Northlight (33 page)

Terris sighed and rested his forehead against the glass. It was single-paned, thick and chill. He gazed out into the darkness, where he could almost see the shining road beneath the standing stones, running south through the snarls and jumbles to the red-black rottenness beneath the Starhall.

The Starhall thing and the Northlight. Two ends of the road, two poles with all of Harth strung out between them.

Not literally true, he knew. There was Archipelago and the ocean to the west, the bitter-alkali steppe to the east, the Inland Sea and vast, unexplored forests to the south beyond Laureal City.

Not literally true — but true in some deeper sense. The Starhall and the Northlight defined Harth.

Shivering, he turned away from the window and back to the room. The fire had died down and orange sparks flickered across the bed of embers. Jakon alone sat before it, his back straight, hands open and relaxed on his knees. Everyone else had gone to sleep.

Eyes half closed, Jakon gave no sign that he was aware of Terris's presence as Terris sank down on the mat beside him, arched his back and willed his muscles to relax. They sat together in the snug dense quiet, the only sound the rustle of collapsing embers.

Terris had no thought of what he would do, beyond continuing north, no idea of what he would find. He could hear his companions breathing as they slept, and through the rock walls now grown paper-thin, the horses twitching and shifting in the thick straw bedding. The strange shaggy animals ambling slowly down the slopes to the yard, moons-light glinting on their stumpy nose horns. Tundra elk lay close together for warmth, drowsing, their legs tucked under their bellies. Brush-sheep dreamed in their pens. Horses ran wild under the moons across the rich Border pastures. Tree branches fragrant with blossoms and heavy with fruit bent low over the streets of Laureal City. His head swam with the memory of their perfume. It filled him, overpowering and nauseatingly sweet.

Sweat broke out all over his body. For a moment he thought the old caretaker had poisoned the fire. He tried to call out to Jakon, but he couldn't draw the air into his lungs. His vision went dark and he felt himself falling, endlessly falling...

Terris opened his eyes and squinted in the sunlight angling through the southern windows. It flooded the room, as brilliant as if it were full noon. He lay on a lower bunk, still fully dressed except for his boots, but cocooned in layers of unfamiliar furs. The room looked empty, the other beds neatly made up. A sharp, charred odor emanated from the fireplace.

Aviyya burst through the door in a gust of frosty air, her boot heels clattering on the stone floor. She wore her parka, her black hair spilling over the thrown-back hood. Kneeling beside the fireplace, she clucked in disapproval and picked up a wooden spatula.

Terris pushed himself up on one elbow, tangled in the elkskins, and almost fell out of bed.

His sister looked up from poking at the shallow pan that she'd just removed from the hearth. “When you were little, you never missed a meal. That at least hasn't changed.”

“Unh...”

“There may still be some hot water left in the washroom,” she said briskly. “If you're lucky. And these oatcakes are never going to be any less burnt than they are now. I'll call the others.”

Terris extricated himself from his covers, pulled on his boots, and stumbled out the door. He remembered the washroom with its surprisingly comfortable indoor plumbing as being right next to the main chamber. There it was, a narrow wooden door. The water in the deep ceramic basin was lukewarm, but he found soap and a towel, and the toothbrush from his pack, which he had no memory of taking out the night before.

Kardith was just coming in from the stables as he sprinted back. She wore her heavy parka and a wool scarf over her curls. Her skin, under the cold-whipped flush, looked waxy.

“The horses are ready to go,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “The old man's still in the barn, milking those — I don't know what they are. Not sheep, that's sure. Not ghameli, either. Horns on their noses and big flat feet.”

Kardith...
His throat ached.

They breakfasted on Aviyya's singed oatcakes, lumps of bitter brown cheese, and dried fruit, washed down with more of the hot rancid-butter drink from last night.

As they led their horses in the courtyard, Terris saw that it was not as late in the morning as he'd feared. The shadows were still long and blue, the sun barely a hand's width above the eastern horizon. The unusual clarity of the air and the brilliance of the sunshine made it seem like noon.

Grissem stood by the sorrel gelding's head as Terris mounted up. “You have the look of one who's dreamed in the night — not peacefully, but well.”

Terris wanted to laugh in the norther's face, but he kept his expression somber. It seemed he'd done very little except dream for these past few days.

“Ah!” Jakon, nearby, stood beside his own pony. “We will reach the Light today. I can't do much more than take you there, you know. I can't tell you what will happen.” For the first time, he looked uncertain. “You're not one of us. It won't be the same for you.”

“Can you feel it, even here, this Light of yours — like acid and honey along your nerves?”

Jakon shook his head —
Dreams, for me it is only dreams
— and Terris knew that he was truly alone in what he had to do.

Beyond the cleft in the cliffs stretched a vast glaring plain, its surface crusted with ice-covered snow. Not more than a half-day's journey away, a solitary mountain breached the horizon, squat and broad, carbon-gray, its top as flat and level as if it had been sheared off with a knife.

They rode in silence now, single file. The horses broke through the surface of the ice and sank in the snow, sometimes hock-deep. The snow packed their rounded hooves and then the Laureans were forced to halt and pick them out. Nobody said anything during these stops, except to curse when a hoof pick slipped.

Terris could not have spoken even if he had anything to say. He could no longer feel the cold and was only dimly aware of the gelding struggling beneath him. A feeling grew in him that he was never coming back the way he'd come, that perhaps none of them were. He had no thought of resistance. He felt in his bones this was not something he could take on like a school assignment or even a promise. This something had taken
him
on, even as Etch had said back in Laureal City, had taken him on and swallowed him up until he was no longer Terricel son of Esmelda of Laurea, failed scholar and reluctant heir and accidental emissary to the north, but something quite different, something not yet fully forged.

Ahead lay the fire that would give him his shape.

Grissem had remarked that the trip from the way station to the Northlight and back was usually made in a single day. At first Terris didn't see how that was possible. Before they'd gone very far into the glassy plain, his sense of movement and distance became completely unreliable. One moment it seemed they'd made no progress at all, the next they were so close he could make out the fissures of the ancient lava flows. When he tried to focus on the volcanic cone as a landmark, the distortion worsened.

The sun had traveled only a little past overhead when they reached the base of the volcano. They left the horses and ponies in a sheltered cove along the southwest flank, where the ridges of hardened lava had kept off the worst of the weather. A few tufts of hardy wire-grass sprouted beside a pool of melted snow. The ponies would stay close, Jakon said, and the horses wouldn't go far alone. He didn't add that if they failed to return, the animals would eventually make their way back to the way station, where they'd be cared for.

The trail began in the crevices above the cove. It was well-worn but so narrow, threading its way westward and then disappearing in the deeper fissures, that it was invisible from the ground directly below. Grissem had known precisely where to find it.

Terris tightened the straps of his travel pack and followed Jakon along the trail. He carried food and water like the others, but also the wrapped dagger. The trail plunged into the mountain, and he had to bend to keep from hitting his head on the low roof. Before long, his neck and back muscles ached from the strain.

No one spoke, except for an occasional hushed warning about rough footing. Their panting breaths and the scuffling of their boots echoed down the tunnels. The black rock made the passages seem dark and closed-in, although they never went more than a few hundred feet without a shaft of light shining down from some hidden crack.

Terris felt along the tunnel sides, finding handholds as they began to climb. Before long he was sweating, his heart pounding. He threw back his hood and unwound his scarf, but didn't dare take off his gloves. The porous stone was treacherously rough. It was all he could do to haul himself up the next grade or scramble through the next crevice.

They emerged into the flat basin open to the sky. The walls of the volcanic cone surrounded them, steep and high enough to cut off the worst of the wind that howled through the crevices, breaking off slivers of rock. Piles of debris collected along the base of the walls, and a few pale green fronds found root in the cracks that laced the caldera's surface.

In the center of the caldera stood a glowing white cone, lightly flickering and yet opaque. The tip was about twenty feet high, the base wide and curved. It sat on the rock as if it had grown from it, but unlike the rock, it showed no trace of weathering.

A shiver, unrelated to the cold, shook Terris. “This...this is the Northlight?”

Jakon signaled for them to halt and put down their packs. Where the wind had scoured the ground, Terris made out the curved outlines of shaped, fitted stones, encircling the base of the cone.

Terris took a few steps toward the cone, one hand outstretched. A faint vibration reached him, tingling but not unpleasant, more intense the closer he came. The tips of his outstretched fingers burned and smarted through his gloves. He lowered his hand, rubbing his fingers, and turned back to Jakon. “Your people built this thing?”

Jakon looked surprised. His eyes turned a deeper blue, as if some reflection from the light momentarily intensified their color. “No, it has always been here. Just as my people have always come, in times of crisis and decision, to be touched by its vision.”

Jakon lowered himself to the ground, crossed his legs and pulled out the small drum from his pack.
Thrum!
He brought his hand flat on the stretched hide, then tapped lightly with his fingertips once, twice.

 — dit-dit —

Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum!
He beat out a slow, accented rhythm, his eyes fixed on the cone, his back ramrod straight.

Grissem sat down a few feet away from Jakon. He took out his bone flute and played a sequence of tones — no melody, no discernible progression, just a high sweet descant that wove in and out of the rhythm of the drum.

Thrum! — dit-dit — Thrum!

The two northers looked as if they'd settled into a trance and could go on like this for hours. Terris felt no impulse to sit down with them. His body tingled from the nearness of the Light, making sitting still about as possible as flying.

Here I am, standing at the Light, just like Jakon said, Terris thought. And not a damned thing is happening.

He took a step closer and then another. The vibration increased, a humming along his bones. His senses swam with it. A milky veil dropped across his eyes, misting the brightness of the sky and the contours of the caldera walls. Even the drumming behind him sounded muffled. He heard Avi saying, “The sooner we're done here, the sooner we can head back home.”

The pulling that he'd felt for the whole trip from the norther lake encampment now returned, magnified a thousandfold. Whatever this Light thing was, it recognized him for its own. His feet stumbled forward of their own accord.

“Terris!”

Kardith's voice reached him, tinny and distant. From the corner of his vision, he saw her face like a faded shadow, the ghostly shimmer of her drawn long-knife. He thought she was racing toward him, yet she seemed to be hardly moving, a figure trapped in frosted glass. She was close enough to touch. He reached for her, even as his body was jerked forward.

Then, with a blast of eye-searing flame, the two of them burst into the center of the Light.

I whipped out my long-knife just as Terris touched the edge of the cone. His body turned misty white and blurred, as if the light were drawing him in. I sprinted toward him, shouting his name. I caught the shadow of his face, turned toward me, and leapt for all I was worth.

The next moment, I found myself on my knees, all cramped over, without any idea how I'd gotten here or what had happened to me. Every hair on my head — eyebrows, too — crisped and stinking, my skin about to peel off and my long-knife gone from my hand.

I covered my face, my fingers digging into my flesh as I tried to keep them from shaking. I couldn't think why I should be here in this exposed place. I should have been safe inside a jort or huddled against the flanks of a lying-down ghamel. I should have been wearing the loose coat and scarves of the Tribes, not this fur-trimmed hooded jacket. I should...I couldn't remember.

What was it I couldn't remember?

Whose name was it I must never speak?

I saw him coming toward me, the sunrise touching cinnamon lights in his beard. He wore a loose gray robe edged in black counterstitch and the soft fabric flowed around the muscles in his shoulders. Hard muscles, long and supple. Knife-fighter's muscles.

It was the week after the priests had married me off to his father, and I was still groggy from the dope they'd loaded me with for the wedding. My mouth was dry, my stomach cramping, my insides raw from the old man's idea of lovemaking.