The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  So the day ended, and at dusk as promised Hercól let them rest. They chose a spot with many cedars near the river. The mountain’s shadow brought swift darkness, but they had good luck with the matches and soon a fire was burning. It cheered them some and dried their boots, but its heat made their burns ache. Alyash disassembled Ott’s pistol, drying the components on a stone. Pazel gazed blearily at the little wood-and-steel mechanism. Hard to believe that it could kill a man.

  Famished, the twenty-one travelers and three dogs shared half their stock of mül, which came to about a teaspoon each. Pazel was battling sleep even as he chewed. He drifted off with Thasha once more examining his leg, and a dog licking his mül-sticky fingers with equal concentration.

  At dawn they were chilled and soaked with dew. Hercól had them up and marching before they were properly awake, and certainly before they could commiserate about their injuries, their fallen comrades, the lack of food, the impossibility of return. The plain widened as the river (unreachable now, sunk deep in its rocky gorge) cut longer serpentines. Hercól maintained his savage pace, cutting off any protests with a lancing stare. When they crossed a stream he ordered them to bend and drink deep, and while they did so he wrenched off his own boots and handed them without a word to Cayer Vispek. In the heat of the afternoon the scalded dog began to limp and drop behind, calling after them with a mournful yelp. Hercól turned back and lifted it over his shoulders, and carried it that way like a sack of grain. “If its foot does not improve by morning we will eat it,” he declared.

  They ate the last of the mül that night, and Bolutu extracted a long thorn from the dog’s paw. Hercól would not permit a fire. “We have closed the gap,” he said. “I think the sorcerer is within five miles, and I would not lose him now.”

  Just beyond their camp the land rose in a stony bluff, leaning out over the river gorge. While the others prepared to sleep, Hercól climbed the bluff with Ensyl on his shoulder. They crouched among rocks at the summit, hidden from the sight of anyone beyond, staring through small gaps. They remained there a long time, motionless.

  “What are they looking at?” said Neeps finally.

  Thasha got to her feet. “Let’s go find out,” she said. She and Neeps climbed the bluff and stood beside Hercól. At once they grew still, gazing beyond the rocks, transfixed.

  When Neda too noticed their fascination, Pazel held out his hand. “Help me up,” he said. “We’ll go and see for ourselves.”

  At that Jalantri leaped to his feet and caught Neda by the arm. “You’re not thinking, sister! You’re badly bruised and there is fighting ahead. Let him waste his strength if he will. We know better, Phoenix-Flame.”

  Neda seemed at a loss for words. She looked at Jalantri’s hand on her arm until he dropped it, chastened. Then she glanced quickly at Pazel and started up the hill.

  They walked in silence (so weirdly normal, climbing a hill beside his sister; they might have been back in Ormael) until Neda said, “The way of the sfvantskor is perfection.”

  “Okay,” said Pazel.

  “If you are distracted by the personal,” she said, “you will fail when your people most need their champion. That is certain, proven. That is why we are chaste. We turn our passions to the needs of the people, to the Grand Family. That is the Mzithrin way, and the sfvantskor must be the example.”

  Pazel looked back: Jalantri was still watching them. “You don’t have to explain, Neda,” he said.

  She smiled, as though amused that Pazel thought he understood. Then she said, “The dogs keep sniffing at Neeps. They look at him strangely, too.”

  Pazel glanced at her, aghast. He could have kicked himself for not noticing. They’re hunting dogs, he thought. Were they trained to hunt tol-chenni? Is that what Neeps smells like to them? Fear for Neeps surged through him once more. But when they reached the hilltop, where the others were still crouched and staring, what he saw drove everything else from his mind.

  A gargantuan lake spread before them, far greater than Ilvaspar, almost as large as the Gulf of Masal itself. Or was it a lake? It was almost perfectly round, and its shores were sheer, rocky cliffs. But there was no water that he could see. Instead, across the whole expanse, some twenty or thirty feet below the rim, spread a layer of dark, murky green. A flat surface, but not entirely smooth. It appeared to be composed of one round patch atop another, like overlapping lily pads choking a pond, except that these pads were all fused at the edges into one solid mass. Pazel could see no gaps at all, except very close to them, where the Ansyndra tumbled into the crater.

  “Hercól says Fulbreech is down there,” said Thasha. “Inside it. Moving around.”

  “But what is it?” said Neda. “A lake, covered in water-weed?”

  “I think,” said Hercól, “that we are looking at the Infernal Forest.”

  “That’s no forest,” said Pazel. “I mean … could it be?”

  “We have seen many strange things on this side of the Nelluroq,” said Ensyl, “but that is the strangest. I do not like it. I fear it will not go well for us there.”

  “Then let us rest,” said Hercól, “for Fulbreech is there below, somewhere. And Arunis must surely be with him, for who would enter such a place if not compelled?”

  That night for the first time since Masalym the air stayed warm. Pazel lay down next to Thasha and held her near. The others lay all around them; a dog curled up and leaned into his back. He tried to nudge the creature but it only groaned.

  Thasha’s eyes were still open. He leaned close and whispered, “What are you thinking about?”

  “Marila,” she said.

  He felt a tightness in his throat. He wanted to tell Thasha about Neeps, but the words would not form.

  “We’re going to know their child,” said Thasha. “If we live, I mean. If we live and we win.”

  A shudder flashed through his body. He pulled her tight. Then Thasha turned and pressed her lips to his ear.

  “Half Bali Adron,” she said, tapping his chest.

  He nodded.

  “What did you find there, Pazel? In the temple, in Vasparhaven? Are you allowed to tell me?”

  Pazel said nothing. He could hear the bursting of the globe, see the empty space where the woman had been, feel the stab of what he’d known was love. Such a distant memory. Such a terrifying force.

  “Crystal,” he said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Everything there was made of crystal, Thasha. The spiders and the people and the music and the stones. And everything outside the temple’s the same, isn’t it? You want to hold it because it’s so beautiful. And you can’t, really. Not for long. It will break if you’re bad and selfish and it will break if you’re good. It snaps or it shatters, or it melts in your hand. And the more beautiful it is the less time you get to have it. And you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Thasha didn’t answer. She turned her back, thoughtful, and then lay still beneath his arm. In minutes they were both asleep.

  Well past midnight, he felt her guide his hand under her tattered clothing and hold it tight against her breast. So quiet when it finally happened. So unlike the way he’d dreamed. He raised his head, kissed her silently from shoulder to ear, tasting ashes, feeling her tremble. Then he lowered his head beside her, nuzzling, and tumbled back into sleep.

  But later still he woke more fully beneath her kisses, and without a word they rose, and tiptoed barefoot into the grass. They neared the river gorge, felt the breeze over the water, stepped cautiously along the rim. Beneath one of the cedars, they turned to face each other, and Pazel lowered himself onto a stone, mindful of his leg. Thasha undressed before him, and she was no more than a blue-white silhouette by the light of the little Polar Candle (the old moon had set; it was almost dawn) but at the same time she was everything that mattered, Thasha Isiq, his lover, naked and frightened and magnificent and strong. And when he carefully removed his own clothes and embraced her there was no more fear in his heart, no room f
or it, she was the place in the world where fear ended, and she backed into the tree and said she loved him, and her hands reached up for a sturdy branch, and for a few seconds he was inside her, just barely; she had raised herself almost out of his reach, and knowing he shouldn’t he tried to stand higher, to scramble up onto a root, rock, anything, it was like trying to mate with the tree, and then she pushed him out altogether and lowered herself to her feet and clasped him tight in her hand, frantic, hips straining against the side of his leg, she was closer than his own skin, closer than he was to himself.

  The moment they fell still another sound reached their ears. The dog had followed them, and was scratching urgently with a hind foot just a few feet away. He felt her heart drum against his chest, the laughter shaking her from forehead to thighs. It was nonsense, what they said about dying of happiness. Happiness made you want to live.

  They walked a bit farther along the edge of the gorge. He tried talking to her but she only murmured; she was suddenly far away and thoughtful. He was teased by the notion that they had done something dangerous, perhaps mortally so. Was it the magic inside her, Erithusmé’s strange, destructive gifts? Or his, maybe: the language-spell working to decode her silence, her yearning; trying to translate her wordless needs into his own? He could not make himself care. They clasped hands, scarred palm to scarred palm. He felt that whatever befell her must happen to him as well, and already he longed to touch her again.

  Thasha said she wanted to bathe in the Ansyndra. He tried to dissuade her and got nowhere; she told him it might be their last chance for days. They found a descent, but not an easy one. Thasha looked at his leg and shook her head. “That’s all we need,” she laughed. “You at the bottom, shouting in pain, and our clothes up here by that tree.”

  So he sat beside the dog and watched her creep down the broad rocks, spider-like, moving in and out of shadow. The river was a braid of murmuring darkness, and it was hard to tell when she reached it, until he realized that she had slowed, and was splashing palmfuls of icy water against her legs. The simple gesture enough to drive him mad. She moved a step deeper, staring fixedly at the opposite shore. Another step, and she was gone.

  Pazel surged to his feet, terrified. Why in Pitfire had he let her go? Into that water out of Ilvaspar, a river that mixed with the River of Shadows?

  His fright grew by the second. How could he have been such a fool? Thasha was gone, gone into the black turbulence he had sensed at the bottom of the temple pool. And suddenly he knew that she had been drawn to the river by more than a desire to bathe.

  Then she rose and clambered for shore. Her eyes sought him, found him, and she hugged herself, and Pazel was so relieved that he never did ask, then or later, if the gesture meant that the water was freezing or that he was loved.

  When dawn came the party rose and set off at once, for there was no breakfast to linger over, no tea to warm. They rounded the bluff and came back to the side of the Ansyndra, and soon the vast green crater was sprawling before them. Pazel had hoped the mystery of its nature would be resolved as they approached; but on the contrary, the place only became more alien and strange. The scrub and feathery grasses of the plain grew right up to its edge. Then the side of the hole fell straight down some thirty feet, to where the green surface began. The latter pressed tight against the rock, leaving barely a finger’s width of empty space, and often not even that.

  What was it made of? How strong was it, how thick? Alyash tossed a rock onto the surface: it bounced and skittered and lay there in the sun. Not a liquid, then, and not flimsy either.

  “It looks like elephant hide,” said Big Skip. “I’ll bet you could walk on it.”

  Hercól stepped close to the riverbank. They could hear the sound of a waterfall as the Ansyndra plummeted into the dark depths, but even at its very edge they could not see much, for the green tissue stretched to within a few feet of the spray. But they could at least see the edge of the substance: it was some three inches thick.

  “There’s a second layer below,” said Ibjen. And so there was: a second layer, slightly less green, about twenty feet beneath the first. And below that, a third? Pazel could not see it, but the dlömu (whose eyes could pierce the darkness better than human eyes) said that yes, there was a third; and the ixchel (whose eyes were better still) detected even a fourth, cracked and withered, about sixty feet below.

  “And something else,” said Ensyl. “Struts, or rafters, on the underside of each layer, propping it up, maybe. But they are very irregular and thin.”

  Myett peered down into the rushing void. “Those are not rafters,” she said. “They’re branches.”

  There were grumbles of disbelief. “Branches,” Myett repeated. “And I would wager that those”—she swept her hand over the miles and miles of olive surface—“are leaves.”

  “Oh, come now,” said the older Turach. “Leaves? All flattened, crushed together like a griddle cake?”

  “Can you think of a simpler explanation?” asked the dlömic woman, Lunja.

  “Pitfire, it’s true,” said Neeps, crouching. “The surface is dusty, like, but you can see veins if you look close. Those are treetops, by Rin.”

  “Then we’re in the right place,” said Pazel.

  “And so is Arunis,” said Bolutu. “The Infernal Forest. And he has taken the Nilstone deep within.”

  “Then let us go and take it back,” said Cayer Vispek. “But there is no entrance here. We might aim for those rocks, but to my eye that is a two-day march, and who knows if the … leaves are as solid everywhere as here.”

  “Something is different far off along the rim,” said Hercól, pointing east. “Perhaps the leaf is torn or folded; I cannot tell. But that too is miles off.”

  “We could try to shimmy down the cliff beside the river here,” said Alyash, “but that’s a tricky wall. Very sheer, and wet with spray.”

  “And dark, too, it must be, farther down,” said Dastu.

  “Let’s make for that torn spot, if that’s what it is,” said Thasha. “Maybe we’ll find something along the way.”

  Having no better option, they set out. The day was bright, and the dark green surface warmed quickly in the sun, and soon the heat was rolling off it with each puff of wind. For several miles there was almost no change in the surface. Here and there they could see a frayed edge, where two leaves were not quite perfectly joined. But they always overlapped, so that one could never catch a glimpse down into the crater. Pazel reflected morbidly that they still had no idea of its depth.

  Slowly the thing Hercól had spotted came into view. There did appear to be a hole, but also something white protruding from it. When they arrived at last, they found themselves standing above a semicircular gap some twelve feet in diameter, opening right against the cliff wall. The edges were not torn but smooth and rounded, as though the opening was intentional.

  The white shapes turned out to be flowers: enormous, fleshy blooms with dark stamens the size of bottle-brushes. They had a rich perfume, a mixture of honey and spirits. The flowers were not part of the leaf structure, but grew instead upon a woody vine reaching up out of the darkness. The vine was massive, and tightly grafted to leaf and stone. Its angle of descent was gradual, no more than a steep staircase, and indeed with its corkscrew pattern and elbow-turns it somewhat resembled a staircase, leading down to the next level.

  “We could manage well enough on that, I dare say,” said Alyash.

  “Look there!” said a dlömic soldier, pointing downward. “There’s another opening on the level below. And what’s that? Fruit? Am I seeing fruit on that blessed vine?”

  It did look very much that way: five or six purple fruits, about fist-sized, dangling in a bunch near a second opening in the leaves.

  “Beware your hopes, and your appetite,” said Hercól. “If ever I saw the makings of a trap, it is here.”

  “Agreed,” said Jalantri, “but what if the entire forest is a trap? It must have done something to earn its name.”<
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  Hercól looked gravely into the depths. “Let us descend one level,” he said. “We will collect those fruits but not taste them, for now. If we are starving—well, then we shall eat, and hope to live. But this is all too convenient.”

  He went first, scrambling down the mighty vine, passing through the highest layer and stepping out gingerly onto the leaf-platform below. Pazel and Neeps went next, and couldn’t help but smile at each other: this was far easier than climbing the shrouds on the Chathrand, and a thousand times preferable to the iron ladders. Still, Pazel’s leg was throbbing again, and the wound felt itchy and inflamed.

  When they reached Hercól, Neeps shouted to those above: “You can all come at once. That vine won’t break, it’s thick as a hawser!”

  “Like your head, Undrabust, more’s the pity!” hissed Hercól. “Do you want to announce us to the sorcerer, and whatever else may dwell here? The next time you shout, I expect to find you menaced by something at least as deadly as a flame-troll.”

  The tarboy glowered, abashed. The others descended without incident. Even the dogs managed well enough, scrambling down almost on their bellies. Pazel bent and touched the leaf surface: it was spongy, like the inside of a gourd.

  When they were all on the lower level, Hercól picked the dark fruits: six in all, very juicy and soft. He placed them carefully in the pack Alyash wore. “They certainly smell delicious,” he said, “as they would, if they were meant to lure us down here.”

  “Call me lured, then,” said Big Skip. “Your mül lasts a fair spell in the stomach, I’ll admit. But not this long.”

  “You can see the branches, farther in,” said Ensyl. “And there in the distance: that may be a trunk.”

  Pazel could make out a few of the pale, slender branches, piercing the leaf on which they stood and dividing overhead, to prop up the uppermost level like the beams of a roof. But he could not see any trunk. It was too dark already: about as dark as the berth deck at twilight. And this, he thought, is just the first level down. He glanced back up along the vine and saw a sliver of blue sky, and wondered what on earth they were getting themselves into.