“I suspect we are too late with our strategy of concealment,” said Bliant, still squinting through the bronze cylinder of his spyglass. “I myself have spied no strangers—Ettare has the sharpest eyes of all—but anyone moving down there must surely have witnessed our aircraft. It is to be hoped they were merely woodsmen, charcoal burners and the like.”
“What if they were Marauders?” said Ettare. “Marauders are clever mountaineers, and have been known to pass through this region.”
“If they were Marauders, then I suspect Aonarán has been up to his tricks,” said Arran. “I have learned not to underestimate him and his relatives. They have trafficked with Marauders aforetime.”
“This is all conjecture,” said Bliant.
“True,” replied Ettare, “but for added security, what say we land elsewhere, thus leading potential adversaries astray, and drawing them to some location far from this doorway into the mountain?”
“What’s your opinion, Arran?” Gauvain asked.
“Fridayweed,” said Arran to the creature in his pocket, “once you told me how many steps there are upon this Stair. Remind me of that number.”
“Four thousand, nine hundred, and thirty-one,” answered an indistinct voice.
The young man estimated the time required to travel down the length of the Stair and back, adding a swift reckoning of a suitable interval in which to scale the cliff in both directions, and the probable duration of the search for the Well at the foot of the precipice.
He said, “In my judgment there is no need for such games of leading interlopers astray. The travelers seen by Ettare are yet many furlongs from the place Fridayweed indicated. If that place is their planned destination we will still have leisure to land, find the doorway, descend the Stair, take the water, return to the aircraft, and take off before they arrive.
“In any case, the doorway might not be their planned destination,” he added.
“Yet, even if it is not,” said Ettare, “they must have glimpsed Northmoth in the sky. As Bliant stated, sky-balloons attract attention. There is a possibility that inquisitiveness alone will lead them in our direction. They might follow the balloon in order to find out what we are up to, with a desire to discover where we set down. Ordinary folk are forever interested in the deeds of weathermasters.”
“Even if they see us descend behind the crags, they might well be deceived in our landing place. Amongst the heights a man’s judgment of distance may play tricks; furthermore, steep slopes and deep valleys make formidable barriers.”
“I am in accord with Arran,” said Bliant. “We ought to land forthwith.”
“Aye,” said Gauvain.
“If I am out-voted, then so be it,” Ettare acquiesced.
The terrain was so rough that it was difficult to find landing places for the balloon. Northmoth was forced to circle the doorway’s location several times while the crew searched for a flat, level apron. Eventually a suitable spot was found, but even then, the aircraft could not be landed properly. Bliant had to use his most precise weatherworking skills to keep the balloon hovering, the floor of the basket floating about three feet above the ground. If it touched down completely, the gondola would be tipped over by the angle of the declivity.
The balloon, lightly anchored by ropes tied to sandbags, bobbed gently in the mists.
A slope of flint and shale led to a dim fissure beneath an overhang that was the doorway. Arran cast aside his cloak, so that it might not hamper him, and made ready to venture in, with Fridayweed curled up silently in the pocket of his tunic. He raised the light javelin he carried in his hand. “Byrñ, ¥ē Béørht BröCd-!” he commanded, and Erasmus’s fire blossomed like a posy of sparks at the brazen point of the staff.
As soon as Arran entered, the ground dropped away from where he stood and the Deep Stair emptied itself down into the black depths, each tread standing about twelve inches high, each one narrowly hewn. Blank, solid walls hemmed unforgivingly on either side.
Lightly, sure-footedly, he stepped down.
While Arran plunged into the mountain’s core his crew kept watch near the doorway, standing guard over the sky-balloon. Out on the foggy slopes they were debating the relative merits of concealing the balloon with vapors.
“In mists,” Gauvain pointed out, “we are an easier target for stealthy attackers.”
“In addition, while we use this method we cannot summon breezes to bring us scents, because breezes would blow away the vapors,” said Ettare.
Bliant, who had taken over command in Arran’s absence, deliberated for a while.
“We shall dissipate the mists,” he decided, at length. His hands and lips began to move.
Presently, winds began converging toward the mountain from different directions, rising up the slopes. This, combined with the plumes of smoke in the atmosphere, caused a charge to begin developing in the air.
In lightless shafts buried deep beneath the feet of his friends, Arran moved steadily downward. The upper surfaces of the treads were constricted in area, and the ceiling pressed close. This was a precarious Stair, neither hewn by human agency nor fashioned in order to be easily traversed by human limbs. It twisted sometimes back on itself, or turned a sharp corner, or looped into tight spirals, or suddenly went up for a few steps instead of down. Faint hammerings knocked at the outer limits of audibility; in far-flung ventricles and arteries of the underground, mining wights were busy at their mysterious industries.
The Stair entered the mountain from the west and plunged at a precarious angle of forty-five degrees or more. As he descended, Arran could hear a murmur, the music of running water, faint, echoing from afar. Deeper he progressed, and the sounds grew ever louder. His heart beat more strongly; the rising noise of the flood must surely mean he was nearing his destination. Fridayweed’s advice had proved well founded. Here was the mountain whose heart was hollow, yet filled with the movement of living waters.
The work of descent was demanding, but excitement empowered the young man. Down and down he sprang, from tread to tread, heedless of effort and hardship. The radiance of the light javelin, borne like a rare and alien jewel into this sunless sink, flickered over inscrutable walls and merciless panels of stone, bleeding into coughing bights of blindness.
The Stair ended on a cliff-top gallery overlooking an abyss.
Arran uttered a short word of command, and his corposant lamp briefly flared brighter.
Along the gallery, a hundred paces in front of him, the gleaming waters of a subterranean stream gurgled down out of a hole in the rock wall, as they had done for aeons. The stream flowed through a water-worn channel that crossed the gently sloping shelf in a series of shallow flumes, finally tumbling over the cliff’s edge and spinning into space, hurtling perhaps a hundred feet to a floor far below, where it pooled briefly, before diving into a gap and vanishing.
To his left, the abyss.
It was as if some gigantic cleaver had split the stone platform on which he stood cleanly in two, and one half had fallen away to vanish into the foundations of the mountain while the other remained standing, upholding the base of the Stair. Down there, somewhere in the darkness at the foot of the waterfall, the Well of Tears waited.
“Fridayweed,” Arran said quietly.
“Man, what?” The voice in his pocket sounded gruff.
“Will you not fetch something for me from below?” Arran said coaxingly.
“No.”
“See for yourself. The cliff is not so formidable.”
The impet popped its wizened head out and stared. “ ’Tis,” it said, and the head snapped out of sight, followed by a flaccid paintbrush.
Privately, Arran had hoped that Fridayweed would descend the precipice if he pleaded with the wight. The creature, however, had made it clear it would not allow itself to be cajoled. Arran had gone so far as to issue a command weighted by his knowledge of the wight’s true name, but even that powerful charm had not availed him.
“You know my
name, but I am not your slave,” squeaked the unruly impet.
Muttering imprecations under his breath, the weathermaster admitted defeat and resorted to his alternative plan.
Back and forth along the ledge he prowled, searching for a way down. In order to free his hands he wedged the light javelin firmly into its baldric-loop behind his left shoulder. Soon he had managed to climb, slipping and sliding, across the rocky balcony to the top of the waterfall. In the eroded channel limpid water flowed, chuckling and sparkling, over beds of coarse sand. Hempen ropes and iron hooks were amongst the equipment he had brought with him. He unslung them from his back, and set to work, preparing to lower himself down the cliff-face beside the waterfall.
Arran was no novice at rock-climbing, and knew what he was about, yet he encountered a peculiar phenomenon: none of his ropes would remain tied in a knot. Nor would the rock accept the iron spikes and hooks he tried to hammer into the crevices. After laboring futilely for almost an hour he gave up in disgust, and flung the tack aside.
Close to despair, he sat on the cliff-top, his arms wrapped about his knees. By the light of Erasmus’s fire he could make out the floor below, barely discernible in the gloom.
From its refuge, Fridayweed spoke in muffled tones: “Your ropes won’t hold a knot. No rope of hemp or flax or even wool shall hold a knot here in the heart of the mountain.”
“How kind of you to inform me.”
The wight huffed indignantly.
“Forgive me,” Arran said, relenting. “You have helped me get this far, and for that I am grateful. Yet I may as well be back in High Darioneth as sitting here in the dark, on the brink of a precipice. The Well is out of my reach in either case.” He fell silent, ruminating. Presently he asked, “Why is this region known as Whitaker’s Sands?”
“Whitaker was a hermit who sued to scrape out a meager existence hereabouts, many lives of men before your birth.”
“And the sands?”
“Beds of sand line the waterways that flow beneath this range, coarse riversand weathered from granite and other rocks. There are great craters and sand pits down here. All the sand pits lie underground, for the alpine winds have long since scoured small grains from the outer slopes.”
An idea struck the young man. “Fridayweed, you are a very fount of knowledge. Do the sands possess any particular qualities?”
“I know not.”
Arran sighed. “Then I shall endeavor to find out.”
The weathermage made his way to the banks of the stream and thrust his hand into the fast-moving water. As he cast about in the streambed, gathering up a handful of sediment, his exertions caused the light javelin to come loose from its brace. It tumbled into the shallows and the flames went out.
Like the tongue of a whip, but quicker, utter blindness licked out the orbs of his eyes. Blackness seeped in through his ears, his nostrils, his mouth, his wide and emptied oculars, a drowning, viscid blackness that was more palpable, more alive, than the mere absence of light.
Meanwhile, out on the mountainside above, Arran’s friends waited restlessly. The air was turbulent and they sensed the rapid build-up of static electricity. Above their heads the silver apple of the balloon’s envelope danced lazily in the hazy air, round and taut.
“It glistens like a beacon,” said Ettare, uneasily. “We are too conspicuous.”
She narrowed her eyes against the high-altitude glare. Her pulse jumped in her throat. As before, she was unsure whether it had been some trick of the light or the shadows; but she thought she had seen a figure, made small by distance, slipping from one hiding place to another.
“I reckon,” she said to her companions, keeping her tone as even as possible, “that some watcher has indeed spied our vehicle, and they are furtively closing in.”
“I see no one,” said Bliant, scrutinizing the valleys through his spyglass. “Yet I daresay you are right.”
“If they are Marauders,” said the damsel, “they will be skilled at moving amongst high places and crossing steep slopes; those brigands are hardy and experienced mountaineers, experts with rope and hook.”
“We can only hope,” said Gauvain, shifting from one foot to another in his restlessness, “that Arran will be swift in completing his task.”
When his lamp expired, Arran found himself in desperate straits. If sight had been killed, sound had not. As soon as the illumination disappeared, all around, throughout the vast cavern, a whispering started up. The young man crouched helplessly, feeling for the javelin in the dark, putting forth all his senses of weathermastery in an effort to overcome the disadvantage of blindness. Even as he groped through the swill of chill water the omnipresent whispering was joined by a low humming noise that grew in volume, becoming a penetrating drone that thrummed beneath the soles of his feet. Abruptly, at the very rim of vision, a dim light flashed on and off. Or was it a trick of fancy, played by sightdeprived eyes? But no—another faint incandescence popped into existence. And the first returned, remaining steady. Then the second was joined by a third to the right, and a fourth to the left, and more jumping out in all directions, until Arran blinked, and blinked again, and his eyes adapted to the weak glows, and he saw.
What he saw was this: The walls of the great, airy cavern were pocked by niches and small chambers, and it was from these that the wan radiances emanated. Within each of these cells, illumined by a subtle, shimmering radiance, grotesque crones were working at spinning wheels; and it was the whirling wheels that generated the humming.
A cracked old voice started to sing. Others augmented it. Their song was lilting but weird; its bizarre cadences and peculiar combinations of keys and dissonances and harmonies made the listener shudder, as if cold water had been poured down his spine.
They had not sung more than a few bars when Arran chanced to put his hand on the light javelin. Quickly he withdrew it from the water.
With a spoken command and a flutter of his fingers he rekindled his brighter light, which seemed suddenly dazzling. The singing ceased. All the preternatural lamps went out, and he was no longer able to discern the spinners in the shadowy walls.
It made him shiver anew, to realize they had been surrounding him all the time, ever since he set foot on the ledge. Odd-looking creatures they were, yet unlike the eldritch spinner-impet in the straw-to-gold story that he had recounted to Jewel. Perhaps they were less malicious. These spinning wights of Whitaker’s Peak looked like quaint old goodwives working at their craft, pulling out their thread with skinny fingers and moistening the fibers with elongated lower lips that seemed specifically formed for the purpose.
As he was pondering on the spinners, a deep voice close to him boomed sepulchrally, “Get thee hence, weathermage. This is no place for thee. Begone from our doorstep.”
Arran almost dropped the javelin a second time. Careful scrutiny of his surroundings failed to reveal the source of the voice. He could see no one else on the cliff-top.
“The underground-dwellers want me to leave their haunts,” he said softly to Fridayweed, who crouched silently in his pocket
As he uttered those words he was reminded again of the song “Ropes of Sand,” which had been hovering on the verges of his mind for many days. In that ballad the situation had been reversed: it had been the human beings who had yearned for the wight to depart.
And a bargain had been struck.
Arran stood quite still, holding up the javelin with Erasmus’s fire sparkling at its tip.
“Begone,” intoned the bass voice, cold as stone. It emanated from directly beneath Arran’s feet. Hurriedly, he jumped backward.
“My departure is conditional,” he cried recklessly.
The gurgling of the waters seemed to recede, as if the stream and the waterfall sullenly quieted to listen.
“I have heard of spinners,” said Arran boldly, “who can perform extraordinary feats in their craft. It is difficult for a man to believe these tales. Give me proof.”
“What proof, weatherm
age?”
“If the wheel-wives can perform a certain task and create a specific instrument I need to carry out my undertaking here, then when my work is done I shall depart as you request.”
“If not?”
“I shall bide here as long as I wish. And I am deathless.”
“What task?”
“They must spin sand into rope.”
A rumble, like the iron-rimmed wheels of many wagons, rolled around the walls of the cavern.
“It cannot be done.”
This was not the response Arran sought. He had no desire to languish forever in the guts of Whitaker’s Peak. The cave-wight, or troll, or whatever it might be was calling his bluff, perhaps. Then again, it was incapable of lying.
As the young man’s thoughts wrestled to and fro, he recalled a snippet of information the garrulous foreman had told him during the tour of the glassworks in Ashqalêth. Excitement surged in him, heady as a draught of potent wine.
He said, “I take it the wheel-wives can spin only filaments, such as lint, hair, and straw.”
No reply.
“I shall depart,” said Arran, “if they can spin strands of glass into rope.”
“It can be done.”
“Then the bargain is struck!”
Again the metallic thunder circled the cavern walls, the echoes phasing wide and narrow as wave-frequencies crisscrossed back and forth.
A muttering in his pocket reawakened Arran to the lurking presence of Fridayweed. “From where will you be getting glass?” the impet hissed.
“Wait and see.”
The young man extinguished his lamp of coronal energy and thrust the javelin firmly into his belt. His heart was pounding wildly. In the dark, as he began to perform the gestures and whisper the vector commands that would evoke the necessary environment, the words of the glassworks foreman in Jhallavad ran through his mind.
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 58