Within seconds the orb became a disk, and then it became an opening. A powerful current immediately sucked the trio of swimmers downward into a cavern below the pool of water. As they hit the stony floor and were swept by the powerful stream of water that followed them, the orifice closed above them, leaving them dazed, but still holding hands.
There seemed to be no light, but as they all lay on the floor, gasping for breath, Kestrel realized that a dim light did exist somewhere off to his right. He rose to his knees and paused, as the two gnomes slowly rose too, and then Kestrel began to lead them towards the illumination, walking slowly while he could not see any details of the ground he walked on, then slowly picking up speed as his eyes captured faint details of the path they followed.
He stopped abruptly, and the two gnomes staggered into him, nearly toppling Kestrel forward. He scuffed his feet and caught his balance, just before he fell into a wide body of water that interrupted the path to the light.
“Why did you stop?” Greta asked crossly, her eyesight unable to see the water.
“There’s a lake straight in front of us,” Kestrel answered softly.
“We’re not supposed to talk,” Hansen warned.
“You and I aren’t supposed to speak to each other, but no one said we couldn’t talk to Greta,” Kestrel quibbled.
Just then they all stopped and listened, as a terrible roar sounded from the water, not far to their left. It was immediately answered by a pair of roars to their right, and then one somewhere at a greater distance behind them.
“Those are Viathins!” Kestrel exclaimed.
“It is the evil monsters!” Hansen agreed.
“How do we escape?” Greta asked.
Kestrel stared out at the body of water in front of them, trying to judge the distance. “Let’s go back this way,” he began to nudge them backwards.
“But there’s a monster back there!” Greta protested, though she moved nonetheless.
“Stop here,” Kestrel replied after a dozen paces. It was a short distance to the edge of the water, but the Viathin behind them had roared again, and sounded much closer.
“What are we doing?” Hansen asked.
“I’m an elf; I can run on top of water,” he told them as he faced them. He could see their faces, though he wasn’t sure they could see his in the gloom of the cave. “If you will climb on my back, I’ll carry you across the water to the other side, so that we can go on towards the light.”
“You think you can carry two gnomes on your back across water?” Hansen scoffed.
“Yes,” Kestrel answered stoutly. “For a short distance at least.”
The Viathins in the water called out with an angry bellow, and the one in the cave with them replied, seemingly right next to them.
“Go! Now!” Kestrel commanded, crouching slightly as he twisted, hoping he could truly carry the pair. He felt them each climb on his back, their hands reaching around to clasp his hands in front of him. The load was significant; he took a deep breath, then launched himself forward.
His first step was slow, as he wobbled forward, then his second step was quicker, and his third step picked up speed. At eight strides he was almost fast enough to be able to stay atop the water, he estimated, and two strides later his forward foot dropped down to the surface of the water as he left the cave floor and attempted to pass across the lake.
His feet sank into the water up to his ankles, and Kestrel tried to find some reserve of energy that would increase his speed. There was a sudden snapping in the water next to him, as he passed an angry Viathin, and he found the extra speed he sought, so that his knees lifted higher and his legs reached further with each stride, pulling him away from the monster lizard, and lifting his feet so that only his toes touched the water for the next twenty strides.
Kestrel couldn’t see the end of the water ahead; the dark water and the dark cavern floor blurred together invisibly. He felt the weight of the gnomes on his back, and he felt the burst of fearful energy receding. Another Viathin gave an angry roar nearby, and yet another monster answered immediately, from a spot just as close, and then suddenly Kestrel spilled forward, his running stride broken as his feet unexpectedly tripped over the edge of the solid cavern floor he sought, as he reached the far side of the lake.
The two gnomes went cartwheeling over Kestrel’s head as he made hard contact with the stones. His two hands were still held in the tight, unyielding grip of the gnomes, so that he could not cushion himself, and his chin smacked hard against the rock, then he was jerked forward by the momentum of his two companions.
“You did it! You really did it” Greta shouted gleefully. She squeezed his hand with hers, just as the cavern suddenly lit up without any source of illumination.
“You have accomplished your goal,” Corrant’s voice spoke to them.
“Master, my lord, I apologize for failing to obey your commandment to be silent,” Hansen immediately replied.
“I would not expect you to refuse to speak in a situation where life or death are at stake. Part of your test here was to discover if you had the pragmatism to do whatever was necessary in dire circumstances,” the god’s voice replied, and then his face appeared on the wall of the cave, just feet away from them, causing Hansen and Greta to immediately kneel, which in turn abruptly pulled Kestrel down as well.
“Your lady companion will provide an interesting alteration as your companion on your journey. I did not foresee that, and I wonder at what her presence may cause to occur,” Corrant told them. “Your reaction was swift and appropriate, Kestrel,” the god told them.
“I could not stand to see her suffer in the water,” Kestrel answered
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“I will momentarily release you to rejoin the others of my people from the village, and you will immediately prepare to depart on your quest. Through the Garrant Spark, you have been prepared and given a better chance of success,” Corrant explained.
“You, Kestrel, will no longer be troubled by the ill energy that has stained your soul. It was been locked away where it cannot reach you. However, the other powers, the risk that Kai took with you, also had to be locked away as well. They remain within you, but are inaccessible to you, as you are to them,” he told them.
“You will each be able to sense the location of your companion, even when out of sight. You must work together and protect each other,” the god directed.
“The knowledge of what you must do is already implanted within Kestrel’s soul, and at the proper time, he will know what action is required. Now go, take care of one another, and please know that you go with my promise of assistance when I am able to give it, which will not always be the case,” Corrant finished.
“May we release hands now?” Greta asked.
“Of course child. You could have released your grip long ago,” Corrant chuckled, and then his face disappeared.
They all immediately separated their hands, and began to stand up, only to be knocked down as the ground shook beneath them. The mystical light around them disappeared, and the cavern behind them collapsed in a downpour of rubble, while the wall in front of them fell open, revealing daylight.
Greta shrieked as she fell amidst the noise and dust. All three of them rolled and stumbled to their feet again, then ran towards the opening, and emerged from their cavern ordeal.
They blinked in the daylight, then saw that they were only feet away from the startled priests and elders who had been waiting for them on the side of the pool of black water.
“You’re back! You’re alive!” the leading priest spoke. “And you young lady, your survival is miraculous. Yet we must take you into custody and punish you for violating the ceremony you interrupted.”
“Corrant said that she would be our companion on our journey!” Hansen immediately protested.
“He did,” Kestrel agreed.
“I will not separate from my beloved now, after all we have just gone through. Even with the huma
n one, I feel that I am meant to be a companion on this trip,” Greta spoke up.
The Garrant Spark is a quest that demands sacrifices, and imposes costs,” the priest replied. “I would spare you from the terms of the obligation that will be imposed.”
“What are the terms?” Kestrel asked.
“One of the members of the Garrant Spark covenant will die if the quest is to be successful; both – or all, in this case – die if the quest is not successful,” the priest shocked them by revealing.
“Let me kill myself now, so that the others may live,” Hansen said solemnly.
“How do you know that your death now might not be the cause of the quest’s failure later?” the priest posed the question.
Hansen slumped.
“So this is a trip towards death?” Kestrel asked.
“In return for the advantages Corrant will grant you, a sacrifice must be made,” the priest confirmed. “That is the way of the Garrant Spark .”
Chapter 21 – The Garrant Spark
Hansen stood in the saddle of a mountain ridge, three day’s hike east of his village. Greta was walking towards him, and Kestrel was behind her. Each carried a sack filled with supplies to carry them across the Dangueax River and towards the Lake in the Sky in the mountains on the other side of the river.
They made slow progress, as a rainy front passed over them and seemed to drop an unending drizzle of fine, misty droplets upon them and all the land they walked across.
“I’ve never seen it rain this much, ever in my life,” Hansen told Kestrel as they sat together on the first night of their journey. Two days later, after three straight days of moisture dropping from the sky, he was convinced that something of divine origin was the cause of the rain.
For Kestrel, three days of light rain was nothing unusual, but as he looked at the landscape around him, the small plants, the light soils, and the usually empty waterways that were starting to trickle with a running flow of water, he understood that it was a phenomenal event in an arid region.
The paths were slippery, and the travelers slowed down their pace to adjust to the conditions. But the visibility had grown so limited that it helped hide their passage from any searching eyes, so that they were able to hike with impunity along trails in the mountains that Hansen knew well.
The saddle where Hansen was standing was the last high point they would have to cross before they reached the river. A lower ridge was vaguely evident through the misty fog in front of them, and Hansen told the others that the following ridges would be lower yet.
They were walking with relative fearlessness through the mountains that the gnomes regularly patrolled and hunted in. Once they crossed the river, they would be in territory that Hansen did not know, but still within mountains that would allow them to travel with a degree of safety. And within those mountains they would be able to approach the tributary river that Lake had identified as a source of the Viathin invasion.
And beyond that, Kestrel wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Corrant had informed the Garrant Spark trio that Kestrel had the knowledge, but the elf wasn’t aware of that knowledge himself. Kestrel counted on some revelation from Corrant to provide direction at the appropriate time, and he hoped that through the Garrant Spark he would have the strength and courage to fulfill his mission, and that the mission would result in the victory of the humans and elves and gnomes over the Viathins. Although he was unaware of what his future held, Kestrel was aware that his eyes were no longer large black orbs, disturbing for his companions to look at. He once again had the purple irises that marked him as a member of the gnome society in the north, though that significance was lost among the gnomes of the south.
Glad as he was to be told that his eye color was once again purple, Kestrel worried. To wash away the black color, the evil energy from the Viathin temple had been locked away, and that had removed the blemish on his appearance. But the energy that Kai had given had been locked away too, so that Kestrel would not have access to those extraordinary powers if he needed them.
“We can descend into the valley, and spend the night there,” Hansen said as Kestrel approached him, bringing the three travelers together atop the ridge. They resumed their order in line, Hansen leading the way down, and Kestrel in the back of the group.
Kestrel thought about the imps, and wondered if they had reached their home in the Swampy Morass. He missed their company. The decision the imps had made to remain with him at the start of his Uniontown adventure had been a tremendous sacrifice on their part, he realized. They had saved his life because they had stuck with him, but ultimately Canyon had lost his life because he and his companions had remained in service to Kestrel; losing the imp had been a hard blow for Kestrel, and made him feel as though he had failed to protect the imps. Kestrel fervently wished them all well on their challenging journey home.
A part of him looked forward to the day when the great mission was over, and he could return to Oaktown, and live in peace among elves whom he hoped would accept him as one of their own, and be next door to the imps in the Swampy Morass. And not too much further away would be Hydrotaz. It would be richly ironic; he would be closer to Yulia and the humans of Hydrotaz than he would be to the elves of Center Trunk, if he were to live in Oaktown’s isolated corner of the Eastern Forest.
A great part of him did not look forward to the future though, because it fatalistically foresaw no future beyond the end of his journey through the mountains. Just undertaking the journey alone was dangerous enough, and the hidden tasks that awaited him and the rest of the Garrant Spark crew did not seem in Kestrel’s mind to be something that could be survived. The journey was going to command a price from the three of them. At best, one of them would die, at worst, all of them would die
And so Kestrel did not think of the future very often. He walked along and let his senses observe the world around him. He felt the presence of Hansen and Greta in a way that was a physical extension of his awareness of the world. The Garrant Spark had inextricably tied the three of them together, so that they could each sense exactly where the other two were. On the first night of their trip they had played a game of making one member close his eyes while the other two had moved about. In every case, the seeker had unerringly pointed right at the hiding spot of the other two team members.
At night, when he wasn’t on watch duty, Kestrel slept apart from the other two, who were always very close to one another, treating the journey in some ways as though it were an extension of their interrupted honeymoon. They accepted Kestrel as their traveling partner, in a friendly manner, and he accepted them as a pair of fellow members of the quest he had pursued for so long, in various forms, ever since the first attack by the Viathins had raised a forest fire along the Eastern Forest border with Hydrotaz. Kestrel didn’t want to see either of the young gnomes die.
When they reached the bottom of the valley, Hansen led them a short distance up the other slope, then behind some bushes to a shallow cave.
“This is a welcome relief!” Greta said as she entered the dry shelter and pulled back her hood. “If I never see rain again on this journey it will be fine with me!”
Hansen began the next morning’s trip by telling them that they would finally cross the Dangueax River, and enter the territory he did not know. “The river crossing is a bit unusual,” he teased them with a grin. “Wait and see.”
They walked until midday, then stopped as their trail reached the lip of the river canyon. The trail ended atop a sheer cliff that dropped more than one hundred yards down to the river below.
“Here we are!” Hansen said.
“How do we get across?” Kestrel asked, puzzled.
Hansen pulled out a coiled rope. “You’re good with a bow and arrow, right?” he asked Kestrel.
“I think so,” Kestrel agreed.
“Can you shoot an arrow with this tied to it and hit that tree on the other side of the canyon?” the gnome pointed to a gnarled pine on the edge of the far clif
f. “And set it firmly in place?”
“You think we can cross the river using that rope?” Kestrel asked in surprise.
“I know that Greta and I can cross it; can you?” Hansen asked.
“Me? I’m an elf! I could cross on a spiderweb,” Kestrel playfully boasted as he attached Hansen’s rope to one of his arrows. He placed the shaft on his wonderful bow, the gift from Kere that had traveled so far with him, then adjusted his shot to account for the weight and drag of the rope.
He released the bow string and watched with satisfaction as the arrow started in its trajectory, flying high at first, then looping downward and coming back to the left as the weight of the rope increased, and the rope was blown by the steady breeze that whistled through the upper canyon.
The thud of the arrow striking the tree was audible across the canyon distance. Kestrel turned from the sight of the arrow with satisfaction, to see that Hansen was already tying the remaining end of the rope in a knot around a tree limb on their own side of the canyon.
“That’s it. We’re ready to go,” the gnome said as he finished his task. He hitched his pack tightly onto his back, then looked at Kestrel. “I’ll go first and show you how a gnome does this.” He reached up to the rope with one hand and swung easily out into the open air above the canyon. He swung forward as his other hand moved to grab the rope ahead of him, and in a matter of moments he was far from the edge of the cliff and moving with graceful ease along the rope line, much to Kestrel’s surprise, as the powerful arms and sure grip of the gnome allowed him to speedily advance.
The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 05 - Journey to Uniontown Page 28
