“Are you not tired, Phen?” Hyden asked quietly.
Borg had just left and the sun had yet to rise. The others were all sound asleep. Phen, as usual, had spent the night lying still, staring blankly. Since his stony predicament began, true sleep had so far been impossible. Hyden noticed this and was curious.
“I just don’t seem to get tired anymore,” Phen said. “Nor hungry or thirsty. I sometimes wonder if I’m really alive.”
“It won’t be long until you’re back to normal,” Hyden reminded him. “We’re halfway to the Leif Repline already.”
“But what if it doesn’t work?” Phen asked. “What if all of this time, my not being able to eat or drink makes me come back a starved-out husk.” He pointed to the small but deep chip missing from his shoulder. One of the skeletons in the Serpent’s Eye cavern had clipped him with a sword. “What if my wounds are fresh when I’m restored?”
“What if you worry yourself to frivels over things you can’t control?” Hyden was stern. “You’re not alone.” He indicated the cavern full of people with a sweep of his hand. “You still wear Claret’s tear. I know it will protect you, and you’ll have me, the greatest wizard of all time, to help you should things go awry.”
Phen laughed at Hyden’s mock bravado. “Aye.” He finally grinned a stony grin.
The realization of how glad he was to see Hyden alive and in the flesh, after so many months of wondering if he was dead, was enough to quell his concerns. “With you casting spells, all we have to worry about is losing our boots,” Phen joked.
“Just so.” Hyden nodded with a grin of his own. “Let’s work on the trick of taking a man’s weapon from him, until the others wake up.”
Phen grew excited. He observed intently as they went about repeating the words and hand movements required to cast the spell. It wasn’t that long ago that Phen was the one teaching Hyden. Now the tables were turned. Once he saw Hyden’s alteration, Phen quickly mastered the variation of the spell. He was well into another trick when Oarly’s snoring finally stopped. A heartbeat later the dwarf sat up and the others began to wake.
Seemingly from out of nowhere, a giant, slightly smaller and much older than Borg, but still over a dozen feet tall, strode into the cavern mouth. He had long, grayish white hair and a beard that flowed down to his ample belly. He was dressed in a fine ankle-length robe of emerald cloth that was trimmed in sky blue. An air of regality wafted off of him. He was obviously from King Aldar’s castle. He looked serious, but his smile was welcoming.
“Sir Hyden Hawk, when you and the princess are ready I will lead your party to Afdeon. My name is Caden Bral, but you may call me Cade. King Aldar isn’t expecting us until this evening, so there is no need to rush your morning preparations.”
“Thank you, Cade,” Hyden replied. “We won’t keep you waiting long.”
The giant nodded, as if it didn’t matter. Hyden noticed the carved bone wolf’s head buckle on Cade’s belt. He was certain it was dragon bone. King Aldar carried a staff made of the stuff and had gifted King Mikahl with a dragon bone medallion carved like a lion. It was a long-told legend that the giants had managed to kill a full-grown dragon once, without the aid of magic. Whether they really had or not, Hyden wasn’t sure, but they had given a dragon skull to Hyden’s people a long time ago. It sat in the Elder’s sacred burrow. The brain cavity had been opened for their fire pit. Dragon bone held some sort of magical power, he knew. He could sense it. Claret once told him that not many dragons were concerned with the ways of man, and even fewer of them were goodnatured. Properly enchanted, dragon bone was supposed to ward off living wyrms. Hyden figured that out here in the mountainous land of trolls and ice, such things were necessary.
They broke their fast on the little bit of elk that remained. After repacking their gear on the pack horses, they followed Cade out of the cavern into the mist.
They traveled a few hours without much visibility. Hyden used Talon’s sight, and though he could see above the cloud of steam when he flew high, he could not seem to find a bottom to the cloud cover. Talon flew as far below the group’s level as he dared but he never came out of the mist. At one point, whatever was below him grew so warm that instinctually he began to climb away from it. Hyden finally called the hawkling back to him, afraid that the curious bird would slam into a rocky floor or a hidden cliff face.
They came to another cavern; this one wasn’t naturally formed like the other had been. It was a carved archway some twenty feet high and easily as wide. The floor was polished smooth, glossy and perfect. The walls were ribbed with fluted column-like protrusions that ran from the floor up to the peak of the arch and back down the other side. These supports were spaced every twenty feet or so, and gave Hyden the feeling that he was walking through the ribcage of some great beast. Spaced evenly between the ribs were large ensconced torches. They seemed high on the wall to the companions, but not so much when a giant passed by them. The stone brackets that held the flaming brands were all intricately carved dragon heads. The flames seemed to be belching out of the dragons’ open mouths. The eyes of the menacing decorations had been polished so brightly that they reflected the dancing flames as real eyes might.
Oarly was clearly awestruck by the quality of the craftsmanship. The others were just impressed, and more than a little unnerved.
The long passage ended in a circular room crafted in the same manner of the long hall they had just traversed. The same fluted ribs ran up the walls, but these met in the center of the domed ceiling at an impossible upside-down pool of shimmering quicksilver.
“What keeps it from dripping out?” Jicks asked.
“Wow,” Phen exclaimed when he saw the phenomena. “Look, Hyden!”
Hyden saw it, too. As curious as he was about it, though, he was even more intrigued by the strange symbol grooved into the room’s floor. It was eerily familiar, and since the only symbols carved into a floor he’d ever seen were gateways into the hells, it alarmed him.
“Please,” Cade urged softly. “Everyone get your bodies, and the animals, completely inside the outer ring of the mark on the floor. We wouldn’t want to leave any part of you behind.” The giant chuckled at this.
No one else laughed. It was clear that he hadn’t meant that he would leave an individual behind, only part of one.
“Sir Hyden, Lieutenant Welch,” Cade instructed. “You and the elves keep the horses calm. This process will alarm them.” He looked around in the air oddly. “Is the hawkling in?”
“He is,” Phen called, setting the bird from his wrist to his shoulder.
“Here we go, then.”
There was a sudden smell of ozone and the air filled with static. Half a heartbeat later a whomp shook them deep in their guts. Only a flash of darkness followed, and then the horses were nickering and braying in distress. Looking around, it seemed to all of them that nothing happened. Everyone looked confused. Phen appeared disappointed.
Hyden realized that something actually had occurred. Now standing in the archway of the corridor they had come down were four giant boys, looking like man-sized ten-year-olds. They were wearing identical uniforms of emerald green balloon-sleeved shirts, trimmed in the same sky-blue as Cade’s robe. They wore leather pants, probably elk hide, or some short-haired goat skin. Their boots were shin-high and they carried no weapons, or anything else for that matter. A movement came in the passageway behind them and a few of the questers suddenly realized that they weren’t where they were before. A deep breath told Hyden that the quality of the air had even changed, from thin and frigid to thick and steamy.
“That was interesting,” Lieutenant Welch said. “How far did we travel?”
Cade indicated that he heard the question and would explain shortly. First he gave them some instruction. “These pages will take the animals to a place where they can rest and graze. They will bring your things over to the guest quarters. Take anything you may need in the next few hours with you. We will be crossing the Cauldron. It’s slow going and visibility is poor.”
Cade then turned to Lieutenant Welch and spoke directly. “We have teleported from the Southern Ridgeway marker down to the Outer Moat marker. To answer your question, we have moved five miles as the crow flies, thus avoiding an estimated eighteen miles of hiking up and down the freezing rocks.”
“You have my most sincere appreciation,” Oarly said, before he started filling several flasks and bladder skins from another small keg he had cleverly hidden in one of the horse packs.
“It’s all right, Spike,” Phen was saying. The whoomp of teleporting had caused the lyna cat to puff up into a prickly ball in Phen’s shagmar coat pocket. If Phen’s skin hadn’t been petrified, he’d have probably been picking sharp quills out of his hand.
“Oh, come to me, Spike,” Telgra said, as if talking to a baby. “It’s going to be all right, little one.”
“Be careful,” both Corva and Phen said at the same time, causing them to share an awkward look. The princess paid neither of them any attention. At her gentle touch, Spike relaxed, and already she was toting him carefully away in her arms.
Dostin seemed terrified. He was clutching the thick oak staff he’d been carrying tightly in his hands. He looked ready to fight. Corva had to urge him along as Cade led them through a passageway almost like the first one they’d traversed. The only difference Hyden noticed was that the ornate sconces mounted between the ribs on the walls were made to resemble the cupped hand of some long-clawed creature. Flames leapt and danced up out of the palm. These were the tamer flames of some sort of oil lamp, instead of the harsh, smoky torches in the other corridor.
The passage opened onto another circular chamber, but this one was a crossroads of sorts. It had no upside-down pool of quicksilver, and no strange symbol etched into the floor.
The corridor they took continued on and eventually another crossed it. They went left, and after slowly sloping downward for what might have been a full hour, the humidity became intense. The air was steamy, almost cloudy. They ended up in a vast, naturally formed cavern that opened up onto a body of slow boiling water. Steam rose in clouds, making it impossible to sense the size of what was beyond. A large, well built barge, complete with a uniformed crew of capable-looking giants, was waiting to receive them.
“Welcome to the Cauldron,”said a man whose uniform wasn’t green, but black trimmed in emerald. Hyden figured him to be the captain of the barge. “You’re about to cross the moat of all moats.”
“If the castle rises up out of the steam cloud miles above us,” Hyden looked at Phen and Oarly, all three with eyes wild and full of wonder, “then the structure that lies between, hidden in the steam, must be grand indeed.”
“By Doon, a thousand, thousand dwarves could live in such a place.”
“I still can’t believe we were teleported,” Phen said to Hyden. “That’s a spell I have to learn.”
“How could you think about spells?” Hyden asked as they moved up the giant-sized gangplank to the barge’s deck. “We’re about to see… about to be inside a castle city that reaches up into the very heavens.”
“I am thinking about the castle, Hyden,” Phen said. “They had to use magic-probably teleportation spells-to get the upper reaches of such a place built. Just think of it.” It was clear Phen was calculating and estimating in his ever quizzical mind. Figuring out how such a construction had been erected would probably keep him thinking and imagining for days.
Talon leapt from Phen’s shoulder and glided to the deck rail at the front of the barge. Once he was settled he began preening himself. Telgra concentrated on scratching Spike behind the ears while Corva helped Dostin onto the boat. The lieutenant and his young men were gawking as much as the rest of them. They huddled close and spoke to themselves as the barge eased away from the cavern’s dock.
As they slid across the water out into the denser cloud of steam, it became a near white-out.
“How hot is the water?” Hyden asked Cade.
“Hot enough to boil the flesh off of your bones in just a moment,” he answered. “And that’s just at the surface. The frigid mountain air keeps the top of the cauldron relatively cool. Just a few dozen feet down and it would boil your bones to mush.”
“No serpents to worry about here, then,” said Oarly, stretching up on tiptoes to look over the rail, instead of ducking to look down under it.
“That’s not true, Master Dwarf,” Cade said. “There are a few creatures who love these waters. Dragon kin, most assuredly. After all, what is a serpent, but a wingless water dragon.”
“The serpent I cut in half was more like an eel than a dragon,” Oarly said. “It smelled fishy and had suction cups on its underside, like an octanomus.”
“It’s an octerapus,” Phen corrected with a grin at Oarly’s claim of halving the serpent. “He didn’t cut it in half, Cade; he just cut off the tip of its tail.”
Cade, after realizing that neither the dwarf nor the marble-skinned boy were jesting, shuddered.
It was hard to imagine that these people, at least the two he was speaking to, and Hyden Hawk, had commanded dragons and killed demons.
With just a little unease showing in his normally confident voice, Cade said, “Master Oarly, I assure you that the things in this lake are nothing like you’ve described. These beasts could swallow this barge whole, if they were so inclined.”
Oarly’s gulp was audible.