Arena

by Karen Hancock

  The cliff was rougher than it appeared. They climbed swiftly, angling left across its face, then right, forced at the end to use hands and feet to scramble over the top. Callie made it, but by then she was shaking, dismayed to find herself dogged by the old crippling fear.

  They stood in yet another grassy basin. The goats were still ahead of them, lingering, as always, at the edge of sight. Leaning his SI against a rock, Pierce stripped off the pack, pulled out the water bottles, and sat down. Callie settled gratefully beside him. Her headache was back, and she was short of breath, so she figured they must be pretty high. Maybe ten thousand feet. Maybe more.

  Pierce sat rigidly, scanning the mists. Presently he got up, SI in hand. “I’m gonna look around,” he said. “Stay put.”

  She glanced at the weapon and nodded, content to rest her still-trembling muscles. As he disappeared into the fog she realized things were going from bad to worse. On a clear day, they could’ve studied the peaks from a distance and picked out the most promising route. Today they didn’t have that option. Leaning back against the rock, she sipped from the bottle. Fear, her most faithful companion, clawed at the pit of her stomach. She tried to push it away with imaginings of an easy route opening before them, sunshine and flowers on every side, all going well—

  But how could she, when the landscape was anything but? This was not the world of The Sound of Music. It was a barren, inhospitable moonscape, just rock upon rock and the impenetrable mist. They were going to get into trouble. She knew it. And though she’d supposedly conquered her fear at Rimlight, she saw now she hadn’t—not totally. Perhaps she never would. I’m going to freak. And then where will we be?

  Stop it. She closed her eyes and clenched her fists. Stop thinking like this. How can you be such a wimp?

  Easy. I’ve had lots of practice. All my life. If it was too scary, I just didn’t do it.

  Well, now you don’t have that choice.

  A thudding, clacking sound came up from the cliff they’d just ascended, and she stiffened, her hand closing on the SI. As she slowly stood and turned she imagined Trogs climbing the same rocks she’d just scaled.

  The soft thumps of approaching footsteps jerked her around, weapon leveled. But it was only Pierce. “You ready to go?” he asked, picking up the pack.

  “Did you hear that noise from down the cliff?”

  “Yeah.” He buckled the hip belt and turned away.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Callie asked.

  “Not really. But I figure the goats do.”

  “The goats? They could be leading us anywhere. Even around in circles.”

  “Or to better pasture on the other side of the mountain.” He glanced back at her. “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence we’ve found them. And they do seem to be leading us.”

  The thought had crossed her mind. “You think Elhanu sent them?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  They crossed the basin and ascended a talus-covered slope. As they climbed, the shattered rock gave way in localized slides so that each step took them back almost as far as they went forward. The mist thickened. Numbness crept into Callie’s extremities. She gave thanks there was no wind but wondered if it would snow. The small ice fields and the crescents and commas of crusted snow testified that flurries would not be impossible, even in summer. How ironic if, after all her concern about falling, she succumbed to exposure.

  The talus was eventually replaced by five-foot chunks of rock even more difficult to traverse, and her limbs soon shook with exhaustion. She gasped almost fruitlessly in the thin air, blood all the while pounding in her temples, a painful timpani of altitude sickness. At length they rounded a slope and found a ragged cliff looming out of the clouds. On a ledge a goat perched bright against the dark rock. As they watched, it jumped from perch to perch, scaling the wall as if gravity did not exist, until it disappeared into the mist above.

  Pierce started after it at once, but Callie hesitated, staring up at the wall, swallowing the thickening in her throat. You can do this, she told herself. You can. But already the black things flickered at the edges of her vision, and she had an unnerving recollection of preparing to climb the vertical bank of the Fire River and saying much the same thing.

  Composed of ragged ranks of layered rock whose slant pitched inward toward the mountain, the cliff was more of a steep hike than a climb. Following the goats in a diagonal route across its face, they were able to ascend at first with shoulders to the wall, not even needing to use their hands. With the mist holding them close, Callie kept her focus on the rocks and climbed carefully, steadily, confidence rising within her.

  Then the breeze kicked up, and light followed shadow as the clouds shredded, reformed, and shredded again. They came to a ledge sprinkled with goat droppings. It curved around a ragged granite face, then dipped under an overhang that forced Callie onto her hands and knees. Her confidence waned. The clouds continued to pull back. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed yawning spaces out beyond the rock’s edge and angled her face more toward the wall. Her heart pounded with exertion and altitude and rising anxiety. She felt shaky and lightheaded. Again and again she was swept with the sensation that something clung just beneath the ledge, preparing to leap up and grab her.

  Pierce waited for her on a good-sized bulge. Reluctantly, one hand holding to the rock, she climbed beside him, keeping her gaze turned down on—

  Nothing. Just beyond Pierce’s booted feet the ledge sheered off into dizzying space and vertical rock faces, plunging so violently she couldn’t see bottom, though she stood almost at the edge. She gasped as with a roar, the demons hurtled out of that space, flapping darkly around her and filling her with the familiar compulsion to hurl herself over the edge. Whimpering, she dropped onto hands and knees and inched back to the overhang where the ledge was wider, and where, shaking and weeping, she huddled and clung to the rock.

  “Callie?”

  She flinched as Pierce touched her shoulder.

  “Callie, we can’t stay here.”

  “I can’t do it,” she moaned into the rock.

  “You must.”

  “No.”

  He gripped her shoulders to pull her up, but she fought him, squealing and struggling to break free until he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly. After a few minutes she stopped struggling and clung to him instead, sobbing hysterically. He held her and said nothing, and after a time the hysteria gave way to exhaustion. She fell silent, sniffing, still shaking, pressing her face against him so she wouldn’t have to see that they were still on this awful cliff.

  Presently he said, “I can’t carry you up this.”

  “Then leave me.”

  His arms tightened about her. “Can’t do that, either.”

  After a moment he pushed her gently away, cradled her face in his palms. “There are Trogs behind us, Callie. We either have to keep on or go back and fight. Is that what you want to do? Go back?”

  If they went back, he would very likely die—or be caught—trying to protect her.

  She swallowed. “You really think there is a way up?”

  “I do.” His hands dropped back to her shoulders. “Elhanu has promised to lead us through this, Cal. We’ve got to trust him.”

  Her fingers tightened on his breastplate, and she shook her head. “It’s hard.”

  “You can do it if you want to.”

  “I do want to! It’s just that when I look at that drop—”

  “Don’t look at it, then. Look at him instead.”

  “Look at—”

  “Use the link.”

  The link. Of course.

  She pressed her forehead to his chest and shut her eyes, seeking the elusive connection, trying to remember all she knew of the one who made the link possible. It was like groping down a dark hallway in a strange house. And then, as if a door had opened to the outside, light and strength and blessed calm poured into her. Suddenly she knew with startling clarity that they
had been led here, to this time, this place, this situation, so that she could face this choice. Would she trust him? Would she use what she had been given?

  Over and over Pierce had reminded them the battle was waged against thoughts and feelings more than material things. And so it was. She could let herself be carried away by visions of the terrible things that might happen, or she could willfully concentrate on the fact that she carried Elhanu’s power in her body, that he had promised to deliver her from this place and was capable of keeping that promise, and that she had climbed a cliff wall like this at least fifty times at Rimlight and knew very well what to do.

  Decision hardened within her. She lifted her head and managed a half smile. “Okay. I’m ready.”

  The expression that flashed across his face was one of relief and something more. Something deeper and more profound than simple satisfaction. It vanished before she could identify it, and then he was squeezing her shoulders and stepping back. “I’ll get the rope.”

  He shrugged off the pack, slinging it around to brace it on his knee. After he helped her drink some water, he tied them together at the waist, putting about twenty feet of slack between them, and they started off again. Callie concentrated fiercely on the link with Elhanu, on the granite wall beside her, on the rocks beneath her feet, and on Pierce, who never got so far ahead that he couldn’t help her if she needed it. More than once she was impressed by the strength with which he hauled her over the rough spots. Rock by rock, bulge by bulge, they inched up the cliff’s face.

  The light shifted constantly, brightening, dimming, brightening again as the mists drew in and out. A breeze gusted around her, tickling her face with tendrils of her hair, wafting the tangy musk of the goats.

  Occasionally she spied dark grapelike clusters of droppings caught in the cracks and took comfort in knowing the animals had preceded her. Then the path petered out completely and the slope went vertical. Pierce pounded a piton into the rock, hooked on a carabiner, and looped the rope through it. They were anchored now. Nothing to fear.

  She started up with inward trembling—and a rising sense of hope. The vertical portion was only about ten feet, and still hardly more than Gerry’s steep hike. Not bad at all. Something she’d done many times before. Light brightened and blue sky peeked through the clouds in promise.

  Then a quarrel smacked the cliff wall to her right. She gasped as she watched it skitter down the gray rock beside her. Its descent dragged her eyes downward to the great bowl yawning below her. She gulped and pulled her gaze back up, but her arms and legs were already shaking.

  It’s just a feeling. I will not give in to it. The arrows can’t hurt me as long as my belt’s on. But was it? She let go with her right hand and pressed the switch to be sure. Breathing deeply, she dove inward, seeking again the precious window of strength and calm.

  The rope tugged on her waist, breaking her concentration. Pierce had reached the top and now peered back at her. “Come on, Callie,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “You’ve got to hurry.”

  She reached for the next handhold, pulled herself up, and groped for a foothold. Her legs shook deep in the calves. Her shoulders burned. The rope slackened, then tightened again. She heard a distant howl and refused to look down, but the skin between her shoulder blades crept in anticipation of being shot.

  She reached for another handhold, clinging to Elhanu’s inner presence as the rope went slack again. Her knee banged into a rocky knob, and she lurched for balance, rough stone tearing at her fingertips.

  Clenching her teeth to still their chattering, she lifted her leg again, out and over this time, gaining purchase on the knob. Abruptly the rope tightened, jerking her upward. She lost the knob, the ledge, everything. Gasping and flailing, she was jerked up again as another quarrel bounced off the rock beside her. She grabbed an out-thrust shelf and hauled herself up. Two more quarrels hit somewhere close below her as she scrambled over the edge and into Pierce.

  They landed in a heap, gained their feet in unison, and, still bound by the rope, sprinted across the mist-bound flat. Only after they had rounded the base of another slope did they stop for breath.

  “I can’t believe they came this far,” Pierce gasped, gulping water and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. Rope burns lashed his wrists and the backs of his hands.

  “Do you think they’ll follow us up that cliff?” Callie asked.

  “I don’t know. They looked like they were hurting, so maybe not. On the other hand—”

  “Maybe we could sit up here and pick them off as they come over.”

  He shook his head. “If the clouds close in we might miss them. I doubt they’ll go much farther. Like I said—they’re hurting.” He stood, pulled her to her feet, untied the rope from her waist, and they started off.

  They had not gone far when the rocky corridor they were following widened into yet another basin. The goats ranged up ahead and then disappeared into the mist on their left. Pierce stopped abruptly. Callie dodged around him, adrenaline firing for fear the mutants had cut them off.

  But there was nothing there.

  Wait. She stepped closer and saw a thin film of light stretching between neighboring rock faces ahead, smears of green and blue undulating across it like a misplaced jellyfish. Dark ink churned between the colors, spilling in and out of the spaces, and a high-pitched hum rode the air, alternately masked and revealed by the errant breeze.

  It was a natural fire curtain, hypnotic and vaguely repellent, yet generating an undeniable allure. It pulled at her, promising respite from the headache, the aching muscles, and the rising nausea of altitude sickness. She turned away, shivering.

  Beside her Pierce stepped tentatively toward it. He had balled his fists and clenched his teeth, and the expression on his face made her heart quail.

  “Pierce?”

  He shuddered and turned off the trail. “We’ll go around it. That’s why the goats were over there, I guess.”

  The goat tracks led across a wide, snow-crusted shelf to another valley where Pierce called a rest. Callie fished two pain pills from the med kit and washed them down with a gulp of water, wishing she could wash away the memory of the fire curtain as easily. Even now a perverse longing stirred in her.

  Pierce sat with his SI across his lap, staring back the way they’d come. After a few minutes, he got up. “I’m going back.”

  She frowned at him. “But you said—”

  “They may be sick, but if they get through that curtain we’re in big trouble.”

  “I’ll come, too, then.”

  “They’ll be less likely to spot me alone,” he said. “You stay here and rest.”

  “But—”

  He was already gone.

  She scowled after him. “I’m not going to stay here,” she muttered and stood—

  A little too quickly. The world tilted, her head felt about to split, and she nearly retched. By the time she’d recovered, Pierce was long gone, and all she could do was wait, trying not to dwell on the way he’d stared at the fire curtain.

  She sat there a long time. The pain pills finally kicked in, and she was again thinking about going back, when a low boom rolled between the peaks, shaking the ground and spreading the goats like buckshot up the hillside. Peering nervously at the opening across the valley, she picked up her SI and switched it on. Shortly Pierce emerged from the clouds, carrying two bags of E-cubes.

  “I got them both,” he said when he joined her. He smelled oddly sweet, almost like actone.

  “Don’t they usually travel in threes?”

  “The third one probably couldn’t make it up the last cliff.” He set aside the bags and his SI and slung on the pack.

  “What if it’s just slow? Once it gets to the curtain—”

  “The curtain’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “I walked through it with the belt on.” He gestured at his waist. “The field acts like a reflector. Sends the waves back to their source and burns it out.”


  “You walked through the fire curtain?”

  “I blew it up, Callie. Didn’t you hear the boom?”

  She regarded him doubtfully, battling unpleasant suspicions. “Why didn’t you do that before, when we were both there?”

  “I didn’t think of it. But I wouldn’t have tried it with you around, anyway. I wasn’t sure what would happen. If it worked, I didn’t know how big the explosion might be. Come on. I think we’re almost to the end.”

  They descended a narrow chute past a chain of lakelets, silver hued in the misty light. All around them rock lay against rock, dark and ragged, accented with dirty ice fields. Callie wondered how Pierce could say they were almost to the end. Even if they were over the top, who knew what horrors of descent lay before them?

  But the slope was not as steep as it had been on the other side, and when they found their first bunch of yellow columbines, she felt a glimmer of hope. Skirting a granite dome, they descended a slope covered with short, thick grass and more yellow flowers and, at long last, stepped out of the mist. Callie staggered to a stop, unable to believe her eyes.

  The mountainside tumbled away from her feet, grassy flanks dotted with white humps of granite rolling down to a wide, spruce-blanketed valley. A great crack of a canyon ran up its middle, sections of the green river at its heart gleaming here and there. From this vantage she could even see the tawny cliffs that marked the Gap—just as she had drawn them on the map. Beyond those lay the Devil’s Cauldron itself.

  Pierce stopped just behind her. “Wow.”

  She glanced over both their shoulders at the wall of mist swirling around the peaks, then again at the spectacular vista before them. Relief flooded her, and on its heels, pure joy. With a whoop she turned and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him so hard he staggered. Laughing, she released him and ran down the slope to the sun and the grass and the bobbing wild flowers. There she stripped off her helmet to let the breeze run through her hair, spinning with a delight so intense it brought tears to her eyes. She tripped and went down laughing, then lay flat on her back reveling in the sun’s warmth and the blue sky and the life that bounced and shone and smelled so pungent around her.