The Magic Mines of Asharim

by Pauline M. Ross

  48: Storm

  We were soaked before we even emerged from shelter. The wind gusted into the cave, carrying drenching rain. More thunder drowned the cries we’d heard, and it was too dark to see.

  My mind could still detect him, however. “He’s distressed, not angry,” I said. “There’s no violence in him, just fear.”

  A flash lit the shore, lighting up Zak’s sword, and the face of the man running towards us. A Hrandish warrior, if a very bedraggled one, and carrying no weapons.

  He held both hands up, palm outward. “No harm! I mean you no harm! Please, you must help. You are shamans, yes? Because we need—”

  Another flash, and he stopped, surprise in his mind, and then relief, or perhaps hope. “I know you! You will help? I know you are shamans.”

  “Shamans?”

  “You have powers. We saw you – the flames, the waves rising by themselves. Please, if you can heal, we have a man badly injured.”

  As I translated for Zak, I waited for the next flash, so I could get a better look at the warrior’s face. One of the twins! “Han Karl?”

  “No. No.” An impatient shake of the head. “I am Han Hrillon. Please, will you come? He will die if we cannot help him.”

  “We will come.”

  The poor boy sagged in relief.

  “We have to collect a few supplies first.”

  We dashed back into the cave and hastily stuffed things into bags.

  “You know this boy?” Zak said in a low voice.

  “His mother looked after me when I first went to the women’s quarter. He’s one of twins. Nice young men.”

  “Can we trust him? This could be a trap.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s no deceit in him.”

  “Hmm.” He tightened the straps on the bag with a jerk. “We should be careful, though. These nice young men are warriors now.”

  I paused, puzzled. “I don’t think so. His mind – he’s just the same as he was. Not like a warrior. Whatever changes in them, it hasn’t happened yet.”

  We moved as fast as we could along the lake shore. In the dark, as the rain lashed us with icy whips, and the wind buffeted us this way and that, it was hard to make progress. We tripped on unseen rocks, or stumbled into spiky bushes that tore at our faces. Every misstep sent us splashing into the water. Only the occasional burst of lightning kept us on the right path and guided us across the bridge.

  The initiates had based themselves in another dragon tunnel. Judging by the permanency of the fire-pit, and the array of cooking pots, sleeping pallets and tools, this was an established camp. There were only two people there, the other twin, Han Karl, and the injured man.

  We heard his cries of agony long before we entered the cave. I had my sleep flicker out before I reached him, and within a heartbeat his cries ceased.

  “What have you done?” Han Hrillon asked me, horrified.

  “He will sleep for a few hours. What happened here?”

  “A spear.”

  Zak and I lifted the cloth covering him, and exchanged glances. The spear had passed right through him, puncturing stomach and lungs and the One only knew what else. The external wounds were small and clean, but the damage was all inside.

  “Can you heal him?” Zak said. “He’s in a very bad way.”

  “I can try.” I turned to the twins. “How long has he been like this?”

  “Since last night. He and Kell Krord and Jarn Kran fought.”

  “Where are the other two now? Gone for help?”

  The twins grimaced. “Kell Krord is dead. His body is in the Skull Cave. Jarn Kran – is gone.”

  I explained to Zak. He grunted. “Not our concern. But look – what is this injury?” He pointed to a long gash across the warrior’s chest. “That looks like a knife wound to me, with some kind of paste smeared into it. Can you ask them what remedy they used?”

  The answer was unexpected. “That is his warrior challenge. He cut himself and rubbed in the blood of the ancestors. To make himself strong. That is what we are all supposed to do.”

  There was shame in both twins’ minds. They had failed the test, it seemed.

  I brought out my healing flicker, and carefully placed her on the injured warrior. To my surprise, she squealed with alarm, and hopped straight off. The twins and Zak all jumped back, out of her way. The instinct to give loose flickers plenty of room was deep-rooted.

  She was distressed, and I crooned to her to soothe her, while I tried to work out the problem. Flickers have no language, and although they can understand images in the minds of their throwers, they have no capacity to create them. Their only form of communication is by emotion. In the end, I concluded that there was something inside the warrior’s body that she couldn’t deal with.

  “Poison,” one of the twins said, when I questioned them. “The blood of the ancestors is a kind of poison. Only a true warrior can tolerate it.”

  “It makes us fight,” the other said sadly.

  “Some, it kills immediately,” his brother said. “Some, it drives mad, with an uncontrollable urge to fight. Those who survive are warriors.”

  But changed for ever, turned from normal, sensible men into vicious monsters, like my husband.

  “Is that why you chose not to put yourselves to the test?”

  They were surprised by the idea. “Oh no. We have… a bond between us. The challenge might destroy that.”

  I nodded. “Many twins have such a bond.”

  They laughed, shaking their heads in unison. “No, not like ours. I can be in my brother’s head whenever I want – see what he sees, hear what he hears, just like being him. And he can be in my head. We will not risk losing that.”

  That was understandable. It made them something like the Keeper, able to be in another place, to have another pair of eyes. Not surprising that they were unusually close. Breaking that bond would be worse than losing a limb, it would be like having your very soul torn out of you.

  I gazed down at the injured man, peacefully asleep. There was nothing I could do for him, except pray to the One for her grace, and it seemed unlikely to be granted in such a case.

  We left the twins to tend their fallen comrade. Zak, ever practical, rummaged about the cave for supplies, found a cooking pot and began preparing a meal. The warriors had not been hunting, but there was dried meat, with vegetables and spices, enough to make something nourishing. He built up the fire, set the pot to boil, refilled water flasks, tidied up discarded cloaks and quivers.

  I couldn’t summon the energy to help. The battle against the wall of stone had left me exhausted in body and spirit, and in the end it had all been for nothing. We were sandflies trying to wake a dragon. Pointless, all of it.

  Then the race through the storm, and that had been in vain, too. Not even that small comfort, to heal a fallen warrior, was allowed me. Everything I had attempted had failed. All my grand schemes had come to nothing.

  Sitting with my back to the cave wall, I wrapped my cloak around me, and scrunched myself into ball, head resting on knees.

  “Drink this.” Zak’s low voice made me jump.

  He handed me a flask and I took a sip. “Oh – wine!”

  He grinned, his teeth flashing in the firelight. “Better than water!”

  His mind, alive with fun, even in this dark place, was more of a tonic than the wine. However desperate I became, Zak could always lift my spirits. So I drank, and watched him move lightly back and forth, while the twins chanted prayers over their friend. Later, as the night wore on and the fallen warrior slipped quietly away to his gods, the prayers became laments.

  ~~~~~

  For the second time that night, I woke abruptly, heart galloping. Outside, the wind had dropped, but rain still hammered down. Within the cave, all was still. My neck was stiff from falling asleep propped against the wall. Zak was curled up on the floor, his head in my lap. With the fire low, I couldn’t see the twins, and their minds were out of reach, but their steady breathing g
ave away their sleeping position.

  I heard nothing unusual, and could detect no conscious minds. What had woken me?

  There! A slight quivering. Just another distant earthquake. Then another, longer, one.

  For a long time, all was still. My eyelids drooped.

  And then the whole cave began to shake. Pots crashed over, the woodpile collapsed, pebbles pinged from crevices in the cave walls. Choking dust filled the air.

  “Out!” I screamed. “Out, quickly! Run!”

  My Hrandish deserted me, but the twins got the general idea. They were racing for the cave entrance almost before Zak and I were on our feet.

  It was hard to walk, never mind run, when the earth kept sliding about, and the thick dust made it impossible to see. Zak grabbed my hand, and gasping for breath, we emerged into the rain.

  Zak swore. “Just when I’d got myself dry, too.”

  “We need to get further away from this cliff,” I yelled above the downpour. “The whole lot might come down at any moment.”

  I called out to the twins, and we walked gingerly away from the cave mouth.

  With a splash, we reached the lake.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

  I’d never heard Zak so exasperated. Nothing under the sun or moon bothered him, as a rule, and no matter what happened, there was always a thread of merriment in his mind. No longer. We’d had a long day and an even longer night, and here we were standing ankle-deep in water in the pouring rain, with an earthquake going on all round us.

  For a moment, it seemed as though the shaking was easing. But then it started again, a great roar like a thousand waterfalls all at once, and a shuddering deep in the earth. The lake churned around us, as angry as the earth. For many heartbeats we waited, holding our breath, before it began to dissipate. When it died away, the silence was profound.

  “I’m going back to the cave,” Zak said.

  “It’s risky. There may be aftershocks.”

  “Fuck that. I’m sick of being wet.”

  The cave was almost intact. There was debris scattered about, and everything was coated in dust, even the poor dead warrior, but our things were still there, including Zak’s boots. I’d never removed mine, so they were wet again. I tore them off in disgust and hurled them across the cave. I was sick of being wet, too.

  While the twins gently cleaned their friend, Zak silently coaxed the fire back to life, then huddled beside it, head drooping.

  I sat beside him, and put my arms around him as best I could. His shoulders were too broad for me to reach all the way round. “As soon as it’s light, we’ll head back to the tunnel,” I said. “See if we can think of a way to sneak through.”

  “You want to give up?”

  “I don’t see what else we can do. We’ve tried everything, and it wasn’t enough. We’ll just have to hope the army can take the city, and then there will be leisure to dismantle that blockage stone by stone.”

  He grunted, and I took that for agreement.

  Dawn arrived in a blaze of fiery red, and the last shreds of the storm blew away. Zak went outside to relieve himself. When he returned, his eyes were wide and his mind was swirling with shock.

  “Come and see,” was all he said.

  At first, I could see nothing. The sun was still hidden behind the peaks, casting the crater into deep shadow, and tipping the mountains with rose and gold and blood red. I looked around me at the lake and the cave-pocked cliff behind it.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing across the lake.

  Even then, I didn’t realise, at first. My eye skimmed past it, not noticing, then jumped back. “What is that? Whatever has happened? That was not there yesterday.”

  Yesterday, the northern rim of the crater was a jagged line of peaks, like an uneven row of teeth, with the scree slope in front of it like a tongue. Now the tongue was gone, and several teeth, too. A massive gap had opened up, the sky showing pale behind it.

  “How is it possible?” I whispered.

  “It must have been the earthquake.”

  “No. There have been earthquakes here ever since the Catastrophe, and not one of them opened up the crater wall like that.”

  “Well, it was none of our doing,” Zak said.

  “I’m not so sure. If we weakened it… When you were freezing the water beneath the stones, maybe some of that was in crevices in the crater wall?”

  He frowned. “I… couldn’t say. I concentrated on long fingers of water rather than bigger pools because it’s easier to freeze. I suppose it’s possible. The freezing drove cracks into the wall and the earthquake shook it down. Shall we go and see?”

  The twins wanted to take the dead warrior to the Skull Cave, so we set off on our own, splashing through puddles and trudging through mud. At least it had stopped raining.

  But that was something else that was strange. The lake was lower than it had been yesterday.

  As soon as we neared the gap in the northern rim, we could see why. Water poured over the edge in a great torrent. When we climbed a little way, we could peer down at the waterfall gushing down the mountain, and the tumble of broken rocks scattered all the way down. Away across the desert, a thin silver line marked the newly returned river.

  We had achieved our objective.

  “Well,” Zak said, bemused. “That is far more spectacular than we had in mind. Now most of the water will head north, and it will be Hurk Hranda which gets a modest share in the wet seasons. But Mesanthia has its water again.”

  “Will they be ready? They will need to have the flood-gates open—”

  “Sweet lady, what do you think the Keeper has been doing these last days? And my group, too. Everyone is ready.”

  “But it is so sudden! One moment, nothing and then – all this. People could be swept away!”

  “Everything is ready. As soon as the Keeper knows—”

  “But how will we get word to her in time, when—”

  He turned to me, lips curved in a slight smile, as I worked it out. “Oh. She already knows. Is she seeing this, right now?”

  “I have no way of telling when she is… in my head. But I am quite sure she has been keeping an eye on our progress. She knows what has happened.”

  It was unsettling to think of, but at least there was a purpose to it. Mesanthia would not be unprepared for the enormity of the change streaming across the desert towards it.

  ~~~~~

  There was no longer anything to keep us at the lake, but the only route out was back through the tunnel.

  “They will never allow us to leave,” I said.

  “We’ll never know unless we try,” Zak responded.

  We collected a few last items from our cave, and began the long descent to the dam. On the way, we found the twins waiting for us, their duty at the Skull Cave completed.

  “May we come with you? Will you take us to your city?”

  “You will not become warriors?” I asked them. They shook their heads in unison, mouths compressed in determination. “You want to leave Hurk Hranda?”

  Vigorous nodding. “Do you know what becomes of failed warriors?” one of them said. “The slave pits. Branding and chains and fighting for the rest of our lives.”

  “Short lives,” the other added. “Only the very best survive for more than a few moons.”

  The slave pits. I shivered. I had never seen them, for my father had refused to take me, but many of the foreign quarter’s population had gone to watch the fights. They returned wide-eyed with shock, talking of the blood, the severed limbs, the split skulls, the fine young men slaughtered for the entertainment of the baying crowds of warriors. The Hrandish kept no slaves, apart from this one obsession, but all captured enemies and convicted criminals ended up there, or in the brothels.

  And their own princes, too, if they failed this test of manhood.

  It didn’t need much thinking about. “You are welcome to come with us, but you should know that we are enemies of the Blood.”

 
; “As we are, now. And you are shamans of great power. The Fire Spirit, the Water Spirit and the Earth Spirit all do your bidding. We want to serve you, if you will accept our spears.”

  I translated for Zak. He raised a wry eyebrow. “Are we starting a religion here? And – Earth Spirit?”

  “The earthquake. They think we summoned it.”

  “And who’s to say we didn’t,” he said cheerfully. “Ask if they can get us through the tunnel. Because those guards at the dam are friendly souls, but I don’t see them turning off the water for us now that we’ve sent the bulk of the river to Mesanthia.”

  When I explained the problem, the two laughed. “Easy! We can pass for warriors. We brought the proper insignia with us. And you can be our prisoners.”

  Zak shrugged when I explained, but I felt the burst of excitement in his mind. It was risky, but that made it a more attractive proposition to him.

  It was too risky for me, however. “Real warriors would never bother to bring us all the way down the mountain in such a circumstance. Immediate execution is more their style. And the soldiers at the dam might just decide to do the job for them. No, our story is that the earthquake did the damage, we’re as horrified as anyone, and we are hastening back to the city to report.”

  “Hmm. And if they decide to sharpen their swords on us instead?” Zak said.

  “What if they do? Look, I never expected to survive this. I’ve done what I set out to do, so my work is finished. We will try to escape… but even if we can find a way through the tunnel, there is the city to get through and the camp outside. I don’t see—”

  He gripped my arms tightly, his face a handspan from mine, his voice fierce. “We will survive!”

  Then a grin split his face.

  “After all, I promised my mother.”

  49: War

  The waterfall above Hurk Hranda was silent. When we had passed this point on our way up, great spouts of water had forced their way through crevices in the rim, to cascade in giant steps to the middle lake below. Today, only a few drips fell into the rocky pools. The stillness was eerie.

  We hurried past, and began the scramble down to the middle lake. The night’s rain had left the path boggy and treacherous. We slithered and slid, or inched down clinging to whippy branches, but we were all coated in mud before we reached the lake.