He proceeded with great care and stopped where the trees clung to a crumbling edge that looked out on a tapestry of forest spread across a circular valley far below. He could just see the opposite cliff, a slash of sheer gray shadow perhaps three days’ steady walk across the valley. And between the stone ramparts, at the valley’s very center, stood a single tree twice as tall as any Cian had seen in all his years of wandering.
He crouched flat, his fur standing on end. A fearful dizziness gripped him, luring him toward the edge of the cliff. He peered down into the alluring softness of that green bed, so deceptively near, and yet so far from the venality and petty ambitions of men.
A hand gripped the fur at his shoulder. “Cian. Mother-of-All…”
He curled back over himself and snapped at the hand, averting his head just in time to avoid crushing flesh and bone. Rhenna hardly flinched.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I don’t understand why I—”
Rhenna shook her head. “It’s this place. It has a strange effect on all of us.” She pointed her chin toward the valley. “So that is where we must go?”
“The great tree,” he said, following her gaze. “I believe that is our destination.”
Rhenna pushed straggling hair behind her ears and kicked at the edge of the cliff. “It won’t be easy to get down there,” she said. “Even if we find a way, we’ll be vulnerable to attack.”
She did not say from what or whom, but Cian knew even better than she that enemies, old and new, waited for a chance to stop them. “I’m the best climber,” he said. “I’ll seek a path down—”
“We stay together,” Rhenna said. “Let’s go get the others.”
Reluctantly he followed her, retrieved his clothing and returned to camp. The villagers and Imaziren immediately began laying plans for the descent into the valley.
“We have some rope,” Cabh’a said. “There are plenty of vines here to make more.”
“We will need ledges where we may rest and secure the ropes,” Immeghar said. “How sheer is this cliff?”
“A panther can find footholds a man could not,” Cian said.
“And I can help,” Nyx said. “If there are any plants on the cliff face, even the smallest, I can shape platforms of the kind Immeghar describes. As for ropes…”
She rose, approached a vine-bedecked tree and gathered three of the thick filaments in her hands. She stroked the vines until they clung together and began to twine about each other, forming a braid that extended from the tree’s lowest branches to the ground. Nyx gave a gentle tug, and the new-made rope fell in a neat pile at her feet. Abidemi and Enitan made gestures of thanks to their òrìshà, and Immeghar grunted his approval.
“It seems we will have all the rope we need,” Rhenna said. “Nyx, make as much as your power allows, but don’t exhaust yourself. The rest of you, gather your supplies and secure them well.” She turned to Cian. “You’ll go first…cautiously. Nyx will follow. Take no chances. If you find that there is no way down—”
“The thing we seek is in the valley,” Tahvo said.
“The Hammer?” Cian asked.
She rubbed her eyes. “I cannot reach the spirits here. Even the smallest ones do not answer me. They are under the rule of another, far more powerful.”
The angry god of the little people. Perhaps, if Nyx’s knowledge of the prophecies was correct, one of the Exalted themselves.
And if the prophecies were true, then Cian had to face whatever lay in that valley, even if he must leave the others behind.
Chapter Eighteen
F or the rest of the morning, Nyx made her vine ropes while the Imaziren redistributed supplies and fashioned harnesses for the climb. Mezwar proved clever at devising knots that held firm but could be released with a twist of the fingers. Abidemi and Enitan collected edible roots to add to the scanty stores of food.
When all was ready, they made their way through the forest to the cliff. Rhenna had designed a harness to fit Cian’s panther body and insisted on tying it on him herself. She played out an ample length of vine rope and fixed one end around a small, sturdy tree rooted well back from the cliff’s edge. She arranged a separate line for Nyx so that if one fell, the other might still survive.
“Take care, Cian,” she said, her voice thick with concealed emotion. She rested her hand on his back, stroking the fur from shoulder to hip, and turned quickly to Nyx. “When it’s safe for the next to descend, pull on the rope.”
Nyx squeezed Rhenna’s hand and checked her harness. Cian filled his sight with Rhenna one last, lingering moment and then let his panther senses take him.
He had little conscious knowledge of what came after. All the world was endless sky around him, crumbling earth and stone beneath his claws. He worked his way from one narrow ledge to the next, panting under the brutal sun. Occasionally he heard Nyx behind him; he remembered to stop and rest when she paused to work her magic on some stubborn bit of vegetation that had found roothold on the nearly vertical surface.
His muscles had gone to water by the time he smelled the rank scent of the valley floor. He drew level with the canopy of trees, sucking in the cooler air beneath the leaves, and scrambled down the last stretch of rock with reckless haste. The bleeding skin of his paw pads sank into deep, rich soil. He lay on his side, chest heaving, and allowed himself to forget that even a girl-child could have killed him with no effort at all.
He woke to the rattle of stones beside his head. Nyx dropped to the ground and slumped against the cliff. She reached for him blindly and clutched one of his ears.
“Are you…all right?” she whispered.
He twitched his ear free and changed, groaning at the stiffness of muscle and bone. “Weak as a cub,” he said. “The others?”
“On their way. I think I made it a little easier.”
He grinned, seized by irrational joy, and kissed her cheek. She jerked away and regarded him as if he’d gone more than a little mad. He leaped up to spin a giddy dance of triumph, abruptly remembered his nakedness, and sank behind a convenient shrub.
Nyx laughed, shook her head and offered him her waterskin. His fingertips brushed hers as he took it. He and Nyx were truly close then, bound by triumph and relief, but Cian knew the intimacy would not last. The bond would slowly dissolve and leave him alone again, as Rhenna had done. As he had done to himself.
He focused his attention on the cliff and settled down to wait. Within the next hours, the Imaziren, Abidemi, Enitan, Rhenna and Tahvo made their way to the foot of the cliff and collapsed in heaps of loose limbs and quivering muscles.
They made camp there, too weary to prepare a fire, and took turns keeping watch through the night. Tahvo sat sleepless, her face turned toward the giant tree in the center of the valley.
The next morning they coiled Nyx’s ropes and started through the forest. Cian no longer needed to consult the earth to determine the direction of their march. His instincts spoke clearly.
Tahvo stayed close to Cian as if she feared more for him than for herself. “It hears us,” she said.
“The tree?” Cian asked.
She tilted her head, listening as he did for the little sounds of insects, birds and the small furred animals that lived in the canopy and the tangle of undergrowth beneath. But there was nothing to hear. The entire valley might have been empty of animate life, and yet Cian knew the silence was only another warning.
Go back, it said. Go back while you still can.
But they continued on through the day and endured another damp, hungry night in the starless shadows beneath the trees. Cian was up before the dim light that marked the dawn, seeking some sign or scent of game, and so was the first to discover that the forest had grown while its unwelcome visitors slept.
The bush behind them was much as they had left it, but the thickets in every other direction had put forth countless new branches and tendrils that grew one into the next in a solid mass. Cian searched for a way through the barrier and found no ga
p big enough to accommodate anything larger than an ant. He tried to climb over it, first as a man and then as a cat, but the deceptively firm thatching collapsed under his weight and only snapped back into place once he had jumped clear. Rhenna and Nyx were already awake when he went to fetch them.
Abidemi and Enitan squatted before the barrier and spoke softly to each other, shaking their heads. The Imaziren debated and argued. Rhenna had no use for conversation. She lifted her blade and hacked at the nearest branches. They recoiled, quivering, and almost immediately began to grow again, reaching toward each other like parted lovers.
Nyx stepped up beside Rhenna and held her hands out toward the severed limbs. They thrashed violently, but after a moment their astonishing growth slowed and stopped. Nyx released her breath and opened her eyes.
“There is much anger in this forest,” she said. “All the things that grow from the earth will resist us. I may be able to hold the branches apart long enough to allow us passage, but beyond that…”
“It will have to be enough,” Rhenna said. She met the troubled gazes of each of the villagers and Imaziren in turn. “Take the ropes and go back. You may still return to the village.”
The denials were swift and unequivocal. Abidemi and Enitan took their places beside Rhenna, blades at the ready. Slashing and slicing with all their strength, Rhenna and the hunters cut a ragged opening in the bush. Nyx followed just out of range of their sweeping blades, working her magic to hold the gap open long enough for the rest of the party to pass.
Immeghar, who brought up the rear, swore colorfully the first few times the vines and branches sealed behind him, but eventually even he became too weary for curses. Each hour of painstaking progress was won with sweat and exhaustion. By day’s end, after Cian and the Imaziren had taken their turns with the blades, Nyx was stumbling and drained by the constant use of her magic. Cian and Immeghar supported her between them, while Rhenna looked for a place where they might stop to rest without constant fear that the undergrowth would close in and seal them up in a suffocating shroud.
Her startled exclamation told Cian that she had found what she sought. She lurched forward, carried by the sweep of her blade, and all but fell into a clearing completely devoid of growth of any kind. The hunters stepped through the gap behind her. Cian and Immeghar eased Nyx to the bare ground and Tahvo knelt beside the Southern woman, pressing her ear to Nyx’s chest. The opening through which they had come closed with a rattle of twigs like the clicking of teeth.
Cian left Nyx in Tahvo’s care and crouched at Rhenna’s side. There was no relief or triumph on her scratched and dirty face. She was staring across the narrow clearing, and when Cian followed her gaze, he felt the full weight of her despair.
The forest had not surrendered. It had simply changed its tactics. What lay before them now was not a living tangle of greenery but a true wall…a wall made not of stone but thorny, leafless branches so tightly intertwined that not even air could squeeze between the joinings. There was no way to tell where one plant began and another ended; the wall rose to the height of ten tall men standing one atop the other, and its armor of foot-long spikes would tear a climber’s clothing or flesh as easily as it would the thinnest sheet of papyrus.
Rhenna laughed. “I think Nyx underestimated the forest’s anger,” she said, streaking the mud on her face with a swipe of her hand. “She has come to the end of her strength—”
“As you have,” Cian said.
“I?” She shook her head. “I’ve only rid us of a few insects and hacked at branches like a novice with her first sword.”
Cian ignored her brittle rage and took her in his arms. She felt warm and vital and strong…too strong to require his comfort. But then she turned her face into his shoulder and twisted her fingers in his hair, demanding the one thing he found desperately easy to give. She kissed him fiercely, with the same abandon she’d shown in Danae’s courtyard so far away. He answered with all the hunger he had suppressed every weary step from Karchedon. The beast inside him wailed its longing to take her, and her mouth ground on his as if she wanted nothing more than to lie with him in this impossible place.
But she broke away as he knew she must, her eyes blazing with anger and thwarted desire. Ignoring the deliberately averted gazes of the others, she seized her blade and flung herself at the thorn wall, wielding the tool like a warrior’s axe. Steel rebounded from iron-hard wood. She attacked it again, cutting from every possible angle. The blade made no impression. She couldn’t even sever the fine point at the tip of a single thorn.
Rhenna dropped the blade in disgust and examined her blistered hands. “We can go no farther,” she said. “Nyx?”
The Southern woman slowly lifted her head. “I feel nothing,” she said. “No life in this that I can touch. It repels me.”
“Cian?”
He knelt and touched the soil. Even the lightest contact seared his fingers. He pushed his hand down. The pain was unrelenting. He pulled his hand free, removed his clothes and changed.
Climbing the nearest tree was no easy matter, for the branches flailed under his claws, and the trunk shuddered to cast him off like a flea from a dog’s back. He snarled defiance and worked his way up, hugging the bole with front and hind legs, until he could look over the top of the hedge wall. Enough filtered daylight remained for him to see the trees beyond and, less than half a league distant, the great tree casting its vast circle of shadow.
But it was what lay on the other side of the wall that drew Cian’s eyes. Heaped at its base were a hundred human skulls, and the soil around them was engraved with the unmistakable tracks of Ailuri paws.
“What do you see?” Rhenna called.
Cian scrambled out of the branches and leaped to the ground, his coat nearly invisible against the darkening forest. Rhenna caught her breath, for no other reason than that she never grew used to the sight of his lethally graceful panther’s body, and because he seemed so much a part of this world. The wildness in his yellow eyes seemed to grow stronger with every passing day.
But he changed back into a man, as he always did, and regarded her and the others with a carefully blank expression.
“Beyond the hedge is more forest,” he said, “and the great tree. The wall continues to either side as far as I could see.” He fixed his gaze on Rhenna. “Let me try to get through. Alone.”
She planted her hands on her hips and returned his stare. “What makes you think the wall will yield for you and not the rest of us?”
“Because the Hammer lies behind it, and this is my quest.”
“If that is your only argument…” She glanced at Nyx. “You said you feel no life in this thing,” she said. “Does that mean you can’t make an opening for us, as you did before?”
Nyx studied the wall with a frown. “I can try,” she said, “but this is very powerful magic, laid down by one with far greater command over the Earth than I. I doubt that I will be able to hold it.”
Rhenna chewed her lower lip. “Tahvo?”
The healer cocked her head. “Whoever made this wall holds no control over Air or Water,” she said slowly. “A wind of sufficient strength might prevent the branches from growing too quickly.”
A wind. Air was Rhenna’s province. She had yet to find a reliable ritual or method to call the spirits of Air when she wanted them…and perhaps some of that failure was because she could not quite accept that she, born a common warrior, should wield power reserved for the Chosen. Nevertheless, when the need was great, she’d managed to bring forth a wind potent enough to blow away the plague of insects.
“Your anger gave you strength,” Tahvo had said. “This time you used it to serve you.”
Rhenna didn’t think it would be difficult to find that anger again. She closed her eyes and imagined the dancing motes of air she couldn’t see, the sapient spirits and the pneumata that had no will of their own but could still be made to serve. She could almost feel them. Almost.
“Nyx,” she said,
“we will work together to make a passage. You untangle the branches as best you can, and I’ll find a way of keeping it open.”
Nyx scraped her fingers through her twig-thatched hair. “Tell me when you are ready.”
Rhenna bit back a laugh. That day will never come, my friend. She gestured to the villagers and Imaziren. “The rest of you keep as close to us as you can, and be prepared to move quickly.” She glared at the wall. Defiance hummed in her clenched muscles. She envisioned the spirits of Air gathering about her, drawn by the vitality of her passion and the stubbornness of her will.
“Go, Nyx,” she said.
Nyx muttered under her breath and stretched her fingers toward the hedge. Branches creaked and rustled. With a sound like the groan of a dying woman, the plaited surface began to give way. Nyx spread her hands, and a dozen tiny branches snapped apart, thorns rattling.
Rhenna called upon the winds. They answered, fitfully at first, in random gusts that left traces of moisture on her cheeks. She focused on the tiny hole Nyx had made, and the air streamed toward it, whistled as it passed through the gap. Branches writhed. Side by side, Rhenna and Nyx fought to widen the hole. The wind blasted the hedge in a storm of shredded leaves and whirling debris.
It was not enough. The branches wove together. The opening vanished. Nyx slumped. Cian caught her, easing her to the ground. Rhenna’s knees trembled, but somehow she kept her feet. The taste of defeat was sour on her tongue.
“We must try again,” she said.
“Nyx is too weak,” Cian said. “And soon you’ll be, as well.”
“I wasn’t ready. We’ll rest tonight and continue in the morning.”
Cian shook his head and stepped away from Nyx. He crouched and thrust his hand into the earth. His hand disappeared, and then his arm to the elbow. His mouth contracted in a grimace of pain, and perspiration streaked his face.
Hammer of the Earth Page 28
