The Coral Kingdom - Douglas Niles [31]
"And look." Brandon pointed at the sky, where the sun lay off their right shoulders. "We no longer go east. We've curved to the north somewhere along the way."
"That's funny. The valley seemed pretty straight to me, even though it was a little steep," Alicia noted with surprise. The hair at the back of her neck prickled upward as she realized that they had been deceived by sorcery.
"No doubt we'll be turned into frogs or something equally hideous if we take a few more steps," grumbled Pawldo, looking around nervously. He paused, as if waiting for someone to urge him forward.
"It seems pointless to continue up this gully," agreed Robyn, with an appraising look at the steep climb before them. "We must have passed the trail somewhere below."
"That's the smartest suggestion I've heard in days!" agreed the halfling heartily.
"Nothing like a bit of climbing to get the blood flowing, though. Don't you agree?" said Hanrald, with a hearty clap on the back for Keane.
The mage scowled but climbed stiffly to his feet. "This means we go down for a while, right?" he checked.
"Due south," Brandon noted. "Until we figure out where the valley curved from east and west."
The descent passed quickly, though they moved with careful attention to their surroundings. Keane constantly checked the magical emanations from the surrounding ridge, particularly the steep faces toward the east and north, reporting that the intensity of the enchantment remained steady. Robyn studied her surroundings each step of the way, seeking some feature that would trigger a memory. Brandon kept an eye on the sun, carefully watching their direction of travel.
All of them noticed the gradual change in the terrain as the narrow draw slowly widened, and the cliff walls rolled back to rounded ridges on either side. The ground leveled, and the stream beside them grew placid, losing the urgency that had formerly carried it frothing from the heights. Now it meandered, deep and murky, between earthen banks and grassy meadows.
"Look! We're going west now!" Brandon's voice carried the excitement of discovery, and the significance of the news could not be underplayed.
"The valley appears to run straight-but here it goes east and west, and a mile back it flows north to south!" Alicia realized.
"That's the illusion-to make a curved valley appear to be straight!" Keane pointed out.
Robyn held up a hand, silencing the others instantly. They waited as the woman removed her staff from its lashings to her saddle and gently placed the butt of the shaft on the ground. She closed her eyes and murmured a brief phrase of a simple spell. It was an enchantment of detection, but unlike Keane's spell, it didn't search for the presence of magic. Instead, she sought a far different thing-a thing she normally would never have associated with Synnoria, except for words that the vision of the wolf had said to heron the previous night.
Now she performed a spell to detect evil.
For a long while, the queen felt no triggering response, no indication of any presence that was other than natural or benign. But then, just as she began to despair of success, a tiny flicker of darkness and dread tugged at the fringes of her awareness.
Whatever it was, the malignancy remained distant. Yet even through the filter of several miles, she felt the power of this evil, the terrible menace it represented.
Quickly she opened her eyes. The detection spell was a glowing spot in her subconscious, the sense of direction compelling and accurate. She knew which way to go now.
"The route to Synnoria must lie-there!" Robyn pointed, surprising even herself with her certainty.
They followed the direction she indicated to look skeptically at a tiny rivulet of water trilling over a series of precipitous waterfalls, spilling from a lofty height to join the stream before them from the opposite bank.
"Just crossing the river to get over there looks impossible!"