A. Hartley - Will Power

They were camouflaged so well that it took her a couple of minutes to see them, and she muttered doubtfully the whole time. I suppose she thought I was pulling her chain. When she finally saw them she grew very still, an expression of mute wonder on her face. Because it was more than camouflage. It was an extraordinary piece of engineering and artistry. The stairs were cut to be invisible anywhere but in the precise spot I had been standing, and the rock about them seemed to just blur them away. Perhaps when the sun was higher or casting longer shadows, the edges of the recess would be more sharply defined, but the rock around it sheltered them so perfectly that the face seemed unbroken. I was still admiring this remarkable craftsmanship when a voice came from halfway up the face.

“Come on,” Renthrette was hissing, with more enthusiasm than impatience. “What are you waiting for?”

My flicker of delight was doused, as ever, by her yearning for blood and glory, and I was left with that trembling, dreadful anticipation that came in its wake. In this case, the “wake” I had in mind had less to do with passing ships and more with farewell drinks round a coffin. Of course, were I to perish in this mountain stronghold, it seemed pretty unlikely that the goblins and their hungry mounts would host a wake where my corpse could be mourned by my loved ones. Not that I had any loved ones.

With such encouraging thoughts, I ascended the stairs, wondering all the while if the recess concealed me as effectively as it concealed the flight of steps. I had, till fairly recently, lived a pretty quiet life, much of it with my head down, an eye on the door, and an ear open for the approach of the authorities. But even in my days as an actor the notion of invisibility had always had its appeal, no more so than now. Imagine being able to take this ingenious little recess with me, to melt into the walls or trees around me whenever I felt like it! To just turn into scenery as soon as the audience got volatile! To be able to just slide away until the world forgot my existence: Wouldn’t that be a kind of bliss?

At the head of the stairs we emerged onto a narrow granite shelf that ran onto the greenish outcrop, onto which we crossed. I stared fixedly ahead, trying to avoid considering the drop to our right, which was about fifty feet and quite sheer. Up close the greenness of the smooth swelling was patchy and pale, covered with a carpet of tiny pale lichen, and moss rich and vibrant. I squatted and ran my hand over their surfaces, the one rough and brittle, the other soft as deep velvet.

Renthrette put one booted foot on a rock splashed with a mustard-yellow lichen and looked about her. “There,” she said simply, shielding her eyes from the sun.

And sure enough, only twenty-five yards from where we stood, the head of a stone lion peered out over a boulder as dark as charred timber. Its sightless eyes looked past us and across the wetlands stretched out beyond.

“The world’s most useless sentinel,” I said to myself, “I hope.”

Renthrette was already stroking the beast’s mane absently and peering into what I soon found to be a corridor, the mouth of which was overhung with the dead or dying branches of some twisted shrub. The tunnel cut into the cliff wall in a perfectly straight line, its floor level and paved, its ceiling vaulted, buttresses intricately carved out of the mountain’s living rock. Impressive though this all was, the thing that really struck me was that ten feet inside, a shadow fell across the corridor and from that point on you couldn’t see a damn thing. A chill, moist air condensed on my skin like sweat and I swallowed hard.

“You aren’t thinking of going in there?” I breathed.

Renthrette just gave me one of her blank looks, drew her sword, and edged into the blackness, disappearing almost immediately. Invisibility no longer seemed like such an obvious plus.

“You will get used to the darkness,” she said under her breath. “Just wait a little while before you go farther in.”

“Good idea,” I replied. “I’ll give it a shot when I’m fifty.”

“Quiet, Will,” she answered, drifting off into her adventurer’s world and advancing, sword poised to champion justice, defend virtue, and win honor, all by hacking bloody great holes in whatever came out of the blackness ahead: a scary way to live but, at least for Renthrette, one uncluttered by dilemma.

I fixed my attention on the shifting of her dark, blurred form and followed, swinging the crossbow round and wondering how the hell I was supposed to shoot enemies I couldn’t see. This was a bad idea. I turned to the rectangle of blinding light through which we had come and considered just walking back that way, but then a hand grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me on.

It was Renthrette, which-in the circumstances-was probably for the best. Sensing the flagging of my barely existent resolve, she had pulled me around the corner where the light vanished. Relief that it was only her who had her claws in my shirt quickly turned into something unpleasantly like terror.

The darkness was complete, opaque. Every sound echoed like rolling thunder or empty wine casks. I stood stock still and lifted the heavy shield in front of me, figuring that it was only a matter of time before something that could see better than I could launched itself at me. I waited, braced for the impact. There was sweat running down my neck and my knuckles were white. Probably. In this light (joke!) I was as likely to see the rooftops of Stavis as I was the color of my knuckles.

“Will you stop that,” hissed Renthrette, making me jump two feet in the air.

“What?”

“That gasping, breathy thing you’re doing.”

“Sorry,” I said indignantly. “I don’t like it here. And I do have to breathe, you know.”

“Debatable,” she muttered, walking away. Of course she started developing her withering banter when I was too petrified to think. I inched blindly after her, my right hand (no longer cradling the useless crossbow) stretched out in front of me.

Renthrette struck a shower of sparks from her flint and steel onto a tiny square of alcohol-soaked cotton: a standard and annoyingly useful part of her campaign equipment. With this she lit a tiny terracotta oil lamp that sat like a perching sparrow in her right hand. The walls around us flared up amber, every detail of their surface flickering tiny shadows as the lamp flame fluttered. Suddenly the tunnel was something quite different and, awful though it still was, it had a dark beauty. This was no natural cavern but a carved passage with a vaulted roof and rows of columns against the walls, rising like perfectly symmetrical stalagmites. So many months, maybe years, of work, now left to the darkness and damp and goblins! What a waste of bloody time.

And did I believe in goblins now? Tough not to, really. I’d seen them, and now I was poking around in their yard, as it were. Still: goblins , for crying out loud? Talk about difficult to swallow, especially for one as brutally realistic as me. And I suppose there, right there in the dark with the threat of these irrational monsters around the next corner, it finally dawned on me that we, or at least I, had been deliberately brought here. I remembered the ambassador’s references to my sense of what was real and I knew that he was involved up to his neck, though where this got me I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I was now living in terror of things which I hadn’t believed in three days ago: no, things that didn’t exist three days before, not in the world I knew, anyway.

I was exploring this seemingly important distinction when Renthrette hissed at me. I turned to find her standing on a great pile of rubble. Part of the ceiling had fallen in (not a terribly encouraging sign in itself), and the corridor was blocked right to the roof. It seemed we could go no farther. Ah, well.