The Quest for Saint Camber

by Katherine Kurtz

  “Shall we do it, then?” Morgan asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Tonight?”

  “No, in the morning. We can hardly just go, without even a by-your-leave.”

  “And suppose Conall won’t give us leave?”

  Duncan snorted. “Do you really think he wants us hanging around here, any more than we want to be here? He’s got his power now, Alaric. He’s going to be king. The old order changeth—and you and I, unfortunately, are no longer a part of it.”

  While they were gathering up the accoutrements of the ceremony and setting things right in the room, Arilan returned and they told him of their decision. The bishop was sorry to hear it, but understood their reasons for wanting to go, and readily consented to setting up prearranged times for contact, so that the two might stay abreast of events in the capital.

  “You’re wrong about Conall not needing you, though, you know,” Arilan said. “Oh, right now, in the first flush of being The Haldane, and preoccupied by his father’s declining condition, he’s even less gracious than his usual wont. But I’m extremely hopeful that he’ll be making some changes for the better. He’s getting married, you know; and a good woman can do a great deal to smooth out the rough edges, I’m told.”

  “He’s what?” Morgan said.

  “Well, don’t act so surprised,” Arilan replied. “Look what marriage did for you.”

  “But—”

  “Be glad that he’s making such dynastic considerations already,” Arilan went on, drawing himself up in episcopal indignation. “I understand that Cardiel will be publishing the banns on Monday, after Conall has made the announcement to the privy council. I would have made you wait until then to find out, but since you’re leaving—”

  Duncan only shook his head in disbelief.

  “Who’s he marrying? Not the little village maid he got pregnant?”

  “Good heavens, no,” Arilan said. “She’s a proper princess, and Deryni, to boot. I’m sure you’ll both approve. He’s marrying Rothana of Nur Hallaj.”

  “Rothana!” Morgan gasped.

  “But, she’s under vows!” Duncan added.

  Arilan shrugged. “According to Thomas Cardiel, not any more. Apparently she made formal application to be dispensed from her vows—which were only temporary, in any case—some time ago, after discussing the possibility with him under the seal of the confessional. Conall’s very keen to get a legitimate heir, so the wedding’s being held even before Lent is over—a small, quiet affair, due to the tragedies of the past month or so—a week from today, I believe.”

  Shaking his head, Morgan could only be amazed.

  “I had no idea. I always thought it was Kelson who had his cap set for her—though it certainly wouldn’t have been easy sailing. I’ll never forget how shaken he was, the first day he met her.” He smiled sadly, remembering. “He asked me if I’d ever raped a woman.”

  “He what?” Arilan said. “Good God, you don’t mean that he—”

  “Oh, good heavens, no,” Morgan replied. “So far as I know, Kelson’s still a virgin—or was,” he added lamely. “I don’t think he ever laid a hand on a woman with other than respect.”

  “Well, what happened between him and Rothana, then?” Arilan asked.

  Morgan sighed wistfully, forcing himself to concentrate only on answering the question.

  “He was after the man who’d raped the Princess Janniver. He wanted to read Janniver’s memory of the attack, to see whether he could identify her assailant, but Rothana wouldn’t hear of it. Then she read Janniver and gave the information to Kelson—only, she also gave him a taste of what it feels like to be a woman under those circumstances. I daresay it was a useful thing for him to learn, but maybe it made more of a negative impression than I’d thought. I wonder if Richenda knows about this.”

  Arilan shrugged. “I can’t answer that, of course. I’m glad, however, to hear that there was nothing between her and Kelson. I should hate to have to get involved with questions of consanguinity and such. She’ll make the perfect queen for Gwynedd. And Conall does need a legitimate heir, no less than Kelson did.”

  “Well, if that’s what Rothana wants,” Duncan murmured. “And at least Gwynedd will still have a Deryni queen, which is certainly to the good. You don’t think Conall will be offended if we aren’t here for the wedding, do you?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” Arilan said. “It will be a very small ceremony, under the circumstances. And it will probably do Conall good to be out from under the scrutiny of both of you for a few weeks, while he finds his stride—no offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Morgan said dryly, mentally signaling Duncan that it was time to go. “It will certainly do us good to get away and work out our grief, once and for all—and I doubt anything will crop up militarily that Ewan and Saer can’t handle for Conall. Please present our apologies to him and his mother for leaving so precipitously, but I understand it’s safest to use the Valoret Portal in the early morning hours, and we’d rather not delay until tomorrow night.”

  “A wise precaution,” Arilan agreed.

  “Just one other question,” Morgan said, before turning to go.

  “Yes?”

  “What will the Camberian Council think of all this?”

  “Of Conall marrying Rothana?” Arilan smiled. “I should imagine they’ll be delighted. Her parents are well known to us and have always been in sympathy with our aims. She’ll make a fine and biddable queen.”

  “Biddable, indeed!” Duncan muttered under his breath, when they were safely outside and heading toward Dhugal’s rooms to change. “Biddable, indeed!”

  Meanwhile, he who should have had Rothana for his queen continued to trudge along an apparently endless corridor deep underground, going steadily deeper, watched and assisted with growing concern by an ever more exhausted Dhugal.

  His royal patient had made some progress. Kelson’s memory was returning with each passing day, so that he now could recall most of what had happened up to the time of the accident, but he still tired easily and was plagued by headaches if he pushed himself too hard; and his ability to tap into his powers was still very weak and chancy. Periodically, he made game attempts to link with Dhugal, in hopes of enhancing the latter’s strength enough to cast beyond their rocky prison and make contact with the outside world, but even the mildest exertion along these lines set the king’s head to throbbing again. The only Deryni ability working with any real reliability was that of lowering his shields so that Dhugal could block his pain for a time and help him sleep.

  And so he did sleep each time they stopped, deeply and without dreams. That, at least, enabled him to go on afterwards. But neither of them was growing any stronger on the limited diet of fish and water that was all the caverns could provide. And the time finally came when the caverns continued on in one direction and the river went deeper underground, disappearing into a deep pool whose bottom Dhugal could not sense.

  After Dhugal had tried and worn himself out in the trying, the two of them slept beside the pool, huddled together for warmth beside only a meager fire, for less and less driftwood could be found as they went deeper into the earth. Dhugal caught more fish and cooked them when he woke; and while he and Kelson ate their fill of it, he tried his best to set out the situation as he saw it.

  “We’ve come to the end of the river, Kel,” he said. “I’ve probed as deep as I can in the pool, but it dives underground, and there’s no indication how far it might go before it surfaces again. Maybe it never surfaces. In any case, it doesn’t appear that our escape lies in that direction unless it’s by way of death.”

  Kelson shivered, pulling his cloak more closely around his shoulders. He chilled more easily than had been his usual wont before their accident and he had lost far more weight than pleased Dhugal. He had resumed wearing his riding leathers in preference to Brother Gelric’s habit once he regained some of his strength, but they hung on him, as Dhugal’s did on him. The pas
sing days had also endowed the king with a sparse but silky beard, which he rubbed at distractedly as he huddled closer to the fire.

  “I want out—but not that way,” Kelson said. “If we’d wanted to die by drowning, we could have managed that when this all began—however long ago that’s been.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” Dhugal said, threading another fish on a stick for roasting. “That being the case, our only option is to push on through the caverns and hope we’ll find an escape before our food and water run out. I caught a couple of extra fish, so we can cook them and take them with us, but water is restricted to what we can carry in the flask—which won’t last long once we’ve left the river, I’m afraid.”

  Kelson shrugged. “So, it’s a choice of staying here, where we’ve got fish and water enough to keep us alive sort of indefinitely—but not getting any stronger or any closer to a way out—or else taking the gamble,” he said, rubbing between his eyes. “There has to be some kind of opening, though—eventually. The air is always fresh. And if there isn’t a way out, at least we’ll have tried.”

  Solemnly Dhugal nodded. “I wish you were strong enough for us to try really punching through a contact with outside, just once. I can’t believe Father and Alaric aren’t searching for us. Of course, after this long, I suppose everyone thinks we’re dead.”

  After a moment, Kelson asked, “How long do you think it’s been, Dhugal? Several weeks? A month?”

  But Dhugal honestly had no idea. Nor did they talk about it any more, after they had cooked up the last of their fish, packed it for travel, gorged themselves on water, and gathered up as much driftwood as they could carry to keep them in torches for as long as possible.

  By the time they were far enough from the river that its roar was only a soft murmur—welcome silence, after so long on its shore—the character of the cavern changed very quickly. At first, their way lay through a succession of damp, rough-walled corridors connecting larger chambers, like beads strung on a necklace, irregularly spaced, some of them blank and featureless, but others fairylands of grotesque rock formations and mineral encrustations. But increasingly, they were forced to pick their way through cathedral-like caverns almost clogged with stalactites and stalagmites studding ceilings and floors. Sometimes, such places yielded pools of standing water; but it was stagnant and mineral-laden and cramped the bowels. They soon learned not to try to drink it.

  After the first few hours, they had to rely exclusively on Dhugal’s handfire for light, too, because there was no more wood for torches. The added exertion did nothing for Dhugal’s already dwindling energy levels; and Kelson could not help, doing well just to stay on his feet and keep plodding ahead. They stopped and slept several times in the next few “days,” each time eating and drinking sparingly from their now limited provisions. Nor did they have a fire anymore to keep them warm while they slept.

  As a consequence, they slept badly and derived less renewal from their rest than they had before. Dhugal judged it well into the third day after they left the pool, and near the end of their supplies, when their hopes were brought up short. The cavern simply ended. A despairing sob escaped Dhugal’s throat as he completed most of his circuit of this final chamber and sank to a sitting position, his back against the stone.

  “There’s no way out?” Kelson called, from the mouth of the corridor by which they had entered.

  Dhugal made a strangled sound of negation as he shook his head and buried his face in his hands, his handfire dimming until he wept in total darkness. Stunned, Kelson groped a few steps in that direction until his hand encountered the wall that would lead him to the other. But then he, too, sank to the ground, laying his cheek and both hands against the stone and merely concentrating on his breathing for several minutes, unable to do more, praying for some reprieve from their apparent death sentence.

  They could not go back. Oh, they could start back—but with what provisions they had left, they would never make it as far as the pool. And even if they could, nothing awaited them there except a slower, more wasting death.

  But as Kelson knelt there in darkness, himself on the verge of despair, he became aware of something he had not noticed before. There was a regularity beneath his questing fingertips—a smooth horizontal line which, as he ran his hands farther afield, was echoed in other lines running parallel—and others perpendicular. An artificial pattern, like—

  Bricks? Good God, could the wall be man-made?

  “Dhugal!” Kelson murmured, hardly able to believe what he was feeling. “Dhugal, it’s a wall!”

  “I know that,” came Dhugal’s listless reply, through muffling hands.

  “No, I mean it’s man-made. Bricks or something. Someone built it. Feel it, Dhugal. You can feel the lines of the joins. Bring back your handfire and have a look!”

  Dhugal snuffled in the darkness, presumably making his own tactile inspection of the wall, then gasped.

  “Sweet Jesu, you’re right!” he breathed, as his handfire flared again to show him frantically running his hands over the wall. “It’s bricks and mortar. Kelson, we are going to get out of here! If someone built this, then they have to have done it from the other side. All we have to do is find a way to break through.”

  But finding a way through was going to prove more difficult than their first exuberant optimism indicated, for they had no tools except Dhugal’s dagger and their hands. The mortar binding the bricks might be dug out, but it was slow, maddeningly painstaking work that quickly ruined the blade for any other purpose and made a disaster of fingernails—but at least they made progress.

  It took them several hours to get the first brick out. Behind it was another, slightly offset from the first. Several more hours were required to remove enough other bricks from the first layer to expose a full brick in the second, though the work went a little easier, with the first one out. They worked far past the time when, ordinarily, they would have stopped to sleep, even though Kelson was starting to droop with exhaustion.

  Eventually, however, they were able to push a single brick of the next layer through to the other side, rejoicing that the wall had proven only two layers thick. It hit with a dull, solid thud, but something tinkled metallically as Dhugal’s questing fingers dislodged more mortar in reaching through.

  “It’s smooth on the other side,” he said, feeling around the opening. “A plaster finish, maybe.”

  “Can you see anything?” Kelson asked.

  But only darkness lay beyond, as the two of them pressed their faces to the opening to peer through; and even when Dhugal jockeyed his handfire through to illuminate the other side, they could see nothing. But the breach was made now; and the wall’s very existence was proof that others had been there before them to build it—and that, therefore, a way out must lie beyond.

  Thus spurred by new hope, they rested for a short while, eating the last of their increasingly unpalatable fish and taking meager sips of water from the nearly empty flask. Kelson slept a little then, while Dhugal continued to dig and pry at the bricks, though both knew it would be at least a day’s work to enlarge the hole enough to wriggle through.

  At the campsite above Saint Bearand’s, Morgan stood with Duncan and Ciard O Ruane on a rocky outcropping overlooking the plunge of the waterfall, spray rainbow-sparkling around them in the bright midmorning sunlight.

  “And you say Kelson’s squire went over this waterfall and survived?” Morgan asked the old gillie, shaking his head in disbelief as he craned his neck to see farther over the edge.

  “Aye, but ye can see there, at the edge of the pool, how the rocks ring it. I dinnae know how the lad managed not to hit ’em. Or maybe he did. The t’other squire did. But the rocks before the falls are treacherous enough.”

  Heartsick, Morgan glanced back at the white water rapids leading down to the drop. Kelson and Dhugal would have gone into the water considerably farther upriver. He and Duncan had ridden up there at first light with the monk who had guided them from Saint
Bearand’s. The man was waiting in the campsite below with Jass MacArdry and the other MacArdry retainers who had kept a hopeful vigil here for nearly three weeks now.

  Much remained to question, but the outlook did not look good. It was now fairly well confirmed that Dhugal and Kelson both had survived the initial fall, for several people had seen Dhugal swimming toward the weakly struggling king as the water swept them out of sight around a curve in the river. But whether either or both of them could have survived going over the waterfall was another question entirely. The fall had been young Jowan’s death and presumably that of the monk who had led them. Certainly, nothing that went over that drop had escaped without some sort of damage.

  Added to that was the treachery of the river plunging underground, just when one might have thought himself safe, after surviving the ordeal of the falls. From where he was, Morgan could detect no hint of where that occurred, but it was certain that the part of the river that continued on down the canyon was not large enough to account for the volume of water going over the falls.

  “Where do you think the river goes underground, Ciard?” Morgan asked, after a minute or two.

  “Just there,” Ciard said, sighting along an outstretched arm and finger. “If ye follow a line straight doon from that cleft in the cliff face, there where yon branch sticks out—d’ye see th’ patch that looks aye stiller than the rest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now watch th’ wee branch comin’ toward it,” the gillie directed, pointing slightly to the right. “It happens without much fuss, but—there’t goes! One o’ the squires ridin’ at the end o’ the line actually saw a horse get sucked under.”

  Morgan saw Duncan grimace and look away and he, too, turned from the sight.

  “Let’s go have a closer look at that part of the river from the campsite,” Morgan said, starting to scramble down the steep path that had brought them to their vantage point.