Copyright © 2008 Daniel Hylton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-4392-1588-X
ISBN-13: 9781439215883
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-092-9
Visit www.amazon.com to order additional copies.
Donald Marcus Bowman
Patrick Finn Bowman
Paul Joseph Bowman II
James Arthur Barnes
Humberto Nicholas Ibarra
Karen Danielle Bowman
Analisa Eunice Ibarra
Andrew Wayne Barnes
Gabriella Rae Ibarra
Ultimately, it’s for you
He comes from the west and arises in the east,
Tall and strong, fierce as a storm upon the plain.
He ascends the height to put his hand among the stars
And wield the sword of heaven.
Master of wolves, Friend of horses,
He is a Prince of men and a walking flame.
~Kelven’s Riddle, an ancient saying among the horses, though they ascribe its origin to an older, and higher, source.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Twenty Nine
Thirty
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thirty Three
One
The wall of the crater was steeper and more treacherous than it had appeared, and it had appeared bad enough when Aram stood on the rim earlier and looked down. Three hours of tense and dangerous labor had gotten him only partway down that nearly vertical surface. Compounding the difficulty, the lava rock of the cliff face was brittle and sharp; he’d been leaving bloody handprints along the route of his descent for some time now. It was also loose in spots, and easily dislodged. A good deal of his downward progress had been accomplished in unplanned, heartstopping slips and slides of everything from a few inches to several feet.
His clothes were torn in many places and the bitterly frigid wind sweeping around the crater and up the steep slope found easy access to his flesh. As his muscles stiffened in response to the cold and the countless small injuries, the descent grew ever more difficult. Whenever he rested for a moment, clinging to a tiny ledge or with his hand jammed into an indentation in the wall, he would try to judge his progress toward the crater’s floor but found it almost impossible.
He could no longer see the rim of the crater above him and the desolate plain immediately below was nearly featureless and did not easily lend itself for use as a marker. There were some smoking fissures here and there on that plain – he’d seen them from the top – but they were farther out, some distance from the wall, reducing their value as a gauge. Besides, twisting around far enough to mark their location increased the likelihood that he would make a false move and fall; the rock wall inches from his face required all his attention.
Farther behind him, across the barren plain to the east, forty miles away at least, a massive cone of rock arose from the center of the caldera, soared into the sky, and pierced the blue of the firmament far above – Kelven’s mountain, the Mountain at the Middle of the World, whose summit was his ultimate destination.
He did not dare turn his attention from the difficult work of the descent to study it either; but he could feel the mountain’s awful presence, its terrible weight, towering over him.
The greatest mountain on earth.
Where Lord Kelven, evidently, still lived.
Florm, the lord of all horses, and Thaniel, his mighty son, had brought Aram through hundreds of miles of dangerous country to the brink of this crater at the edge of winter, risking their own lives in answer to a summons by Lord Kelven, the ancient god of wind, weather, and all living things other than man. Almost all creatures had thought Kelven dead after his disastrous duel with the grim lord of the world, Manon Carnarven, ten thousand years ago, or at least that he had gone from the earth because of his disembodiment during that ancient confrontation. But no, he had spoken to Florm by mysterious means that the horse would not divulge, and had made it plain – he wanted to see the man, the descendent of the ancient king Joktan that had recently come into the world.
He wanted to see Aram.
So Aram had come, carried by the faithful horses as far as they could go, to the precipitous lip of the caldera from which the mountain arose. The rest of the trip he would make alone, down this wall, across the crater floor, and up the massive slopes of the great mountain to answer the summons of a god.
The bitter wind froze the flesh on the backs of his hands even as his palms streamed warm blood from dozens of cuts and tears, and the muscles of his legs and arms cramped with the strain of maneuvering down the face of the cliff. He had eaten very little this day – there was very little left in his knapsack – and his strength ebbed dangerously; utter exhaustion was near.
Adding to his concern, the afternoon was waning. He was descending the western wall of the crater, and somewhere even further west the sun declined toward the edge of the world. If darkness caught him while he was still up on the cliff face, there would be little hope of reaching the bottom by any means other than simply pushing off the sheer rock and hoping that he was near enough to the bottom that the plunge wouldn’t kill him.
Fortunately, the light lasted, and the vicious slope of the crater wall eased a bit toward the bottom. Even so he actually did fall the last few feet, losing his grip and slipping suddenly down the rock face, tumbling backward, and landing flat on his back in the dust of the plain. He lay for a moment, wearied, bloodied, and bruised but temporarily below the worst of the bitter wind’s blast, eyes closed, gasping for breath as his aching muscles twitched and quivered from more than five hours of exertion.
The floor of the crater, however, quickly became surprisingly and uncomfortably warm against his flesh, as if it lay over a subterranean generator of heat, driving him to his feet. He stood up, hunched against the wind, and looked up at the crater’s rim far above. Nothing moved along the edge of that dark curve of rock against the leaden sky.
The horses had gone, apparently moving quickly, fleeing the onset of winter, and the silence in his mind told that they had already passed far beyond the reach of communication. The sun had not yet set, he could still see a faint pale ghost of light in the clouds above the rim, but the day was nearly spent, soon it would be dark. A heavy, gray cloud cover had steadily thickened throughout the afternoon. By all appearances, the first major storm of winter was preparing to cover the land with snow.
Glancing once more at the curve of the rim far above, he sent a quick prayer skyward that Florm and Thaniel would make it back across the high plateau that bounded this crater on the west and northwest and down into the relative safety of Vallenvale beyond before the sky let loose its burden and imprisoned them on that cold and desolate plateau. If that happened, they would likely not survive the coming winter.
He pivoted then and looked eastward over the arid plain toward his objective, miles away from him across the desolate floor of the crater – the tall, broad mountain that rose up and pierc
ed the leaden grayness, disappearing into the overcast. All he could see was a few thousand vertical feet of its immensely wide base. The bulk of that mighty cone of rock was hidden above the clouds, in the depths of the unseen sky.
Aram stared at the broad expanse of the mountain’s base for a long moment. It appeared to span a distance of at least fifty miles, north to south, its northern and southern extremities curving smoothly away from him until they faded into the deepening twilight. Kelven’s mountain rose abruptly from the level of the plain, and its slopes, though not as steep as the walls of the crater that surrounded it, were nonetheless formidably sheer.
And he was here, standing alone on a barren, cold plain, out of food, almost out of water, far from home at the knife’s edge of winter, for the express purpose of climbing that behemoth of stone.
For several minutes he stood immobile, paralyzed by the enormousness of the task before him. Then he gathered himself, checked his weapons, bowed his head against the wind and moved off across the plain toward the mountain. The various wounds he’d suffered during the descent, though mostly superficial, were already affecting his mobility, especially about his knees, and he stumbled a bit as he went.
The wind sweeping around the great circle of the crater blew fiercely and steadily and was bitterly cold; enough to make him pull at the collar of his coat, but in inexplicable opposition to that numbing frigidity, the floor of the crater was warm, almost hot. Aram found the disparate sensations unsettling. As sweat turned to frost in his hair and beard under the influence of the bitter wind, his feet inside his boots felt as if they walked near flame. Probably, he thought, it was so. The fires of the furnaces of Ferros no doubt licked the upper ramparts of caverns not far beneath the surface of this desolate landscape. But the warmth arising from the ground did him no good; the howling wind took the heat away before it rose above the level of his knees, its vicious frigidness unaffected in the process.
As the twilight deepened, he paused for a moment to check the level of water in his deerskin canteen – there were a few ounces, no more – then checked his food supply. It was nearly gone; there were only a few crumbs – these he gathered carefully and ate. They would do little for him in any event, but better now than later. He gazed ruefully across the vast plain toward the mountain, trying to estimate the distance. Forty miles, at least, perhaps fifty. Strong as he was, he could not walk that far in a day. And this day was almost gone; he wouldn’t cut into that distance much at all before night stopped him.
Nor was it very likely that he would make the base of the mountain on the morrow. He faced the certain prospect of spending at least two nights on this wide, dusty plain with little water and no food. He took a deep breath, steeling his mind to accept the inevitable. At least the floor of the crater was flat. As long as the light held today, and when it returned on the morrow, he should make good time.
He took a drink of his water, holding it in his mouth for a while before swallowing, and glanced up at the heavy sky. If it snowed, his need for moisture would be defrayed somewhat, whatever problems it caused for him in other ways. He did not fear hunger – that particular privation had often been his companion and had never defeated him. But he would have to have water. He shook his canteen, gauging the amount – two more mouthfuls, maybe three; he would have to reduce his intake to mere sips of the precious liquid if it was to last the rest of the way to the mountain. Once there, he would have to pray for help from the heavens, rain or snow. Glancing once more at the darkening sky, he set off toward the east, toward the mountain. He found trouble in less than a thousand feet.
Earlier in the day, as he’d gazed upon this land from the crater’s rim far above, he’d noticed cracks here and there in the surface of the plain from which tendrils of pale gray smoke issued. They had appeared like the hairline fractures one often saw on the surface of pottery. Now he faced one of those cracks, only it wasn’t a hairline fracture – it was a sizeable fissure, wide and deep, too wide to leap over, and it went away from him out of sight in both directions.
He bent down out of the wind and gazed into its depths, and was instantly assaulted by ferocious pain. The smoke issuing from somewhere deep in the earth was thin but acrid and poisonous; it burned like fire in his nostrils and eyes. He snapped erect and stumbled backward, touching his sleeve to his nose. It came away from his face spotted with blood.
Blinking his eyes against the stinging pain, he looked along the fissure in both directions. To his left, it angled away from him back toward the wall of the crater but to his right it appeared to curve the other way, toward the mountain. He went right; keeping far enough away from the fissure that its poisonous smoke was diluted by the wind and would do him no more harm, and began the task of putting this miserable ground behind him.
The plain was utterly barren; no plant life of any kind sprang from its rock and dust. Probably, he thought, the ground was as poisonous as the fumes that arose from the cracks in it. Besides, what kind of plant could possibly germinate in and grow from the baking soil of the plain and flourish in the withering, icy wind that howled above it?
Before he found the end of the fissure, the sun dropped over the distant rim of the world somewhere far behind him. Night fell quickly. Because of the overcast, there was no moon or stars to aid him; progress would soon become impossible. Moving beyond the end of the fissure, he wheeled toward the mountain and went on until it became so dark that he could not see the ground before him. There was no point in going further. He could no longer see his way to the mountain, and if another fissure yawned in the earth somewhere to his front, it would very likely claim him.
He sat down, and laid his sword, his bow, and his quiver of arrows aside, pulled his collar up behind his head and lay back, staring up into the blackness with eyes that still stung and streamed from their earlier injury. It was perfectly dark upon the plain. If there was a moon somewhere above, the heavily overcast sky shuttered it completely. And there was no sound except for the ceaseless howling of the wind.
Despite the coldness of the night air, the heat of the earth beneath him soon rendered his makeshift bed unbearable. He turned first to one side and then to the other, but could never find sleep. The heat of the ground forced him to constantly change position, always before he got any real rest. It was as impossible as trying to sleep too near a fire. Deep in the night, he considered getting up and moving on but that foolish thought was defeated both by common sense and the fact that he could not tell directions in the complete darkness.
Morning found him exhausted and terribly thirsty. Despite its inherent chill, the wind that constantly blew over the plain was as dry as the dust it carried with it. He checked the alarming level of water in his canteen and allowed himself a tiny sip. Then he rummaged through his pack but as he’d already known, his food was gone.
He stood and breathed deeply of the cold air for several minutes, clearing his head. Then, pulling his coat tight to him, he located the broad bulk of the mountain that showed below the clouds to the east and resolutely moved toward it. All through that day he forced himself forward, hunched against the chill wind, trudging across the bizarrely warm earth, too cold at the one extremity of his body, too warm at the other.
His thirst became unbearable and it took all his will to ration his tiny portion of water. The wind drove the moisture from his body, chapping his lips and the skin of his face. He began to anxiously watch the sky, pleading silently for it to release some of its burden – not enough to trap the horses upon the plateau but enough to ease his need. He drank a few drops at about what he figured to be midday and a bit more toward evening, which arrived with alarming swiftness. The mountain was closer, but not nearly as close as he would have hoped after hours of skirting smoking fissures and enduring the strange discomfort of the temperature differences between his head and his feet.
He faced another sleepless night on the plain. This time, exhausted and discouraged, he actually slept fitfully, in small bits, allowing
the heat from the ground to wake him whenever the side of his body that touched it could bear the discomfort no longer.
Some time toward morning, it began to snow, easing his thirst but adding another dimension to his misery. The snow melted on the warm surface of the plain and on his body. Before long his clothing was soaked. And the heated crater floor sent the moisture back upward as thick, pungent steam that rendered breathing impossible near its surface. He was forced to stand upright in the dark, waiting for daylight. Fortunately, the wind had calmed a bit with the coming of the storm, or the depths of his misery, as the moisture in his clothing hardened to ice, might have turned from mere hellish discomfort into the more serious issue of illness as his body found it impossible to retain heat.
Daylight, when it came, presented another problem. He could not find the mountain. The heavy sky dropped large snowflakes in enormous quantities, like the plucked feathers of a million birds, obscuring the horizon in all directions. Aram’s instincts had always been superb, he’d always trusted in them, but now, standing shivering in an endless sea of falling snow and rising steam, they were blind.
For the first time in his life, he found himself stymied by utter indecision. The few yards of the featureless plain that he could see looked the same in any direction. Throughout the thirty-one years of his life thus far, from his birth as the son of a slave, and the twenty-three years of his youth that he’d spent in chains as a thrall in the empire of Manon, the grim lord of the world, he’d trusted his own counsel. Even during the horrors of the transport to the frontier of the empire, his ultimate escape into the eastern wilds and his subsequent war with the wolves and friendship with the horses, he’d always been fiercely pragmatic and coldly decisive.
Now, blinded by steam and snow, wet, terribly cold – and yet too warm – hungry, thirsty, and tired; he was utterly at a loss as to what he should do. For perhaps an hour he stood immobile, miserable, uncertain in the tumbling deluge of snowflakes, willing the storm to cease, or the clarifying wind to blow, whatever further misery that bitter gale brought with it when it came; anything to clear the shuttered horizon and restore his sense of direction. Finally, knowing that he needed to do something with the tenuous daylight available to him before much more of it was lost, he began deliberately walking in widening circles, hoping rather foolishly to find some evidence of his movement from the day before.
Kelven's Riddle Book Two Page 1