Black Jade ec-3

by David Zindell

  So saying, he snapped his middle finger against his thumb, and looked about as if disappointed that this rude gesture hadn't magically transported him from the valley.

  Master Storr kept on staring at him, and said, 'The key, of course, is in discovering how things are connected. We know, for instance, that Ea touches upon other worlds in places of power such as the Vilds or where the earth fires have been disturbed or concentrated.'

  'Such as the Black Bog? Kane told that in our passage through that accursed swamp, we were walking on other worlds.'

  'So you were — and Dark Worlds at that. The Black Bog is known to lead into such places, just as the ocean, toward the North Star, flows into the seas of the worlds where the Star People dwell.'

  'Then you believe the legend of King Koru-Ki?'

  Master Storr's eyes gleamed as he said, 'All worlds are connected by water, on the physical plane, as they are by the aethers on the others.'

  'But that still doesn't explain the tunnel.'

  Master Storr, I thought, did not like Maram's impatience to learn the truth of things, and a note of irritation crept into his voice:

  'As I've said, there are other ways of making these connections. Whoever built this tunnel must have forged a gelstei that opened up the earth chakra over which the tunnel was built. And so

  directed its fires to open other chakras in other places so that a passage might be made.'

  'Then is it possible to pass to other worlds this way?'

  'Not through this tunnel at least so far as we've been able to discover. But there may be other tunnels through other mountains somewhere on Ea that lead to the Star People's worlds.'

  'But might it be possible,' Maram asked, 'to pass to another part of this World through this tunnel? Ah, perhaps to journey to Hesperu in a click of a moment?'

  Again, he snapped his fingers, and again Master Storr looked at him with disapproval. He said to Maram, There are no tunnels like these that we know of in Hesperu, or indeed outside of the White Mountains. But if you discover any such on your journey, you must be sure to let me know.'

  'I shall, I shall,' Maram muttered as he looked into the tunnel's glowing mouth. 'But I still don't understand how walking into here will result in our walking out there — when 'there' is not just one other tunnel, but any one of seventeen.'

  'Haven't you been listening to anything of what I've told you?' Master Storr asked him. 'There is really only one tunnel, interconnected in its seventeen parts. But connected how? Geometrically, yes, certainly, in ways that we don't fully understand. But we know they are also connected through thought and will. This is the key, Sar Maram. When you were looking for our school and went back inside the tunnel, which the sun had brought to life, its gelstei sensed your desire to reach us, and so brought you out into our valley. If you had willed a different destination and held it strongly enough in your minds, you would have found that place instead.'

  'Ah, but what if the tunnel came alive, and we willed nothing?' Maram's voice boomed out and disappeared into the curved, pulsing walls of gelstei ahead of us. 'Because we were frightened or confused?'

  'That is an experiment we haven't wanted to make,' Master Storr said. 'Presumably, you would eventually come out into one lost valley or another.'

  'But what of Morjin then? Aren't you afraid that he will learn to control the tunnel's gelstei?'

  'He might know nothing of it,' Master Storr said. 'He is not omniscient, you know. Now. if you will please forbear and let Brother Lorand learn the ways of these tunnels.'

  None of us, I thought, was pleased at the prospect of Master Storr utilizing our circumstances to teach his young student, but that was the way of the Brotherhood. In truth, however there was little danger of Brother Lorand guiding us wrongly, for Master Storr guided him, holding his concentration on the rustlike gelstei even as he encouraged Brother Lorand with a ready smile or a kind word. Our passage through the tunnel was much as before. We lined up in order behind Master Storr; I took the lead of my companions, followed by Atara, Liljana, Daj and Estrella, with Master Juwain and Maram riding closely behind this irrepressibly joyful girl. Kane, in the rear, kept a close watch on what Estrella watched, gazing into the flowing hues of the gelstei on the walls in hope that she might discover something of note. The horses, which we had blindfolded, clopped along nervously as each of us fought the spinning sensation in our heads and the sickness that crept into our bellies. Maram moaned to see Master Storr waver like a ghost and then reappear a moment later. It seemed that we walked a long time and an even longer way over the road's cold stones. But in the end, as Master Storr kept promising Maram, we drew closer and closer to the spot of light at the tunnel's end.

  We came out, as before, into a valley — but a very different one than the Valley of the Sun. Below us, down steep and heavily wooded slopes, ran a long, deep groove between two ridgelines of jagged mountains. It was higher here, and colder, and crusts of snow whitened, the rocks above the treeline. The blueness had fled from the sky, to be replaced by a solid sheet of grayish-white clouds.

  We stood by our horses on the rocky ground outside the tunnel, trying to catch our breaths as we scanned this rugged terrain. Maram leaned across his knees as if he might lose his breakfast. And then he pointed down into the valley as he gasped out, 'But which way is that? I can't see the damn sun! North, I would guess, but it seemed that we were walking south, or perhaps east.'

  Master Storr came up beside him and placed his old hand on his-shoulder. And he said, 'It is north by west. The line of the valley curves off due west, just around the base of that domed mountain. It will take you down into Acadu.'

  'Are you certain of that? What if we get lost?'

  'Would it reassure you if I taught you a Way Rhyme to guide you?'

  'Ah, is that really necessary?'

  'No, it. is not,' Master Storr said, smiling at him. 'From here, you can't help but walk straight into Acadu, but you'll have to find your own way through the great forest, as your circumstances will determine.'

  He embraced Maram then; and me and the others as well. And he told us, 'You must undertake this quest with only one end in) mind. But if you should come across any new gelstei on your journey, I would be forever grateful if you would return them to our school for study. You seem to have a knack for finding gelstei — let us hope that also holds for finding the Maitreya.'

  As Abrasax had, he enjoined us to walk in the light of the One. Then he gathered in the reins of his horse, and with Brother Lorand, moved back into the tunnel.

  'Well,' Maram said to me as we looked off into this new valley, 'shall we get this over with?'

  I nodded at him, then turned to pull on Altaru's reins and go down into the dark forests of Acadu.

  Chapter 11

  For the rest of the morning, we worked our way down into the valley. The going was rough. The road here, as ancient as any I had ever seen, had mostly disintegrated into a long, twisting slip of broken rock and dirt. Near the bottom of the valley, where a river rushed between steeply cut banks, the forest swallowed up the road altogether. We had to take care where we stepped, lest a rock hidden in the undergrowth or a root turn an ankle or hoof. We moved slowly, from need, guiding our horses over this bad ground. And yet a greater need drove us like a match flame slowly growing hotter inside us. We each knew that our quest had little chance of success in any case, and none at all if we wasted a week coddling ourselves — or perhaps a day or even an hour.

  After a quick lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches, washed down with a bubbly apple cider, it began to rain, and this added misery to the difficulty of our descent. As we came down near the river and the ground flattened out, Maram let out a grunt of thanks — and then he began cursing as the rain suddenly drove down harder in stinging sheets that made him, and all of us, squint and shiver as we hunched down into our cloaks.

  'I'm tired and cold,' he complained late in the afternoon. 'And I'm getting hungry again, too. Why don't we break for the d
ay, and see if we can roast up some of that lamb the Brothers packed for us before it rots?'

  Kane, however, insisted that we plod on another hour before making camp, and so we did. But by the time we found a level spot above the river and began unpacking the horses, Maram had grown quite surly with hunger — and fairly wroth when he discovered that every twig, stick and log that he could find rummaging around in the woods was soaking wet. As the day darkened into night he spent another hour fumbling with matches and strips of linen, trying to get a fire going. He finally gave up. He sat on a large, wet rock feeling as sorry for himself as he was ashamed at failing the rest of us. Then he took out his firestone and held it between his hands as he might a dead child.

  'Oh, my poor, poor crystal!' he moaned. He nudged the pile of! wood beside him with his foot. 'If that damn dragon hadn't ruined you, I'd turn this damn kindling into char with a real fire.'

  'It might help,' Atara said, sitting down next to him, 'if you used paper for tinder instead of linen.'

  'Paper? What paper?'

  At this, we all looked at Master Juwain, who said, 'Tear up one of my books? You might as well tear off my skin and try to get a fire out of that. Only if we were dying from cold would I consider it.'

  'Ah, well, it wouldn't matter anyway,' Maram said, kicking his woodpile again. 'The problem is not with the tinder — these damn logs are soaked to the core, as am I.'

  We brought out two large rain cloths, and propped them up with sticks. Then we all sat around in a circle beneath them staring at the heap of sodden wood through the dying light. Liljana had taken Daj under her cloak, and Atara likewise sheltered Estrella. We listened to the rain patter against pungent-smelling wool and break against the leaves of the trees towering above us.

  Atara oriented her soaked blindfold toward Maram's crystal, and she said, 'Do you remember the prophecy concerning your fire-stone?'

  'Do you mean, that it will bring Morjin's doom?'

  'Yes. But I can't see how it ever will.'

  'That's because you've no faith that it will be made whole again. I know it will,' Maram said. He sighed as he pointed his crystal northwest, toward Argattha. 'And then I'll make a fire such as has never been seen on Ea, I swear I will. Then I'll roast Morjin like a damn worm!'

  'Ha!' Kane said, coming over to clap him on the shoulder. 'You can't even roast a little lamb for our dinner! Well, it will have to be cold cheese and battle biscuits for us tonight, then.'

  And so it was. We sat in the driving rain eating these unappealing rations with resignation. Our two cloths did not keep this slanting deluge from soaking us. Maram complained for the hundredth time that we should lave brought tents with us, and for the hundredth time Kane explained that tents were much too bulky and heavy for our horses, which were already weighted down with our supplies. In truth, they could not carry enough oats and food to take us even half the way to Hesperu; this arithmetic reality of constant subtraction would compel us to replenish our stores along the way and Kane bitterly resented this necessity.

  'But there's no help for it,' Maram said.

  'No help, you say? I say we could jettison certain stores to make room for more food.'

  Maram cast Kane a suspicious look and said, 'I hope you don't mean the beer and the brandy!'

  Kane turned up his wrists and let the rain gather in his cupped hands. 'It seems we won't lack for drink, at least until we reach the desert.'

  'Brandy,' Maram said, 'is not just drink — it's medicine. And one that is badly needed on such a night. We could all use a little of its fire.'

  Master Juwain, however, was not quite ready to concede this need. He said to Maram, 'Why don't you practice moving the kundalini fire up your spine, as Abrasax taught you. That would warm you better.'

  'Ah, a woman would warm me better still,' he moaned. 'If only I had a good tent against the rain, and my sleeping furs were dry, I'd crawl inside with her, wrap my arms around her poor, cold, shivering body, and then, like flint and steel, like a match held to a barrel of pitch, like a poker plunging into a bed of coals, I'd — '

  'Maram,' I said to him, 'I thought you'd learned to redirect this fire of yours?'

  'Well, what if I have?' he said. 'I could redirect it, as you say, if I wanted to — I'm sure I could. But why should I want to? It's too hard, too uncertain; too … unnatural, if you know what I mean. I'm a man who was born to live on the earth, not the stars. And it's been too long since I held a woman in my arms, much too long.'

  And with this lamentation, he tried to settle in to sleep for the night as best, he could. And so did the rest of us. But it rained all that night, and we awoke to a dull gray light fighting its way through the gray clouds above us and slatelike sheets of rain. We fought against the ache of our cold, stiff limbs to get under way and continue on down the valley. The squish of the horses' hooves against mud and soaking bracken was nearly drowned out by the rushing of the river and the unceasing rain.

  By mid-afternoon, however, this torrent had let up slightly. And then, as the valley gave out into lower and flatter country, it dried up to a stiff drizzle. So it was that we at last entered the great Acadian forest. This vast expanse of woods stretched from Sakai in the northwest five hundred miles to the borders of Uskadar and Karabuk in the southeast. We proposed to cross it, east to west, along a route through its northern part less than two hundred miles long. This would take us well to the north of Varkeva, Acadu's greatest and only real city. And north, as well, we hoped, of that dark place of which Abrasax had warned us. Master Juwain had brought with him a map of Acadu, little good that it would do us. It showed Acadu's few main roads, but these we could not take. Into the map's tough parchment was inked the position of the few bridges across Acadu's rivers, but we would have to find fords or ferrymen to help us along our way.

  It did not distress me to set out into this strange woods without any path to guide us. Maram often envied my sense of direction, even as he called it uncanny, even otherworldly. I had been born knowing in my blood east from west, north from south, with all the certainty of a ship's pilot steering a course by the stars. Even on such a dark, sunless day as this I had no trouble leading my companions due-west.

  The openness of the woods here made my task all the simpler. We needed no road or game track to wend our way beneath the great oaks and elms, for the ground of the forest was remarkably free of shrubbery, deadwood or other entanglements. Grass grew in many places, beneath the trees and in clearings where they had been cut down. Antelope and sheep, in goodly-sized herds, grazed upon the grass. Atara drew an arrow and pointed it toward one of these fat sheep, whose spiral horns curling close to its head resembled a helmet. But then she lowered her bow as she thought better of killing it.

  'We have uncooked lamb wrapped in store already,' she said, 'and who knows if we'll be able to cook tonight — or tomorrow?'

  At this observation, not meant as a jibe, Maram's face pulled into an angry pout, but he said nothing.

  'At least,' I said, 'it seems we won't lack for meat here. I've never seen a wood so rich with game.'

  And that, as Master Juwain informed us, was not due to any natural bounty of Acadu but rather the design of man. From one of the books in the Brothers' library, he had learned that the Acadians, many of them, disdained the hard work of farming such crops as potatoes or barley, and therefore farmed animals instead. Each autumn, when the forest floor grew bone dry, they would set fires to burn out the undergrowth. Grass grew in its place, and animals such as sheep and antelope — and deer, wild cattle and even a few sagosk — grew fat and strong upon the grass.

  Indeed, the whole of this great wood teemed with life. As we rode our horses beneath miles of an emerald-green canopy, racoons and squirrels scurried out of our way, and we saw foxes, wood voles and skunks, too. Many of the trees were like old friends to me, and it gladdened my heart to see the oaks, birch and hickory standing so straight and tall. Other kinds, holly and chestnut, were rarer in the Morning Mountains and
in other lands through which I had journeyed. And there were trees that I had never laid eyes on before, two of which Master Juwain identified as hornbeam and hackberry, with its bushy, drooping leaves that looked something like a witch's broom, or so he said. Many bees buzzed in fields of flowers: day's eyes, dandelions and sprays of white yarrow. There seemed to be few mosquitoes about, however, or any of the other vermin that had so tormented us in the Vardaloon. It was truly one of the loveliest forests I had ever beheld.

  And yet, from the moment I set out to cross Acadu, I felt ill at ease. What little we knew about this lost place, I thought, would be enough to disquiet anyone. It seemed that many years ago, twenty-three 'kings' had held sway between the two great, lower ranges of the White Mountains. Now Morjin claimed it. Not being willing to commit any great force to subdue this wild country, the Red Dragon instead had sent into its vast reaches corps of assassins and his Red Priests, to murder, maim and persuade, to terrorize the scattered Acadians into submitting to his will.

  This danger, however, was known and quantifiable, even if we presently had no news as to our enemy's position or numbers. What vexed me more was the unknown: rumors of strange beasts that could suck the life out of a man's limbs with a flash of their eyes and even turn a man into stone. Had Morjin, I wondered, also sent cadres of the terrible Grays into Acadu? Worst of all, I thought, was the dread of the dark place called the Skadarak that Abrasax had warned of. Even the glory of the orange hawkweed over which we trod and the burst of scarlet feathers of a tanager flying across our path could not drive this foreboding from me. I could almost smell its blackness, like a fetor tainting the perfume of the periwinkles and other flowers around us. It seemed to whisper to me like an ill wind, to call to me faintly and from far away.

  As we made camp at day's end, I sensed that none of my friends felt the pull of this place — at least not yet. They set to work drawing water and building our rudimentary fortifications out of wet logs with good cheer. This diminished somewhat when Maram yet again failed to make a fire. But the rain finally stopped, and the patch of blue that broke from the clouds just before dusk promised better weather for travel the next morning, and we all hoped, drier wood.