by Tim Jones
"Oh," said Anarya suddenly. "We've come the long way round. That's the upper Opthia—the old Volost—down there." She pointed at the silver thread that flowed far below and to their right. "We'll have to climb up and over."
Kendik nodded sourly, flexed his weary shoulders, and prepared to trudge upwards again.
Now Anarya had found her bearings, she was happy. When he finally gained the ridgeline, she was looking at the view with a smile on her face. "See, there's Dinazhe's tower"—a fleck of rock far behind them—"and there's the saddle"—a slight dip which, in all honesty, Kendik couldn't make out from the hummocks and hollows around it—"and"—she turned on her heel to look a little west of north—"there's the peak. Recognize it?"
With a thump of fear, the landscape came into focus before Kendik's eyes. Barely three hundred yards away, the horn of rock Kendik had first seen with Atlan and Mors flung its dark point into the sky. He had been below its base on that day; now he was above it. The petty annoyances of the journey vanished into insignificance. They were almost at their destination.
They walked slowly, quietly, through the grass. They gained the shoulder of the mountain and dropped down to the trail. Once, twice it turned, then fetched up in front of the two pillars of rock and the path leading down into the blackness. There was no fresh sign of either death or life. They paused at the threshold, screwing up their courage. Then they heard footfalls, echoing, quiet at first, slowly getting louder. In unspoken accord, they walked away from the mouth of the kaer and hid behind the nearest rocks they could find.
They saw her armor first. Even in the entrance to the tunnel, in the dim light of late afternoon, it gleamed. She walked slowly, hesitantly, out into the light. Her hair hung long and golden about her shoulders. She carried a helmet in one hand and a sword in the other.
'She could be a Horror, boy! Keep away!' Atlan's remembered words resounded in Kendik's head. He looked at the Anarya who had just emerged from the kaer, and turned to look at the Anarya beside him. But he was already too late. She had leapt to her feet, drawn her sword, and charged.
Chapter 27
Kendik called something—"No!" or "Wait!"—but to no effect. The new Anarya, as fragile and beautiful as a butterfly newly emerged from the chrysalis, had barely reacted, barely raised her sword, when Kendik's Anarya was upon her.
Kendik climbed to his feet and drew his sword, then stood there, unable to decide what to do. But his lover, the woman who had gasped and moaned with him through long hours of passion, had no such hesitation. She raised her sword high and brought it down on her doppelganger's neck. The new Anarya screamed once, a horrible noise that ended in a thick gurgle, and fell to the ground. Blood spurted from her partly severed neck, pooling on the dark rock. Her sword fell to the ground at the mouth of the kaer, clattered, and was still.
Anarya fell to her knees above the body of her rival. She retched. Kendik approached warily, his sword still drawn. "Anarya ..." he said.
"It was some evil of Dinazhe's!" Anarya said. "Some Horror-spawned thing, sent into the world in my semblance! I had no choice!"
The words "Yes, but" formed themselves in Kendik's mouth. He did not utter them. It was the worst possible time to raise the mystery of Anarya's own origins. Kendik wondered if, every time treasure seekers and adventurers had come to this portal, a blond simulacrum of a woman had walked out of it to lead them astray.
But if that was the case, why was the world not populated by copies of Anarya?
Kendik looked at the body on the ground—a body he knew intimately, now disfigured in death.
The living Anarya rose to her feet beside him, disheveled, breathing hard.
"We should bury her," Kendik said. "She may draw unwelcome attention."
"I will not touch that thing," said Anarya, and turned away.
So Kendik dragged the body off into the bushes and covered it with branches, averting his gaze as much as he could from the gashed and broken neck, the expression of surprise and terror. His mind went back and forth between the horror of the dead Anarya and the passion of the living Anarya, till he turned away, bent double, and retched up the meagre contents of his stomach. What had he been traveling with, what had he been sleeping with, all this time?
He looked back at the living Anarya and knew, despite everything, that he still loved her.
And that they had a job to do. She had more chance of finding her way deep within the kaer than he did, so he must travel with her still. He walked across to her, looking down into the darkness of the kaer, and reflected that she had had a multitude of chances to kill him, and had not taken any of them. Whatever her origins, she had so far proven herself worthy of his trust.
"We should start," he said. She looked at him gravely, then nodded. With swords in one hand and light quartzes in the other, they started downwards.
It was easy going at first. They passed the great gates of the kaer, wrenched open so many years ago, and walked down a steady incline. Kendik wondered what mighty hands had finished these walls so well that no crack or flaw could be seen in them. The floor was not quite level, however; water had flowed down here, and in its patient way, begun to erode a path for itself.
Their easy progress did not last long. The entrance was still visible behind them, a rectangle of brilliance in the distance, when they came to a great fall of rock that completely blocked the way ahead.
"This must be where Dinazhe found me," said Anarya, pointing at a pit half filled by the rock fall.
Kendik looked carefully at the rock. "I don't think so," he said. "I think this was very recent. Look at all this dust and grit. Surely enough water would have flowed down here to wash that away since you were a young girl. And besides—does this remind you of anything?" He gestured at the rock walls. It looked as if the rock had melted and flowed, and it was pitted with little holes.
"The thing that took Atlan and the assassin."
"And Sezhina. I think Dinazhe came this way, and pulled the passage down behind him."
"How does he intend to get out, then?"
"Perhaps he will get his pet Horror to open the door again. Does he have another way out?"
The memory came to them both at once: the door in the mountain's side!
"There were gaps in his knowledge of Kaer Volost," said Anarya. "He may not know it exists."
They returned to the mouth of the kaer and began their hunt for the sally port. The last blue was leaching from the sky when they found it. The concealing boulders, patterned with lichen and moss, shaded into darkness, and they found the entranceway more by touch than by sight.
There was barely room for them both to crowd into the small space. Kendik was distracted by Anarya's closeness, and more so by the dried blood still visible on her sword. The door that blocked the sally port was flush with the entrance. Kendik put his hand against it and pushed. Nothing happened. Anarya added her weight and, with a groan, the door swung open. They stumbled over the threshold.
The passage inside was barely wider than the doorway. They had to sheathe their swords and crawl, Anarya in the lead. They had not gone far when the tunnel narrowed. Anarya stopped.
"I'm not going to make it through," she said. "The armor will have to go."
By the time they had returned to the entrance so Anarya could divest herself of her armor, Kendik's stomach was grumbling. They lightened their load a little more by eating. Anarya's appetite had returned. She looked fine, so fine, in her thin undergarments and her cloak. She caught him staring, and smiled. "Later," she said. "We have work to do first."
Then they started in earnest. The tunnel wound down, down, down into the darkness. Though they faced tight squeezes at times, there was none so tight that they could not negotiate it, and there were long stretches during which they could walk upright. Once or twice, they climbed down rough stairs, though nothing like the endless procession of steps that had taken them into the mines far beneath Axalekso.
Kendik wondered how the first scouting
parties to leave Kaer Volost had felt as they climbed these stairs and squeezed through these passages, knowing they were probably going to their deaths, preparing themselves to face all manner of Horrors—but also, he thought, stirred by the same blind, primitive hope of the Sun that drew plants from the ground. To die with the sun on their backs, not in a lightless hole—that would have been something to hope for. Whereas he, Kendik, was going down once again, down to danger, darkness, and death.
Sunk in gloom, he did not realize that Anarya had stopped until he bumped into her.
"Why ...?"
She held her light quartz in front of her, and he saw the answer. They had entered a section of tunnel spacious enough that it could fairly be called a cave. The track dropped down a few steps below their feet, and disappeared under water that filled all of the cave they could see.
"Now what?" said Kendik, but he knew the answer. Now we swim.
Weighed down as they were with food and weapons, keeping afloat was not easy. They tried to swim in a straight line, on the assumption that the path they had been following continued on the far side of the cave, but Kendik began to feel a current pulling him off to the left. The water was not deep; once or twice, Kendik's feet brushed rocks, and he was able to stand for a moment and rest his legs. But they were both getting very cold. They had to keep moving.
Then the current got stronger, and before they could react, they were swept off their feet. Kendik cried out as a ragged circle of blackness opened in front of him, and then he was falling in the darkness. He threw up his unencumbered arm to protect his face. At the price of a numbing blow on the elbow, his raised arm saved his head from being cracked open. He fell in water, then fell through air, then landed in shallow water, crashing into Anarya, who had landed just before him. They struggled, managed to disentangle themselves, then rose to the surface.
"My sword!" said Anarya. "I've lost my sword!"
But that was the least of their worries. They were now so cold that they could barely move. To Kendik's great relief, however, this cave was not completely filled with water. At one side, the ground was just high enough for them to haul themselves out. They lay on the bank, bedraggled and exhausted, their ears filled with the crash of water.
Against shivering so violent it threatened to break his teeth, Kendik forced himself to open his pack, and made Anarya do likewise. They had each shoved one set of dry clothes into tied-off bags of cured hide placed within their packs. Kendik found that his spare clothes were damp, but not soaked. He stripped down and changed. So did Anarya. Despite the cold, he felt the renewed stirrings of desire, and chided himself for a fool. Wasn't there anything else he could think about?
They clutched each other for warmth rather than pleasure, then fumbled damp food out of their packs. It was like eating wet clay, but it still helped. Hypothermia, that eager specter at the feast, drew back, disappointed.
"My sword ..." said Anarya, her teeth now scarcely chattering.
"Is gone, I'm afraid. Unless it's lying in the shallows."
Anarya lifted her light quartz over the water to see, then recoiled in horror. The shallows were full of broken, tumbled bones, and there was another drift of bones just ahead of them on the path. Blind cave spiders had made their nests among them. This place was a charnel house, a graveyard of hopes.
Anarya cried quietly, tears trickling down her face.
"I know where we are now," she said. "I played in this room as a girl. It is close to the heart of the kaer. It was dry then, and these people were . were ."
"The Gnashers got them," said Kendik, and his mind painted the scene on the back of his eyes. These people had been further back from the gate when it was opened. That gave them more time to run. The Gnashers must have stopped to feast on their first victims before continuing the pursuit. He imagined the people of the kaer fleeing down the long halls, children and the old falling behind, the strongest perhaps leading the search for some redoubt to make a last stand ... but it had all been in vain.
"Are you ready to go on?" he asked Anarya.
Anarya nodded. She was dressed in damp rags. Blood oozed from a scalp wound, and she was walking with a slight limp. She had lost her sword and now held a small dagger, barely six inches long, in one hand. "I have never been more ready," she said.
Together, they stepped through the high, arched exit to the cave.
The water from the pool spilled through the doorway and fell noisily into the darkness below, but their path led them off to the left, then down again. It was surprisingly warm. Occasionally Anarya interrupted the silence with whispered recollection from childhood. "We are entering one of the farms," she said as they passed out of a low passageway into a new cave lit by a dim, diffuse light. To Kendik, it was an underground jungle, a profusion of untamed gray and green growth that clutched at him from the floor and walls. Water dripped, pooled, ran across the path. In the darkness, small things chittered.
They were halfway across the cave when they heard voices. Anarya pulled him behind the shelter of a rock encrusted with strange, ramifying growths and shielded their quartzes with her cloak. Something small and scaly skittered across Kendik's foot, and he resisted the urge to cry out. The voices came closer. He strained to hear what they were saying.
"... was it this one?" A man.
"No, the leaves are larger, and there are three on each branch." A woman. Both voices were elderly.
"What does he want it for, then?"
"Better not to ask."
They were close now. Anarya and Kendik shrank back against the wall, although Kendik had the uneasy feeling that insects were swarming out of the vegetation on to his back.
"This might be"—the man's voice dropped to a whisper—"our best chance to get out. Maybe we could just keep going, and he wouldn't come to look for us. He has all those others now."
Others? Kendik turned to glance at Anarya, and in that moment, the two voices assumed faces and bodies, and passed in front of them: an old woman and an old man, holding hands. Whatever they were looking for, they did not expect to find it in this dark alcove, and Kendik and Anarya remained undetected. But Anarya's eyes were wide.
The conversation continued. "... disloyalty," the woman was saying. "He will find us and kill us. That thing of his —"
"That Horror!" said the man, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. "You know what it is!"
The voices were fading, but Kendik needed to hear them. He motioned to Anarya. She shook her head, pointed to the rock beneath her feet. Kendik shook his head in return, and crept out of concealment to follow the old couple. The man was still arguing his point.
"... to get away from enemies. He doesn't care about us!"
The woman stopped. Kendik stopped too, about fifteen paces behind them. "There," she said, pointing to a plant he could not see clearly.
"I am not going back," said the man. "Many years ago, I swore to serve a master who was a Wizard. I did not swear to serve the evil thing he has become."
"But we cannot go beyond this cave. The stones we wear will not permit us."
"Then let us cut out the stones! We have known pain before. It means we still live. I will suffer any pain short of death to be free."
"Free to die in his traps," said the woman. "They are ahead of us as well as behind us."
The man shrugged. "A clean death, then. Will you come with me?"
She turned to face him. "I would see the open air again before I die. I will come with you."
Then Kendik realized that his previous uneasy feeling that insects were crawling on his back was, in fact, caused by insects crawling on his back. He shook his shirt, trying to dislodge them silently. He failed on both counts: the insects only skittered faster, and, in swinging round, his sword hit a projecting rock. Even the spongy vegetation did not muffle the slight but distinct ting of metal hitting stone.
The couple turned as one, their lined faces horrified. "He has sent one of them after us!"
"Run now, w
hile it's still confused!"
"Stop!" called Kendik. "I don't know what you think I am, but I want to help you. Besides," he added, "I could catch you in a few strides. Will you not listen to me?"
"If you stay where you are."
"I will," said Kendik fervently. "I will! But first ..."
With a sigh of relief, he undid his rough linen shirt and took it off. Three spiders and two insects of unknown type had been using it as a racetrack. He shook them off. There was only one problem -
"There's still one on my back!"
"Don't worry," said Anarya, stepping out of concealment, "I'll take care of it."
The effect on the old couple was instantaneous. As one, they turned and ran.
"Duck!" said Anarya. Kendik ducked. A rock flew just over his head and hit the old man in the back. He cried out in pain and fell to the floor. The woman bent down to him.
"Why? ..." asked Kendik, but Anarya was already moving past him, talking urgently to the woman. "You said yourself, you can't go beyond this room. It was my only chance of saving you both."
"By killing us?"
"I am sorry that I hurt your husband, but he is bruised, not dead."
"She's right," said the old man. "I've had worse backaches after a day cleaning Dinazhe's tower."
"But she -"
"I know. This is the one who came out to greet us when we arrived at the entrance to the kaer. Kept trying to lead us away, till Dinazhe waved his hand at her. She looked quite disappointed." For the first time, his face, seamed with years and labor, broke into a smile.
"I am not the same woman!" said Anarya. "Dinazhe stole my appearance for some purpose of his own! I killed that thing with my sword. Do you not remember me? My Name is Anarya Chezarin. Sometimes you used to look after me, when I was young. But how old you have grown!"
"You used to look after her?" asked Kendik, incredulous.
"We used to look after a girl of that Name," said the woman. "The Wizard rescued all three of us from the destruction of the kaer. That was over thirty years ago. We never thought to see her again. Then, one cold morning back in the tower, the master ordered us to take some food down to the dungeon. There was a woman there, in shackles. When she lifted her head, we recognized her. It was our little Anarya, grown to a woman, come back to us."