Bearers of the Black Staff

She looked but didn’t see anything. “What am I looking for?”


“What you’re not seeing, which is good. We don’t want the Trolls to see it, either. We’ve rigged pins linked to ropes on either side that hold back several tons of rock. If they are pulled, we create an avalanche that will bury anyone caught in the pass on the wrong side of the wall. A last resort, if the walls should be taken. The Trolls will be crowding forward, hundreds deep. There won’t be time or space to run. Most will die where they stand.”

She nodded. “So you don’t think they will see the trap you’ve set?”

Tenerife shrugged. “You didn’t. Are their eyes any sharper than yours?”

“They might have more experience with these things than I do.”

“They might be too busy trying to stay alive if they get this far to make a careful study of outcroppings several hundred feet up.”

She nodded. It made sense. “Who designed all this?”

Tasha cocked an eyebrow at her. “Ronan Caer. Remember him?”

She shook her head. “But the name sounds familiar.”

“It should. He broke your arm when you were five. You were playing with staves, pretending to fight each other. He pretended too hard or you pretended too little, and the result was your left arm in a splint for nine weeks. Do you remember now?”

She did, although she hadn’t thought of the incident in years, and she didn’t think she had seen Ronan Caer in almost that long. He had moved away from Arborlon when she was still little. “He designed all this?”

“It seems he wasn’t wasting his time while he was away. He was studying architecture, particularly as it relates to creating defensive positions. He was exploring, as well. Knew the pass as well as we did. He set the positions right away. Haren knew his talent from before and called him up as soon as we arrived. Made things much easier.”

Haren Crayel, captain of the Home Guard. A good man, one her father trusted implicitly. She hadn’t known he was up here, but it made sense that he would be placed in command.

“Enough of ancient history,” Tasha declared, taking her arm. “We’ve got something else to show you besides the fortifications, something that isn’t quite so reassuring.”

They left the staging areas and the defensive wall behind and proceeded through the pass. Soon even the noise of the construction had disappeared in a baffle of twists and turns that first distorted and then deadened the sound of the noise altogether. They wound deeper into the cut, approaching the wide opening where they had stumbled upon the dragon the last time she was up here.

“Any sign of that …?”

“Dragon?” Tenerife finished for her. “Haven’t seen it. Maybe it moved on to less crowded quarters. Maybe there wasn’t enough for it to eat in these mountains and it went in search of better feeding grounds.”

“Maybe it’s waiting for you to get careless,” she suggested.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “I’ve been known to do that, but not where dragons are concerned.”

They crossed the broad opening, Phryne glancing skyward more than once, caught between wanting on the one hand to be safe and on the other to encounter the beast again. She could not forget the mix of exhilaration and fear she had felt on seeing it for the first time. But the dragon did not appear, and soon enough they were past the widening and back inside the narrows, moving ahead once more toward the far opening of the pass. It took them only a short time after that, and as they neared their destination she caught sight of a handful of Elven Hunters gathered just inside the cut. Sentries warding the mouth of the pass, she realized.

“Any change?” Tasha asked as they came up to the group, glancing from face to face.

“Nothing,” one replied. “Take a look for yourselves.”

Wordlessly, the Orullians led Phryne forward the last few steps to where the pass opened out onto the foothills and plains beyond. As they neared the opening, Tasha looked over at her. “Look down on the plains, but don’t show yourself. Stay in the shadow of the cliff sides.”

He motioned for her to go ahead of him, and she did so. When she reached the edge of the light, she stopped and stared out at the broad sweep of the landscape beyond. There were mountains all around, but in the distance, below a ragged clutch of scrub-littered foothills, were plains turned as barren and brown as the rock of their passageway, rolling off to the northwest until they disappeared in the haze of the distant horizon. She scanned from mountains to plains and back again. Nothing.

“I don’t see anything,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the Orullians. “Where should I look?”