by Tim Stead
They ate a little. Time passed. There was still no sign of Fane and they were both beginning to feel the cold.
“He should be back by now,” Cain said. He stood up and walked twenty paces along the tracks the lieutenant had left, but it didn’t improve the view. “Do you think we should follow him?”
She said nothing, but sat in the snow looking at her feet.
“We will not be apart again,” he said. “I swore an oath to that effect. No duty will make me break it.”
She looked up at him. “I understand,” she said. “Perhaps I can managed another climb if we wait a while.”
It was a brave thing to say, Cain thought, and he loved her the more for saying it. “Come,” he said. “Let’s go and find out what’s keeping Jerac Fane.”
Sheyani stood up. He could see that her joints had stiffened in the cold. She shivered, rubbed her hands together vigorously. She glanced up at the mountains, but quickly lowered her eyes again. “You lead,” she said.
He set of at a steady pace. It was strange, but wading through the snow didn’t seem that difficult. He had expected it to be tiring, but his breath hardly quickened. Looking back at Sheyani he saw it was the same for her. Their new strength and stamina made this easy for them when it would have sapped any natural man. They were quite high and the air was thin, but it troubled neither of them.
They followed Fane’s tracks. They walked down the valley and it broadened out. There were several smaller valleys off to both sides, all of them rising towards distant peaks, all of them choked with snow. They could see that Fane had explored several of these. The tracks went up and came back down. They ignored these diversions and continued to follow the main track. It was surprising how far Fane had walked. They had covered half a mile, and still there was no sign of him.
Sheyani made a noise. She pointed at something. In the distance she had spotted Fane, and he was stationary, but he seemed to be digging at the side of a mountain. They hurried through the snow, and when they were drawing close Cain called out.
“Find something?”
“Something,” the lieutenant called back, and carried on digging, throwing scoops of snow over his shoulders with his bare hands. Cain stopped beside him and looked. Something was as fair a description as could be made. What had caught Fane’s eyes was a piece of stone upon which there seemed to be something carved. He had almost walked past it, but a casual kick with a boot had revealed not one, but a line of what seemed to be characters carved in the stone. Jerac could not have recognised the script, but there was doubt that it was deliberate and had meaning.
By the time Cain and Sheyani had found him he had uncovered about ten square feet of stone, smooth enough to have been deliberately cut, and if time and ice had worn it away a little, there could be no doubt that it was a mason-carved slab. Sheyani leaned forwards to study the writing.
“Do you know the tongue?” Cain asked.
“I have seen similar,” she said. “I cannot say what it says, but it is very old.”
Cain joined in, digging with both hands, shovelling snow away. He found an edge, a vertical edge that ran under more snow both upwards and down. He began to work along it.
“It’s a door,” Jerac said.
“You can’t know that,” Cain told him.
“Just wait,” Jerac said. “You’ll see.”
He followed the edge upwards. Before he reached the top Jerac had found another edge running parallel to Cain’s, and about seven feet to the right. He began to clear that, and Sheyani joined in, digging down towards the ground.
It took them half an hour to clear it top to bottom, and when they’d done it they stood back and looked. It was a square slab of grey stone, ten feet high, seven feet wide. The writing was scattered about it like a confetti of sentences. In places the script was larger, in places it was deeper cut.
“A door,” Jerac said.
“No handle,” Cain replied. It was true. The surface was unbroken apart from the writing. He looked at the edges. There was no cut stone around the slab. It was set into the living rock, and set so perfectly that the crack around it was never more than the width of a fingernail.
“If it is a door, how shall we open it?” Sheyani asked.
“Do we want to?” Cain replied. They both looked at him. “All right,” he said. “We want to open it.”
Jerac tried to get a grip on the door, but it was impossible. He grunted and strained, but the thing did not move.
“It’s probably frozen in,” Cain said.
“It may be for the best,” Sheyani said. She pointed to a symbol on the door, a tall triangle balanced on its point, a line rising at an angle from its flat top. “This is the symbol of Seti, the god mage.”
“This place is his?”
“I do not know,” she shook her head, looked worried. “I would have thought to see this in a more prominent place if that were so, but it certainly seems to be associated with him in some way.”
“There must be a way to open it,” Jerac said.
“If it is a door,” Cain said. “It may just be some sort of monument.”
“Here? Where nobody can see it?” Jerac asked. “It’s a door.”
“Perhaps you need magic to open it,” Cain said.
Sheyani put her hands on the stone again and leaned her forehead against it. She closed her eyes. Cain watched. She didn’t move for at least a full minute, but then she abruptly stood back.
“There is no magic that I can detect. If there is anything it has faded or is beyond my knowing.”
Cain took his turn at the door. He did not push or strain. He reasoned that if this door was very old, and if had been used for many years, there might be some signs of that use upon it. He ran his hands along the stone, feeling for changes in the flat surface. He laid his cheek against it, looked along the surface. He saw at once that although it was perfectly smooth, it was not entirely flat. He stood back.
“You really want to see inside?” he asked.
There was no reply. They just looked at him. Cain shrugged. He leaned forwards and placed his hands in the two hollows he had detected and pushed with all his strength.
Something behind the door clicked.
Without a sound it swung upwards, revealing a dark cavern beyond. Cain stepped into the opening, and suddenly the cavern was no longer dark. Sections of rock along its walls began to glow so that they could all see the passageway vanishing into the distance.
“It goes west,” Jerac said.
Cain was apprehensive. This was magic indeed. The door had been a simple machine, or could have been, but the light, and the doorway knowing they were there – it could be nothing but magic.
“Do you think it is safe?” he asked.
Sheyani stepped past him out of the daylight. She looked at the lights. “Safe for now,” she said. “And better than climbing another mountain.”
Cain was uncertain. This was a place he knew nothing about, an ancient place, and there had been ancient powers inimical to men. He examined the closest light. It was a rock. It felt like a rock beneath his hand, and there was no seam between it and the surrounding rock. Some mage had touched it and made it promise light whenever someone entered the cave, and so it fulfilled its oath.
Yet the door had been easy to open. Not to a natural man, he thought. It had taken all his strength to trigger it. But to a Farheim it would be easy.
Sheyani said this had been a place linked in some way to the god mage Seti, and Seti was a warrior mage, history suggested. He had many Farheim. Who else could climb the slopes that had brought them here? Perhaps this was a place for them.
Besides, he had little wish to subject Sheyani to the terror of another climb. If this distracted her for a while that was a good thing, and if it happened to shorten their journey somehow, well that was also good.
“We will explore it,” he said. “But if it leads us nowhere we will cease after an hour.”
They went in. Cain led the way an
d Sheyani followed close behind. Jerac brought up the rear. They had gone no more than twenty paces when a grinding of rock made them turn. The door had closed again, and the little square of snow and ice, the world beyond this tunnel, had vanished.
“Well, I’m sure we can open it again if we need to,” he said.
They walked steadily. The tunnel did not rise or fall and the floor was smooth, so it was easy going. It was, in fact, quite dull, and after walking for almost half an hour with no change in their surroundings Cain paused.
“Are you sure this is heading west?” he asked Jerac.
“Aye, colonel. It was pointing west when we began, and it’s been straight as an arrow since.”
They must have covered over a mile. He tried to think how far it was across the Dragon’s Back east to west, and thought it must be two miles at least until the peaks began to decline. Another half hour and they might be drawing close to the other side.
They carried on. It was difficult to keep track of time. He had promised an hour, to turn back if there was nothing to find, and he was not sure how much of that was left. He need not have worried. A few minutes after he had asked Jerac about the direction they came upon a room.
They did not see it from a distance. It was only when Cain stepped out into a larger space that it was illuminated, abruptly and in the same manner as the passageway. He stopped so suddenly that Sheyani walked into his back, trod on his heels.
The room was not vast. It was perhaps thirty feet from side to side and circular. The walls and ceiling were bare rock, rough hewn the same as the passage, but there were twelve doors set in the walls, as though this was a junction of some sort, or they were rooms. Cain thought they must be rooms because they had doors. The corridor from which he had stepped had no door to bar it; nor did the corridor that continued on the other side of the room.
He moved to the middle of the chamber so that Sheyani and Jerac could enter. Jerac went straight to one of the door and examined it.
“No handles,” he said. “How did you do the trick with the other door?”
The doors here were different. They looked as though they were made of metal, bronze perhaps, but smooth as a mirror. Indeed, he could see s reflection, blurred and unrecognisable, every time he moved.
“The doors are mage craft,” Sheyani said. She had moved to the other side of the room. She was touching one of them, running her fingers across the surface, and Cain saw at once that whatever they were made of it wasn’t metal. The surface of the door rippled like water, and then settled quickly again. He touched the one in front of him, and rings spread from his finger, subsiding a few inches from his finger tip. He pulled his hand away.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jerac said. “Can we step through them?”
“You’d jump off a cliff if you couldn’t see the bottom,” Cain said.
Sheyani walked to the middle of the room. “Have you looked at the floor?” she asked.
Cain looked. Jerac looked.
“Dirt,” Jerac said.
“Under the dirt,” Sheyani chided him as though he were a student, and not a particularly clever one. Cain brushed the dirt aside with a foot and saw lines, clean lines cut in cut stone. He crouched down and swept the debris aside with his hands, revealing more.
“How old is this place?” he asked. Nobody answered. He hadn’t really expected an answer. They worked quickly, sweeping the accumulated dust and grit of centuries away from the floor and into the open corridors to the east and west. When they finished the floor was impressive. It was divided into fourteen divisions, one for the eastern corridor, one for the west, and one for each door. The door segments were carved with a multitude of symbols, curved lines of script like the ones on the outer door that grew smaller the further from the centre they were.
“If only we could read it,” Cain said.
“Place names,” Jerac said. “I don’t suppose they would mean very much to us if we could.”
Sheyani got down on her hands and knees and looked closely at the writing. She shushed Cain when he asked her what she was doing, but he followed her around the room anyway. She worked steadily round in a circle, moving from the centre of the room towards each door, then back to the centre for the next segment.
She stood again, her clothes covered in dust. “Some of these symbols I know,” she said. “You were right to think that they are doors to places, but as Jerac supposed, those places no longer have any meaning.”
“But you were able to read something?” Cain could see it in her eyes.
“Something, yes.”
“And?”
She knelt again, pointed to one of the symbols – a circle with a single line from the centre to the circumference. “This is a direction,” she said. “And this,” she pointed again to a row of symbols. “This is a number, perhaps a measurement of distance.”
Cain looked where she pointed, but it didn’t help. They could have been tea leaves in a cup for all the good it did him. He looked at Jerac.
“You’re sure this passage runs east west?”
Jerac hesitated, then nodded. “Unless we have been turned around by magic. The passage was straight. I was sure of the direction when we entered.”
That would have to do. He walked quickly around the circle and found two that pointed somewhere between north and west. “Can you say the distance of these?” he asked.
Sheyani frowned and studied the script, tracing the characters with her fingers. “No,” she said. “The form is unfamiliar, though I can name some of the words. The numbering is different from our own. It does not follow that the longer script is the further distance. I cannot read it.”
“We could end up anywhere,” Jerac said.
“We don’t even know if the doors work,” Cain looked at both of them. “But at least we think we will be further north and further west.”
“We could keep walking to the end of the tunnel,” Jerac suggested. “See what’s there.”
“Just a moment ago you were all for trying the doors,” Cain said. Jerac shrugged, but said nothing. Cain looked at Sheyani. “You think this is safe?”
“I think the doors will do whatever they were meant to do, Sheshay,” she replied. “I cannot say if they are safe.”
Cain looked at each of his companions, but there was no help there. They were waiting for him to make up his mind. He looked at the closest door, one that promised to take them north-west. It shimmered at him. Surely such an elaborate thing could not be a trap? Nobody but Farheim could have reached this place, and it had ever sign of being a place used so come and go, a crossroads.
“This one,” he said. “I will go first. Wait for a few seconds after I have gone through, then follow.”
“Aye, colonel,” Jerac said. Sheyani nodded.
Cain squared himself before the smooth bronze doorway. He took a deep breath. He stepped forwards.
Forty Seven – Pascha
It was almost over. Pelion was not yet lost for words – she didn’t think that would ever happen – but his speeches were becoming repetitive, his sentences more loosely assembled as though he was stitching bits of thought together without much of a plan behind them.
Pascha was excited and sad at the same time. The thought that she would be free again raised her spirits. This was a charming place, in its limited way, but she did not doubt that it was a prison. She had been brought here against her will and could not leave without Pelion’s blessing. She had learned much, and part of her accepted that this had been necessary, but still she chafed at the restraint.
The gaps between their talks – or lectures, a better word, she thought – had grown longer. She had more time to think, to experiment, to dream.
While she yearned to be free she knew that with that freedom would come an awesome responsibility. She would be a god mage, a wielder of unimagined power, and more significantly, the only one of her kind. The world would be hers for the taking.
But that would be wron
g.
She was as sure about that as she had ever been about anything in her long life. She had watched Narak turn down the crowns of the kingdoms of Terras, and she had known, even then, that it was the right thing to do. If she took power she could never relinquish it, and holding it forever she would eventually succumb to its poison. She would become a tyrant. She knew that this was in her nature. It was there because she was no different from any other man or woman, not underneath all the powers and trappings of godhood. She might rule wisely for a hundred years, even a thousand, but eventually she would become what Pelion had been, her conscience cauterised, the rest of the world no more than perishable goods, their lives and loves no better than coin in her hand, there to be spent as she willed.