Silas turned his attention to the terrain around the road they were on. It was rolling hills, on the edge of the great Granite Range of mountains that served as a long, high spine to the continent of Ellan Sheeant. Brigamme was in the center of the northern reaches of the Granite Range, while Heathrin was on the western slope of the range, some ways south of Brigamme. Silas was used to the steeper slopes and higher altitudes of the greater mountains, and found the scenery of the foothills to be pleasant and calming, as the valleys provided terrain for small clusters of fields and buildings – hardly large enough to even merit the name of village – that stood and took advantage of the proximity to the road.
The wagons rolled all during the day. Midday meals were delivered by horseback, and Silas had no interruptions in his solitude until the mid-afternoon, when first Ruten and then Minneota came back to sit with him briefly. Neither made much conversation, but Silas noted that they each studied the wagon in front of him, their eyes checking the dimensions at length, before they parted ways.
That evening, after sundown, the caravan pulled into a small meadow off the road. Silas let his mule graze in the tall grass briefly, while he waited for the others to settle their animals in the corral, then Silas led his own animal in as well. He was assigned to carry buckets of water from the nearby brook to care for the beasts.
The dinner that night was stew and bread. Silas sat on a bench near the fire and listened to the others in the caravan crew talk about the boring ride, some complaining about the lack of opportunity to sell wares, others pleased that no misadventures on the road had occurred.
“Silas, what happened in the back of the caravan today?” a dark-eyed girl asked him when he had finished eating. The girl, Sareen, rode in a different wagon, but Silas had seen her at every stop, and had found himself staring at her. She was a pretty girl, not tall, with broad hips and a swaggering walk that seemed full of self-confidence. Men in the caravan seemed to float towards wherever she was, he had observed already – they seemed drawn towards her. And now she had chosen to sit down next to him.
“Not much,” he answered her question. “The mule pulled the wagon, and I rode. My seat is sore; I’m not used to sitting on a hard bench like that all day long,” he gave a grin.
“Something must have happened,” Sareen obligingly smiled at his rueful statement for a moment before she spoke. “Prima came back up front and seemed to wear a thundercloud the rest of the day. He and Minnie and Ruten were talking about something.”
Was it the wagon with the compartments for contraband, Silas wondered? Prima had told him not to say anything, and so he wouldn’t, but Ruten and Minnie had each come back to his spot in the rear during the afternoon, to study the smuggling wagon themselves.
“Well, I’m glad they aren’t going to throw you out already. You’re quiet, but you seem like a nice addition to the crew,” she patted his knee in a friendly fashion as she rose from her seat next to him on a log facing the fire, and then she left, followed moments later by the small coterie of men and boys entranced by her warm personality and looks.
Silas slept uneasily that night, but in the morning shook his doubts aside while he prepared his wagon and mule for the day’s travel. He spent the first part of the day traveling on his wagon in the rear of the caravan, though a new wagon had been swapped into the position directly in front of him. A part of his attention was spent studying the new wagon, while a part of him responded to the boredom of the ride by beginning to mentally review some of the Wind Word codes he had memorized during his apprenticeship. When – or if, he admitted to himself – he was to return to the academy at Heathrin, he wanted to not fall too much further behind.
He discovered that he mentally categorized each of the codes based on what had been going on in his life on the campus at the time he had been focused on each code. One code was the code of the spring cherry blossoms, because Brean had made him take time away from studies to go look at the beautiful flowering trees in the town when spring arrived. Another code was the dance code, because the eldest students of the blue dorm had organized a dance at the time he had been studying that code with his tutors. And so it went, as he mentally reviewed the many codes and whiled away the time he sat on the bench.
In the afternoon, the landscape began to change. The slope of the road grew steeper, the mules pulled more slowly, and some drivers even got out of their wagons to lighten the load as their mules and horses climbed the incline into the mountains proper.
That evening there was no broad pasture to pull the caravan into. Instead, the long train of wagons pulled into a pair of sections of wide shoulders along the road in places where the road was relatively flat between long stretches of inclines. Prima and some of his caravan staff stayed with the front-most portion of the collection of vehicles, while Ruten and other guards stayed with the rear section.
“Did you see anything unusual about the wagon you followed today? Any hidden compartments?” Ruten asked Silas stealthily at dinner that evening, as the pair walked forward to get their meals.
“No, nothing out of the ordinary,” Silas replied.
“Blast it!” Ruten muttered. “I bet money that young Trumco was the most likely smuggler we had in the whole caravan; he’s awfully shifty, if you ask me. You’re sure you didn’t see any signs?”
“I’m sure I didn’t see them,” Silas confirmed. “That doesn’t mean there’s nothing there – I just didn’t see it.”
“Aahh,” Ruten sighed.
The next morning, the caravan was told that they were going to stop in a small mountain town called Semie for a half day sales fair. The wagons moved out and onward in a steady fashion, which allowed them to reach Semie shortly before midday.
The settlement was centered around a large public green, one that had two large fountains at either side. Though the green was large, it was not large enough to hold every wagon in the caravan. Ruten rode along the side of the line of wagons and designated those that were going to be sent to the green to offer their wares for sale, while the other wagons were told to simply ride on through the town and then wait on the other side of town for the carnival to end and the retailers to return to the road.
Silas wasn’t surprised when his wagon was designated to be one that rolled through town. His load of mirrors were apparently mostly commissioned work from what he had been told, and few were able to be sold to the public. Hence, he let his mule continue to move the load past the town center and to a pasture on the far side.
“Do you know the code I learned during the flowering dogwood tree week?” he asked his mule when he unhitched the animal and took it to a patch of greenery where it began to graze peacefully. “It was the kitchen code. Do you know that strainer means a meeting, spoon means soon, oven means battle, and water pump means peace?” he asked the content creature as its ears twitched and its eyes remained glued to the surface of the road ahead.
Silas needlessly quizzed the mule about other codes he had memorized, as he tried to both keep his academic memories intact as well as pass the time spent waiting for the rest of the caravan to rejoin the waiting non-trading wagons.
When the other wagons did finally come through the town and rejoin the leaders, Silas scrambled to quickly rehitch his wagon to his still-unnamed mule, then he pulled into the spot he had grown to think of as his own, in the rear of the caravan. The afternoon passed into evening, and the outriders began mounting the guide lights along the trail, while Silas’s wagon again sported a light of its own to designate the rear of the caravan.
When the steady progress across the hill country began to slow as the slopes of the road turned steeper, the wagons were halted for the evening. That’s when Silas discovered the shocking story that had riled the other, older members of the caravan community.
“Did you hear? They ejected Moochie from the caravan!” Hooves, the animal handler, told Silas when he brought his mule to the corral for the evening.
“What?” Silas was stunned, and he felt his stom
ach turn. Moochie had driven the wagon with the hidden smuggling compartments, the subtly hidden spaces that Prima had not known about until Silas had told him.
“They did. They took his animal and left him and his wagon and his cargo in that spot in the road back there. I heard he was doing some smuggling of his own without telling Prima or cutting him in. The man must have made quite a scene – he had the worst temper of anyone I’ve known to ride with Prima in ten years. He’s good riddance in my book, but what a way to do it – dropping him out in the middle of nowhere!” Hooves was eager to talk as he took the lead to the mule’s bridle and chatted away at his captive audience.
Silas eventually escaped from the repetitive stream of comments, and walked back to his wagon for a moment to think about the unexpected turn of events. He felt a sense of guilt. It had been his innocent observation that had tipped Prima to the small-time smuggling that was occurring in the leader’s own caravan.
Minutes later, when he went to have a plate of sloppy dinner served by Flames, the caravan’s resident cook, he heard more discussion about the expulsion of Moochie. No one spoke up for the man during an extended conversation, making Silas wonder why no one had spoken out against the man previously. Or at least he wondered about Moochie when he wasn’t trying to discreetly watch Sareen talk to her friends; the lovely girl seemed even more attractive than usual as she was illuminated by the warm tones of the campfire. Her eyes never seemed to roam in his direction however.
A good night’s sleep followed the meal for the caravan crew, a prelude to the unexpected adventure that befell them the next day.
Chapter 12
Minnie rode back to the back of the caravan the next morning as the wagons began to slowly climb up a mountainside slope.
“This will be the slowest day of the trip,” she told Silas as her horse easily trotted next to his wagon. “We’re climbing towards a pass that we’ll reach in the afternoon. From there, it’ll practically be downhill all the way to Ivaric for the next few days.
“You may need to get off the wagon to lighten the load a bit for your mule when the going gets tough,” she suggested.
Silas nodded his agreement, and she waved good bye cheerily, then rode away.
The morning passed slowly. The increasingly mountainous scenery was much like the northern locale of his home village of Brigamme, giving Silas a chance to hear bird calls that were familiar and also a reminder of the Tracker career he hadn’t been given by nature.
Then, a few miles later, the air grew thicker, permeated with strange odors that Silas couldn’t identify. There were no dead animal carcasses along the road to produce a stink, and the smell was not so sickly sweet in any event, but it lingered over miles of the landscape, while Silas wrinkled his nose and wondered at the cause.
His wagon slowed more than the others, and he began to drift further and further behind. When the last wagon in view rounded a corner of the road and disappeared behind a stony outcropping, Silas knew he needed to climb out of the wagon and walk alongside, to ease his mule’s struggle.
As he stood up, he heard a shout overhead. He turned his head upward to look in confusion at the unexpected sound. For just a fraction of a second, he saw a dark shape in the sky, a person who had leapt off the stony bluff along the side of the road. Then the person landed in the wagon, on the bench beside him, the man’s arm striking down and knocking Silas to the floor of the wagon.
It was Moochie, the wagon driver who had been banned from the caravan the day before.
“I know you’re the one who told Prima about my compartments on the wagon. What did you do? Go snooping around?” the man snarled.
“I just saw it,” Silas squeaked in fear. Moochie held a long knife with a wicked blade, and he pointed it downward at Silas, who had become jammed in the narrow footwell of the driver’s bench. He couldn’t move in any direction to escape, while the knife wavered overhead.
“You snitched to Prima, and he got all noble and said there would be no contraband in his caravan, as if we all don’t know that he carried a shady item or two of his own on most trips,” Moochie scathingly complained. “So now I’m left in some backwater no-place – that’s not right!” he rose up with emotion, and as he did, the wagon shivered slightly.
“So I’m going to get revenge!” he looked down mercilessly at Silas.
“Ruten!” Silas shouted for the caravan guard, knowing that the rest of the caravan had moved away from the trailing wagon.
“There’s no Ruten coming to save you now, snitch!” Moochie shouted. “You’re going to pay right now.”
The outraged criminal raised his deadly knife above his head, holding it in preparation for plunging it down into Silas.
Frightened by the imminent attack, Silas tried to struggle upward into a sitting position. As he did, the mule suddenly brayed loudly and repeatedly.
“What’s that fool doing?” Moochie was momentarily distracted by the noise.
And then the earth opened up beneath the wagon.
Chapter 13
One moment, Silas was sitting up in the wagon, his arms struggling to lift him up from the floor well, as the murderous Moochie stood over him, weapon raised high in an outline against the bright sky above. The next moment, the ground shook violently, and the earthen roadway opened up in a yawning chasm that split the road and caused the wagon – including the mule that still stood in its braces – to drop precipitously into the darkness of a cavern below.
Moochie and Silas both bounced in response to the movement, causing the point of the knife blade to stab Silas in the shoulder. The wound was shallow however, not done through any control of the blade by Moochie. As the knife pinked Silas, its point cut a fine line in his flesh, downward and to the side, across the shirt and the chest of the shocked boy, leaving a thin red trail of welling blood from one side to the other.
The bright daylight was suddenly replaced with gloomy stone walls that the wagon fell past as it plunged downward.
“What in the name of Kai?” Moochie screamed as a look of intense panic covered his face.
The look lasted only a second, during the freefalling episode. The wagon bumped against some stony protrusion in the wide chimney-like chasm that it was plummeting downward through. The bump against the wall threw Moochie upward out of the wagon, away from Silas and the mule and the mirrors and everything else that had plummeted together in the aftermath of the earthquake that opened the cavern up.
Moochie somersaulted as he floated freely above the wagon, until the wagon struck the confining walls of the chimney – both sides simultaneously. The wagon jerked to a nearly complete halt, and the mule brayed loudly again in terror as it fell below the wagon, then was mercilessly left dangling in the air below the wagon by the wooden rails and leather straps that connected it to the wagon.
Somehow Moochie managed to fall through a narrow opening just past the rear of the wagon and disappeared from sight with a continuing wail of fear.
The wagon spurted free from its momentary confinement and began to fall once more. Silas scrambled up to the drivers bench as the wagon fell. He was slammed back downward as the wagon stuck in another narrow neck of the passage, then he began to float upward when the wagon broke free and began to fall again.
It only fell for a moment more before it came to a jarring stop.
Silas heard the sound of breaking glass, and he heard the sound of the braying mule.
Then he realized they had truly stopped falling.
The wagon was resting on the dim floor of an unknown, underground chamber.
Chapter 14
The mule brayed. The animal was alive; despite falling untold number of feet down through a shaft in the mountains, the mule had survived.
Silas himself was alive. He too had suddenly plunged in the most unexpected circumstances that nobody would have ever imagined, atop a wooden cargo wagon that had scrapped the sides of the cavern shaft, before it had landed at the bottom of the pit, in virtuall
y one piece. The only noticeable harm he had suffered had been the knife scratch across his chest.
There was almost no sound, other than the heavy breathing of both Silas and the mule, and a distant, soft hissing sound.
There was light. It was a distinct, unearthly frightening light; Silas’s mind began to comprehend the strange world his senses were revealing. There was the light from the opening at the top of the shaft, perhaps a hundred feet or more overhead. It was not a great deal of light, the sunshine that filtered and reflected and traveled downward from the hole that had opened in the road through the mountains.
There was more light, a brighter light. But a garish and strange light that did more to illuminate the cavern space that Silas and his conveyance occupied. The walls of the cave were glowing – on one side they glowed yellow, and on the other side they glowed purple. It was a ghastly combination that cast strange, unsettling shadows.
But the light was only one part of the frightening color spectacle. There were also gasses, like a living, roiling carpet of fog – twisting and moving, ground-hugging clouds of gas – that edged across the floor of the cave where Silas sat on his wagon. One portion of the gaseous cloud was yellow, and one part was purple. They each seemed to emanate from the respective walls that glowed in the matching colors, but they met one another at various points across the flow and intertwined with one another without diluting each other.
The wagon sat on a small promontory in the center of the cavern, a spot that seemed to be above the high water mark of the gasses, which moved around the wagon’s location as if they were the seas that enveloped a solitary island. And the cavern that the wagon sat in was a large one. It was ceilinged with a high dome, at the center of which was the shaft the wagon had fallen down. The glowing walls were at a fair distance in all directions, glowing with their mottled colors, except in one dim spot that appeared to be an opening leading off into some further underground chamber; the opening was located at the seam where the two glowing colors of walls came together in front of Silas.
The Mirror After the Cavern Page 9
