Son of Avonar

by Carol Berg

  CHAPTER 32

  After all that had happened in my life, how could walking into a hole in a wall be so excruciatingly difficult? Every hardship of our journey paled in comparison to the first step into the cave behind the falls, but I told myself I’d be Evard’s whore before I’d give D’Natheil an excuse to leave me behind. “Have we anything to use for a light?” I asked, taking pride in my matter-of-fact demeanor.

  “I think I can provide that,” said the Prince, snugging the ties that held our waterskins to the saddles.

  “No, you mustn’t—”

  “It makes no difference now. They’re coming, and we’ll be able to go faster.” He peered into the mouth of the cave. “I have no love for darkness.”

  I did let D’Natheil go in first. I wasn’t a fool. A pale yellow light took flickering shape from his left hand, and then settled into a steady white glow. I took a deep breath and stepped through the opening after him. There’s plenty of air, I told myself. Plenty of room. Annadis preserve D’Natheil and his light. I was not in the habit of invoking the Twin who controlled fire and lightning with his sword, but if he was interested, I would not turn down his help.

  We had to lead our horses, as the ceiling soon became too low for riding. Baglos, who had been unusually quiet since the near disasters of the day, followed Firethorn. The path tilted slightly upwards, and the damp walls and floors were worn smooth by uncounted years of flowing water. The rumble of the waterfall was deadened by the mountain’s foundation, soon fading away into heavy silence, broken only by the ring of hooves on stone. Occasionally we walked past pockets of cooler air, unrelieved blackness where the soft light made no inroads. I tried not to look at them; they made my chest hurt.

  Rather I focused my eyes on D’Natheil’s light, wondering what was the source of the radiance—fingers, palm? Anything to take my mind off of the oppressive stone, and its associated images of tombs . . . dungeons . . . Xerema collapsing around its people after the earthquake. I tried to start a conversation with Baglos, but the three of us were separated by the bulk of the horses. And whenever I managed to get the Prince’s attention, his light would fade. So I stayed quiet. How far could it be to travel under a mountain? Keep breathing, Seri. There’s plenty of air.

  We walked, stopped to rest, and walked more. Hours passed.

  “Hold!” D’Natheil’s voice echoed through the stone passage.

  “What is it?” I asked, squeezing past the chestnut to where D’Natheil stood frowning. He held up his hand, and my stomach constricted. Our way was blocked by a pile of rubble. “Oh.”

  “I think I went wrong back where the path bent to the right. It was hard to guess which was the side passage and which the main. We don’t have a clue to tell us, I suppose?”

  I tried to keep my breathing steady. “We’ve only one more riddle. I’ve assumed that it tells the final destination.” Somewhere water dripped slowly. The soles of my feet throbbed.

  “We’ll have to go back then. Only a few hundred paces. I can switch places with the Dulcé.” The Prince smiled at me in the glow of his enchantment. “Baglos and I will find our way, will we not, Dulcé?” Baglos did not answer. As we got the horses turned around, it was quite obvious why. Neither Baglos nor Polestar was anywhere in sight.

  “Baglos!”

  “Dulce!”

  We called out together. Only our own echoes answered.

  “I don’t think I quite believe this horrid day,” I said. “How could they have sent you such a dolt for a Guide?”

  The Prince peered into the blackness beyond his circle of light. “When did you last mark him?”

  “I’ve not been paying attention. It must have been when we stopped to adjust his boot.”

  “Fires of night, that was half a league back!” D’Natheil shook his head. “Baglos has a good heart. But I’ll confess, I don’t understand him at all.”

  We tied the chestnut’s halter to Firethorn’s saddle and started back the way we had come, a task easier set than accomplished. We’d had few choices of direction along the way, but looking backward was a different matter. There seemed to be passages everywhere and no distinction to be made between them.

  “This is where I went wrong,” said D’Natheil, pointing around a sharp corner. “When we find the Dulcé and return here, we’ll need to go left. Easy to see now that it’s the main passage.”

  “We should mark it,” I said. “I should have thought of that from the beginning.” Stupid. Stupid. Perhaps the dark would be less fearsome if you kept hold of some sense.

  I pulled out my knife to scratch a mark on the stone, but the Prince stayed my hand. “Perhaps there’s an easier way.” He let out a slow breath, as if to settle himself, and then he rubbed a finger on the stone. A glowing green mark appeared. “I’ve no idea if it will last as long as we need. I hope so.”

  “This is an immensely opportune time for your talents to manifest themselves. I don’t suppose you can search for Baglos as Kellea does?”

  He laughed a bit. “Unfortunately not. We’ll have to hunt for him in the usual way.”

  Carefully, always marking our path before losing sight of the previous mark, we picked our way back through the warren. At every opening we called for Baglos, but heard no reply save our own voices bouncing around in the hollow spaces. One hour, two hours we searched. D’Natheil’s light faded to a sickly yellow.

  When we reached the place we’d last seen the Dulcé, I leaned my back against the wall and massaged one tired ankle. “Perhaps he stayed on the main route after we went wrong. He’s most likely on the other side by now, worrying about us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said the Prince. “I don’t think it would be wise to search beyond the main passage.”

  He got no argument from me. I eyed his hand and the shrinking circle of light radiating from it. “Perhaps we should go all the way back to the ledge to spend the night. Try the passage again in the morning . . . when we’re rested.”

  “Better not. The ledge will be closer to our pursuers, and the tunnel will be safer in the dark.”

  “Probably so.”

  We reversed direction and started up the path, proceeding slowly through the closing blackness toward the green mark, taking turns calling out for Baglos. Soon the Prince’s light encompassed no more than a single footstep. I dared not blink lest I lose sight of his hand.

  “I’m sorry I can’t hold the light for you,” he said, as the last glimmer faded. “I’m not practiced at the art. We’ll follow the marks as long as we can manage, and then rest for a while. Tell me when you can no longer bear the dark, and I’ll try the light again.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. Despite this boastful claim, doubts gnawed at me.

  We passed the first green mark. “I should remove it,” said the Prince, pausing for a moment. “It will aid our pursuers. But if the Dulcé is lost . . .” He left it.

  I was not so gracious. I would have abandoned the incompetent little fool to fend for himself.

  To my surprise, I endured the next few hours quite readily. We returned to our missed turning with no sign of the Dulcé, but by that time I had to stop for other reasons. One blistered heel was raw, my ankles were wobbly, and my neck felt as if someone had hung me from a meat hook. “This isn’t a place I’d choose to spend a night,” I said, “but my feet will not move another step.”

  We unsaddled the horses, pulled out our blankets, and shared some bits of cheese. The horses whuffled softly as the Prince gave them each a handful of oats from our emergency stores. “I’ll take these two and go a little farther down the passage,” he said.

  “Please stay close,” I said. “Proprieties are long past.”

  “As you wish.” His voice was clear and comforting in the darkness.

  It never came morning, of course. The absolute blackness was only relieved when D’Natheil spoke his word of magic. With his other hand he passed me a hard biscuit. “We must hurry,” he said. Even with no light to revea
l the strain on his face, I could have felt the tension in him. “I don’t think our pursuers slept.”

  I hadn’t slept much either. The stone passage was hard and cold, and my tangled thoughts and worries would not stop spinning and permit any decent rest. We were off in moments, on a tedious repetition of the previous day’s journey. After two hours we stopped to rest and drink. Fortune was with us, for if we hadn’t stopped in just that place, the sound of the horses’ hooves might have masked the faint moaning. We heard it at the same time, and D’Natheil strengthened his light so we could see into the side passage.

  Baglos lay in a crumpled heap at the base of a sizable step down from the main passageway. The Prince jumped down and knelt beside him, listening for breath, examining the Dulcé’s limbs. Soon he rolled the Dulcé to his back, revealing a bloody scrape on his forehead. “Seems he’s only knocked his head a bit.”

  I tossed the Prince a wineskin and a rag to clean the injury, and then clambered down beside him. No sooner had I knelt beside Baglos and dribbled a little wine on his lips than his dark eyes popped open, darting quickly from my face to that of the Prince.

  “What have you done to yourself, Dulcé?” said D’Natheil.

  I poured a little wine on the rag and began sponging the wound.

  “Ah, my lord . . .” Baglos snatched the cloth from me, pressing it to his head as he pushed himself up to sitting. “Please, woman, I can take care of this. I am good for little else, it seems, but causing delay.”

  “We feared you were lost,” said the Prince.

  “I . . . was feeling ill. The incident of the morning in the river, the long climb in the heat. Ah, my lord, I was shamed and I could not—Well, I wished to maintain some dignity before you. So I held back until I had recovered, believing there would be no divided way until we emerged from the tunnel. I assumed I could follow your light, but I could not catch up with you no matter how fast I traveled. I came dizzy once more and thought to myself that I ought to wait until I had more sense about me before proceeding. But like the fool I am, I stumbled down this step. . . .

  “You’re fortunate that it wasn’t one of the pits we’ve seen in some of these side passages,” said D’Natheil. “And we’re fortunate also,” he added, before the Dulcé could reply.

  “Bless you, my lord. You should leave me. I’ve caused nothing but difficulty.”

  “I don’t think the Heir can proceed without his Guide.” D’Natheil displayed remarkable patience. “You will fulfill your mission, Dulcé.”

  Baglos bowed his head, but not before I noted that his expression was quite at odds with his demeanor. His shame and apology sounded quite sincere, but he was not at all flustered. His almond-shaped eyes were sharp, and his face filled with determination and sorrow. I had always considered the Dulcé a simple, shallow man who wore his feelings and beliefs quite openly, one whose oddly constrained intelligence obscured nothing but a good heart. Yet in that moment his expression carried such conflicting stories that I began to think that perhaps he was more complex than he seemed. Though determined to continue this journey, he was afraid of its ending.

  Well, so was I, I thought, as I watched the Prince help Baglos to his feet and boost him over the tall step in the rock. More so by the day. How could a man change so rapidly as D’Natheil? I could no more envision the Prince striking Baglos as he had once done than I could imagine myself embracing Evard.

  Polestar was nowhere to be found. The Prince tried to summon him as he had the previous day, but after a quarter of an hour with no sign of the beast, we dared wait no longer. He insisted that Baglos ride the chestnut. Baglos protested, vowing unending humiliation. After what I’d seen of his private feelings, I wondered at his true sentiments.

  Two more hours of slow progress and I felt a slight movement in the dead air. I lifted my face and hurried my steps. In a few moments more, the Prince allowed his light to die, and ten steps later we stood on the southern doorstep of Mount Kassarain, inhaling cool, thin air. We laughed and made jests about adventurers who feared caves or made wrong turns or stumbled off steps. Pursuit and uncertain destiny were momentarily forgotten in our delight at being in the open.

  We stood high on the mountainside, overlooking a lush meadow of rocks and flowers, laced with tumbling streams, a green gem set into the harsh framework of the mountains. At the meadow’s eastern end the streams converged into fretting rapids that vanished into a bottomless, blue-white vista of gentle forested hillsides. To the west a faint track traversed a grassy slope and led deeper into the heart of the rugged peaks. But on every other side the grass yielded to boulder-strewn slopes and barren cliffs that offered no passage. We let the horses graze for a while.

  Soon, D’Natheil was ready to press on. Urgency and excitement burned in his eyes as he peered into the west. “It’s there, ahead of us. I feel it.”

  I climbed onto Firethorn. Baglos mounted the chestnut behind D’Natheil. The path led us from our high perch down through the flowered meadow, where blue, yellow and white blooms stood higher than the horses’ knees, and then across the velvet slope that funneled us into a narrow, grass-floored valley. Though easy and pleasant at first, the valley trail quickly became so steep and rocky it was difficult to pick out a good path.

  Banners of wind-driven snow flew from the highest mountaintops, filmy white trailers against the intense blue of the sky. The air grew colder and thinner. By early afternoon the cold wind gusting in our faces made it impossible to distinguish the swirling banners from the clouds gathering over the icy peaks.

  Another hour and D’Natheil halted in front of a short wall of massive boulders that stretched the width of the gorge. “We’ll have to leave the horses,” he said. “A foot trail hugs the wall on the right, but the beasts won’t be able to manage it.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew. His movements and words were abrupt, and I found myself looking over my shoulder, expecting to see our empty-eyed pursuers bearing down on us. If Baglos and I didn’t hurry, the Prince would go on without us. I dismounted, pulled my cloak tight about me, and made sure the journal was in my pocket.

  “What should we carry with us, my lord?” asked Baglos. He, too, was anxious.

  “Don’t burden yourself heavily, Dulcé. Food and drink for a day. I don’t think it will be a concern beyond that.”

  The Prince rubbed Sunlight’s head and spoke to him softly. When I declared myself ready and Baglos had shouldered a small pack, D’Natheil slapped the horse’s rump and the beast trotted back the way we’d come, Firethorn close behind. “They’ll go back to the grass and wait for you,” said D’Natheil.

  “Paulo isn’t the only one who communicates with horses,” I mumbled as we started up the steep rock stair. I couldn’t say why I felt so resentful.

  An hour’s difficult walking brought us out of the gorge onto open, gently sloping tundra, surrounded by spires of ice and rock. It was as if we had stepped back a season. Everything was huddled to the windswept earth. No trees. No growth of any kind stood taller than a finger’s height. The afternoon had turned gray and bitterly cold. We came to the crest of the modestly rising ground, and before us lay an ice-bound lake, ringed with sheer cliffs. There was no going any farther.

  A gust of wind billowed D’Natheil’s cloak as he looked out over the gray lake. He said only, “I think we have arrived.”

  CHAPTER 33

  No hint of green could be seen in that ice-bound vale. Rather a thousand shades of gray and white lay one upon the other, as if the artist who had painted that particular canvas had forgotten to dip his brush in any other region of his palette. Massive stones lay jumbled about the water’s edge, and behind them steep, ice-clad slopes of crumbled rock footed jagged cliffs that soared straight into the ironhued sky. A faint tread wound from where we stood through soggy tussocks to the lake shore, skirting granite slabs that stood two and three times D’Natheil’s height. It was hard to imagine anyone, man or beast, coming willingly to such a desolate spot. How could
it be the refuge of the J’Ettanne? No life existed here, only rock and ice, dead water and silence.

  The fifth clue was the most obscure of all. Though he cannot see it, the hunter knows his prey, for it speaks to his heart whether he turns right or left.

  Nothing in that landscape spoke to the heart; nothing beckoned or charmed or seduced. The wind off the lake whined through the boulders, nosing at our cloaks like a mournful dog. I wrapped the scratchy wool close about my face and tried to remember it was summer.

  Willing my blistered feet to take a few more steps, I joined D’Natheil and Baglos on the rubble-strewn edge of the lake. There was nowhere else to go. No passage, no trail. Nothing but cliffs and rocks. Journey’s end. I was so tired that I could not rejoice in the stopping, and so uncertain that I could take no satisfaction in the accomplishment. “Where could we have gone wrong?”

  “We’re not wrong,” said D’Natheil, his voice hungry. “Can’t you feel it? It’s like the heat shimmer that rises from the desert.”

  I felt nothing but my feet. “Are you saying that what we see isn’t real?”

  “Not at all. It’s just there’s much more than substance here—layer upon layer hidden behind what we see. I’ve never felt such a concentration of life.” Was it anticipation or dread that dropped his voice to a whisper and colored his skin like burnished copper?

  I wrenched my eyes away, sank to the ground in the lee of a rock, and wrapped the damp tail of my cloak about my freezing ankles. “I still don’t understand the fifth clue.”

  “It’s doesn’t matter. The Gate is here.”

  He was right, of course. And the fifth clue was no more obscure than the others. From somewhere high in the encircling crags a white-tailed hawk screeched the doom of an unlucky rock-mouse, the lonely call reflected once, and then again, and then again from the rocks, a perfect triple echo. Then, from somewhere beyond the three reflections of the hawk’s cry, a thousand other birdsongs teased at the edge of our hearing, the songs of birds that had never known this pocket of ice and snow: flamboyant birds of deserts and jungles, sweet singing birds of deep forests, majestic birds of the ocean’s edge, larks and pipits and magpies and loons. Indeed, enchantment existed here. And abundant life.