Pool of Twilight - James M. Ward [34]
Come, Hammerseeker! the dry, dusty voice spoke from the shadowed nave. Come, meet your doom!
Kern shook his head dizzily. He stood once again in the cavern of death. The skeletal spectators of the coffin walls jabbered and jeered at him in a gruesome cacophony. Bone splinters and broken teeth rained down. He gripped his battlehammer with a gauntleted hand. Somehow he knew he had to resist. To venture any closer was to die.
"Come out and face me!" he shouted to the darkened archway. Fear clutched at his heart with talons of ice. The thick, turgid shadows swirled angrily in the nave.
You show yourself for a coward, Hammerseeker, the ancient voice sneered.
The watchers in the coffin walls rattled their bones and clattered their teeth in a hideous mockery of laughter. Every instinct told Kern to run, but he planted his boots on the hard basalt floor. He was a paladin. He would stand firm.
"I will face you where I can see you!" Kern shouted.
Oh, you do not wish to look upon me, youngling. Believe these words I speak. Better for you that I cloak myself in shadow.
For a passing moment, the darkness of the nave lessened. Kern caught a glimpse of long-impossibly long- yellowed bones and, attached to these, a sinuous shape ending in a stiletto-sharp point. An eerie clicking sound issued from the nave, an insect noise that turned Kern's stomach. Then the curtain of blackness thickened. The guardian of Tyr's hammer was invisible once again.
Kern shook his head. The fetid air seemed to be weighing down upon him, pressing him toward the floor to smother him. His knees were on the verge of buckling, but he raised his hammer high.
"By Tyr in all his might, you will not have me!"
You are wrong, youngling! the voice shrieked with unholy rage. Dead wrong. An ear-shattering crack sundered the air of the cavern, a sound like a giant's bones breaking. The floor lurched wildly under Kern's feet. Suddenly a jagged rift appeared in the stone beneath him. It opened in the floor like a vast, stony maw, a void of darkness ready to swallow him alive.
You will never have the hammer! Never!
Kern's arms flailed wildly as he tried to catch his balance, but to no avail. The gap opened wider yet. With a scream, he went tumbling down into thick, suffocating blackness.
Yes, join us! the mummified spectators screeched and cackled, their voices echoing after him. Embrace the bottom of the pit, Hammerseeker, and join us in death!
Another scream ripped from Kern's lungs. Shreds of darkness rushed by him as he fell. He knew there was nothing to break his fall except for the jagged rocks waiting at the bottom. And they were only heartbeats away.
* * * * *
If it hadn't been for Listle, Kern would have died. Of that he had no doubt. The wounds he had received in his previous dream had been real enough. If he had struck the jagged rocks at the bottom last night…
But he hadn't hit the bottom, he told himself for the tenth time already that morning. Listle had breezed into his room and woken him up just in time.
"I think you saved my life, Listle," he'd said breathlessly after telling the elf about his dream.
"That's all right, Kern," she had replied flippantly. "Something tells me it won't be the last time." Despite her casual demeanor, fear had shone in her silver eyes.
Kern had made a resolution to himself, then. The next time he was plagued by a nightmare, he was determined to fight back and take control of the dream.
Clad in his usual gray tunic and breeches, Kern made his way down the spiral staircase in the center of Denlor's Tower. This last day had been a difficult one. Yesterday, Shal had ventured on a spirit journey with the sorceress Evaine, hoping to learn something about the enemy behind the attack on the temple. But something had gone wrong. His mother had cried out in shock and then fell into a deep unconsciousness from which she had not woken. She lay now in her chamber, pale, silent, and terribly still.
Patriarch Anton had come to visit Shal three times already, but so far none of his healing spells had been successful.