by Janzen, Tara
* * *
Difficult but not impossible. Kristine thought, eyeing the narrow gap on the trail, a break, an empty space, an abyss of thin air no more than eighteen inches wide that she had to step over to get to the solid trail beyond. She would have gone back hours ago if the opportunity had arisen, but she’d gotten herself good and lost, and high. Oh brother, had she gotten herself high.
The ledge she stood on dropped away in a dizzying fall of thousands of feet. Vertigo, though, wasn’t her problem. The gap was a definite problem. Maybe more of a problem than she could handle, and she still wasn’t any closer to the monastery carved into the canyon wall. There had to be a trick to it.
“More than one, Kreestine,” Kit said from above her.
He startled her, but she had the good sense not to look up at him, or even to twitch too much.
“Hi.” Her voice sounded hushed and insignificant against the radiant panorama spread out before her in mile after endless mile of sun-baked, gilt-edged landscape. The rift valley pushed the canyon walls even farther apart, leaving room for a river basin to widen and flow over the acres of stone tumbled from the cliffs.
She didn’t bother to wonder where he’d come from. She’d been lost in the maze of paths scoring the cliff-face long enough to know they had more secrets than the CIA. She’d popped out of nowhere a couple of times herself, to find herself dangling over a whole lot of nothing.
“Give me your hand,” he said, “and I’ll pull you up.”
A sensible request, but she wasn’t buying.
“What happened to the bandits in the mist?” she asked, not daring to look up, which she’d discovered was much worse than looking down.
“They are probably home by now.”
“And the Turk?”
“That one has a long walk, but he is young and strong, and maybe his horse will stop for him.” He paused, then added, “Maybe not. The stallion was running pretty fast when I released him. He found my mare less accommodating than he’d wished.”
“Oh,” she said, finally understanding what had turned the not exactly docile animal into a nostril-flaring, head-tossing beast. “You planned for everything, didn’t you.”
“Almost.” She heard his heavy sigh. “Give me your hand, please, Kreestine.”
She still had a hundred or so questions, and this time she was getting answers. “What about the mist? Did you do that?”
“You overestimate my talents. It is nothing more than that which happens every morning during this season. Nothing more than cold air condensing water vapor. The canyon is empty now.”
“I’ve seen river mist,” she said, her tone skeptical, “and that ain’t it.”
“We are in Chatren-Ma. There could be more, but not by my hand, and nothing I can explain.”
She didn’t know whether to feel better or not, or safer or not. She did know she couldn’t stand on the ledge indefinitely. Her path had dead-ended . . . and Chatren-Ma still beckoned like a promise just beyond her grasp.
She had another question, something along the lines of “Why didn’t you come for me yesterday?” or “What made you so sure the Turk wouldn’t hurt me?” or even “Didn’t you care that he had me at his mercy?” But no matter how she phrased it in her mind the words seemed too personal, the doubts too real to expose to a man she might have only slept with. A man who’d said he’d wanted to leave her, and then by some quirk of fate had found she’d left him first and shown up at the exact place he’d professed to want to go. Complicated stuff to be dealing with on a ledge barely wider than her foot was long.
She knelt and dusted her hands with dirt for traction. She had a job to do. She had a discovery and a name to make. Kristine Richards was on the road to glory, a damned tiny but guaranteed road to glory. Whereas love, it seemed, held no guarantees at all.
Slowly and carefully turning toward the stone wall behind her, she flattened herself against it and raised her arm high in the air. Strong, warm fingers wrapped around her wrist. She gripped his forearm with her other hand, and prayed he could lift a hundred and twenty-five pounds of dead weight. She helped where she could, jamming the toes of her boots into every nook and cranny the cliff offered, and trying to think light, trying to be light.
I’m a cloud, a mere tuft of cotton floating on the wind, lighter than the air, less substance than a dream.
She heard his labored breath, then his other hand clenched the collar of her coat. With a heave and a groan, he got most of her onto the upper path, she hung there, resting, her legs suspended in space.
He drew a deep breath and pulled again, and Kristine swung her knee onto the ledge. He pulled once more, rolling her on top of him as he collapsed on his back.
“You are no cloud, Kreestine,” he said, gasping, “but it was a good thought.”
They lay there for long moments, catching their breaths, and that more than anything proved to her he was a mortal man.
“Next time . . .” she said breathlessly. “Next time I’ll send the coat up first.”
“Good.”
Still neither of them moved. She rested her head on his chest, checking out her new perch. His was a far cry better than the one she’d left. His was ten feet wide and had a good solid path carved in either direction. She could set up housekeeping on such a good ledge.
She turned her head in the other direction, toward the monastery, and felt his hand slide down her back in a gesture of comfort.
“Can we get there from here?” she asked, unaware of the wistfulness in her voice.
His smile teased her. “Only if you get off me. But truly the choice is yours, bahini. I have no complaints.”
Chivalrous to the end, she thought, knowing what she looked like. He must have noticed, too, because he’d called her bahini. She’d looked the word up, and little sister was a far cry from wife, a damn far cry from what they’d shared in her bedroom. With a soft exhalation of air, she rolled off him. She would have gotten up except he rolled, too, pinning her to the ground.
“You are well, then?” he asked.
“Pretty well,” she hedged. Physically she was fine, rather invigorated by the high mountain air in fact. Any anger and anxiety she’d felt during her ordeal had been subjugated by the sheer beauty and the uncommon opportunities of the place she’d been brought to. Emotionally, though, she’d had a couple of major glitches, the cause of which was looking down at her with such tender concern, she wondered if she was blowing them out of proportion.
“You’ve been too long in the sun.” His fingers traced the bridge of her nose and caressed her cheek.
“I forgot to pack my sunscreen,” she said softly, feeling the spell of him bind her anew and wishing it wasn’t so.
“Are you hungry?”
“Maybe.” Her gaze fastened on the mouth mere inches from her own, and she watched a smile form.
“We have work to do, Kreestine, and quickly. I do not wish to attempt the paths at night.”
“Work?” she questioned, then silently cursed herself. Of course, work. Wasn’t that what she’d just been telling herself?
His smile widened into a grin. “We are in Chatren-Ma, bahini. I do not wish to leave empty-handed, but I also know we should leave before dark.”
An outlaw, his words confirmed in her mind. No monk or mystic, but an outlaw to the core.
“You may come with me,” he said. “I will not insist that you wait, but it would be my choice. I—” He stopped and reconsidered his words, then only said, “It would be my choice for you to wait.”
“Not a chance,” she said, looking him straight in the eye.
Eleven
“You have surprised me,” Kit said, edging around a curve in the much narrowed trail and reaching a hand back to help her. “I did not think you would get this far on your own.”
What could she say? Kristine mused. She was more than a little surprised herself.
“How did you get past the first avalanche?” he asked.
“Well
, it wasn’t exactly an avalanche.” She grasped his hand and swung around the corner, coming up hard against the new cliff-face and letting out her breath. “I thought so at first, but then I noticed the boulders had a kind of pattern to them, like somebody had placed them there to block the trail, or a least give the appearance of having blocked the trail, and I figured anybody that determined to make an illusion had done it because the trail wasn’t really blocked at all. It probably took me another fifteen minutes, though, to find the opening. I’d like to be able to date it, maybe shake up some conceptions on the early technological advances of a people still considered backward. It’s a remarkable feat of engineering.”
“Yes, a remarkable feat,” Kit said, surprised again. It had taken him over an hour to find the opening the first time. “And Heaven’s Steps?”
“Harder coming down than going up,” she said with a nonchalance he would have been hard pressed to emulate. “What makes you think they were called Heaven’s Steps?”
“There’s an inscription carved into the stone at a juncture in the trail about twenty yards earlier.” He edged around another crumbling precipice. “The words don’t translate into English with precision, but they’re very celestial.”
“I don’t remember a juncture twenty yards before the staircase.” Talking helped, she thought, unwilling to look either up or down. Knowing the strength of his arm also helped.
His hand tightened on hers, and she glanced over at him. “You took the tunnel?” he asked.
She nodded. “I figured it would be kind of hard to fall off a tunnel.”
She amazed him. She had more courage than he had thought, much more. He’d avoided the tunnel his first time in, but by the time he’d returned, he’d been forced into many tunnels, all of them to his detriment. There was no other way to enter Chatren-Ma. The monastery was impregnable from the valley floor. The sole access was from inside the earth, deep behind the cliff-face.
“Kreestine.” He spoke her name with a note of gentle pride and a share of warning. “There are more tunnels ahead of us, and in many of them it would be an easy thing to fall off. The caverns are riddled with traps of emptiness for the unwary.”
Traps of emptiness for the unwary, she slowly repeated in her mind, then caught his gaze. “You mean holes?”
“Holes,” he confirmed, keeping his other knowledge to himself, not knowing how or if she’d be affected. “Big holes.”
* * *
He was right, Kristine thought, edging around another “trap of emptiness.” Without him guiding her, she would have disappeared about a mile back. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she’d quickly worked up a steady stream of gratitude for Kit’s presence. She was following him. She didn’t know what he was following, but he hadn’t missed yet.
“If you knew about the tunnels, why didn’t you bring a flashlight?” she asked. If she’d known what she was getting into, she would have asked the Turk to stop someplace where she could have grabbed one of those halogen quartz things, or maybe two or three.
“Your eyes can deceive where your intuition will not fail. I spent many years, Kreestine, many years learning to see through the darkness of thoughts, learning to tread a path of light.”
Lois wouldn’t have liked his explanation, she mused. It was a little too mystical for the curator’s pragmatic tastes. Kristine had no choice but to believe, and the only things she didn’t like were the strained quality of his voice and the increasing heat of his hand in hers. She had a ridiculous urge to press the inside of her wrist against his forehead to see if he had caught a flu.
“You wouldn’t have accidentally shot me, then?” she asked.
“You were safe from the minute the Turk discovered my knife in his door. The message was clear. He knew his life depended upon your safety. And—and the man I questioned in Shanghai assured me you were unhurt when he last saw you.”
The hesitation in his voice and something about the way he said the word “questioned” bothered her. “Did you hurt him?” she asked quietly.
“I touched him, nothing more.”
Touched him like he’d touched old Luke in the bar, she knew. “How did you get your knife into the compound gate?”
He hesitated again, as if reaching for a breath, then said very softly. “With much anger, Kreestine, much anger.”
It was practically a declaration of love, but she wasn’t going to push her luck. She was going to let the words float around inside her for a while, let them soak in, sort out. She knew what kind of man he was, and she was sure nothing short of the truest emotion, of undeniable need, could have snapped the rationality of his mind. The amount of anger he’d demonstrated left no room for rational anything. It must be love. But she wasn’t going to push her luck.
“Come up behind me and put your arms around my waist,’ he said, his voice tense with concentration.
She did as she was told, keeping an inch of distance between them to help her ignore how good he felt, just in case she was wrong.
“Closer,” Kit insisted, pulling her arms farther around him. “Match every step I take. Start . . . start with your right foot.”
He was fighting a losing battle, and he cursed himself for a fool with every passing second weakening him. Because he’d had to hurry after her, he hadn’t had the time to meditate, as he had before, focusing his energy so that all that was unseen in these tunnels could not distract him from the path. They couldn’t turn back though. A thousand lost, soft-shod footsteps filled the caverns behind them, echoing through the centuries. They were dreams, thoughts with substance, and he heard every one, every question, every answer, trying to confuse him and make him lose the way. There was no evil, but there was warning, and certain death for an unsure footfall.
Kristine was another difference between the first time and this. Her strong will shone like a beacon behind him, attracting the ancient amalgamation of souls and the prayers they’d chanted into the rock. His sensitivity was both a blessing and a curse. He wasn’t blind in the darkness. On the contrary, he saw too much, and he didn’t know how long he could handle it all.
They moved along a path Kristine could only guess at, one slow step at a time, for what seemed hours. She knew merely minutes had passed, but darkness changed time, elongated it or suspended it altogether until a mark was met. It added an other-worldliness to the earth beneath her, to the walls around her. She couldn’t see anything, but she felt . . . something.
In front of her, Kit stopped twice, three times, then four, and cursed softly at the fifth halt.
“Don’t move.” His voice echoed plainly, chasing the air into the dark void. Don’t move . . . don’t move . . . don’t . . . move . . .
She felt one of his hands leave hers and shove into his pocket. A striking sound came from the vicinity of his knife sheath, and a match flared. She took one look and froze like a rock.
She wanted to go home. She had no business being there, no history business, no love business, no sensible business. A gust of wind from somewhere extinguished the match.
He struck another, and Kristine looked again. She still wanted to go home.
They were balanced on a spit of land jutting out into a fathomless, floorless cavern, though land seemed too substantial a term for the bit of earth and stone beneath their feet. As if to confirm her opinion, an almost infinitesimal portion of pebble and dirt gave way, whispering off into the darkness. The match followed the fall, snuffing out in the abyss.
“We are almost there,” Kit said. She forced herself to concentrate on his spoken words and not on the echoes wafting around them. “Let go of me, but do not move until you feel my hand around your ankle.”
“Where are you going?” she whispered, trying to keep her own echoes out of the air.
“Over the edge.”
“The edge?” Oh, she didn’t like the sound of that, but he slipped away from her before she could voice an opinion or offer an alternative. Worse, she thought she heard him stumble, a man who
could run on four-inch wide rails, a man whose grace exceeded that of the stars in the sky – and she began to get very nervous.
Standing there on the small promontory, surrounded only by her own shallow breaths and a whole lot of timeless blackness, she discovered a few new things about herself. She was afraid of the dark after all; her balance, like his, didn’t seem to be what it used to be—she swore she was swaying from side to side; and she’d picked a very interesting place to die.
She’d definitely make the news with this bit of folly.
“Krees, give me your hand.”
This time she jumped at the opportunity, figuratively speaking.
He eased her over the edge, the front of her body sliding down the front of his. Suddenly the darkness filled with a crackling awareness. He pressed closer to her, closer than was absolutely necessary, she was sure.
She didn’t mind the closeness, but she’d felt weakness in his arms where only strength had been before. He leaned against her, quietly, seriously.
“Are you okay?” she asked, smoothing loose strands of hair behind his ears and secretly checking his temperature. He was burning up.
“I missed you.” His hand slowly rose to cup her face, and his voice grew husky. “I will not let anyone take you from me again.”
He lowered his mouth and found what he searched for with her softly spoken. “Good.”
The kiss was sweet, yet erotic in its creative intensity. His tongue slid across her lips, laving the tender skin before slipping inside the welcoming warmth of her mouth.
His groan echoed around her, heightening her senses and pushing her toward an edge she longed to fall off again, the one he’d taken her to when they’d made love.
Tonight, Kreestine, you will be mine. He deepened the kiss, the muscles in his arms tightening, giving her a taste of the power of his desire.
She sank under the pliant assault of his mouth, and she knew in her heart she could get addicted to his barbaric ways and Neanderthal tendencies. She would be his, indeed.
