The Well of Darkness (22 page)

I wonder if that
‘
s what happens to all of the sha
‘
um, I
thought.
For their time in the Valley, they
‘
re just smart animals for a while, intent on the biological business of continuing their species. It
‘
s an entirely different life for them, one they don
‘
t remember when they come back into the world they share with their riders.

Tarani and I were keeping a decent pace. Our lead over the men behind us shrank more slowly than I had been expecting. They hadn’t been pushing as hard or as long as we had—but neither had they been toughened, recently, by a run across the Strofaan. They had had a reasonably soft life in Chizan, and we had been on the road, not counting our eight-day rest at Stomestad, for more than a month.

My mind stayed with the memory of Keeshah in the Valley, both because it was my only my real contact with him since he had left us in the desert and because of the puzzle the vision presented.
Why would I become aware of the link now?
I wondered.
Or at all, for that matter? Tarani said the rest of the Sharith never had a clue about what happened in the Valley.

Excitement gripped me.
But nobody else has the same kind of link as Keeshah
‘
s and mine. Ours is a different quality, not just communication, but a lifesharing
—
motivations, emotions
—

Emotions
—I missed my step and fell flat on my face, skidding in the sand.

Tarani was beside me, helping me up. Her eyes were curious, but she didn’t waste breath asking questions.

Me, I was busy kicking myself for not seeing the truth sooner.

Keeshah goes into his animal state
, I reasoned.
The link is still open, though neither one of us is really aware of it. He
‘
s troubled by the most powerful emotion he
‘
s ever felt, the need to mate. And I can
‘
t think clearly because that need is affecting me, unrecognized, through the link. He finds his mate, and courts her, as cats do, with teasing and passion …

I groaned inwardly, remembering a roll down a hillside, and the need that had overtaken me then.

No wonder Tarani couldn
‘
t think straight either,
I thought.
She was trying to deal with a man who was half animal.

I can blame Keeshah, now, for the fierceness of what happened in Carn
‘
s cellar. I thought my release had cleared my head
—
but now I think it was Keeshah
‘
s. That must have been the moment when he mated with the female.

As desperate as our situation was just then, I still wanted to laugh as I thought:
It’s a good thing Tarani and I were in a private place when Keeshah got laid.

But if I give Keeshah credit for the passion, don
‘
t I have to give him credit for the feelings, too? Is what I feel for Tarani all mine, or part Keeshah
‘
s feeling for his lady?

It didn’t take long to put that worry to rest. All I had to do was call up the “dream” again. The quality of Keeshah’s relationship to the female was strictly on an animal level—a good-humored tolerance, respect for their shared purpose, devotion to the concept of family. Not only was there no trace of the tenderness and joy I felt when I looked at Tarani, but I could find no similarity between what Keeshah felt for the female and what I knew he felt for me.

Well, maybe one similarity,
I admitted.
I
‘
ve felt that “good-humored tolerance” from him a time or two.

“Rikardon,” Tarani panted.

Awakened from my reverie, I realized that my sides were beginning to hurt and that I, as well as Tarani, was laboring for breath.

I checked my inner awareness. Several hours had run by while I had been engrossed in my discovery of the existing Keeshah/Rikardon mindlink. I looked back in sudden panic, but the flapping scarfs and puffing dust of the troop of men seemed no closer to us.

“Something’s wrong,” I said, and looked ahead of us, expecting to see the thickening line of green that would mark the beginning of the forested area in which the sha’um lived. It should have been straight ahead, Obilin and Worfit straight behind us. The line was there, all right, but off to our left, with the running men edging up between it and us.

I wasted breath and a few precious seconds swearing at myself. I had been preoccupied, running automatically, peripherally aware of our lead distance but blithely assuming the direction was right. We had been skillfully herded away from our original goal—no doubt at the instigation of Worfit, who knew of my sha’um connection—and were aimed due north now, directly toward the Well of Darkness.

I studied distances, did some figuring, and came up with disaster if we tried to cut across the path of Worfit’s men.

My link to Keeshah is unique
, I told myself. I knew it was a long shot—I had seen into his mind, seen the blank place that had once been his friend Rikardon—but I put a part of my mind into gear, screaming
“HELP, KEESHAH!”
at full volume.

It wasn’t just his help I wanted. It was his awareness, a return of the closeness I had missed for so long.

But I couldn’t dwell on what seemed our slimmest chance. I clutched my aching sides and looked ahead, searching for some hope in the landscape.

I see now why they call it a well,
I thought. We had topped a sharp ridge that seemed to circle the huge, spreading darkness. I stumbled to a stop, less from fatigue than from curiosity and amazement. We were looking into an inverted cone of land perhaps a mile wide. Another step would start us down the side of the cone, which was covered with pale, crumbly-looking rock dotted, here and there, with chunks of gleaming black. Some two hundred yards deep in the cone drifted a smoggy-looking light fog. It lay across the “well”, a light swirling motion suggesting a subtle turbulence. It formed a transparent layer that truncated the cone; we could see the ground clearly enough through its edges.

But if we looked down, toward the center of the cone, that transparent layer merged into a darker one, then one even blacker. We couldn’t see the ground, even at the edge of the fog, more than four hundred yards straight down.

“Well of Darkness,” I panted. “Perfect name for it.”

“I’ve heard of it all my life,” Tarani said, “but I had no idea it was this big.” She looked back over her shoulder. “We cannot stay here, Rikardon.”

I took her hand and started down the steep slope. It was treacherous going, with the gravel-size rocks sliding out from under our feet with every other step. I had to let go her hand and use both mine to keep upright. Luckily, the slope wasn’t perfectly smooth, but stairstepped with uneven ledges.

“Call Lonna,” I ordered, a little awed that Tarani had followed me unquestioningly. “They’re expecting us to turn aside here, and think they can cut us off then between here and the Valley. We can’t cross this—that stuff has to be poisonous—but we can hold our breath and take short dips into it. Lonna can guide us, tell us when it’s safe to come up for air.”

“They will line the rim and wait for us,” she said.

“Not the eastern rim,” I panted, “the side away from the Valley. They won’t expect that. We ought to be able to work our way around to the north, and climb out the other side. By then, I’m hoping they’ll assume we’re dead. If not—we’ll at least have surprise on our side, and that may give us enough of a head start to reach the Valley.”

We had clambered down until breathing was becoming difficult, and I realized that the top layer of gas was even more transparent, once we were inside it.

That makes things harder
, I thought, dragging Tarani back up the slope a ways.
For this to work, we
‘
ve got to go deep enough to be obscured from sight. I thought this layer might be breathable, but from its taste and smell, it
‘
s richly layered with sulfur. It
‘
s going to take all our breath-holding time just to dip down to the heavier layers and get back up in time to breathe again.

I could hear men shouting to one another. They would be standing on the rim in minutes, and if they saw which direction we were taking, we’d be trapped for sure.

“Is Lonna ready?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tarani said.

“Aren’t you going to tell me this is a crazy idea?” I asked.

“You know that already,” she said.

She stumbled, caught my arm for support, smiled. I kissed her, lightly.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We took deep breaths and slid and scrambled down the slope toward the darkness. As we moved deeper into the relatively clear top layer, my eyes began to sting and water, and I was already wanting my next breath. When we dipped into the murkiness below, I had to close my eyes to protect them, and we felt our way deeper.

Tarani tugged at my hand and we struggled back up the slope. We both gave out and gasped for breath a little too soon. The gas stung my eyes and burned my lungs. Tarani’s coughing told me she was having the same sort of trouble. We crawled higher, breathing heavily when the air was cleaner and lying still for several minutes. When I felt I could move again, I looked around. We had been traveling eastward on the zig and the zag of our short trip, and were a good distance from our starting point. We lay in clear view, should anyone be looking—but the men who had followed us were stationing themselves along the western rim, and looking straight down.

I felt a surge of hope.

“They’re not looking for us,” I gasped to Tarani. “I don’t think we need to go quite so deep.”

The ground trembled slightly, and Tarani jerked up on her elbows.

“What was that?” she cried.

I wondered what the Gandalarans believed the Well of Darkness to be. I found I couldn’t tell Tarani what I—what Ricardo—knew it was. Gandaresh had no vocabulary equivalent for
volcano.

Unless you count “Well of Darkness” as a generic, as well as specific, term
, I thought.
This seems to be the only volcano in Gandalara, and a mildly active one, if that ground tremor is any indication.

I ignored Tarani’s question and started breathing deeply, getting ready for the next stage of the trip.

I also checked the volume of my SOS signal to Keeshah, and turned it up a notch.

We had dipped down into that stinging, cloying mess of gases three times more before I finally figured out why we were making such good distance.

“Lonna’s watching us and giving you directions, isn’t she?” I said.

Tarani only nodded through a spasm of coughing. She looked as bad as I felt.

There didn’t seem to be one square inch of surface, inside of me or outside, that wasn’t burning from exposure to the gas or stinging from scraping on the rocks
and
exposure to the gas. I looked westward, but my watering eyes couldn’t see the opposite rim very clearly.

“I’d guess we’re pretty close to the easternmost point of the rim, directly opposite the group watching for us,” I said. “Will you ask Lonna if that’s right?”

She closed her eyes, then nodded.

“Then I think we can quit trying to breathe soup,” I said. “We can climb up and work around the rest of the way on the far side of the rim.”

“Thank Zanek for that!” Tarani gasped, and we started the treacherous climb.

We moved slowly. I felt weak as a baby—I doubted I would have been able to make another trip into that smelly darkness, anyway. Our clothes were covered with a sooty dust that helped them blend in with the color of the slope, so I didn’t worry too much about the long periods we lay still, totally exposed to anyone who might be looking our way.

When we got close enough to touch the weathered edge of rock that marked the rim, the ground trembled again, and Tarani whimpered. Lonna swept down from the sky, concern for Tarani’s distress drawing her. She hovered about twenty feet above us.

Lonna screeched. It was a blood-freezing cry of pain. My eyes were blurred, but I could hear her wingbeat falter and stop. When she hit the ground close to us and started to skid down the slope, I had no trouble distinguishing the dark red stain spreading slowly through the whiteness of her feathers, or seeing the dagger hilt at the center of the stain.

Tarani moaned and crawled over to Lonna’s body, catching it by a wingtip before it could slide down into the well. She hugged the bird tight against her chest, rolled to her back and lay still.

“Tarani,” I whispered. Her head turned toward me, but her eyes were blank. Utterly blank.

“Obilin!”
I screamed, and launched myself over the rim of the crater. “This is the end of it, you bastard! You hear me, Obilin?”

I found my feet and stared around in a wild fury, blinking away the tears that were washing the last of the stinging smog out of my eyes. Obilin waited for me not ten yards away. Small drifts of dust in the air told me he had just now slid back down from this side of the rim.

“This will be the end of it indeed,” Obilin said in his damaged voice. “I have not made the error, this time, of trusting others. You always manage to use the others against me. But now—” He pulled the steel sword from his baldric and gestured, inviting me downslope. “We’re alone. Worfit’s a good man—he followed my instructions to the letter, allowing you to think you had fooled us while I crept along after that idiotic bird. But he has sworn not to interfere—unless I fail. And Tarani no longer has my interest, Rikardon. You. Your death. That is all I care about now.”

I drew my sword and moved cautiously down the slope. The red heat of rage had coalesced into a white-hot point of hatred that left me room to think and plan.

This territory is in his favor,
I calculated.
Lots of room for those quick and fancy moves of his. That
‘
s got to be the first priority
—
limit his mobility.

We circled. He lunged in, swung an overhand blow which I blocked, then leaped back again. The edge of my bronze sword was no longer smooth.