“Glass ropes, such as you request, have no load-bearing capacity,” the foreman had said, “yet in other shapes glass possesses huge strength and many other useful qualities besides. Even before glass-making was discovered, warriors valued glass for its sharpness, and used it to make knives, arrows, and spearheads—”
“Wait!” Arran had interjected, holding up his hand again. “Do you mean to say that glass existed before glass-making was invented?”
“Indeed, my lord,” the foreman had answered, pulling his forelock politely. “Obsidian is formed when the fierce heat of volcanoes fuses sand.”
“Of course,” Arran had murmured, in the tones of an enlightened man. “I had forgotten.”
“And sometimes when a fragment of a star falls from the sky,” continued the erudite foreman, “its heat is so tremendous that it melts rock as it strikes the ground. Gobs of molten rock are hurled into the air by the force of the impact. When they cool they form smooth glassy tektites, shaped like sand-timers.”
“From what you say,” Arran had said, “I deduce that for glass to be formed naturally all that is required is sand containing the right combination of minerals, and a heat source of extreme intensity.”
“Even so, my lord. Even so.”
Under Whitaker’s Peak Arran stood utterly still, as if locked into a timeless stasis. Reaching out his weathermaster’s faculties, he explored the tons of rock suspended above his head, probing for variations in magnetic forces, pockets of air, trickles and gushes of water. It was the most difficult enterprise he had ever attempted. His ramifying senses could make nothing of the bones of the world, the strata and sub-strata formed from rocks of varying types and density and geological eras, some riddled with fossils, others veined with ores.
Yet, after much effort, he discovered something his brí-consciousness could decipher: behind the wall of the cavern a waterworn fissure, almost vertical, reaching right up to the very surface of the mountain. Had there been no lively water running down this channel, he would not have been able to recognize it. This perpendicular outlet was perfect for his plan, if only something else existed in the ground below his feet.
Downward he drove his superhuman perception. Heat grumbled and simmered in the depths. From the core of the world, tentacles of molten rock exuded. Not far away, in a hot subterranean dungeon, water was constantly accumulating. The natural chamber was filled with steam. As more water continuously seeped in, the pressure built up, until the cavern trembled like a gigantic cooking-pot with the lid tightly screwed on. All that separated the vertical fissure from the cauldron below was a thick plug made of small pebbles and sediment.
The hands of the young weathermage glided, outlining the contours of invisible shapes. Convoluted vowels streamed from his lips and ricocheted off the stones. To his knowledge, such an exploit as he embarked upon had never before been attempted from beneath a mountain. In fact, it might prove impossible. It was necessary for him to be very precise.
“Ooh, man, there’s a terrible power a-breeding!” wailed the little thing in Arran’s pocket. “ ’Twill explode any moment now! Run, man!”
Arran experienced an odd sensation of reversal, as if he had lived through this same moment in earlier times.
“Why do you wait until I’m with you, before you destroy everything in sight?” wailed the wight.
Arran ignored the outbursts and continued his work. He must focus on the task in hand, or fail. He was gambling on many variables, including whether the sands of Whitaker’s Peak contained the right combination of minerals. Certainly, the exposed crags on the mountaintop far above were perfect for his purpose.
Somewhere below the floor on which he stood, something gave way. A blockage cleared. Silt and gravel emptied out from a natural tube, like sand from a timer. Instinctively Arran flung himself behind the shelter of a boulder as a screaming jet of overheated, moist air shot past, invisible on the other side of the rocky partition, and up through the escape vent that led to the outer slopes of Whitaker’s Peak.
Thunderstorms are more likely to form over mountains than over flat land, especially when strong winds are converging toward the mountain from different directions. The atmosphere above the peak was already highly charged; into this projected the powerful jet of conductive steam, and the swirling gases of the heavens could no longer prevent their snapping, fretting, snarling currents from biting the ground.
The bolt, exceeding one hundred million volts, seared down the air and struck the pinnacle of the tallest crag on Whitaker’s Peak. It drove down through highly transmissive seams of ore, into pits of dry quartz sand. As the lightning strike diffused through the mineral particles at a temperature of fifty thousand degrees it vaporized those in its direct path while melting and fusing those on the periphery, forming brittle, glassy tubes that preserved the shape of the current. Unfused grains were blasted aside by shock waves. The thin partition between the vent and the cavern burst asunder down its length, vomiting lethal missiles, skin-flaying detonations of sand and blobs of boiling vitreous. The return stroke—to the slow human eye, undifferentiated from the first—created yet more fulgurites.
No mortal man could have stood so close to that strike and survived. For the briefest of instants the current’s path was as hot as the sun, generating pressures one hundred times that of the world’s atmosphere.
The cavern now glowed with a lurid light that shone from holes in the sand. Before the fulgurite tubes had time to cool and solidify, Arran dredged them from their incandescent pits with his bare, immortal hands; his hooks and hammer would instantly have burned at the touch of the newly birthed compound. Still semi-liquid, the root-like structures warped as he handled them. Strings of glowing syrup sizzled when drops of moisture from the wet riversand vaporized against them. Arran stood in the center of a surging steam-cloud, a spiderweb of smoky gray cables strung between his fingers. The material clung stickily to his charmed skin as he drew out the mass like viscid honey, to create threads.
“Take it!” he yelled above the roaring and hissing of the steam. “Take it now and spin it while it is yet pliable!” He was unable to draw the threads skillfully enough to produce hair-fine filaments that would remain flexible when they cooled, and was forced to gamble again: this time, on whether the spinners would willingly work with molten glass.
Violent steam-billows obscured his surroundings. As he let fall the vitreous cords he became aware they were being dragged away. “You must comb it out, tease it into fibers,” he cried, “before it can be spun.”
His hair was pasted to his head, his skin dripping with sweat and condensation.
“After spinning you must ply the threads, and twist them to make strong cordage—strong enough to bear my weight!” he shouted into the murk.
“Do you presume to instruct craftsfolk at their own trade, weathermaster?” resonated the uncomfortably close Voice of the Cavern. Little could Arran perceive through the dimness, but as the vapors condensed on the rocky walls and the steam’s sibilance faded, he heard the humming of rapidly turning wheels, and a cackling of ancient, cracked laughter. Arran guessed that if he tried to spy on the spinners they would disappear as soon as he generated his light-source. Motionless he stood, in an agony of suspense, wondering what would eventuate, until at length something heavy was thrown against his legs.
“Done,” boomed funereal and somewhat aristocratic tones.
At the tip of Arran’s light javelin, Erasmus’s fire sprang open like a sunburst.
Beside the weathermage’s feet the fulgurites were gone. In their place was a plentiful coil of glistening, smoky-gray rope.
He picked it up.
“Have you vanished, Fridayweed?” he asked, struggling to hold his jubilation in check.
“Mmph.”
“I have them—ropes of sand!”
Without wasting another moment Arran tossed the flaming javelin over the cliff’s brink. It seemed to descend gently, as if falling through water, until it came
to rest on the dry stones and sand below. There it burned like a welcoming lamp in some distant tavern window. The young man tied one end of the strange rope to a sturdy boulder and paid out the other end over the edge of the precipice. After tugging experimentally to ensure the cable would bear his weight, he belayed it by passing it under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder, then rappelled down the precipice toward the light.
Upon reaching the cliff’s foot he snatched up the light javelin and barked a command to Fridayweed: “Lead me!”
The wight directed the weathermage to the right of the waterfall’s pool and across the stone-strewn floor. “I have never visited this place before,” it grumbled. “I only know of it from hearsay! Me mither says the Well is conspicuous, and cannot be mistaken.”
As he walked, Arran systematically inspected the ground in all directions.
Presently he gasped, as if startled. “If that is so,” he said, “then we have found it.”
In the world above, the day was waning. Through their weathermasters’ senses the crew of the Northmoth had been fully aware of Arran’s summoning of the lightning. Even so, they were astounded at the force of the strike, which had dislodged several large boulders from the higher buttresses of the summit. The questionable climbers on the slopes had turned back, retreating toward the lowlands. Conceivably they had been woodsmen curious to learn what weathermasters were doing on the heights, simple folk who, when confronted with the evidence of a weathermage’s power, had thought better of interfering and returned to their huts. Peril had evaporated, unlike the mists of evening, which were beginning to coagulate in the lower dales.
Now Arran’s companions waited.
Docile breezes shifted the airborne particles, and it was not long before the crew stood beneath clear skies, gazing out over the northern ranges. Glistening in the lucent airs, mountain peaks thrust like islands from oceans of translucent cloud-wisps. The weathermasters wondered what was happening deep beneath their feet.
So Arran Maelstronnar, weathermage of High Darioneth and scion of the Storm Lord, came at last to the Well of Tears.
As twice before, he came to kneel at the brink of an embedded stone chalice, lined with alien metals from beyond the stars. As before, he came to steal the strange water imbued with uncanny qualities, the Draught that could throw unseen shields around beings of flesh and blood, screening them forever from the ravages of time, the inconceivable bane of non-existence, the finality of death. As before he knelt, but in this instance, the third, he fell to his knees as if an axe had smitten him a mighty blow across the shoulder. His palms struck the ground in front of him, and he leaned forward on his hands, staring wordlessly, while the intervals that linked time’s chain clicked past one by one until the chain grew long and heavy.
Lying on its side in the sand, the light javelin flamed silently.
Arran stared, and not a word did he utter; nor did he breathe but shallowly. For the Well was as empty as daylight, dry as the moon.
Bane
The Well of Tears had long ago been cracked and choked and ruined by some ancient upheaval beneath the world’s crust, some natural avalanche, perhaps, or tectonic shift, or a disturbance caused by those underground wights, the Fridean, in their delvings. Whatever the cause, the Well had been burst asunder, perforated and drained, until all that remained were fragments of dark silver stuff, rubble, and vacancies.
Later, as he continued to kneel at the brink, Arran discovered his hands were full of chips and slivers that sifted between his fingers. His nails were splintered. He remembered he had been digging, scrabbling, scratching wildly in the disintegrated rocks; seeking, seeking; finding no drop, no moisture, no seepage or osmosis, nothing but aridity and crumbling, parched gravel—sand that seemed even drier than bones in a desert.
Waterlessness.
It was then, sitting back on his heels and raising his face to the distant ceiling, that he sent forth a cry. Terrible was this cry, so filled with devastation that it was the utterance of profoundest horror, of desolation and loss too bitter to be endured. That single wordless plaint spoke of years, centuries, millennia of sorrow unassuaged. Ripped from his throat, it was a sound that belonged in the pits of madness.
Through hollows and shafts of the mountain it reverberated, bouncing from wall to wall, meeting and remeeting itself, doubling and redoubling in a clamor that fled away down the corridors into the deepest wounds of the mountain, into the darkest and most forbidden cavities where, since the dawn of days, sunlight had never reached.
At the sound, even the eldritch miners temporarily paused at their tasks, ceased their continual hammerings, and looked up. Even the Blue-caps with their tiny sapphire lanterns halted momentarily in their age-old labors, twitching their tufted ears. Even immortal entities could not remain unmoved.
It was with a haggard countenance and torn garments that Arran stumbled from the upper doorway of the Deep Stair to meet his comrades. The afternoon had aged. In the west, behind the mountains, the sun was a gigantic fireball. Its golden surface leaped and lapped with superheated fires, flaring with a myriad wings of translucent amber and boiling bronze. The seething furnace of the sky was falling below the horizon, but as its final rays struck the western faces of the ranges they teased out long, drowning shadows. One beam momentarily illuminated the man emerging from the door on the mountainside. Yet he spoke not, nor did he see the splendor of the day’s passing as he hobbled, like some failing graybeard, across the slope, with his shoulders hunched, his head bowed, his eyes fixed and blind to such transient phenomena as beauty.
The last chance was gone. All hope was extinguished. His anguish metamorphosing to rage, Arran swore vengeance on those who had thwarted his hopes for Jewel’s perpetual survival—Fionnbar and Fionnuala Aonarán. He would return to his wife at High Darioneth and gaze upon her, before he kissed her goodbye once more and went hunting.
A new sky-balloon had been delivered to Rowan Green from the spidersilk farms of Longville-in-the-Dale. After being inspected, tested, and proven to be airworthy, it was given the name Mistmoor, and officially launched. Delivered along with the gigantic envelope, borne in its covered wain and guarded by two dozen outriders, there came interesting intelligence: at a village in Narngalis an oracle had arisen, who declared himself a representative of the cult calling itself “The Sandals of Doom.” This new leader had verified his approbation in the eyes of Lord Doom by, amongst other exploits, walking through fire and emerging unscathed. It seemed he was not short of marvels. He had, in addition, immersed himself in a barrel of water for fully an hour—some said a day, others a week—before reappearing alive and well, and had offered twenty golden guineas to the axe-man who could chop off his head. No man, churl or champion, had, as yet, succeeded in decapitating him. Many were the extraordinary feats said to be performed by this protégé of Míchinniúint. Consequently the diseased, the desperate, the needy and the indecisive had flocked to him, begging for succor and advice. Having gathered a following, he had commandeered the village hall as his headquarters and set up a hierarchy of sycophants to do his bidding. Their practice was to haul ordinary folk before the throne of the oracle, forcing them to kneel before him and praise his greatness as the chosen favorite of Lord Doom. Power and adulation, it seemed, were the primary goals of this mysterious miracle-worker. His influence was growing. Proportionately, the fears of the local populace were increasing, and it was widely rumored that King Warwick would not long tolerate such a tyrant within the borders of his kingdom.
“Where is the center of these odious activities?” Avalloc Maelstronnar asked the news-bearers.
“In the tiny hamlet of Marchington Hythe.”
Avalloc’s pronouncement to the Council on the matter was thus: “I daresay there is only one man who could be enacting such vulgar displays of invulnerability. Fionnbar Aonarán has reappeared.”
Soon afterward, to the gladness of all, Arran and his crew returned to High Darioneth. Everyone was keen to hea
r of their adventures, which they recounted on the evening of their arrival, seated at the dining table of Avalloc’s house in the company of family and councillors. The visage of Arran Maelstronnar was sorrowful indeed as he told of his discovery of the dry Well. He could not bear to look at his young bride while he made the disclosure. When at length he glanced at Jewel, he read in her eyes all the disbelief and despair that he himself had felt when he knelt at the broken brink and realized her last chance of immortality had been lost. She was to remain mortal, while her husband and child lived on through the ages. It was too much to bear.
The son of the Storm Lord was moody and preoccupied. The only ones whose presence could soften the hard lines of anger on his features were his wife and daughter. He was impatient to depart again as soon as possible, in order to track down his nemesis. Upon hearing the news of Aonarán’s reemergence Arran waxed even more intolerant of delay, and declared he would remain at High Darioneth only long enough to collect a crew willing to accompany him on his mission of retribution.
It was a mission about which his father warned him: “Seek justice, not vengeance. Seek only to protect the world from the folly of this wretched madman.”
“I have vowed to punish both brother and sister for their part in defrauding Jewel of her birthright. Our own sovereign has decreed that Aonarán should be arrested and charged with crimes against humankind, should he venture into Narngalis. He is guilty, no question, and ought to pay the price. Besides, I shall not be long away. It should be easy to discover this dissembler posing as a soothsayer, since he has made himself so famous. If I do not find them both within six weeks I shall set a bounty on their capture, and publish news of it throughout the Four Kingdoms.”
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 59
