We arrived north of the great rock that had impeded our progress, and once again I heard the rhythmic tumult of waves far below us. Had Havoc been a foolish beast, we might well have met with disaster, for with full dark and only a faint, cloud-shrouded moon, we came to a sudden ravine.
“Yes,” Sabito said, swooping past.
Mystified, I dismounted and walked to the lip of the chasm. It was a sheer drop-off, less a valley than a tear in the land, no more than two hundred yards at its widest.
I sucked in a breath. Far below, where the ravine met the sea, I saw something miraculous.
Light.
More than one light. Many, in fact.
Enough to brighten a small village.
49
A Treacherous Descent
“How do we get down there?” Tobble asked, peering over the side. “And what about the horses?”
“There must be a path,” I said. But the odds of us finding a trail down that sheer drop in the dark were just about nonexistent.
“I could carry Tobble,” Sabito offered, “as long as we’re descending. Otherwise, I’d need a good, stiff breeze. The wind right now is blowing from offshore, which won’t help us.”
“I might be able to make it on my glissaires,” I said, but I had my doubts. A dairne’s glissaires aren’t meant for perilous, thousand-foot drops into a narrow ravine. I’d already endured enough airborne acrobatics to last a lifetime.
In the end, I decided we should wait until morning, though my yearning to move forward was nearly desperate. I stared at the lights until my eyes blurred, trying to imagine what lay below.
Was it really the dairne colony? And if so, what could that mean?
For Khara, and for the war, it could mean a huge advantage. Truth tellers might prove invaluable when dealing with the enemy. For my species, it could mean there still was hope that we could survive.
And for me? A colony of dairnes could mean a new beginning. A life with others of my own kind. The thing that I’d wanted most of all.
With a pang, I thought of Maxyn. If only he were here to share this moment!
Tobble approached me with some steaming dorya leaf tea he’d managed to make. I warmed my hands around the wooden cup we shared. “Thank you, Tobble,” I said, grateful for his company as much as for the tea.
“Are you excited?” he asked, gazing at the lights twinkling like sunken stars.
“I am,” I admitted. “Though I don’t want to get my hopes up.”
“I am, too,” Tobble said. “As relieved as we were to find Maxyn and his father, this”—he gestured with a paw—“would be even more important, if it really is a whole village of dairnes.”
I passed the mug back to Tobble, who slurped—Tobble was a big slurper—contentedly.
“If there are more dairnes here,” I said, remembering what he’d confessed about Maxyn, “I’ll be . . . preoccupied for a while, Tobble. Speaking Dairnish, sharing stories. But don’t ever doubt that you are my dearest friend.”
“I will never doubt again,” Tobble promised. He leaned his head on my arm. “I wish Maxyn could have been here for this. I really do.”
I lay awake much of that night. I must have finally fallen asleep, for I was awakened by Sabito, flaring his wings as he landed on a dead branch a few feet away.
“Found it!” he said. “Oh, they were clever, very clever, your dairnes. No one on foot could ever have discovered it.”
Tobble was already busy frying the last of a slab of bacon. I wolfed down my food, scalded my tongue with hot tea, and said, “All right, then, let’s get moving. Sabito? Lead on, my hawk friend, lead on.”
We followed him to the east for a while. When I looked back, I could see that the great mass of rock we’d been forced to circumvent actually formed the southern edge of the ravine. Soon we turned, following the northern edge, but still I saw no path leading downward. Each time I peered over the cliff, I recoiled at the terrifying drop.
Sabito landed, as had become his habit, on a packhorse. “There! Do you see?”
I saw nothing but a jumble of boulders filling a collapsed bit of cliff. “We can’t possibly take horses over those rocks.”
“Ah, but we don’t need to,” Sabito said smugly. “Just beyond those rocks there’s a narrow, but usable, trail down the cliff. You would never notice it from ground level.”
“Fine,” I said. “But I still see a massive pile of rocks, and it looks unsteady. I don’t fancy tumbling a thousand feet down in a rockslide.”
“You see that first boulder, the big one with the little tree growing on top?”
I nodded.
“I suggest that you and Tobble give it a push.”
“Give it a push?” I laughed. “It’s bigger than a house!”
Sabito cocked his head. “Indulge me.”
Tobble and I reluctantly dismounted. Feeling like complete fools, we placed our hands against the towering rock, a rock that must have weighed more than a dozen horses. We leaned into it, pushing with all our meager strength, and promptly fell on our faces.
The giant boulder swung aside as easily as a door.
In fact, it was a door.
“I saw the marks made by the swiveling action,” Sabito said. “Quite obvious from the air.”
The path through the boulder jumble was narrow. Briefly I considered abandoning the horses and heading forward on foot. But we needed them. Not just for the supplies they carried, but also for a quick escape.
Nothing I’d endured so far had prepared me for the descent that followed. The trail down was as wide as Havoc’s stance, with perhaps six inches to spare. One wrong step, and we were facing a long and deadly fall. I gripped the reins until my hands ached, afraid to move a muscle. Havoc’s flanks scraped the rocks on either side, and Tobble and I had to draw up our saddlebags and raise our feet to squeeze through.
A third of the way down, we came to a washout, a place where rain had eroded the pathway, creating a three-foot gap.
Sabito could carry Tobble that short distance, and I could glide. But the horses were another matter entirely.
They would have to jump.
I’d never before tried to get a horse to jump. It wasn’t easy. Havoc, sensible beast that he was, had no interest in leaping from one narrow pathway, across a long and deadly drop, in order to land on another narrow pathway. I couldn’t blame him.
But I’d already decided that we needed the horses, and in any case, the trail was too tight for us to turn around. With much coaxing and urging, along with Sabito’s gentle but strategic pecking, we convinced Havoc and the packhorses to back up fifty yards or so.
“If he misses, spread your glissaires and try to push away from the cliff,” Sabito advised.
“As it happens, I’d thought of that,” I replied. It sounded more sarcastic than I’d intended, but then, when you’re terrified, politeness can be in short supply.
I twisted in my saddle. “Hang on, Tobble,” I advised.
“Yes,” he said with a smile, “as it happens, I’d thought of that.”
I leaned forward and whispered to Havoc, “You must trust me. We’ll make it.”
With my heart thudding and my stomach churning, I dug my heels in hard and yelled, “Go, boy! Go!”
To my amazement, and his, Havoc broke into a panicked run, hooves pounding. I barely stayed in the saddle.
Even more remarkably, the two packhorses, perhaps assuming Havoc was their leader, followed after him.
The leap—the part where we were actually soaring through the air—seemed to take hours. Breath held, fur flying, I gritted my teeth as Havoc made a hard, but clean, landing on the other side.
The first packhorse had a tougher time, barely scrabbling to safety. Then, to my horror, I watched the second horse miss his footing. He fell, silent, as I cried out. The only comfort was that his death was instantaneous.
Another loss that could be blamed only on me, I thought, my heart breaking for the poor animal.
/> Deeply shaken, I led on, ever downward. The angles were sharp, and I caught only fleeting glimpses of our objective before we finally reached level ground.
A palisade of stripped, sharpened tree trunks awaited us. The logs were old, graying with age, the bark rotting from ants and termites, although a gate in the center of the palisade appeared newer. I saw no observers anywhere, and no watchtowers. In fact, the whole thing seemed quite abandoned.
“Hello!” I yelled. Nothing. “Hello!” I cried at the top of my lungs, this time in Dairnish.
“Shall I just take a quick peek?” Sabito suggested.
I nodded. He flew off, and a minute later I heard a shout, a yelp, and an angry question.
Sabito reappeared. “The gate will be opened shortly. It seems the guard was having his lunch indoors and did not expect to be disturbed.”
I had only one question, of course. Was the guard a dairne? But before I could ask, a small spyhole opened in the center of the gate.
An eye stared, blinked, stared some more. The spyhole closed. After some rustling of chains, the gate squeaked slowly open.
The guard was old, shaggy, and gray-muzzled. “By all the fish in the sea!” he exclaimed. “You’re one of us!”
50
One of Us
Us. One of us.
I grinned hugely. I nodded frantically.
I must have looked like a lunatic.
“I’m a dairne!” I cried. “And so are you!”
“Well, of course I am,” the old dairne grumbled, eyes narrowed. He was using the Common Tongue, presumably because of his role as gatekeeper.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I wasn’t sure you . . . existed,” I explained, laughing as I wiped away tears with the back of my hand.
“Seems I do. Well then, you’d best come on in, and I’ll take you to the elders.”
Tobble patted me on the shoulder. “Can you believe it?” he whispered, sounding as thrilled as I felt.
“No,” I admitted. “I keep waiting to wake up.”
We rode behind the slowly shuffling dairne, passing habitations. They ranged from modest, windowless log houses with low doors to two-story buildings leaning out precariously over a narrow paved lane. There were few side streets, and the ones that existed traveled only for a few yards. I was quite aware of our position at the bottom of a steep ravine. Sunlight, it seemed, would rarely reach the cobbles of the street. This was clearly a fishing village, and not a wealthy one. I saw no gold- or silversmiths. And even the finer houses looked worn and somehow fragile.
But everywhere, everywhere, there were dairnes!
Dairne couples, leaning out of windows to watch us suspiciously. Dairne children, following behind us in a chaotic procession. Dairne merchants, selling fish, dried seaweed, herbs, and pottery from small stalls.
The old dairne led us the length of the main street. When the cobblestones ran out, we came to a cheerless, gray shale beach. It featured a pier made of boulders, topped by a wooden walkway that was in better repair than the rest of the village. Two small fishing boats rocked in the water, while five more boats lay at angles on the beach, abandoned by the receding tide. All were painted in cheerful, if fading, colors.
“They shouldn’t be in the harbor,” Tobble said to me.
“What?”
“The boats. I come from a fishing village myself, and on a day without storms, the boats should all be at sea.”
“Perhaps it’s because of them,” said Sabito, who was flying beside us.
I followed the direction of his intense hawk stare and saw two boats. One was a galley of no more than eight oars. The other was a sailboat, much larger, with two masts amidships.
“Whose ships are those?” I called to the old dairne.
“Who do you think?” he snapped.
“Are they the Murdano’s?”
The dairne spat. “You must be a stranger to these parts. We’ve seen nothing of the Murdano’s men for many a year. No, those are Marsonians. Marsonian raiders blocking our boats from leaving, and hoping to seize our boats. They arrived a week ago.”
At the southern end of the beach was the largest structure I had yet seen. It was an odd building, constructed out of limestone blocks and wood. Clearly some ancient building had been abandoned here by long-ago inhabitants and left to collapse with age. The dairnes had used the crumbling stones as a foundation for a two-story building, topped by a shaky tower that rose another fifty feet. Gazing up, I saw a dairne watching the ships from Marsony.
“Did you notice the fish in the market stalls?” Tobble asked.
“No. What do you mean?”
“It was old fish. Eyes clouded, scales slimy, a rising smell. I think the village is being starved out.”
It was a disturbing thought, but the more I considered my surroundings, the more it seemed a real possibility.
We stopped at the stone-and-wood building and the old dairne announced, “This is the hall of the elders. Go say hello to them. I have my duties to attend to.”
He left us standing at the bottom of a set of steps that led to an impressive door bound with rusting iron straps.
Sabito landed on a bit of broken stone railing and said, “So. Here we are.”
He seemed rather satisfied with himself, but I was too giddy to care. “Thanks to you,” I said, “in large part.”
“Yes,” Sabito agreed. “Thanks entirely to me.”
I think he was joking. But you can’t always tell with raptidons.
We tied up the horses, and I mounted the steps on trembling legs, followed by Tobble. I touched the door as if it were a holy object.
The hall of elders. Dairne elders!
We stepped inside. Sabito chose to wait where he was most comfortable—a few hundred feet up in the air.
The interior, cool and dark, smelled of mildew and time. I sensed that it was a large space, but with just two stingy candles burning, one at either end of the rectangular room, it was impossible to perceive any details.
A dairne female, quite old and leaning on a wooden cane, came out of a side door. She caught sight of us, gaped in disapproval, and said in Dairnish, “Well, what are you waiting for? The elders are over there.” She waved a gnarled hand.
I looked at Tobble, his eyes glittering in the candlelight, and nodded.
As we advanced, I heard the soft murmur of voices. At the end of the room we found a shallow, circular pit with benches placed all around the sides.
Four dairnes—two males, two females—sat in dim light. One was knitting. One was reading a scroll. One was throwing dice against a wall. And one was snoring heartily.
They could have been the elders of my own pack, sitting in companionable silence on a peaceful afternoon.
For a moment, I just breathed it all in. The scent of a roomful of dairnes! The sweet, warm comfort of it. The heart-filling familiarity.
The acceptance. The belonging.
“Eh? What’s this?” asked the reader, speaking Dairnish, but with an accent I didn’t recognize. She was old but not ancient, a grandmother but not a great-grandmother, I thought. Her muzzle and the tips of her ears were silver, but other than that, she was glossy black, a rare, and thus treasured, fur color among dairnes.
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said, struggling to find the words in my native tongue, “but I am Byx, and we—oh, this is my dear friend, Tobble—” I began to cry, but they were gentle, grateful tears. “We have traveled many leagues to find you.”
51
A Roomful of Dairnes
The older female dairne peered closely at me. An aging male, the one who’d been knitting, set aside his needles and joined her.
“That’s a wobbyk, as I live and breathe,” he said. “Hah! I haven’t seen a wobbyk in ages.”
“Do you speak the Common Tongue?” I asked, still sniffling.
The male shrugged. “Of course. Not much use for it here, though. Why d’ya ask?”
“So that my
friend, Tobble, can join in our conversation,” I said. Tobble’s ears perked up at the second mention of his name.
“Hard to believe a wobbyk could contribute much,” the female said, adding with a gruff laugh, “though goodness knows he’d make a fine meal!”
I decided not to translate her comment for Tobble. Instead, I changed to the Common Tongue and asked, “How many dairnes live in this village?”
“Not as many as there used to be,” the male replied, switching as well.
“All right, then. Let’s get down to basics,” said the female, in heavily accented Common Tongue. “I’m Larbrik. And that there”—she jerked her chin at the knitter—“is my husband, Figton. Now, who are you? Where are you from? Why have you come here?”
Once again, emotion overwhelmed me and I started to weep. Tears flowing, I rushed over and hugged her as if she were my own mother. She patted my head and said, “There there, now,” but with an edge of lingering suspicion.
“Orban!” she called. “Fetch tea! You, wobbyk, does your kind take tea?”
“We do, and most gratefully,” Tobble said politely.
The tea came promptly, delivered by a young male dairne about my age. He winked at me as he set down the tea and withdrew.
It was an odd-tasting tea, something made, I suspected, of algae or seaweed, more salty than sweet. Still, it was warm and soothing, and I calmed down enough to share my lengthy story while the others gathered around.
I’d become so accustomed to speaking to different species that I’d almost forgotten what it was like to speak to my own kind. With humans especially, I always had to be aware of their suspicions. Because they couldn’t always distinguish truth from lies, they were often wary of an unusual story.
But because dairnes can instantly discern lies, as strange as my tale was, they believed me wholeheartedly. By the time I’d finished, other dairnes had crept in around us, hanging on my every word.
The more questions they asked, the more I realized just how isolated from the world these villagers were. Who was Araktik? Had the old Murdano truly been replaced? What was all this about exiled families?
Endling #2 Page 21