The Hidden Icon

by Jillian Kuhlmann

  I didn’t feel the same apprehension that I’d felt when we’d waited at the docks in Cascar, nor the confidence that followed. But I didn’t want to, for it had preceded a frightening recklessness. A quick glance at my companions confirmed that their thoughts ran along a similar vein. Kurdan didn’t keep his hands on his weapons, but his posture betrayed a man ready at any moment to spring.

  Gannet studied me openly, his look not unlike the one he had given me that day, mere moments before I had caused the ship to sink. That he blamed himself in part for what had happened wasn’t a comfort, but a curse. It was hard enough to live with my guilt alone, but to know that he felt the same, that he considered me to be helpless as an infant, was maddening.

  I focused on the cave’s opening, the uncertainty of the journey ahead of us. Because there were only three of us now, and because I would not have much longer to ask, I spoke without looking at either man.

  “What can we expect in there?”

  The list of what we couldn’t was no doubt far shorter, but I asked all the same. After Re’Kether, after Cascar, there was little that would surprise me. But still plenty to fear.

  “It’s not a way meant for mortal passage,” Gannet answered. “We take it now only because we must.”

  “So we’re in danger?”

  Even as I asked, I glanced at Kurdan. He wasn’t frightened, but I could smell the certainty of death on him. He didn’t think he would see the other side, and the shade in his heart haunted me.

  “If you do everything I say and don’t stray from the path, we won’t be in any danger.”

  The way he said it made me sure that Gannet thought there was no way I would do as he asked, and I wasn’t sure what appealed to me more: doing as I wished, or doing what he told me and proving him wrong.

  The hour expired after what seemed twice the usual length of time, and Kurdan, Gannet, and I approached the Rogue’s Ear, the guard at the head of our party and Gannet at the rear.

  “We should stay close together,” Gannet said to Kurdan and I both, and though the older man bristled at being guided by someone without military rank, he made no motion but to acquiesce to Gannet’s orders. “When the path divides, we must not hesitate in making our choice. We are headed north, and no other way.”

  I wasn’t sure what Gannet meant by choices, but I followed Kurdan all the same. He hefted the torch he had taken from our fire in one hand and a little device for determining our course in the opposite. As he stepped forward I did, too, eager to be done with the anxiety I felt about going in, if not necessarily eager to begin. Gannet put a hand on my shoulder, lightly, so much so that I wondered if it were a touch of another kind. I shivered, remembering that brief moment in the forest when there had been nothing between us but terrible honesty.

  “You must follow Kurdan, Han’dra Eiren. Even should you want to go another way. If you do, I’ll have to stop you.”

  His words were soft, but Kurdan could hear as well as I, and I could sense if not see his stiffening muscles. Would they restrain me, sedate me, something worse? I stepped out of Gannet’s reach, and his hand fell to his side as casually as if he had never lifted it to touch me.

  “I will stop myself, if it comes to it.”

  With that understanding between us, we entered the Rogue’s Ear.

  Chapter 13

  Our first hours underground were marked only by the sloping path, winding down within the mountain. When our course had leveled, I lost all sense of time and distance completely. But Kurdan followed Gannet’s directions expressly, and I followed Kurdan. When the torch threatened to gutter out, Gannet coaxed the flame back with his hands and a bit of breath, giving me a look that suggested that I should not ask him to show me this particular trick, not now. I was happy to marvel, for a little while.

  We didn’t talk, but we weren’t moving so quickly that I didn’t want for something to distract me from my own thoughts. The caverns were tight and close, not at all like the spacious, vaulted chambers where I had grown to womanhood. Gannet had claimed the Rogue’s Ear was not for mortal passage, but the tunnels we passed through were deliberate and featureless, far more like the craft of human industry than they were some natural phenomenon. I was surprised that I didn’t feel the ghosts of those who had passed before us, and with a shuddering certainty I knew that they had not come this way, not any of them, for all there had seemed when Gannet, Kurdan, and I first entered only one sloping course to take.

  We could’ve traveled hours or minutes before Gannet suggested we rest for the night; the darkness and silence made it impossible to tell. I watched carefully, this time, as Gannet coaxed the last remnants of flame from the torch into a fire, using the wood that Kurdan had carried. It seemed to me that Gannet would not be able to simply create a fire, but to increase the potency of one already ablaze would not be so much greater a step than seeing light in the dark. The light was there already.

  But I wanted to enjoy the brief light and warmth, and put away my curiosity for a little while. While Gannet produced our rations from his pack and Kurdan unburdened himself opposite the two of us, I took measure of our surroundings. In the natural light they seemed no more remarkable than they had to me earlier. Only the smoothness of the tunnel walls was worthy of note, especially here where the path had widened to a size reminiscent of a bed chamber. Enough for three to sleep comfortably, and for the tending of a smokeless fire. It was as though we had been expected.

  That we didn’t talk while we ate was not entirely strange, but that we didn’t look at each other, either, made me swallow my food as though it were lumps of hard earth. Burdened though I might have been by what I would no doubt see in their eyes, it could not have rivaled what I imagined. I feared for Morainn and the others somewhere ahead of us, though I felt sure our paths would not cross. I didn’t know if Gannet would worry: for all the reservations he expressed it was not in his nature to do so. Would I have allowed one of my sisters to walk ahead of me in this place? I didn’t think so. But he hadn’t been given a choice.

  At last we readied for sleep, but even the finest down could not have compelled my eyes to close. The fire burned down to a glow so faint it ceased throwing shadows. I didn’t need to hear Kurdan’s steady breath to know that he slept, and neither did I need the too silent stillness to know that Gannet remained awake and alert as I was on his pallet to my right. When he spoke, it was an invitation.

  “Do you think your brother and sisters think of you as often as you think of them?”

  Gannet’s voice was low and curious, an open tone from lips usually shut against such simple confidences. He surprised me.

  “I don’t believe that I think of them often enough,” I admitted, sharing with him a little of the shame I felt in having given myself over to the life that lie uncertain before me instead of the comfort and familiarity of what lay behind. “I don’t know myself anymore, so I’m not sure I know them, either. I feel like I’m still the child I was when we were exiled.”

  I didn’t want to be told what I could do better, or what I had better do instead. I only wanted him to know.

  “Still,” I continued, daring a little with the harmless soldier asleep on the other side of our cold fire, my words insulated between stones and our bundled bodies. “They are a part of me, like you and Morainn. You were separated as children, weren’t you? And still you care for each other.”

  I wouldn’t have employed my sight in the dark to see him then. It was enough that the sound of his breath all but halted before beginning again, a calculated rhythm.

  “We lost many things we can never have again,” he answered after a moment, and I was surprised by the obvious hesitancy as he continued. “When we get home, you’ll see how it must be between Morainn and I. Between all of us.”

  His words were a warning, but not for me. Gannet was steeling himself for something, against something, but what little connection I had made with him was gone, as empty and formless as the black before my eyes. The
light shuffling as he settled down to sleep confirmed that we would have no more confidences tonight, and I curled reluctantly on my own bedroll.

  “If only you gave in to my demands as easily,” I said softly, unwilling to let him go, not just yet. Gannet didn’t respond to my baiting, and my disappointment could have lit the Rogue’s Ear entire, if such feelings were fuel. I knew that the time we had left together was limited, that things would change in Ambar, and not only because he promised they would. More than what he could know would change, and I would, too.

  What I hoped to preserve about the weeks we had troubled each other I wasn’t sure, but the thought of going forward without him into Ambar, as Theba or Eiren or the torture that was both, that I could not imagine.

  Only when I was nearly asleep, drifting along the pleasant edge of dreams soon to be, did Gannet speak.

  “I have made more than my share of sacrifices, and I shall sacrifice more still. So will you.”

  In the morning, if it was morning, there were no embers left in the fire for Gannet to stir to life, and Kurdan resorted to one of his firestarters. He had a fair number of them, but neither man seemed comfortable in relying upon these means entirely for fire and light, and waiting in a darkness so thick and alive it seemed to crawl inside me, I couldn’t blame them.

  I panicked when I first attempted to employ the sight Gannet had taught to me, for nothing stirred in the absolute dark of the Rogue’s Ear, and it became a struggle to find a particle of light upon which I could focus and expand. I didn’t know if my troubles were my own or the result of where we were, but when I had the means to see again, our faces were cast grim in the ghostly glow. I would’ve preferred the limited light from Kurdan’s torch, but worried that I wouldn’t be able to gain again the sight I had wrangled from the dark, I held fast.

  “If the path is anything like yesterday’s, it won’t take three days to cross, will it?” Kurdan asked the question as though he knew he wouldn’t like the answer, but hoped anyway.

  “It won’t be anything like yesterday,” Gannet said bluntly. There was a rawness about him, still, leftover from last night. I knew better than to ask how a natural passage through a mountain should be so unpredictable. I could feel in the first steps we took away from last night’s fire that we were not walking within the mountain, at least not the one we had seen barring our way into Ambar. It was like being in another world, underground.

  Gannet was right, of course, for we were no more than an hour from our camp when the path dipped sharply, growing rocky where it had been smooth, and so narrow in places that I thought perhaps I would become wedged between two sharp stone faces and have to be chiseled out. Kurdan had the hardest time of it, his build one for the swinging of weapons and not the carrying of books, as Gannet and I were. Still, he would pass through with a struggle and then I would struggle, too, which made about as much sense to me as anything else. At one point we had to pass through one at a time, pushing and tugging from either end, and I couldn’t breathe for the panic of it.

  I had removed my cloak and pack and handed them to Kurdan, out of reach where the path grew mercifully, marginally wide again. My limbs strained against the stone, but it was too late to consider removing my overdress, as well, cold and modesty be damned. I was wedged so tightly I wasn’t sure the fabric even had room enough to tear.

  “I can’t move,” my voice quavered helplessly, muffled by the stone.

  “If I could pass through, you can, as well. You are at the narrowest point, only a few steps more,” Kurdan answered, his voice coming like something over a great distance, though it was my fear, and not the space between us, that his words had more trouble in crossing.

  “I can’t,” I repeated, this time more shrill, feeling as though my heart was being squeezed into my head. I was being punished for what I had done. If this was no mortal path, it was where immortals paid their penance. Theba would have hers now, through me.

  There was a scraping of boot upon stone, the creeping shuffle of someone moving deliberately behind me. I couldn’t turn my head to see, but I felt the touch of Gannet’s hand on my arm. How he had room to touch me I didn’t know, for I felt as though there was not space enough to clench and unclench my fist.

  Eiren.

  His name in my mind was like birdsong, light and swift, like something carried on the wind, carried on airs sweeter than any these caverns had ever seen. My heart pounded. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

  You can. I need you to pull yourself through. Pull us both.

  I could taste blood in my mouth, from my displaced heart or bitten tongue or both. My stomach and chest tightened as though I might shrink myself through the passage, but that would not have been enough for both of us to reach the other side. I couldn’t be any thinner than I was, nor Gannet, and what made the most sense to me then was that there was no course but for our path to widen.

  My hands and feet scrabbled against the stone, the fingers of my left hand snagging a hold on Gannet’s sleeve and those of my right tearing at the jagged wall of the passage. Like sand it crumbled, like the castles I had fashioned with Jurnus when we were children and had destroyed when we had no more use for them. I did the same thing now.

  At first the walls resisted as naturally as rock walls should. I felt my fingernails bleed and bend against the stone but I wasn’t deterred. I scrabbled like an animal trapped, tearing at the stone. Kurdan’s gasp was louder to me than the sound of falling rock. I could feel the ragged path underneath of my boots as I inched forward, and more littered down still as Gannet followed after me. The fabric of my dress tore and my hair tangled and pulled away from my scalp as my face and shoulders scraped against the stone. When I had planted my feet on the landing where Kurdan stood back, torch aloft, I used both hands to pull Gannet the rest of the way, coloring his skin and clothes with my blood.

  “It was wide enough, I said,” Kurdan began, though his bewildered tone and wandering eye betrayed him. For a moment I held Gannet’s arm, the gesture like a misbegotten greeting, but he knew that I was thanking him.

  You said that you felt like a child when you were exiled. But you were a child when we took you, too.

  His eyes were colorless and shallow in the half-sight we shared in the dark, but I saw more in them than he ever allowed by the light of day.

  And now I’m not, I finished for him, releasing his arm but not turning away, daring him to say more, to confront Theba, to confront me. His secrets were of greater interest to me now than anything he could tell me about myself. He could not tell me how I had moved a mountain, but that he believed I was capable of moving much more was clear.

  Gannet said nothing, but I left myself vulnerable to him, open as the chamber where I had first met him, to wind and weather and the high cries in the streets below. Still he didn’t speak, but when we began to walk again he offered me a salve for the cuts on my face, arms, and hands. Though my body mended, my heart and head felt flooded, and I returned the salve to him without a word. For many hours I heard nothing, the Rogue’s Ear as silent as a tomb and my traveling companions speechless as the dead.

  We wouldn’t die here, no matter how perilous the way. I knew if I wanted to I could burrow through solid stone to the other side, dragging both men along behind me without lifting a finger. Terrified by the certainty of this power, I kept to the path the Rogue’s Ear had seen fit to give me.

  Chapter 14

  On our second night underground, Kurdan woke from some night terror, and his cries were too near for my tastes to those of the young man who had died in our camp outside Re’Kether. But I felt none of the impulses I had suffered that night. Neither did Gannet seem alarmed, for all he ever did. Kurdan denied the offering of a tonic to help him sleep and tossed fitfully until we had rested enough to mark the beginning of a new day.

  I couldn’t manage the reserve I had mastered the day prior, but it was a difficult thing, finding some entertainment in the mindless dark. Kurdan and Gannet moved forwa
rd relentlessly, as though they weren’t just trying to reach the end of the cavernous dark, but that passing through to that end was a battle. The tunnels we took at first didn’t seem like they could have belonged to the same course as the narrow tortures of yesterday, open as avenues, warm and damp. By mid-morning, my desires were as pressing as the stones had been. If I had any control over the tones of my mind, I willed them innocuous as I reached for Gannet.

  Have you anything left you want to teach me? We don’t have much time left.

  The last was not necessary, for he knew as well as I how close we were to his home. I darted a glance at Kurdan’s back, wondering if we gave something away about ourselves when we communicated this way, if people like Kurdan even knew such speech was possible. People like Kurdan, of course, included my own family and every friend I’d ever had. I didn’t think that I could call Gannet my friend, even if he was my only comfort in this place.

  You’ve grown quite adept at closing your mind against intrusion, but you should know, too, how to combat a closed mind.

  My brow furrowed even as I opened and closed my mouth to question him, my steps faltering slightly despite the evenness of our path. Kurdan cast a look over his shoulder, blank and unassuming, as though he satisfied reflex and not curiosity. I smiled apologetically, but he had already looked away again.

  Why?

  I wasn’t at all sure how I felt about acquiring information from an unwilling individual, or demanding entrance where the door was barred. I wouldn’t appreciate such force myself and this seemed basis enough for my skepticism.

  Surely there are things you wish to know that I haven’t told you?

  Now it was my turn to look over my shoulder at Gannet, whose lips bore the ghost of a grin, so slight I could have imagined it.

  Is this some sort of test?

  I don’t administer tests.