The Crow (28 page)

The walls were running with water, a thin curtain of wetness that gathered into rivulets, and ran over the floor of the cave, over their feet. Sometimes they waded through water up to their knees. The caves were still leading downward, and the water was getting deeper, and it was becoming colder and colder; Hem was shivering constantly.

They had been walking for what seemed like hours when they were forced to crawl through a cave that was barely a span high, and that was almost filled with water: only a hand's breadth of air was between the black, cold surface and the roof of the cave. It was very difficult to move through, as the water current was quite strong. They had to walk awkwardly, crouching low, keeping their heads and packs above the surface of the water, which was too high to permit crawling on hands and knees. It was sheer torment. And then Soron dropped the lamp, and everything went completely black.

At this point Ire's nerve cracked: he had been close to panic as it was, and this was too much. He was clinging to Hem's head, trying to keep out of the water, but when the lamp dropped he took off, trying to fly back along the passageway, and fell squawking into the water. Hem grabbed for him in the darkness, and picked him up, soaked and terrified, his beak open, his chest palpitating, as Saliman made a magelight and its gentle bloom illuminated the rough walls of rock. Somehow, squatting in the freezing water with his thighs and knees burning with strain, Hem calmed Ire down, and dried his feathers with a gentle charm. And then, because there was nothing else they could do, they went on.

They scrambled out of that passage into a huge cavern, so high they could not see its roof. A wide expanse of black water glittered before them in the magelight, stretching farther than they could see. At its edge was a beach of coarse red sand. They sat on the beach, panting and massaging their legs, and gazed at each other in the wan magelight. They were not a prepossessing sight: smeared with mud all over, and wet through and shivering.

"There's not far to go now," said Saliman. His voice was hoarse.

Zelika looked up at him. Her hair was in witchlocks, falling over her face in tangles, and deep shadows cut beneath her eyes.

"I'm so tired and cold I think I will die," she said. "Can we rest for a little while?"

Hem had wanted to ask the same question. He looked yearningly at Saliman.

"We can rest once we are out of here," said Saliman. "We have come through the hardest part. But we cannot rest now."

Hem looked down at his trembling legs, and then took a deep breath and stood up. "All right, then," he said.

They each had a sip of medhyl. Then Soron relit the lamp, and they stumbled for a long time along the sand, the sound of their steps dull and strange in the wide space, until Saliman led them into another cave. To Hem's relief, for the first time since they had entered the Passage of the Kings they were heading upward. His relief didn't last very long, as the incline became steeper and steeper until they were almost climbing. Hem gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the pain in his body. He really didn't know how much longer he could keep going. Every now and then he thought the ground shuddered under his feet, and he was sure the deep groaning that troubled him was getting louder. But he was so dizzy with exhaustion that he wasn't sure of anything anymore.

At last they stopped climbing, and the roof of the cave drew away from their heads. Their way twisted and turned, still heading upward in a gentle incline. Hem struggled on with a surge of renewed strength. Surely they were on their way out now. But then the cave seemed to reach a blind end, and his heart sank.

They stopped by the wall, Zelika giving Hem a glance of dismay. Saliman pointed to a hole by their feet. "We have to crawl through here," he said. "One at a time; it is not far. Hem, explain to Ire, so he does not get too frightened. We're almost there."

Hem wondered briefly where "there" was, while he obediently told Ire that they were going through another small cave and that he was not to panic. Ire, silent with fear, pressed even closer to Hem's neck. The bird was exhausted, his legs hurt after what Zelika had done to them, and now he was living through a ceaseless nightmare that made him believe that he would never see the sky again. Soron had gone ahead with the lamp, and now it was completely black, so Hem made a magelight. He was so tired that even this small magery was a struggle. Then, sternly telling Ire to go ahead of him, he stooped and crawled into the hole.

Saliman was right: the hole was a tunnel scarcely longer than the length of a man, and when he scrambled to the end of it, Hem fell a short distance onto a surface of damp earth. He stood up slowly and saw he was in a rough, dimly lit cave.

Hem's eyes had been blurring in and out of focus for some time now, and at first he wasn't sure if he was imagining it: could it be daylight? But then he noticed that the air was fresher than the still, close air of underground. He didn't really believe that they had reached the end of their journey until Ire gave a little caw and leaped off his shoulder, flapping toward the light. The crow perched on a stone near the cave entrance, ruffling his feathers, and looked back.

Eagerly they followed Ire, and in a short time stood at the entrance. Long flowering vines hung down from above it, stirring in a slight wind. All Hem could see were leaves, veil after veil of leaves of every imaginable shade of green. After the lamplit tunnel, he felt almost drunk with the color. The trees and bushes were dripping, as if it had only just stopped raining, and the earth was exhaling a damp, rich smell of rotting vegetation.

Looking up toward the sky, Hem saw that they were just above the floor of a narrow gorge: red cliffs climbed high on either side of them. He couldn't see the sun, but it felt as if it were just after dawn: the air was still crisp and cool. He stood at the cave entrance and gulped in the fresh air, too overcome to speak.

None of them spoke, in fact, for a long time. In the filtered light Hem could see how tired Saliman was: underneath the grime and blood that smeared his face, his skin was ashen. He sat down heavily, drew a flask of medhyl out of his pack, took a gulp, and passed it around.

After the medhyl, Hem's limbs stopped shaking so much. Soron sat with his back to the others, and did not answer when Hem addressed him. Hem remembered that he had asked after two Bards who were supposed to be with them and had not come; they must have been friends of Soron's, and now he grieved for them. Zelika leaned against the trunk of a tree and gazed up at the small patches of blue that she could see through the leaves.

The first thing Hem did was to change his wet clothes. He sat beneath a tree and felt the deathly cold of the caves slowly leaving his body. Ire, who had flown up into a tree out of sight, came back and sat on his shoulder, nipping his ear.

I did not like that,
he said.
Never take me back there.

It was better than being cut to pieces,
said Hem.
But I didn't like it either.

It is not over,
said Ire.
Something is going to happen.

What?
asked Hem.
What's going to happen?

I don't know,
the bird answered.
The earth is crying out.
Ire restlessly jumped off his shoulder, and then hopped back on, and finally flapped up into the trees again.

Ire was making Hem jumpy; he remembered the rumbling he had heard underground. Trying to rid himself of his unease, he looked across at Saliman, who lay on his back staring up at the sky.

"Saliman," he said. "What happened, out there on the Lamarsan? Did you clear the seaways?"

Saliman did not answer for a time. Then he sighed heavily, and sat up.

"Aye, Hem, we did," he said. "The last defenders of Turbansk are, I hope, now well on their way to the Zimek Harbor, from which they can retreat to Car Amdridh. It is not an enviable journey, not with the Black Army on their heels; but their way is open, and I hope we have bought them some time."

As he spoke, he took off his tunic and inspected a nasty wound on his forearm. Hem stood up, searching in his pack for his healing balm and a spare bandage, and knelt down to help him.

Zelika's face lit up. "Then it worked," she said.

"Yes, it worked, but at a heavy cost. Of the two score ships that set out to destroy Imank's navy, less than half returned to harbor. And on each of those ships were no less than four score warriors and oarsmen."

"But we won," said Zelika, with a savage joyousness. "That's what matters."

Saliman caught her eye. "Zelika," he said, with a hard edge to his voice. "I am a warrior by necessity. I fight not because I love war or joy in arms, but because I must. We had the victory on the sea, but I cannot be glad of it; it is a bitter triumph. Many, many people died, so that many more could live. That is a harsh logic. I accept it, but I do not like it."

Zelika blinked with confusion and averted her gaze.

Saliman went on. "I believe that we were betrayed. We were expected, and in the darkness and rain our fleet was encircled. It was all too neat for comfort: someone knew our strategy intimately. For a time I thought that we had failed utterly. But we did not fail, even though when we came back to harbor, we found two black ships had come in over the boom chain, and soldiers were setting fires in some of the ships and in the markets. That was when Palindi was killed. He saved my life: but for him, I too would be lying cold in the Harbor of Turbansk. He was murdered by treachery." Saliman's voice hoarsened, and he stared down at the ground, his eyes hidden.

Soron, who had been listening intently, stirred but said nothing.

Before Hem's inner vision passed a series of images, brief but intolerably vivid, of burning ships moving through veils of rain over an expanse of black water, of broken corpses floating waterlogged between broken wreckage, of the desperate struggles of the drowning and the terrible fights on the decks of the triremes and on the quays. Darkness and water and fire and death. He shuddered.

"Betrayed?" said Zelika sharply, bringing him back to the present. "Who would betray Turbansk like that?"

"I do not know," said Saliman shortly, and would say no more. But into Hem's mind flashed an image of Alimbar. He had not trusted him; something had moved in his stomach whenever he had had to speak to him. He had put it down to his misadventure in the garden, but Hem knew in that moment, in some deep part of him, that Saliman suspected the same thing.

"Why would anyone do that?" Hem whispered, staring at Saliman. The idea that a Turbanskian, even a Turbanskian he distrusted, should even speak to the Black Army shocked him to the core.

"Fear, perhaps," Saliman shrugged. "Greed, no doubt. Hulls, after all, were all Bards once. Some people desire only power, and will do anything for it. I do not care why. If ever I meet the traitor, I will take my revenge, Balance or no Balance."

Hem had never heard such implacable hatred in Saliman's voice before. Even given everything that had happened, it surprised him; Saliman had always seemed to him somehow too noble for such emotions. He finished tying off Saliman's bandage in thoughtful silence.

As he did so, he suddenly realized that everything around them had gone still: he was sure he had heard birdcalls before, but now he could hear only the wind rustling through the leaves. Around them the air seemed thick with a dreadful, tense quietness. He looked at Saliman and opened his mouth to ask a question; but it was never asked. At that moment the earth shrugged, and Hem, taken by surprise, toppled over onto his face.

He scrambled up and looked around him wildly as a shower of small pebbles and soil rained onto his head from the rocks above. Zelika sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with alarm, and Soron put out his arms to steady himself, his face white. Saliman cried out to the others and ran for the middle of the gorge floor, between the swaying trees; stumbling in panic, they followed, afraid that the rock walls were about to collapse on top of them. A landslide of boulders crashed down on where they had been sitting only moments before, and stones bounced down the cliffs above them and landed around them. Before Hem, a great tree seemed to rise up in the ground like a living thing, and fell over, dragging smaller trees in its wake. There was nowhere to shelter: if they went back to the cave it might collapse on them.

The ground shuddered like a giant animal for what seemed an age. Hem, terrified, wondered if the gorge walls would fall on top of them, burying them beyond recall. When at last it stopped, all four cautiously looked up. There was another long silence and then, all at once, a chorus of birdcalls broke out, and far off Hem could hear the indignant chittering of a troop of monkeys. Ire, frightened witless, burst out of the trees and landed on Hem's shoulder, cawing in distress.

"What was that?" asked Hem shakily.

"An earthquake," said Zelika. "It sometimes happens."

"It was indeed an earthquake."

Saliman stood up, and Hem saw that his face, already haggard with strain and exhaustion, now seemed drawn with a dreadful grief.

"Juriken has done what he promised he would do," Saliman said. "No Bard in all the ages of Edil-Amarandh has done anything greater than Juriken's task this day."

Hem stared at Saliman. "You mean that Juriken made the earthquake happen?" he asked, his voice cracking. He thought of his last sight of the Bard, and how he had sensed that he was about to do something terrible. He had not imagined anything like this.

"Aye," said Saliman quietly. "Here we felt just the outer edges of his power: we are far enough away not to feel its full wrath. Turbansk now will be a wasteland of rubble. That was our plan: to attack and then retreat, so we would draw the Black Army into Turbansk – and once they were within the walls, to call up the slow anger of the earth and bring the city down upon the heads of Imank's forces. Juriken alone, of all of us, had the power to do such a thing. And now it is done, and he will be dead."

"I did not know," said Soron in a low voice. He was sitting with his hands clasping his knees, rocking from side to side. "I did not know what he was going to do, but I knew I would never see Juriken again."