On the other hand, Hallin had five hundred crowns waiting in Montor that bade him be certain of it.
“We’ll build the pyre at sunset,” spoke Pax gently, helping to lift the first body from the heap of stone. Already, the granite had covered the other completely and appeared solid once more.
“We’ve no time for that,” barked Hallin, “we’re set behind as it is.” He glanced at the horses, took in the grass near the river and the way toward the west. “He’ll be near the top by now, and we must go on afoot if we would cross this peak. We’ve lost a day on him at least by now.”
“Besides,” added Tawn when the others glowered and grumbled in protest, “we cannot afford the smoke.” At his words, the men grudgingly nodded and solemnly set the dead climber back atop the pile of stone. There, at least, he would be as safe from the scavengers as they could make him.
Once again, Hallin was grateful for Tawn’s presence and his unshakable pragmatism. He sincerely hoped the Montor selectmen would have his payment for him; he would regret having to kill such a one.
“Geretous,” called Tawn, waving the thin Hadrian toward the dead men. “You’re the nearest thing to a priest we have. Come, see to them, will you?”
The young man lowered his head and spoke a few soft prayers over the bodies.
Once the prayers were done, Tawn came forward and rested his hand on the shoulder of the dead climber atop the hard pile of stone. “Rest assured; the mage will pay for these deaths as well as his crimes in Montor,” he said, looking to Hallin for agreement, “and then we will put both our men in the pyre.”
Having gathered what provisions they could carry from the horses’ bags, the five men disappeared into the deep forest to the west, leaving their mounts at the river to graze. None of the Hadrians looked back to see the casual gesture Hallin made over the animals that bent the light around them, so none of them saw the horses vanish into the afternoon light.
Once Dith regained the soil of the hillside, he still had a steep hike back to the top of the falls, steeper, so it seemed to him, than his climb over the rocks had been. He had to lean well over and pull himself along by tree trunks and low branches as he went, stepping up along the roots and deadfall and winding his way over strange boggy sinkholes until, at last, the steeps gave way to more gradual climbs and, finally, to the promontory itself overlooking the falls.
North of the falls, the way along the river was once again passable, and after only a moment spent looking out over the lower mountains below and back toward the open land he had left so many tendays past and back further still toward Graymonde Hall and his beloved Gikka, he turned to continue his path along the river, deeper into the heart of Galorin’s lands, only idly wondering about the horses he saw grazing at the river’s edge.
Nineteen
Hallin’s outstretched arms hung before him, still taut, still reaching helplessly into the emptiness. A shout, a name, still echoed through the trees and filled the glade with a muzzy sound of panic. His own panic. The shout had been his.
The pretty little glade was only a few yards across, the kind of place that bade the men stop and sit a moment in warm sunlight and on level ground, a welcome respite from their steep and treacherous climb through the cold of the high forests. The floor still sparkled in the early sun with a light dusting of frost, and the last of the autumn’s wildflowers were just beginning to fade; everything was just as it had been a moment ago.
Except that Pax was gone.
By the time the hunter and his men had reached the top of the falls, their quarry was at least half a day ahead by Hallin’s best guess and had moved his path closer to the river, weaving his way through the most absurd places, taking himself seemingly right through pits of bubbling hot mud or around treacherous lips of stone that overlooked mist-hidden heights. Over the next several days, they had come close to him a few times—close enough that Hallin had hoped to attack, but always some dratted bit of the terrain seemed set against them, as if the very mountain would protect him from them.
The Hadrians had been of a mind to attack anyway and flush Dith into the open, to force him into a defensive position right away. During the war they had been as adept at battle as anyone on Syon; such a strategy had worked well for them then. But this was to be a battle between mages, Hallin had told them. It would be no matter of weaponry, armor, nor even endurance. The first attack would decide the thing, so they’d best see to it that the first attack was Hallin’s.
Time and again they fell back. Meanwhile, Dith went blithely on his way as if unaware of the dangers he had just passed or of the hunters following him. It was as if he saw a completely different path than they, perhaps a completely different mountain. Which was just as well. Hallin would choose the time and place, not Dith, and certainly not Galorin, if somehow his hand was in this.
After they had regained Dith’s tracks near the river, Hallin decided to outwit Galorin’s defenses by following Dith’s every footstep, even going so far as to have each man fit his own foot within each of Dith’s prints. While following him this way was exhausting and rather harrowing at times, they had managed to keep pace with him for a time.
Ultimately, even this approach failed. They had watched Dith walk right over an unusually open piece of ground only to find that by the time they reached the same spot, the land had split itself apart and left an impassable ravine. If they had not been forced to the ground with the power of the tremors, Hallin might have thought it an illusion. Whether by Dith’s own hand or not, the ground was changing behind him, destroying whatever path may have been there, and they could not hope to follow, at least not directly.
Any path they took, whether in Dith’s footprints or not, would be of their own carving in these woods, so Hallin took his men deeper into the sound-damping safety of the trees to the west, there to make a new path through the forest. They could do no worse traveling through the trees, he reasoned, and perhaps they would fare better, knowing as they did that they must watch each step. The men had not been pleased, but in the end, what choice did they have?
Tawn had been keeping a careful map, charting the mud pits, the vents, the hot springs, freely adding new ones where he thought they might be and crossing off those that made no sense, those that had to be illusory, so that now his map looked nothing like the terrain they had followed. Pax had looked at it a while, as had Haan, but neither had the patience to hear Tawn’s explanations of it, and they both eyed it with suspicion. Only Geretous, the one born to the religious caste, the failed priest, had studied it with interest and understood.
So it was at sunset the night before when they had come upon this little glen. It was, more than anything else, blessedly flat, and it had struck Hallin and the others as the perfect spot to camp. But Tawn, after staring for some time at his map, had insisted that they backtrack to a spot they knew was safe, even at the risk of their own comfort, rather than sleep over untested ground. No exact reason did he give; by his own word, the glade was as welcome to his eye as to any, and the map did not dispute it, but it was a bit too attractive, and he would see it by daylight before he would trust it. Reluctantly, Hallin and the others had agreed.
Daylight this morning had found Tawn crouched at the edge of the clearing, frowning over his map again. Whether he had slept at all or whether he had spent the whole night there, no one knew, but while the others were eating and breaking camp a few hundred feet away, he was staring over the thin sheet of ice covering the clearing floor.
He looked up suddenly to see Hallin standing beside him. Behind them, the others were making their way toward him, muttering between themselves and carrying what few supplies they had brought up with them. They were ready to move on. Tawn shrugged and rose to his feet. “I don’t trust it,” he said finally, folding his map carefully, not bothering to show it to Hallin. “Nothing says it can’t be here, but...”
“Nothing says it can.” Hallin nodded grimly. The clearing was blanketed in thick strands of power, b
ut then so was the rest of the mountain this near the top; thus to his eye, the clearing was as likely to be dangerous as the very ground where he stood, and while such dependence chafed, he had had to trust Tawn’s instincts entirely for the last several days.
“It strikes me a bit too welcome to be just so, aye.” He squeezed Tawn’s arm. “Your word’s enough. Nothing presses us that way; we move on.”
“Hallin.” Pax pointed through the clearing toward the high crest above. “We could reach the top of the ridge well before Dith if we go this way.” He saw the look in Hallin’s eye, the dread in Tawn’s, and stepped forward with the same diplomatic smile he had shown so many times before. “Tawn says he does not trust it, but he has no proof, not even for himself.” He looked at Tawn a moment, but the older man did not look away. Then Pax turned to Haan and Geretous for agreement. “We know just where Dith is. If we mount that ridge ahead of him, I say that’s our best position for attack, the best we’ve seen! Tawn’s got a feeling, is all, Hallin—”
“His feeling’s been enough ere now.”
“Oh, aye,” Pax offered quickly, “and we’ve all felt the same; by Limigar, the whole mountain’s witched and well we know it. But sometimes rocks are just rocks.” Pax clasped his hands patiently and lowered his voice. “Beyond this, this meadow here, lies the best way to go, if we can. I only—”
“We can’t go that way,” barked the hunter, “so we’d best move on.” With that, Hallin turned and started off toward the east, thinking to put them nearer the river, nearer the way Dith had gone. Dith was no more than a few hours ahead of them now—twice Hallin had seen the flash of gold from his robes the day before—and with their early start they would have him within striking distance again by sunset at the latest. As Pax had pointed out, if they could reach the ridge before him, they would have the advantage.
But at the back of the group, Pax had stepped away through the clearing. Whether to relieve himself or to feel the warm sun on his face for a moment or to prove to the others that he was right, no one would ever know. Only a few feet from the trees that bordered the clearing he had suddenly, horribly, found no ground beneath his feet. The realization had only just struck him before his face disappeared beneath the unwavering surface of stone.
Now Tawn stood woodenly from where he had hurled himself to the ground to try to catch Pax’s clutching hand as it passed. He had been just a moment too late. Pax had fallen through instantly.
Hallin looked up to see the other two Hadrians staring at the frosty ground of the clearing with wide eyes. Indeed, the ground looked solid even while their minds told them it could not be, and the knowledge filled them with vertigo. Geretous picked up a few pebbles and tossed them into the clearing. Eerily, they rested on the ground where Pax had disappeared, without falling through. Haan only stared and shivered.
“It’s thick,” Tawn grumbled. He picked up a single heavy stone, one weighing about as much as a young boy, and heaved it with a grunt from his shoulder. That stone dropped through the ground with a soft thud and disappeared, as if it were falling through clouds. Right behind it, a small rabbit paused for a moment at the sound, then bounded neatly, energetically, over the same ground, over the pebbles, and into the underbrush at the opposite edge.
Tawn touched Hallin’s shoulder and crouched at the edge of the clearing to touch the ground beneath the melting frost. Then he pointed toward where the rabbit had come bounding across the meadow. Tiny tracks melted through the light frost at the edge of the clearing. At first Hallin did not see what Tawn found so interesting about it, but then Tawn directed his attention toward the center, just beyond where he had thrown his rock.
Hallin shook his head and looked again, having seen nothing that struck him as important.
“The tracks,” Tawn breathed.
Indeed, if the hunter forced himself to stare at them, he could see that something was a bit odd about the tracks after all, but he had to stare a good while longer before he understood what it was. They distorted and faded a few yards short of the clearing’s center, yet he had seen the rabbit continue across. Indeed the tracks faded back into existence just a few feet away from where they had stopped and continued to the other side of the clearing. Now, having seen it, his eyes would not leave the incongruity alone and kept staring at it, trying to use that as a wedge of reality to destroy the illusion.
Hallin frowned. Either a chasm lay beneath the illusory ground or it did not, and a hidden chasm was as deadly to a rabbit as to a man unless the rabbit saw the only true way across it, perhaps a narrow bridge of rock. But that did not explain the pebbles skittering evenly over the ground where Pax had disappeared.
If there was no chasm, if instead it were only a trench full of quicksand, then Pax might be just below, drowning within a hand’s reach of them. Hallin edged warily toward where he expected the edge to be, testing his footing at every step. “Pax,” he called, peering down at the ground as if his gaze might cut through it. But it did not.
“A volcanic vent,” observed Tawn who wiped a few drops of sweat from his brow. “See how the ground is stone all round? That much is real.” He had unfolded his map again, and his eyes met Hallin’s. “I’d say it drops away a good thousand feet or more, right to the volcano’s heart.” He sketched at the map a moment. “I’d expect to see more like this.”
Hallin shut his eyes against his dizziness. In his mind, he could hear Pax’s screams, could feel the blistering heat of the steam that swallowed him up and carried him down into the liquid rock below.
Steam.
He opened his eyes again. Could Galorin truly give steam that kind of substance, that kind of density? Could he control it so finely as to make it thick enough to support a small animal, say, or a toss of pebbles, enough to pass any simple test a man might think to make, but not enough to support his full weight? That kind of control was beyond anything Hallin had ever seen, and he stared at the glade in awe.
To cover it, Galorin had only to extend the light from the stone edges of the vent, except that in stretching the light so far, he eventually distorted all but its color; the full depth of its texture and all the minute details blurred and distorted toward the center. At that point, believability became more a matter of suggestion than of actual illusion, having only to turn the mind’s assumptions against itself. Such suggestion, even for one of Hallin’s experience, was not easily overcome, and by the time someone found himself far enough inside the clearing to see the flaws in the illusion, it would be too late.
Dith had not had to pass this test; he had not come within a thousand feet of this defense. Hallin’s blood burned with rage. Dith could not have survived the temptation of this clearing any better than Pax; how could he possibly be worthy? Hallin cast one last look back at the clearing before he rejoined the three Hadrian men in their slow climb toward the ridge. He would make Dith pay for this, for all of this, he vowed between grinding teeth.
The river had diminished to an icy brook and finally to a small slushy creek beside him, and Dith had made his way over countless fallen logs and rocks to cross its many tributaries. It forked one last time, just as he had seen on the River Stone, and became two equal trickles from springs whose hot water steamed out over the icicles building at the edges of their stone beds. The keep had to be just over this ridge.
Since his climb near the falls, the land had become steeper and less accommodating, forcing him through narrow passages between cliff walls and along ledges that fell away into the misty wintry clouds below, or over crackling mud ice and rotting deadfall. The way had grown colder for a time, and a thin wind blew gusts of snow from the tops of the highest ridges. Even so, his fingers were not as stiff as they had been further down the mountain, and he could feel a small amount of warmth rising from the ground itself.
He topped the ridge and stood to catch his breath, looking down over the valley below. As he had guessed, the bowl-shaped valley was the crater of a long dormant volcano, one of many in the range.
It was by no means the largest, but neither was it the smallest; it seemed the perfect place for the keep.
But something was wrong. The terrain was not right, not bare and rocky enough. Galorin’s Keep could not be here. His heart sank in his chest, but he shrugged up his rucksack once more and carefully scanned the walls of the crater, hoping to see thick gray stone walls standing aloof and inscrutable high above a barren cliff wall. He had seen the place countless times in his dreams; he would know it at once.
Instead, he saw a thick ring of forest covering the gentle slopes of the crater walls that broke only occasionally at falls of rock and trickles from high springs. The trees below him looked as ancient as any he had ever seen, and the underbrush grew thick in the rich volcanic soil, as thick as if it were still summer. Where the slopes eased away into the low grassy valley, the trees and underbrush ended abruptly, as if the land had been cleared for farming.
He glanced at the old trees and then down into the valley itself. Apparently this volcano had been asleep for many centuries; it was in no danger of erupting today.
Then he saw something odd, something that made him stare for a moment, and if he had not stared at it so directly, he might have looked right past it.
Just a few hundred yards from the forest’s edge below him, he saw a great mass of dark glossy volcanic rock gleaming in the sun. From here it looked to be no more than a lumpy bulge of black, the chronic seepings of a boil on the volcano’s skin, nothing more. But his eyes would not leave it, and as he watched, it seemed to reshape itself in his mind, slowly, awkwardly, until at last he saw what it was. What it had to be.
His heart raced, and his breath came quickly in the thin air. This was nothing like the heavily fortified place he had seen in his dreams. Nothing at all. Thoughts flew through his mind of falling prey to deception, of having chosen the wrong stone from the river, of having come all this way to find nothing at all.
Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1) Page 29