Darkwell - Douglas Niles [60]
He shook off the thought and looked again toward Canthus. The moorhound led the party as they advanced carefully into the heart of Myrloch Vale. Yazilliclick sat before the king on Avalon's broad back. The little sprite held his tiny shortbow ready, with one of his silvery, dartlike arrows nocked in the weapon. His antennae quivered, and the king wondered if they helped him to search the woods for enemies. He hoped that they did.
Though the season was autumn, the chill in the air and the low, leaden sky bespoke more of winter. No snow had fallen here yet, but the bleak wind blew off the highlands with an icy bite that penetrated their cloaks and clothes and flesh, cutting right to their bones. Shivering, Tristan pulled his woolen cape more tightly around himself, but even that offered little comfort.
They followed a faintly visible trail through the black trunks. Though fallen leaves, now rotting, covered parts of the path, Canthus seemed to have no doubts as to the trail's location. Their route took them on a gradual decline into the flat basin of the vale.
Soon they came to the shore of a bleak and stagnant fen. The vast marsh reeked with an air of death and disease, and Tristan nearly gagged as the trail moved along the fringe of the swamp. This must, very recently, have been a thriving wetland, teeming with ducks and otters and other creatures. Now it lay brown and still, a lifeless smear upon the land. A few barren tree trunks jutted from a vast swamp of brown, stagnant water. In other places, patches of thick scum covered the surface.
He felt relief as the trail again returned to the woods, climbing gradually away from the fen. The return to the forest was only a slight improvement, for still there was no sign of greenery or animal life, but at least the abhorrent stink of the swamp grew more faint in the air. Still, the whole vale, forest and fen alike, gave him a chilling sense, as if they were all cloaked in a blanket of death.
The king watched as Canthus stopped and sniffed nervously at the ground. He saw the hackles rise on the great dog's neck, and he quickly dismounted.
"W-Wait for the others! B-Be careful – careful!" squeaked Yazilliclick.
Tristan looked back, surprised to see how far the rest of the party had fallen behind. "Watch my back," he ordered. "I want to see what's bothering Canthus." He saw Robyn spur her mare into a fast trot as he turned back to his dog.
Canthus stood at a bare spot in the trail, turning his huge head this way and that. Abruptly he growled and began to back toward the king. The hound's body, stiff with tension, poised like a coiled spring as he bared his great teeth at a threat that remained, to Tristan, unseen.
Suddenly the ground began to convulse under Tristan's feet, and he crashed to his back, the wind knocked from his lungs. Gasping, he saw Canthus leap backward with a prodigious bound that took the dog clear over his master's body. Then came an awful ripping sound, as of a body being torn asunder, and he felt the ground quiver beneath him again.
Suddenly the firmament beneath him fell away. For a sickening split second, he felt himself hang in the air. In that same instant, a stinging wave of gas exploded from the yawning space below him, sending fiery fingers into his chest as he gasped for air. Great roots dangled from the broken ground, hanging into the hole, and Tristan felt poised, for a moment, at the brink of doom. And then he started to fall.
A great fissure had opened in the ground along the trail, and now the stunned king lay at its lip, sliding into bottomless darkness. Noxious fumes rushed upward from the chasm, again biting into his lungs, and then blackness claimed him.
The moorhound rebounded instantly from his leap and sprang forward to seize his master's arm in his jaws. As Tristan's body dropped into the pit, the dog tightened his grip and held the king