“Come on, it’s only grass,” Ashley reassured his mount.
They moved out into the glade. The air held a scent of sweet blossoms. It was warm.
But at the limit of Ashley’s vision, something moved.
He spun in his stirrups to look—a swinging vine, dappled brown and gold. He eased back into the saddle. There were many vines like that. He’d seen them everywhere, woven through the creepers. They swayed in the breeze, appearing to be much lighter than they should be. He urged Princess onward, to get a closer look.
Then his heart dropped. He didn’t need to bring Princess up short; she was already prancing backward, away from the threatening, weaving obstruction. Not vines. Snakes! They were entwined with the vegetation. Their camouflage was clever. The first snake dropped to the ground and slithered toward them. Princess reared and squealed. Ashley had nothing to hold on to except her wiry mane. He urged her to turn around, and she obeyed his thoughts. They leapt away, but they hadn’t gone five paces before Ashley saw the movement in the grass ahead of them. Another snake reared beside the path and Princess skittered to the right. There were snakes there as well: Ashley could see the telltale disturbance in the grass. The hunting was clearly good along this game-trail. It was a trap, and Ashley was in the middle of it. The snakes came at them from all sides. He wondered how the snakes would divide a prey as big as a horse, but he didn’t have time to complete the thought. A serpent reared out of the grass and Princess leapt.
They never came down. They were flying again.
Princess floundered, unsure of her movements in the air. Ashley looked down and wished he hadn’t—it seemed that as soon as they had launched, he was too high to jump down to the ground. The snakes met below in a writhing heap. Princess lurched through the air toward the high curtain of vines. There were snakes there too, ones which had not yet dropped to the ground. They waved about in the air like tentacles, hungry for flesh.
“Right, right!” shouted Ashley, wishing again he had reins to pull on. He discovered the first hard lesson of steering a flying creature. Pushed by a powerful stroke on her right wing, Princess went left.
“Left, Left!” he shouted.
Princess gave a stronger beat with her left wing. He was almost tipped off her back and into the snakes. As they brushed the lowest leaves of the creeper wall Ashley’s legs tingled. He’d been bitten by a snake once, a little coppercoil, and it had hurt for days. He couldn’t guess how much worse a bite would feel from one of these big Oldenworld vine-snakes. At last Princess gripped the air with her wide white wings and began to fly properly. Ashley was pushed down into the saddle as his mount flapped hard, escaping the clutch of the forest and its deadly inhabitants.
They were free. The matted green canopy fell away below his feet.
Flying!
Princess maintained a steady rhythm with her wings, beating her way higher. He held onto her mane for dear life. He was scared, but by flying they would cover a lot of ground. He would try to backtrack and find Tabitha. Once they had gained sufficient height above the forest he could see the wasteland, which judging by the sun’s position was due south. He guided Princess that way. A great channel lined with dark and jagged rocks cut through the forest and headed out across the wastes. The whole of Oldenworld spread out before him again like an arcane tapestry, waiting for him to learn how to read its patterns.
They rose and rose, flying all the while under a high-knuckled mass of cloud that reached out from the grey wastelands all the way to the great white-crested mountains to the north. It looked to be over thirty leagues to the beginning of that distant range. One knotted carpet of clouds shadowed all the land.
It’s only a cloud. Stop worrying. If they stayed below it they should be fine. The sun was hidden from view, only the ground far to the east and west was lit. The under-surface of the cloud was like an inverted saucer, and it had grown little dark hooks of mist on its belly. He’d never seen a cloud like this before. Princess nickered. Her flying was growing more uncertain. Ashley sent her reassuring thoughts, but lacking conviction.
A gaggle of banded geese joined them, straggling out in a ragged ‘V’. Ashley watched in fascination as they crossed under their feet. They had such glossy, smooth feathers on their backs and along their wings. He watched them grow smaller as they dropped away toward a shadowed lake on a plain to the east.
It took a while before Ashley realised that the wind was doing strange things to them. It whistled steadily in his ears, and Princess was beating the same rhythm, but they didn’t seem to be moving over the ground. Ashley squinted down at the forest below. There was a wide river which was easy to reckon on. They were drifting backward, in the direction of the distant mountain range, whose white-capped peaks were now hidden in dark cloud. It was impossible, they couldn’t be going backward! Princess was flapping with a regular beat, and he could feel wind in his face, so they had to be flying forward, but it seemed that the headwind was just too strong. They were being drawn up toward the great brooding cloud at their backs.
Stop, Princess. We must go down.
She trusted his inner voice completely, too completely. One moment they were flying, the next she had folded her wings against her body, and they were falling. Ashley yelped in fright. Princess splayed her legs to steady herself, and her wings snapped hard back in a widespread gliding position.
“Keep them like that! Keep them like that! Don’t do a thing!”
They were gliding, smooth, calm and majestic.
“Just stay like that, sweetheart,” he whispered.
It had helped them down last time; it should do the same again. Ashley looked nervously over his shoulder at the brooding thunderstorm. It had grown blacker and bigger, and it had spread out on either side of them. He leant close to Princess’s neck and peered down to where the trees of the forest ended and the wasteland began. It was very difficult to tell if they were going down or up. The ground was so far below them now that it seemed to be a flat tapestry of greens, blues, greys and browns. He hoped they were going down.
The strain of catching the wind so suddenly had hurt Princess, deep in her shoulders, where the wings joined her body. It was a strain to keep them outstretched. She whinnied plaintively. Cold fear turned in Ashley’s stomach. Down, down, down, we have to get down! He couldn’t think of any quick way to do it that would not strain Princess’s wings.
The ground went all misty, then all of a sudden, was gone altogether. They were in the clouds.
It was quiet. The wind became a hushed whisper in his ears. He was sure they began to tilt to the left, so he compensated by guiding Princess to the right, urging her to shift the angle of her wings. He still hoped they could outrun the storm. If they kept heading south, for Eyri, they should come out of the cloud in the end, shouldn’t they?
A fine mist collected on his eyebrows and on the hairs on the back of his hands. Princess’s mane began to bead with moisture. She whinnied louder and louder—she didn’t like this place, the gut-tilting sensation of it, and the way the world had been taken away. They couldn’t see more than a yard in front of them. It could have been ten yards, Ashley couldn’t tell, it was just a grey featureless mist, all around; underneath them, above them. The sunlight faded away to nothing as it became darker and wetter. Rain began to sting his face and he stayed close to Princess’s neck. There was a horrible sensation of the power all around him, the hunger of the cloud which drew the air to its mouth, feeding it with moisture. It had taken up twenty leagues of sky, and still it wanted more.
The wind shrieked at them and tore at Princess’s feathers, wrenching and twisting her wings. Such immense strength. Was it more than just a cloud? Ashley strained to see into the mist, to pierce it with his mind. If there was some presence, it was hiding, with fangs and talons, twisting the cloud’s gloom against them and reaching for them with fear alone. The cloud spun about them, swirled and rushed, boiling upward in angry coils.
They tumbled as the air was sucke
d out from beneath them. Princess flapped in desperate lunges to recover her balance. Just fly straight and level, Ashley prayed, just straight and… level. But there were no reference points to tell up from down. They tumbled, nose over tail, as Princess beat furiously against the broken air, falling with a downdraught, then—slam!—lofted from underneath, as the air currents switched.
Princess floundered, her wings were wrenched forward. She gave a forlorn cry. Muscles tore in her wings, Ashley suspected, but there was nothing he could do to help her. Slam! They were tumbling again, up became down, sideways, backward and the wind was tearing at the roots of her feathers, roaring past their ears. Princess’s majestic wings were turning to sodden clumps of feathers on bone.
They fell into a maelstrom, tumbling out of control. Something hit Ashley hard in the back; something else thudded against his head. Hailstones. The air blackened, thick and seething with a fearsome presence. Something was building around them, he could feel the gathering charge… all the air seemed to be rushing forward, pulling them into a deep and waiting silence. He tried to make himself very small against Princess’s neck.
The strike was swift, and it passed them in a forked flash, blinding and intense. Time seemed to stutter and repeat. Then they fell.
A careless calm settled upon him and he stopped shivering. He couldn’t feel his arms or his legs any more. His face felt like solid ice. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t fight the storm anymore. It began to seem funny, in the end. He’d wanted to fly all his life, and here he was, in the realm of the gods. It didn’t pay to play in the realm of the gods unless one was a god, Ashley decided. Only gods had the power to be up here. Only the gods could save him, but they wouldn’t, because he was falling, cast out of the realm of the gods, an unworthy human, sent back to the earth where he belonged. A peaceful way to die, in the end. Would their bodies eventually come down to earth in some exotic corner of Oldenworld, where strange and beautiful people lived? It was a sad thought, because they’d miss seeing it, Princess and he. They’d be dead for sure.
Only the mournful shriek of the wind and the sting of rain in his eyes told him he was still alive.
“No!” he tried to shout to Princess. She hadn’t wanted to be with the gods; she didn’t deserve to die. “Life is worth living! Save yourself!” His lips were frozen and he made no sound, but he thought it loudly.
A strange face appeared in the cloud, a distorted face that flickered through the mist, enlarged around the right eye as if the watcher was peering through a bulge of glass. The watcher reached out and the cloud bent outward as if it were a membrane.
The Sorcerer. Ashley knew it the moment he saw him. Even his stomach turned cold.
The Sorcerer watched them with that unnervingly enlarged eye. Then he raised his hand and slapped the open palm toward them. The outline of a great hand ripped through the cloud above them, a handprint traced in silver. The sky was ablaze with lightning. Bright bolts shot at them. The image of the watcher was lost in the raining chaos. They fell through crisscrossed crazy light, stuttering and exploding. Stuttering and exploding.
Threads of Chaos tangled upon them then were suddenly wrenched away, by the cloud’s power, or by some vagary of magic. Had the Sorcerer changed his mind? Either the Sorcerer had a terrible aim, or he had aimed to miss. They escaped from Chaos.
A scene flashed into view; a patch of sky or water of the palest blue; and a speckled green rim around it, and mountains, which jutted up at odd angles. The perspective was all wrong: the scene was swirling, spinning. He could see they were out of the cloud though. Its dark base stretched away like a tilted wall of dented iron.
Ashley adjusted to the new jagged horizon. The widening oblong of light blue below them really was water, a high alpine tarn, the white-flecked green its snow-covered banks. They were spiralling toward it at great speed, and the way he could see the individual ripples probably meant…
Spla-doosh!
Icy water closed overhead, and they were driven deep below the surface. He lost his breath. He kicked away from Princess, fought against the weight of his clothes. He thrashed at the water, struggling to propel himself upward, kicking for the surface, but he was too weak. He fought the overwhelming desire to open his mouth and draw in all the water of the lake to satisfy his burning breathlessness.
Slower than the dawning of the morning sun, the translucent surface came closer. It was patterned with circular ripples from heavy raindrops. Ashley broke through and heaved in a desperate breath, then sank, came up for another breath and sank again in the icy water. His strength was failing. Princess broke the surface beside him, snorting and spluttering through her nostrils.
Help me to the shore, he thought. Help me. I can’t paddle anymore.
Princess came close. He tried to grip her mane as she passed but his cold hands were useless and had no strength. She came around again and nudged him from behind, edging him forward, even though it caused her to snort desperately to avoid drowning herself. She ducked her head under his body and heaved him upward, so that he could draw breath. He slid across her back. They emerged thus from the blue waters of the tarn, crawling out of the shallows and falling heavily upon the ground.
Princess lay on her belly with her sodden wings splayed to either side, blowing gusts of steam. Ashley remained where he was, lying on her back. He hung his head down and wept. Relief flooded him. They had survived.
After a while he realised that they could not stay there, with the waters lapping at their legs, exposed in this cold wild place. He crawled away to look for shelter, and urged Princess to follow him.
The vast cave he found had a funny smell, a carrion scent, but there was no rain inside. A great tumbled pile of bones littered the floor. Something big had died there long ago and had been picked clean. A small charred tree grew in the entrance, its blackened limbs struggling toward the sky. The way the rain was falling meant the tree was protected. Ashley guessed it would make good firewood, but he couldn’t finish the thought before losing consciousness for a time.
Before nightfall he roused himself again. He was shivering uncontrollably.
Move, you fool, move. He hung on the weakest branches of the blackened tree until they cracked and tore off. That was the easy part. He searched in the damp saddlebags, and retrieved the tinderbox from the pile of salvaged supplies. Getting a spark to catch on the sodden slivers of tinder with the flint and steel was impossible. His hands were so cold they hardly worked at all. Only when he found some old grass and fluff in a nest among the shelved rocks did he have his first hint of smoke. Eventually the grass took, and he added kindling, then the branches caught ablaze. At last he began to feel some hope for living through the night.
Thawing out was more painful than the growing cold had been.
Princess was nervous of the flames, but he did manage to convince her to bring her sodden body close enough that she was out of the coldest draughts. She would not come close enough to be dried by the flames, though. He rubbed her down as best he could, but he knew she was going to have a cold night.
There was little to eat. Most of his supplies of drybread had floated away upon the lake. What remained was sodden. He squeezed it into a fist-sized lump, pierced it with a short stick, and stuck it over the open flames.
The wet bread turned out to be as awful as it looked. Even though he’d crisped it to black on the outside, it was still soggy in the middle, but it was food, and he knew he needed every scrap he could get. He was in trouble—he was in the mountains, in a grey, cold and bitter place, with a horse that wasn’t a horse anymore and might not make it through the night. At least she might be able to tear up some grass in the morning; there was enough of that between the clumped snow, but what would he eat? He might be able to hunt. If there were things that built nests among the rocks, there had to be ways to catch them.
Ashley lay down beside the fire. What kind of a beast had owned the bones which lay scattered at the mouth of the cave? He closed hi
s eyes—he was truly too fatigued to care. The warmth of the flames was heavenly. The warmth was everything.
21. A LOOK INTO THE FOREST
“Isn’t it odd, what different cultures
can ferment from the same brew?”—Zarost
The storm broke above them, and the night fell heavy and wet upon their backs. Garyll got them to their feet. Despite their fatigue, they had to go on. There was no shelter where they had fallen, and no way to keep warm except to walk. Mulrano shouldered their meagre supplies. The water puddled on the bare grey earth, soon forming pools, then running under their boots in a sheet of liquid whispers. The hardpack became slick and treacherous. Garyll led them over the lip of the rocky gorge they had been lying beside and they descended into the scoured channel.
The sides of the gorge rose.
The rocks were jagged, they chewed at the soles of Tabitha’s boots, but at least they offered a solid grip and kept out of the water, which sloshed down the sloping rock-fields in hundreds of rivulets. The occasional silver sparkle lit the waters like lost fireflies, but for the most part the runoff from the desert plains above was dull and harmless. The rocks underfoot were all compacted like ragged crystals. Tabitha picked one up. It was extremely heavy, and bluish, but in the dark it was hard to tell for sure. It was composed of a solid sound, a blue bass note in the chiaroscuro of raindrops and silver silence. The rain sluiced down, and they picked their way carefully through the scree until they reached an overhang where they could huddle together and escape the worst of the storm.
Tabitha didn’t remember much of that horrible time, except that she shivered, on and on. Garyll held her tightly all through the night, but his body heat didn’t help much. She wasn’t shivering because she was cold. The rain came down, washing down on the corpse of the day, and they waited upon its resurrection, but it never came. Night stole into their souls. Beyond the protection of Eyri, they were small; the world was vast.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 34
