The Gathering Storm (111 page)

Erkanwulf’s eyes got very round, and his mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. “Here.” He thrust one lead into Ivar’s trembling hands. “I’ve heard they come back to eat their kills. We’ll take the Carter’s track until light. They can’t abide human-made roads.”

“A-are you sure?”

“I’m sure that elfshot kills.” He, too, started to shake with fear, making the lantern light jig across the corpses. The lack of blood made the scene more gruesome. The corpses had already begun to stiffen.

Erkanwulf snuffed the lantern, hoping that the moon would give enough light to guide them. They fled east along the track, walking until dawn with the nervous horses on leads behind them, but they were too afraid to stop. When dawn came after an eternity of walking, they found a deer trail that wandered east, and they kept going at a steady walking pace because, after all, fear prodded them on, so it was only when they reached a stream and had to stop the horses from drinking too much cold water while overheated that they remembered that while they might march on they had to rest and graze the horses.

“Why didn’t they kill you?” Erkanwulf asked after they had watered and rubbed down the horses and turned them out to graze.

Ivar washed his face and drank from the rushing stream before he answered. “I don’t know.” He touched the ring, but its polished surface told him nothing. “I just don’t know.”

HE lay winded and gasping, recovering from the panic that had seized him just before the last of his air gave out. For a long time he sprawled in blackness, his only reference points the touch of water on his toes and the grind of pebbles and
sand against his skin where he had dragged himself out of the flooded tunnel. The ground sloped gently upward until, at the limit of his reach, it humped up into a curved shelf of rock. The air swelled thickly in his chest; it seemed as heavy as the darkness surrounding him. He could see nothing, not his hand, not the floor, not even the armband that had before this faithfully lit his way in the depths.

After a longer while he shouted, but the caverns swallowed his voice. He heard no answering reply nor the scuffle of curious scouts.

Again he called out.

Again, silence answered.

Buried deep under the ground one heard silence in an entirely new way. No sound but that of his own breathing disturbed the air. If he shifted, then his knee might scrape rocks; his toe might lift out of the cold bath of water and cause a droplet to splash. That was all.

He stood and reached above his head, searching, but could not touch ceiling. He took in air, called out again, and a fourth time, and a fifth, and each time the sound of his voice faded and failed as he stood in a stillness so lucid that he finally understood that this was a dead place where nothing lived. He had swum into a blind pocket.

Without light, he could not explore to see how wide this cavern spanned or where tunnels might spear into stone to make roads that would lead him to light or help. He dared not move away from the water lest he could not find it again and, thus trapped, starve and die.

If he could not explore, then he would have no choice except to swim back to where his companion waited, where there was food and a chance to live buried in a gravelike prison. This taste, like defeat, soured in his mouth.

There had to be a way out.

“What are you?”

He shrieked and leaped backward, stumbling into the water, slipping, and falling to his knees. Then he began to laugh, because he recognized that rumbling whisper. The creature had been crouched in front of him all along, yet he had not sensed it. It made no sound of breathing. Now, it
scraped away from him, retreating from the unexpected laughter, and he controlled himself quickly and spoke.

“I pray you, Friend, I am a messenger. I am come from your own tribesmen who are lost beyond this tunnel.”

“They are lost,” agreed the voice. “One among us watches since the time they are lost. If the deeps shift, then the path may open. How are you come through the poison water?”

“It is not poison to me. I am not one of your kind.”

“You are not,” it agreed. “We speak tales of the long-ago time when a very few of the creatures out of the Blinding dug deep. So do they still, but only to rob. Once they brought gifts, as it is spoken in the old tales. Once there was obligation between your kind and ours. No more.”

The words made his head hurt. Each phrase was a bar prying him open, cracking the seals that bound him; thoughts and memories spilled into a light too bright to bear. A great city. A journey through the dark.

Adica.

“No more,” he echoed, pressing his face into his hands as his temple throbbed and his skull seemed likely to split open. But despite his pain, he had a message to deliver. “Can you help them? Some still live, beyond the tunnel, but they are trapped. Can you help them?”

“Come,” said the voice. “The council must decide.”

It shuffled away, but he had to call after it.

“I can’t see to follow you.”

“
See
?”

“I am blind in this darkness.”

It said nothing, and he tried again.

“The light above that blinds you, that you call the Blinding, is what I need to see. This place, where you can see without light, it is a blind place to me.”

Out of the blindness cold fingers grasped his arm, tapped the armband, and jerked back. “Poison water!” It hissed and gurgled and went still, as though that touch had poisoned it.

He waited, and after a bit it spoke again.

“Such talismans we make no longer. The
magic
flees after the great calamity. Hold to me and follow like a
young one
.”

He reached out, grasped its cool hand, and trusting that it
did not mean to lead him to his doom, he stumbled after it as it moved away with a strange rolling gait into a blackness so profound that he might as well have been walking into the pit.

The earth trembled beneath his feet, rocking him, then stilled.

“What was that?”

“The earth wakes,” said his guide. “The wise ones shift their feet, and the deeps tremble.”

“Ah.” His head was hurting badly again, and so they walked for a long while without speaking. He had to concentrate on walking; because each step jolted the pain in his head to a new location and back again, he came to dread the movement although he had no choice but to go forward.

After a long, long time he had to rest.

“I must drink,” he said to his guide, “or I will fail.”

“Drink?”

“I thirst. I must have water or some wine or ale, something to moisten my tongue and body.”

“Wait here.” The creature let go of his hand and before he understood what it was about, he heard it scrabble away over or along the stone and knew himself utterly lost.

He had no choice but to trust it—otherwise he certainly would die—so he lay down on the stone and slept. It woke him an unknown time later and put into his hands a bowl carved out of rock and filled to the brim with a brackish but otherwise drinkable water. When he had drunk it down, his head didn’t hurt quite so badly and, although his stomach ached with hunger, he could go on. They walked on for what seemed ages upon ages or a day at least up above where the passage of the sun and the moon allowed a man to measure the passing of time. Time seemed insignificant here, meaningless. Twice more the stone shuddered and stilled beneath and around them, causing him to pause as he swayed, heart hammering with instinctive fear, although his guide seemed untroubled by the shaking.

The second time, as the shaking subsided, he heard the noise of a distant rockfall, a scattering and shattering echo upon echo that propelled in its wake an avalanche of memory in his own mind: He remembered two young men with
wiry black hair and short beards, surefooted as they climbed across and up a vast swath of rockfall that had long before obliterated one slope of a valley.

“Shevros!” he breathed. “Maklos.”

There had been another man with them, and two more companions, but to think, to struggle to name them, made his head throb.

“Come,” said the guide, tugging him along.

They walked for another day, perhaps, or so he guessed because in addition to the pain that crippled his head he was now growing weak with hunger and again faint and irritable with thirst. The darkness ate away at him until it filled him and he was empty, even those sparks of memory lost in that vast ocean where night reigns and indeed a thing beyond night because night is elusive and transitory and this blackness had no beginning of end. The armband abraded his skin where the last of the salt water still stung, and at last when they stopped for him to rest again—the skrolin needed no rest—he slipped off the armband and rubbed the inside with the filthy loincloth he still wore which had dried while he walked. He blew on it until it felt dry and clean—as clean as anything could be under such conditions—and eased it back up on his arm.

“Come,” said his guide, stamping twice on the ground as though impatient, and it seemed the stamp and the low rumbling growl that came from deep in the creature’s body performed as an incantation, or else it had been the irritant of the salt that had poisoned the armband, because a soft glow rose from the metal and the darkness retreated.

He stared in amazement. They stood in a high tunnel whose ceiling was perfectly round while the path they walked on was level. No natural cave would appear so regular. If an arrow forged out of the iron had been shot by a giant’s bow and pierced stone, it might bore a shaft such as this.

“Come,” repeated his guide. “We are close.”

The creature had a pale cast of skin and a handful of crusty growths patching its squat body. It grabbed for his hand, but he took a step away, not meaning to.

“I can see.”

Pale-skin’s huge eyes whirled as it regarded him. He had no way to interpret its expression. It had no expression, in truth, only features that mimicked those of humankind perhaps simply because he insisted on seeing the resemblance.

We recognize only that which we already know.

“I can see to follow you,” he said. “I am steadier on my feet if I walk alone. But I will have to eat very soon, and drink again.”

“So much?” it asked. “Your body is inefficient to need so much fuel.”

“I am no different than any other man.”

“You are a creature of the Blinding. So. Come.”

They walked on, but he was getting light-headed from lack of food, and his tongue felt swollen and heavy. Yet within ten hundred paces, not seen at first because the glow of his armband lit his way no more than a stone’s toss in any direction, the tunnel’s walls became pillars marking the advent of a hall of monumental proportions, so vast that the feel of the air changed as they walked through a forest of pillars, a woodland carved out of the stone, each pillar rising up to an unseen ceiling spanning far beyond the reach of the light, each pillar studded with gems that dazzled before fading into the darkness as he passed, a glimpse of riches soon gone.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“The old ones built it, so legend says.”

It was more like a forest than any building he had ever seen; there was no layer of undergrowth, and no sky, but the pillars marched out on either side in uneven ranks, and each column had as different a look to it as any individual tree might—some resembling each other as oak tree resembles oak tree, yet different in the pattern of gems or decoration on its surface or the width or smoothness or curve of the pillar itself. Pale-skin divined a path by means of touching each pillar and moving on to the next, sometimes backtracking before heading out in a new direction, but always moving into the vast forest itself, endlessly on, into the wilderness.

In the midst of the forest a clearing opened. They came to the rim of a shallow bowl cut into the stone so unexpectedly that he almost tripped and fell, stopping himself on the brim, teetering there for one breath, then stepping back. In that
bowl, along the level base, a hundred boulders rested all helter-skelter, and that was only what he could see within the halo made by the light, for the bowl itself was too wide for the glow of his armband to illuminate the whole of it. When he blinked, he realized that of course these were not boulders at all but a congregation of skrolin.

His legs crumpled under him, and he sat hard on the lip, where the floor gave way. He was too dizzy and weak to negotiate the sloping side. There he sat while a low rolling scraping sound shifted around him, disorienting him, and he fought to stay sitting and not simply keel over.

After a long time he became aware that Pale-skin squatted beside him holding two objects in his hands: a loaf of clavas and a stone bowl filled to the brim with water. The smell of the water made his mouth hurt, and in fact his lips were so dry and cracked that the moisture stung them and they bled, the iron bite of his blood blending with the metallic taste of the water. He forced himself to drink less than he wanted, to eat only a corner, not to gorge, and afterward he was so tired that he curled up on stone and slept.

When he woke, he drank and ate again, and now he had the strength to stand, for it was apparent that the boulders—the skrolin—had moved while he slept, changing position to create a clear path for him down into the bowl.

The slope wasn’t so steep that he staggered, but it was still difficult to keep his balance. Pale-skin followed him, bearing more water and clavas, acquired from an unknown source. The skrolin moved only their heads as he passed, watching him, and that shifting rumbling sound followed him as he descended because they all of them fell in behind. He came to a round amphitheater cut into stone with a series of circular ledges and, in the middle, a shallow pit like the fighting ground for cocks or dogs.

Most of the skrolin gathered on the ledges, but Pale-skin led him down by stages to the pit where eleven skrolin waited. Each one wore an armband, but his was the only armband that gleamed, and when he got close to them, he saw that the armbands they wore were pitted and faded and scratched and even tarnished green with age, ancient objects whose potency had withered.