The Goblin Mirror

3

CAME QUIET, AND COLD STONE BENEATH TAMAS' BACK. Water dripped and echoed in the dark around him. His body still felt the falling, but did not move, in a long, slow gathering of scattered wits, trying to reconcile sliding in a torrent of rubble, with this pervasive ache and this darkness and the regular echo of water drops.

The ceiling reflected a faint glimmering of light. None touched the wails. It was a broad cave, or a man-made vault-he could distinguish that much; but being here made no sense to him. He remembered going down, he felt the battering of the rocks—remembered he had outright fallen off his horse, no glorious end to his journey, Bogdan had been hit. Jerzy had. Dreadful images succeeded that one, arrows streaking black across a clouded heaven, horses and men screaming ...

A second waking, how long after the first he had no idea. He was still lying on his back. Light from some source touched both shaped and living stone, a ceiling glistening with water and black mold, but nothing of the walls. It was the same place as before: he could hear the drip of water and smell the mustiness of wet iron and stone. But there was a thumping somewhere distant, like drums, he thought, or the beating of his own heart. He remembered the road, and he had to find his brother, he had to get back there, their father had told him take care of Bogdan—

But something held his hands fast above his head, and fighting that restraint sent a wave of pain through his back. He worked half-numb fingers, trying to feel what was holding him, and touched what might be rope about iron bars, but he could not be sure whether anything was warm or cold, nor tilt his aching neck further back to see.

A shriek reached his ears, for away—only a bird, he told himself, a crow, maybe a dog's injured yelp—not a human voice. His hazed wits could not shape it. He lay straining and dreading to hear it again, but the drip of water into some pool was all the measure of time and sanity.

Eventually, louder than the water dripping, came a slither like something dragging across the floor, with an audible breathing. It was a nightmare. He wanted to wake, now, please the god, he was very willing to wake up now, but there was no waking. One wanted to think of escape, but he could not so much as turn over. He asked himself who had tied him here, and why; and with his head lifted as far as he could, saw a large shaggy lump move out of the faint light and into the shadow beside him.

A troll. He was done. He knew he was. Only the bones left, he remembered Nikolai saying; and wondered if he was the only one imprisoned here. "Bogdan?" he called into the dark, with all the courage he could find.

"Ssss!" the troll hissed, trailed musty rags of wet fur across his face and clapped a massive hand over his mouth. Half-smothered, he struggled and, with his head beginning to spin, stopped, in token that he would be quiet, with no surety at all it would let him go. But it slowly drew its hand away and let him breathe.

Then it shuffled off as erratically as it had come. He listened after its departure over the beating of his heart, saw its retreating shadow against the light and, shivering, gazed into the dark for a long time after. He wondered where it went and why it had left and most of all what ,had become of Bogdan and Nikolai and the rest of them—not without reckoning master Karoly. A wizard might have defended them. Maybe Karoly had saved the rest of them, Bogdan and all of them, that was what he wanted to think—he might be the only one the trolls had gotten, lying unconscious as he must have. Bogdan and Karoly might be looking for him this very moment. They might save him if he could stay alive, if he was not going to be a troll's supper before they could get here.

And if he could somehow get his hands free, and get away on his own . . . that would save everyone the danger of rescuing him and himself the guilt of making them do it.

He refused to think of other possibilities. He worked at the ropes, not pulling at them: that would tighten the knots; but trying with every possible stretch of his fingers to find a knot within reach.

The troll had been cleverer than that; and while he was working, he heard the troll come shuffling back again, a humped shape against the illusory light, trailing cords of its shaggy coat to the floor as it walked.

He tried not to think what came next, as it crouched over him, as it slid a hand beneath his head, lifted it gently and put the cold hard rim of a cup to his lips.

He did not at ail understand its reasons. But he saw nothing now to gain by fighting the creature, and the liquid against his lips tasted of herbs, nothing foul. It let him drain the cup, after which it let his head gently to the stone floor and crouched beside him, waiting, he had no idea for what. He only hoped it would go away and let him go on trying after the knots.

But he was in less pain than he had been. He felt his fingers and feet going numb, and then he began to be afraid, even while his wits were growing foggy.

He thought, I've been a fool. What does it want? What is it waiting for? Do they drug their victims? Poison—but would it poison what it was going to eat?

Hold Bogdan back, his father had said to him, and he had chased Bogdan down the road after that warning marker, instead of making a strong, reasonable objection to the decision that had put him here.

He was very sorry about that. He hoped Bogdan had gotten away. He hoped Bogdan would not come running in here to rescue him, even with Karoly's and Nikolai's help, because he much feared they were not going to be in time, considering the growing numbness he felt now in his limbs—he feared they would find nothing in this cave he ever wanted his father and mother to know about ...

The road was deserted, so far as Nikolai could see, from his painful vantage on an otherwise glorious sunrise—he had crawled to this place on the mountainside, with a rock between him and the view of the road, but as for how he had gotten off the road and into the rocks in the first place ... whether he had been left for dead and crawled up here or whether some one of his companions had carried him this far and left him to seek water or help ... he had no recollection. He was, if he began to dwell on that thought, afraid, and confused; and the pain did not help him at all to sort out his thoughts.

He had gone down with the howling of goblins in his ears. He had waked with his sword in his hand, its hilt glued to his hand with blood, and he still carried it: his arm hurt too much to try to sheath it, and he had no assurance that what had brought him up here was not a goblin with a particularly selfish bent. He supposed he had had time to draw it and to use it, and that it was not his own blood on it, at least.

He had been shot—he had a sure reminder of that: the arrow had broken off, the black stump of it through his arm-through his side, too, except for the inside of his leather sleeve and the mail about his ribs. Hell of a pull that bow had had—he could admire the goblin archer that had drawn it; and damn him for the pain, in the next breath, when he moved his arm and the projecting head raked against his ribs.

Enough of trying for a view. He fell back and watched the dawn sky, trying to force any recollection out of his pain-fogged wits—where the boys were, what had become of Karoly, where anyone might be. He was halfway up the hill, hidden, as he hoped. He remembered—thought he remembered—the dirt of the road in front of his eyes—

So he had fallen. He remembered a confusion of rocks and brush. Maybe that was the climb up, a jumbled image of rock and sky. Karoly—damn his stubborn forging ahead into disaster—was not here to help. 'Listen to advice,' lord Stani had said. As well spit into the wind. Trust a witch or a wizard, listen to his advice, and this was where it brought you. The lady gran had had a cruel bent. He had known it. He should have suspected Karoly.

An eagle crossed the sky. It was the only feature in a sea of dawn, serene, without obligations to the world. But that was not his case. He shut his eyes, recalled the road last night, the tower hulking beside the stream, and thought, I have to go down there. I have to know. That arrow has to come out, doesn't it?

Damn Karoly for not being here.

An eagle cried like some lost soul across the mountainsides. On either side of the road, mere stumps and blackened trunks and stubs of trees. Nosing the ground, Gracja blew at the ash in despair, snorted, and lifted her head without resisting the reins. It was no place to stop, Yuri told himself, no matter how tired they all were. Even Gracja knew it, and kept moving on her own.

He had expected green grass, he had hoped to find his brothers not too far ahead once he reached the warmer elevations. His brothers would come off the mountain heights tired and in want of rest, and most probably they would camp and rest at the first opportunity—that was what he had told himself, before he met this desolation. He had found traces of their passage all along, seen tracks of their horses as late as this afternoon, on a wind-scoured crust of snow that he did not think was that old.

But no sight or scent of a campfire this day. Everything was charcoal. Zadny limped, sometimes on one foot, sometimes on the other, leaving blood on the snow this morning, but he was still going ahead, still tracking, nose to the trail— and that was assurance of a kind, but it was a scary place, this road, so void of every living thing.

The way began at least to be wider, steadily downward with another turn on the mountain, and there, lord Sun, was a deep stream-cut valley falling away steeply at his left. That encouraged him—because where streams cut, there were passes, Nikolai had said so.

The road became a steep descent, then, with the afternoon sun behind the mountains, a plunge deeper and deeper into the premature twilight of the valley. With every rest they took, once silence descended, the gloomier and the spookier the place felt. It was not like gran's stories. Not a leaf rustled here. There was only the wind, and once they were under way again, the solitary, lonely sound of Gracja's hooves made him think of walking through some vast, forbidden hall.

I don't like this, he kept thinking. Zadny seemed anxious— circling back closer to him, looking out into the shadowed valley and growling. Yuri thought, I don't like this open place. Anybody on the heights can see anybody on the road. I wonder if it is the right road, after all, or if we're even following the right horses.

But there was no going back now. He kept telling himself—if I just keep going, I'll surely find them. Some forest fire happened here, that's all.

The last of the grass had run out; the last of the rabbit was yesterday. Lord Stani's youngest had never missed a meal in his life, and he was so hungry he seemed apt to fold in half. As soon as the air had warmed enough to risk the wood, he had strung his bow, and carried an arrow ready in hope of rabbits; but now he kept the bow and the arrow resting against his knee because he was anxious and determined to get down to the streamside. The road was getting darker and darker, in a real twilight now.

Color touched the sky and cast a strangeness on the rocks and the surface of the road. He came to a milestone that looked the same as the milestones in Maggiar, old and worn and telling travelers nothing useful nowadays; but a dreadful painted face grinned at him from its whiteness, and the paint was not old. His heart jumped and for a moment everything seemed scarily sharp in detail, the white stone in the twilight, the grinning face, a boy on a fat, shaggy pony, a yellow hound, all brought together in this almost-night.

He rode further, slowly around the turning of the road and, by the last light, into the valley beyond, where a great tower was set low beside the stream, its crest rising beside the road.

Men had made it. One hoped that they were men. But there was that stone back there. Gran had never told his brothers about such things. Or if she had, Tamas and Bogdan had never told him. And he had been too young to remember.

Would they go there? he asked himself. Should I?

Master Karoly was with them. Master Karoly undoubtedly knew what he was dealing with, and had planned everything, and knew exactly what he was doing, no matter how dangerous. So here came a boy, a pony, and a silly dog, into the middle of older people's plans that were life and death to everyone—not things he knew how to deal with, like cold and wind and getting food in the mountains—but places with strangers, in towers like that.

I don't belong here, Yuri said to himself. I should have stayed at home and never tried this at all. I can starve or I can go down there and knock on the door, or I can try to get past. What did master Karoly tell my brothers to do? Or why did they come this way, if not to find this place?

The more and less of haze seemed only part of slipping into unconsciousness, except Tamas found his joints stiff and his back numb and realized that he was on the other side of that dreaded sleep. More, something was still hovering near him with the same slithering movement and musty smell he associated with the troll. He saw its shadow loomed between him and the source of the faint light like a huge mass of shredded rags, all hunched down as it was. He did not want to be awake. He shut his eyes all but the least view through his lashes and tried not to betray that he was.

But it did not touch him. Eventually it got up and moved away, a shambling hump that, indeed, had a long tail. Tamas lifted his head and saw it dragging and snaking nervously in its wake, as the troll passed the dim lamp and its shadow crept up to the walls and the ceiling.

It was a nightmare. He heard that thumping sound again, or it was the beating of his own heart. Dizziness overwhelmed him as he let his head down. He was not dead. It had made him sleep long enough that his back was half numb and he could only wish his arms were numb, too. But why would a troll want to keep him here, and sit by him while he slept?

A bolt clanked and thumped somewhere above, a hallway echoed. The troll jumped, leaped, and a flare of its shaggy arm extinguished the lamp. It scrambled toward him, felt him over hastily and shoved his knees up perforce, smothering him with a raggy, massive hand over his mouth. Another clank. The creature settled its long, damp fur over him, and hissed, close to his ear, "Goblins. Husssh."

Goblins. Worse and worse—the troll crushed him into a bent-legged knot in the corner, against the bars, urging him to be quiet, and he lay absolutely still, breathing through the musty fronds as it tentatively let up its hand.

A door creaked. He saw a seam of light through the trailing fur of the troll's arm, past the shadow of its crouching body. Came the gleam of a torch, a silver sheen of weaponry and armor in that light, and he held his breath, ready to call out at any risk of his life, in a heart-clenched hope that it was one of his friends come looking for him.

Then the intruder turned his head, showing an animal's sharp ears in a mane of dark hair, a jutting jaw, a face human and beast at once. His heart froze as its gaze passed over them. It lifted the torch and scanned the vault in other directions, as if it dismissed them as some mound of rags.

Then the goblin slowly turned the other way, along the corridor and around the winding way me troll had always appeared and vanished. Tamas trembled beneath the troll's crushing weight, dreading the goblin coming back—and it did, a martial and dreadful figure in its silver-touched armor. It cast a slow second gaze in their direction, holding the torch aloft.

But it seemed blind to them: it went out by the same door it had come in, and shut it.

A bolt slammed home. The troll shifted its weight very slowly, drew back and left him as another door opened and shut, deeper inside the mass of stone.

Everything was dark and breathlessly still then, except the troll moving about in the utter night of the vault. Tamas slowly, painfully straightened his legs and settled himself, in a depth of despair he had never imagined. Goblins. That put more pieces together: Krukczy Tower, the clouds, the road, the outlook toward the valley, the long slant of loose stones . . .

He realized his horse had been hit, now that he put things together; he remembered its sudden jump before it hit the edge, and he pieced together an attack from the rocks above the road.

But it had not been trolls, in that attack: he had never heard that trolls were clever enough to use archery. Goblins were. And he remembered the stone marker, the dreadful living face he had just seen in torchlight, the doors and the echoes he had heard.

It was no troll's den, it was the cellar of Krukczy Tower itself; and goblins held it, loosed from what hell he did not know: but by all the late-at-night tales that had ever frightened a boy sleepless, he knew they were no solitary bandits, no witless bludgeoners, like trolls. Goblins came from deep and unfriendly places, they were clever and they came in armies, that was what he knew from gran's tales. Sorcerers and wicked powers used them to fight their wars.

What had happened this side of the mountains? Had not Karoly known they were in trouble, the moment he saw that stone—and still he led them toward this place? Had he not known in dreams before that? Had the mountain not told him, that morning on the heights, and he had said nothing to them?

Betrayal and Karoly had never seemed possible in the same thought. But whence this sister? Whence this mysterious sister Karoly had never mentioned to anyone? And whence this plague that Karoly could not stop—except from what was here in Krukczy Tower? Whence the smell of burning that had roused the whole household, but on this mountain? And whence the cries of lost children, if not here, in Krukczy Tower?

Ride quickly, Karoly had said, before the attack. Karoly had known, and he wished he could believe Karoly was free somewhere and plotting his rescue; but Karoly, if he was alive, well knew where he was—in this tower, and in the hands of creatures Karoly had already failed to deal with. He began to hope that everyone else was dead in the ambush-please lord Sun they were dead ...

But if they were, he was not, and since he was not, he had no hope but the troll's slow wits and its intention to keep nun to itself—which meant time to work on the knots, if not to rescue anyone, then to get away and onto the road and up the pass to home, to warn his father what was happening over-mountain, because he saw the next step in the taking of this tower: goblins raiding through the high pass next year, killing and doing in Maggiar whatever goblins did with their victims—which he did not want to think about. How he should escape, how he should survive the cold of the pass he could not imagine, but he could not imagine his father's son lying here and waiting to die, either. That was not what his father had taught his sons, and not what his father expected of the men he had sent over-mountain.

And once he heard the troll's slithering sound dimmish down toward the end of the tunnel, he began to try again to feel out the knots, using what slight movement he had in his fingers, in the case that the troll might have redone its work and left him a knot in reach . . .

There was so little feeling left. He tried and he tried, and eventually decided he could just reach something curious that might be a knot. He stretched as far as he could and worked ever so patiently, tears of exhaustion running on his face, and his arms and back burning with the effort.

But while he worked, long before he had loosened the knot, he heard the troll returning, in faintest light now, from some distant source. Unfair, he thought resentfully, if after all this time it wanted its supper, please the god it did not, and that it would not test the ropes. He knew now that it had the power of speech, and he asked it, "How many goblins?" —to gain what knowledge of his situation he could, perhaps to distract it, or, most improbably ... even to befriend it and escape this place, if trolls could reason, if it conceived of itself in danger from the goblins.

But it hissed at him, then lifted his head as it had before, and put a cup to his lips as it had before, with no answer to his question.

He would not drink this time. He kept his mouth obstinately shut. But it shook him sharply, one snap that rattled his brain in his skull, and offered it again. He drank, flashes of color still hazing his eyes. It let his head down afterward, and sat close to him, waiting.

He tried again. "What happened to the others?"

"Ssss." It might be asking him to be quiet. Or it was an expression of its anger. He whispered faintly: "I can lead us out of here." But he was already feeling a numbness in his hands and his feet and a frightening confusion in his wits. His tongue was going numb. "I could help you." He was not sure it could even understand him.

It hissed at him, more intensely. He thought it might be answering him after all—if one had goblins upstairs, one certainly might want quiet in the cellar.

"I wouldn't bring them," he argued with it.

It said, "Not now."

There were drums, Yuri could hear them from here, the whole mountain echoed them crazily, and one had no choice but hear. He hunkered down on a flat stone in this concealing bend of the road, with Gracja's reins in his lap, holding her out of sight of the tower, waiting—because the more he considered knocking at that dreadful gate, the more he was afraid. It was not a tower where farmers came and went, it was a martial tower, where it was set and as simply as it was built, with no other possible use for it but border watching and bandit hunting. Whatever men might live here, if they were men at all—might be little better than bandits themselves, for all he knew. He was only waiting for moonset, hoping for clouds, and shadow—him with a yellow dog and a pony with a wide white blaze and a white foot. He had muddied up Gracja's blaze and her white stocking, with water from his canteen; but that was small good—he could not lay a hand on Zadny, who had gotten restless and run off on his own business, to bark at the tower, for all he knew, and rouse everyone in there.

Probably something had caught the dog. Or he was going to come back chased by a hundred bandits, and run right up to him. And the wind was getting colder or he was growing shivery with thinking about it and listening to the drums in the night.

He left Gracja tied to a cindery tree trunk for a moment to stretch his legs, and went far enough to steal a look down at the tower. It was lit up on top, torches all about.

No sign of Zadny.

"Stupid dog," he muttered to himself and to Gracja, and paced and shivered, and paced, and sat down and waited, and finally told himself that he had to go. The moon was setting and if he was going to try to pass the tower in the dark, he had as well do it while there was still noise and they were busy, not while they were sleeping—with the sound of a horse passing right under their walls. He started to get up, teeth chattering with the thought that he was really, truly about to try it.

Suddenly a pale shaggy shape came barrelling off the hill and into his lap, licking at his hands and his face and making his heart skip a dozen beats. He sat down hard on the stone, the hound a flurry of paws in his lap and on his arms. He shoved to protect himself, he flung anxious arms about what was warm and safe and alive in this dreadful place, and tried to hold on to him, for fear of what had sent Zadny running back to him.

"Where have you been?" he whispered. Zadny's pale shape, cavorting down the road, had been plain for any eyes to see. "What's down there, what do you know?"

But the hound jerked about of a sudden, braced and staring wildly up into the rocks, toward a dark shape and a gleam of metal.

A troll, Yuri thought, frozen as Zadny was frozen, expecting it to spring.

But it skidded down among the burned trees, human looking, and slid down against the rock right in front of him, saying, "You damned fool! What are you doing here?"

"Master Nikolai?" he said faintly, and, holding Zadny's collar fast, hugged him tight. "Master Nikolai?" He did not intend his teeth to chatter when he spoke: he tried to stop it. "Where are my brothers?"

Tamas waked with his arms free beside him, with a warm cloak over him, and blinked in a wild hope that he was miraculously rescued, that Nikolai or Karoly had found him, or that Bogdan had—

But it was the same dank, dreadful place. He hauled himself painfully onto his knees, felt about him in the dark, and up against the iron bars that he had lain next to. They made a wall, and a gate, and that gate—

—was chained shut.

He sank down with his shoulder against the bars, and leaned his head there until his heart had settled and the despair that welled up behind his teeth had found a bearable level again.

It was no worse than before. It might be some better. He bestirred himself to search the dark, and, feeling around him, discovered a slimed wet water-channel, carrying water that smelled and tasted clean. He washed his hands and face and drank and drank until he was chilled through, sure at least it was not drugged.

But when he had felt his way about the rest of the space of his prison, and found masonry walls on either side and the ceiling lowering at the end so he had no hope of squeezing further, he went back to the bars and sank down against them.

He could move; he had his cloak to wrap in against the chill; and when time passed and nothing threatened the silence or his solitude he crept back to the water-channel and washed at his leisure, although he was sore down to his fingertips and the cold and the effort hurt. Papa would not die in filth; mama would never tolerate perishing like this; Bogdan had not had to, he hoped that much for his brother, and for all the rest of them. And in the increasing cohesion of his aching and battered wits he told himself if once the troll opened the barred gate, if it once gave him the least chance, he was going to run for it, find his way out or find a weapon. If he did not make it, well—he had seen worse waiting for him, in this very cellar.

So he waited, nursing a headache and rubbing his chilled limbs to keep them from stiffening, and passed his time remembering good things, his home, his family, playing up and down the brook, sailing leaf boats.

Master Karoly's lessons—the tower room, the cluttered shelves with then-dried leaves and books and curious objects; learning their letters, and their insects; and the name of the birds that built nests under the eaves. . . .

When Bogdan and he were boys together they had gotten bored with indoors and played pranks on the old man, turned the pages in his lesson book when he was out of the room, put live frogs in his tackle basket, rearranged every single book on his shelves, and never understood that they were doing wrong. Master Karoly had always seemed different from serious grown-ups, both wiser and more childlike. Master Karoly had kept his own counsel regarding the mischief they did; and derived his just amusement and his revenge (as they had duly expected) by posing them long, long cipherings or particularly arduous errands the next day. That always seemed fair, in the balance of things. And it had never once occurred to them that master Karoly should mind looking foolish, because dignity was not the province of young boys.

But as he thought back now, he decided the old man might have been annoyed at young fools who happened to be a lord's undisciplined sons—especially in the matter of the frogs, which had been his personal inspiration.

That was the forgiving master Karoly he wanted to believe in—not the short-tempered, close-mouthed old man on the trail. He was not sure now which man had really ever existed—but discovering what had lain next door to Maggiar unsuspected, and discovering that grown men fought and picked on each other like boys, and that sometimes good people died for no fair reason at all, everything else seemed in question, of things he thought he had understood. He was not likely to have the chance to use that knowledge ... or to find out other lessons this place had to teach, only defeat, and his own limits of courage, and the fact of a lord's second son mattering very little to the creature that looked on him as its property or its supper.

In time he heard the troll returning. He waited, trembling with the effort to hold his limbs tensed to move. It came up to the bars, a shadow that cut off all the light on what it was doing. He heard the chain run back ever so softly, link by link, and suffered sudden doubt what he should do next, whether it might be wiser to await a better chance than to try to break past it—it was a clever troll, cleverer than any troll he had heard of. It seemed to have some obscure purpose in what it did; and it whispered, now:

"Follow me."

It was foolishness even to imagine it could mean something other than harm to him. It might have hidden him from the goblin, but it had hidden itself by doing that. He had provoked it, and it had curled him, using nothing of its prodigious strength—but none of that said anything at all of its reasons.

He got up slowly, thinking: What if it only wants me in reach? And again: What if goblins are about to search this place? He felt after the gate in the dark, ducked his head when his fingers met the low bar overhead. The troll moved away from him, affording him all the room to run he could wish. He saw its moving shadow in other shadows, heard the slithering passes of its tail along the stone floor, and followed it—like any silly sheep, he said to himself: Bogdan had always called him the slow wit of the family; and he could not make up his mind what to do or what to trust—but he had no idea whether that sometime source of light down the tunnel was open or barred or a route straight to the goblins.

A door creaked ahead, on the right hand, the same door the goblin had used, he was sure of it. He saw it open, heard the troll go through, heard it breathing, and thought—the troll did fear them. It hid from them. It wouldn't willingly walk into their hands ...

He felt his way through the doorway, banged his shin and stumbled against steps. The slithering sound came from above him, as the troll climbed. "Where does this lead?" he whispered, as loudly as he dared; but it gave him no guidance but the sound of its tail trailing up the steps.

He felt the pitch of the stone stairs, climbed, aching from bruises, his head throbbing—there was no quickness or agility about it. A door creaked above, and when he had gotten there he felt his way through into another dark, smooth-paved passage, with an unfamiliar taint: goblins, he thought, dreading what he might stumble over in the dark, his worst fear that the troll might have made some understanding with them.

A door in front of him cracked on night and moonlight. The troll went out. He followed it onto the broad wooden roof, delirious with relief to have the sky and the stars over him.

But ringed about that sky, on pikes set in the ramparts, stood the skulls of humans and of horses. Heaps of bone were swept like offal against the ramparts, white bone with dark bits of flesh still clinging.

He spun about to escape the sight, to strike at the creature that betrayed him—

A slim, slight shadow stood there, wrapped in a dark cloak. A goblin, he thought at first blink—until the figure cast back the hood. A mere girl faced him, pale as the starlight and insubstantial as his grip on the world. She had a cleft in her chin. Would a sorcerer's illusion add that human detail? His wits were fogging, his legs were shaking—he felt the troll's shadow in the wind at his back.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"A witch," she said. "A powerful witch. I came here to find a wizard named Karoly. Do you know him?"

No, he thought distressedly, no, I'm not sure I ever knew him. He thought of the skulls at his back, and doubts and anger welled up, with a memory of his brother, and the road, and the warning stone. "Are you a friend of Karoly's?"

"My mistress is. Was he with you?"

"How should I say? I don't know your kind, I don't know if wizards die or not. He saw the stone, he didn't warn us, he didn't stop—" He was shaking in the knees, and it was not all the cold. "Look around you. Tell me if he's alive, and I'll ask him where my brother is!"

She looked distressed then. And the troll said, in a deep, deep voice:

"Ate them all. Only bones are left."

She glanced past him and above, and for his part, he wanted to sit down and let the troll and the witch argue out what to do or what more they wanted with him—escape was a far, confusing enterprise, and led probably to the hands of goblins, or witches, who knew?

"I have two horses," she said. "I've food enough. Krukczy, bring him."

He did not want to be brought. If there were horses, if there was a way off this rooftop, he was willing to go. The witch walked away to the edge of the parapet, and over the edge—onto downward stairs, as he saw; and he began shakily to follow, stepped over the brink and saw dark air and empty space as the wind rocked him.

But the troll caught his arm in a powerful grip and held him from falling—kept its grip on his arm and guided him all the way down the steps to the stones of the streamside, the witch moving constantly ahead of them, a cloaked black shape with now and again a pale wisp of hair or gown. He went without argument now, although the troll's grip hurt him. He thought: We came to find a witch; and I've found one, and she might even be what she says . . . If she's not in league with the goblins herself.