his attacker.

It was a dead tree.

Or rather, it was a twenty-foot section of tree, with a handful of dead limbs reaching out from its trunk like so many crooked arms. Malik’s foot was caught beneath a narrow crotch where two leafless branches came together, and one of those branches had splintered halfway through and then bent across Malik’s ankle to trap his foot.

This was no act of random chance, Malik knew, for it was through such haphazard events that the gods worked their schemes, disguising their true intentions from mortals and fellow gods alike. Knowing that any effort to free himself would be in vain, Malik made circles with his free leg and waved his uninjured arm through the water, all in an effort to keep his head above the surface.