by Tim Jones
"I have faced Horrors before," said Anarya. "I do not fear to face them again."
"Brave words," said Vulumensthetika, "but now you should look to the visible world, and mind your step. We are descending into the mines which run back for many miles towards the mountains, and the way is not always easy."
Indeed, the dark staircase down which they descended had grown steeper, and the steps were rougher and more irregular. Kendik's knees were beginning to ache from the interminable descent, but they were the least of his worries. Compared with the prospect of facing a Horror, even a conversation about the various attempts to assassinate him was preferable.
"Vulumensthetika said you were still working for the shivala-hala when you tried to kill me," he said to T'shifa. "Why have you stopped working for her?"
"I do not consider that I have stopped working for her. I am still working in the shivalahala's best interests, and the best interests of my House, though I doubt she would see it that way. Recovering from your blow—it was a good one, by the way—gave me a chance to reflect on what Vulumensthetika had been trying to tell me for some time."
"If I had known it would have taken such a drastic form of persuasion, I could have got through to you much earlier," said Vu-lumensthetika. T'shifa shot her a glance that no one but a t'skrang could have deciphered.
"Also," T'shifa continued, "Vulumensthetika presented certain facts concerning the death of a riverboat captain of whom I had grown fond. She was able to convince me that what seemed a sad and pointless fight over dice in a riverside tavern was actually a carefully staged assassination by the Holders of Trust. I decided, despite the risk, to throw in my lot with my old friend."
"How do you know T'shifa is telling the truth about her change of heart?" Anarya asked Vulumensthetika.
"Hathilt can tell such things. I had him check you two again when you arrived in that cellar, and we did not leave until he signaled to me that you were honest in your intentions. Unfortunately, Hathilt cannot be everywhere at once, and though we have need of more such as he, Earthroot has not seen fit to send them."
"My king plays a long game, and fights on many fronts," said Ha-thilt. "He cannot move all his pieces to one square on the board."
"A comforting thought for the king," replied Vulumensthetika, "but of less comfort to his pawns. This way."
They had reached the bottom of the staircase. It opened into a tunnel that ran out of sight in either direction. It had been growing warmer as they descended, and now it was uncomfortably hot. Moisture dripped down the dark rock of the walls. Vulumensthe-tika led them left and round a corner. The tunnel opened without warning into a vast, dark cavern. From far below came the sound of running water. Kendik flung himself back against the safety of the wall, breathing deeply.
"Mines," said Vulumensthetika. "They extend deep into the mountains. This near the town, they are all worked out. There is a lot of room down here, and all this rock shields the magic that Hathilt and his apprentices work from the shivalahala's magicians. Follow me."
Their pathway was a thin line indented into the near-vertical wall of the cavern. Twice they had to step across miniature waterfalls, hoping that some footing remained on the other side. The light quartzes only deepened the darkness beyond their feeble reach. Kendik had rarely been more glad than when they turned abruptly, entered another tunnel, and started down again, safely protected by dripping rock walls.
At last, after twice stopping so Hathilt could recite formulas in a tongue unknown to Kendik, and then pausing before a door which it took another lengthy incantation to open, they reached their destination: a well-equipped laboratory in a long, narrow cave. Two other Pale Ones labored there, barely looking up from their separate workbenches to acknowledge the new arrivals.
"What happens here?" asked Kendik.
"Here is where I can open that door behind which you will find Dinazhe. But I will need to concentrate. Stand there."
Kendik and Anarya walked to the indicated spot, about five feet from where Hathilt was working. Kendik gripped his sword more tightly and smiled, as bravely as he could, at Anarya.
"Ready?" he asked her.
"As I'll ever be," she replied.
Hathilt stood erect, muttering, or perhaps chanting, beneath his breath. It seemed to Kendik that the light in the room was slowly being sucked out of the corners and towards Hathilt. Torches guttered in their sconces. Abruptly, the air grew cold. Kendik wished he had a thicker cloak.
A ragged oval of darkness opened in the air just in front of them. "Go!" said Hathilt. They took a deep breath, linked hands, and went.
Chapter 26
They stepped out of the portal and fell, both pitching forwards. Kendik banged his head painfully on something hard, then his knee smashed into a rock. Anarya's armor clanged against stone. They slid down a sloping rock wall and came to a halt, bruised and shaken, on an uneven floor.
The noise of their arrival echoed, diminished, and died. They sat in the near darkness without moving, waiting to see whether someone or something would come to investigate the noise. Nothing did.
"Are you all right?" asked Anarya.
Kendik levered himself to his feet. His knee ached and his scalp throbbed. He felt his head carefully, finding a painful contusion but no blood.
"I think so. You?"
"I'm glad I put my helmet on. My ears are still ringing. Wishing you'd brought your armor?"
"I can see your armor even in this light," replied Kendik. "Right now, I'm happy to be invisible."
Anarya's cloak had come undone in her fall, and her armor gleamed faintly in the diffuse light that filtered down from somewhere high above them. It wasn't bright enough to get a clear view of their surroundings, but they were in a large, echoing space.
Anarya pulled out a light quartz, but it made little difference to the darkness.
"Torches are what we really need," Kendik said.
But they didn't have torches, so they were forced to investigate their surroundings as much by touch as by sight. The wall and floor near where they had landed were oddly smooth, as if the rock had been melted and then refrozen. Otherwise, Kendik found nothing of interest.
Anarya had more luck investigating the other side of the cavern. "There's something bolted into the rock here," she said. "Shackles."
Kendik crossed the room and peered at the iron shackles on their iron chains. He counted five pairs. "Look," he said, "there's dried blood on this one."
It looked as though someone had tried to work his or her hands out of their confinement, and paid a price in pain. There was no other sign of life, or death.
A little further round the circumference, they stumbled across a ladder bolted into the rock. They climbed it and found an open trapdoor. It led into a basement full of barrels that, upon investigation, contained nothing more sinister than wine, water, and salted meat. The stairs in this basement led into a circular room with a spiral ladder on one wall, and a door opposite it.
"As I thought," said Anarya, "we are in Dinazhe's tower. It seems he has reoccupied it since I was last here." She went to the front door and opened it. They found themselves staring at a snow-covered hillside beneath sullen gray skies.
Wedging the door open, they stepped outside. They were standing at the foot of a tall gray stone tower, from which the land sloped away on all sides. It was perched on a minor peak, behind which taller mountains lifted their summits to the unforgiving sky. On each side, far below them, they saw streams that carried the snow-melt to lower lands. The door of the tower looked down the ridge-line. There was nothing else to see but snow.
"Not exactly needle-tipped peaks," said Kendik.
"What?"
"We were on our way to find this tower when we came to Kaer Volost. According to Mors, it was surrounded by needle-tipped peaks."
"Do you think there are two such towers up here?"
"No. I think Mors was prone to exaggeration."
They looked around at the gray sky.
It was growing dark. A few flakes of snow filtered down from the clouds. A bird called, high and cold, against the silence. There was no hope out here.
"I don't think Dinazhe has been here for a while," said Anarya, when they were back in the comparative warmth of the entrance hall.
"Yes," said Kendik, "but he might have left some little surprises in store for us. We'd better be careful."
And careful they were. They worked their way up the spiral staircase, pausing to look in each room as they went, Anarya making small exclamations at things she remembered. "Once this was my room," Anarya said as they entered the room above the entrance hall. Now it was a self-contained apartment, with a bed, a wardrobe of warm but unprepossessing clothes, in two different sizes, and its own hotpot, bowl for washing, and modest pantry.
"I can't imagine Dinazhe living here," said Kendik.
"Servants' quarters," Anarya replied.
The next floor was divided between a better-equipped kitchen and a dining table with three chairs. So far, there had been no sign of magical paraphernalia, but that changed as they climbed up to the next level. In this room, there was a bed and a scatter of personal possessions, but every spare space was taken up with scrolls. There were shelves cut to fit along part of the curving wall, but it looked as though these had long since proved inadequate to contain Dinazhe's magical research. Kendik picked up a scroll at random and opened it. He looked at the first few lines, then put it down hastily. Though the scroll was in a language he could not read, the words seemed to leave after-images in his brain, so that he saw a dark door swinging slowly open. He shook the image from his head, then followed Anarya up the stairs.
This was the topmost room, its ceiling the peak of the tower. Above, spiders had built their airy kingdoms. The upper darkness pressed down against the air of the room, which was as full of retorts, tubing, colored liquids, and bottles with wax-sealed caps as the room below was full of scrolls. Mechanisms of bizarre design and incomprehensible purpose writhed up towards the spider webs. There was barely space for Anarya and Kendik to stand.
Anarya made a small sound of disgust. She had picked up a large jar. In its depths, lifelike but lifeless, floated a human embryo. Other jars contained the organs of creature both large and small.
"Once I looked up to this man as to a father," said Anarya. "He was all I knew."
There was nothing Kendik could do to ease this pain, except to be with her. Wordlessly, they stood together in this high room, as the wind sighed through the embrasures of the narrow windows. Leaving Anarya for a moment, Kendik went with barely a qualm to the window that looked down the ridge from the tower. It was dark outside.
"If he is not here," said Kendik, "then ..."
"He will be in Kaer Volost."
They found torches and descended the ladder into the cavern at the bottom, looking for another exit, or any clue they might have missed. They found a few crumbs of food beneath the shackles, and a scattering of iron needles, but they found no other exit. Kendik took a long look at the discolored rock he had noticed when they arrived. Higher up the wall, the melted effect was even more prominent, and the rock was dotted with dark holes, about the thickness of his wrist. Looking at this area for any length of time gave him the same feelings of dread and disorientation that he had suffered after looking at Dinazhe's scroll. He thought of the arms that had reached out for Atlan and the assassin.
"Hathilt did not play us false," he said. "Dinazhe's portal was here, and that nightmare creature with the tentacles, too. But they have both gone now, and his prisoners with them."
"Unless he killed the prisoners first," said Anarya.
Kendik nodded. That possibility was preying on his mind.
"There's something else," Anarya said. "I think we will have to stay in this tower tonight."
"I would rather stay anywhere else but here!" replied Kendik.
"Me also. But where? We have no tent, and there is no other shelter this high in the mountains."
"We have quartzes, and you know the route to Kaer Volost. Can we not make our way there by night?"
In answer, Anarya led the way to the entrance hall. "Hold your quartz high and take a few steps outside," she said.
Kendik did as he was bidden. He could see a few steps in front of him, but within twenty paces, he had tripped twice on obstacles hidden under the thin blanket of snow. He turned and made his way back to Anarya.
They slept that night in the servants' quarters. "How strange to be back here," said Anarya. "Yet I am comforted."
Kendik was not at all comforted. Though the tower felt empty by day, with nightfall came the sense that there was still a presence here, watching, waiting to strike.
"I will take the first watch," Kendik said. Anarya smiled, removed her armor, stood for a moment shivering and naked, and put on a nightgown that she had found. It was too small for her, and she pulled up as many covers as she could find onto the bed before disappearing to use the bathroom. Watching her descend the staircase, Kendik was pierced by a lance of desire such as he had not felt since he first saw her emerge from the darkness of Kaer Volost. He averted his eyes as she returned to the room, lest he be overmastered; and though she threw her arms around him and kissed him before she crawled into bed, he held fast to his purpose. This was no place for love.
She was asleep in minutes. He looked down at her blonde hair, the only part of her that had escaped the covers, and wondered again how well he knew her. This tower, for example: she had said, when first recounting her adventures, that it had been long abandoned. Earlier today, she had airily stated that Dinazhe must have reoccupied it. But the clutter in this room, and in the other rooms, was the accumulation of years, not weeks or months. Had she been lying, then—or was it that years were like months to her? "She is not my mother's sister, nor my own daughter," Sezhina had said before she was snatched away. "She is myself." But Sezhina had not known, or would not say, how this had come to be.
He began his vigil filled with brave notions of staying awake all night and letting Anarya sleep, but after two hours of forced inactivity, he gave in, woke Anarya, and let her take over. Turn and turn about they passed the long, cold night, until, at dawn, they gave up their vigil and both lay down together to sleep. It was mid-morning when they awoke, rested at last.
"It would be well to arrive at Kaer Volost before nightfall," said Anarya. Kendik had no argument with that. They gathered up all the portable food they could, equipped themselves with light quartzes and torches, borrowed another cloak apiece, and set off. As they trudged down the ridge, Kendik risked one look backwards at the tower. It stood, tall and gray, watching them with empty eyes.
Conditions had got worse in the night. It was no longer snowing, but cloud had settled on the mountaintops, and they were engulfed in it as they walked. Freezing, clammy, it wormed its way between their garments and their skin.
Still, they set off jauntily enough. Anarya had been this way many times, she assured Kendik. The ridge they followed would lead them almost directly onto the same track to Kaer Volost that Kendik had stumbled across with Atlan and Mors.
"Almost directly?"
"There's just one section that's a bit hard to find ..."
According to Anarya, the ridge they were on ended in a bluff high above a stream—some un-Named tributary of the Opthia. Shortly before the end of the ridge, they should turn off to the left, where a short descent would lead them over the stream, up to a saddle, and onto the track.
In fine weather, it would have been no more than a stroll. In the fog, it was like negotiating a labyrinth. While they were still debating the right place to turn, the ground fell away in front of their feet. They had reached the end of the ridge. Anarya found herself teetering above a hundred-foot drop, and Kendik had to pull her back onto safer ground. There was no going on that way.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
"Retrace our steps and see where we went wrong," she replied.
Half an hour la
ter, they were colder, wetter, and grumpier, but no wiser. "We'll just have to find our own way down to the stream," said Anarya, and plunged off down the hillside. Kendik followed. He put his front foot on the wet tussock blades and promptly slipped, landing damply and painfully on his behind. From then on, he placed his feet squarely on the base of each clump of grass, and made his way slowly but safely down the hill.
The stream was well disguised, flowing in a narrow channel beneath the roots of the grass—so well disguised that Kendik took a step and found his leg disappearing down a three-foot drop into cold water. He sprawled flat on his face with one leg in the stream, and his ankle protested ominously as he levered himself upright.
It wasn't sprained, but it hurt every time he put weight on it. Muttering curses at Anarya's retreating behind, he followed her up the far slope.
But the hillside kept on rising, and there was no sign of the saddle. Anarya decided that they had gone too far left, and led the way across the hillside to the right. Kendik concentrated on putting one front in front of the other. Here, any stumble would mean a fall down into the unguessable, mist-disguised depths below them. They walked. Kendik's stomach rumbled. Time wore on.
"This is no good," said Anarya. "I need food."
"Where are we going to eat it?"
"The next flat place we find."
Kendik doubted that they would ever find a flat place. But he was wrong. Not ten minutes later, they stumbled across a rock outcrop that stuck out from the hillside like the prow of a ship, and provided a few spare feet of forecastle for them to sit on. It was a cheerless meal, there in the mist, eating the food Dinazhe had left behind; but it was better than nothing. When they resumed walking, Kendik's ankle had stiffened up again, and it was a good while before he could catch up with Anarya.
In mid-afternoon, the wind rose, tearing the clouds into tatters that flowed around them as they walked. The thin sunlight illuminated the scene with a watery glow.