by Tom Deitz
“Or we could get off this place—which would at least expand our options.”
Avall nodded again. “We’ll have to. We’ve already seen that there are more caves in the cliffs opposite ours, and the landscape looks pretty ragged there—so I think we can reach the top fairly easily. The trick is going to be getting there.”
“I assume you’ve ruled out swimming?”
“Well, we all can swim except Kylin, and even he can manage if someone helps him—when he’s conscious, which he isn’t. But it looks to be almost two shots from here to there, which is a fair distance, especially if we want to take anything else across. We could use logs as floats, of course, but unless we can jump there by gem power, it seems to me we’re looking at building rafts. Which brings us back to Kylin. Obviously we can’t leave him here, but, unless he comes around in some manageable way, some kind of raft appears to be our only choice.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Rann said through a grin.
“What?”
“Riff. He’s a shipwright by clan. We tend to forget that, because we’ve always known him as a soldier and as Myx’s bondmate. But he’s Ioray by birth, which is incredible luck, if you ask me. If it even is luck. I—”
He broke off. Straight ahead rose a screen of laurel twice as high as their heads and maybe two spans deep, splitting the trail neatly. “Left,” Avall decided. “It looks like the growth is thinner that way.”
“Slope’s not as steep, either.”
“Lead the way.”
Rann did. And while the land was rockier thereabouts, the undergrowth was commensurately less dense. So it was that before long they found themselves following the bottom of a defile where rocks rose higher than their heads—until they ended in the merest scrap of stony beach. It was no more than a span wide, and stretched south but not north, with boulders taking over again in the latter direction. Even so, it was enough to provide the clearest view yet of the strange place in which they were now marooned.
“Beautiful,” Rann said, sinking down on a convenient boulder.
And so it was.
Ahead and to the left, the island tapered inward to a cone at least a shot above their heads. It was a fairly steep taper, too, but not so much it could not support a good growth of trees, mostly conifers, but also some tall broad-leafed trees neither Avall nor Rann could identify. The ground—what they could see of it—sported a lavish cover of ferns and moss, ornamented with a fine selection of wildflowers. Avall was glad to see the latter, as many wildflowers had medicinal properties. The summit was forested as well, though the trees there didn’t look to be as tall as those lower down. But there were also at least three places where naked stone showed, notably the cave where they’d sheltered, which was clearly visible. Avall sniffed the air appreciatively, only then aware that it was utterly devoid of the scent of smoke and horseflesh that had haunted his nose for days.
“Coastline curves around out of sight,” Rann observed, pointing straight ahead. “That fits with my fire-mountain theory, as does the fact there also seem to be a fair number of declivities running down from the peak. I’ll bet if we were to look down on this place from above, we’d see a many-pointed star.”
“We would,” Avall agreed dreamily. “I have seen it from above …”
“Later,” Rann grunted, rising to hop lightly atop a higher boulder to Avall’s right. Small waves lapped against the shore. Avall scooped up a handful of water and drank it absently. It tasted good, though with what he could only describe as a slightly “dark” flavor, with a hint of salt that made him wonder if there might not be some kind of connection to the western sea. He had started to let his gaze drift toward the curve of cliffs, when he caught a flash of movement to the left, where the island’s nearer shoreline bent around out of sight. Birds, it turned out: a considerable flock of good-sized ones wheeling and swooping, but never venturing far from land. Even as he watched, one arced down, skimmed the lake’s surface, and rose again, with what had to be a fish flipping in its talons. Which relieved some of his concern about food.
They were noisy, too, their raucous cries enough to draw Rann’s attention that way. “Rocks look steep there,” Rann observed, “which I bet means they nest there, like in the sea cliffs up past North Gorge. There’ll be eggs, if we’re brave enough to get ’em. Those lads look big enough to give a fellow a solid peck.”
“We’ll wear armor,” Avall shot back with a grin. “That may be all it’s good for down here.”
“Down here,” Rann echoed. “I—Oh, Eight, look!” he cried, pointing at the juncture of land and lake.
Something had risen from the offshore waters: something serpentine and senuous, and as long as a man was tall. It appeared to have a head at the end, and that head looked to be snapping at the birds. All at once the beast heaved itself upward in a leap that took its forequarters clear of the water, which revealed a thicker torso and what might be either forelegs or fins. It was too far away, at half a shot, to tell for certain.
Avall scooted back from the shore reflexively, scanning the nearer wavelets anxiously. “Looks half like a geen, half like a serpent.”
“One of those big serpents like they have in southern Ixti, maybe,” Rann offered.
Avall scrambled up on the rock beside him, and found even that not as far above the water as he would have liked. “Puts a few restrictions on swimming, I’d say,” he gasped.
Rann nodded ominously. “And let’s hope there aren’t many of them, that they’re exclusively aquatic, and that, if they’re not, they den on the mainland, not here.”
“We’ll have to explore the entire coast to confirm that last,” Avall observed. “All of us. With arms. In armor.”
“Tomorrow at the soonest,” Rann gave back, “given what we’ve still got on our plate today.” Without comment he scrambled to a higher rock. Avall followed. This one—hopefully—was higher than the water-beast’s head could reach.
In any event, it gave them a better vantage on the opposite shore, which bent somewhat closer there. Even so, it was hard to tell much beyond the already established fact that the lake seemed ringed with what was effectively a wall of cliffs, though swaths of vegetation showed as well, as did the darker slashes of caves. “Doesn’t look like we can make landfall just anywhere over there,” Avall opined. “We’ll have to target someplace where we can actually get upshore as well as onshore. Optimally someplace we can make it over the ledge at the top.”
“Agreed,” Rann said, wiping his brow. “Want to explore that other branch?”
Avall checked the sun, which still had a fair way to go until noon. “We’ve got time.”
The other fork skirted the merest thread of beach for only a dozen spans before it was interrupted by a waterfall that slid down rocks thrice as high as either of their heads, beside which a fallen tree trunk made a convenient ladder up to the rocky rim of a small pool four spans across, which ultimately proved to be the lowest of four, all connected by cataracts. There were fish, too, but none longer than a forearm. “If nothing else, we’ll be clean,” Rann sighed, rising from where he’d been sampling the water from the last one. “And look: The feeder stream turns back toward our cave.”
And so it did. It was a much less precipitous slope, too, running a quarter shot above the route by which they had departed, though the stream kinked sharp left half a shot from the cave, so that they had to scramble through raw woods the last part of the way, and jump down a bank at the end, which put them back on the trail from which they had commenced.
Myx handed them mugs of what looked and smelled like cauf once they returned to the fire pit. He looked smug. Avall wondered why, even as he sampled the brew. It tasted odd, but not bad.
Rann scowled at his uncertainty.
Myx motioned to a clump of dried ferns spread across his cloak. “Found these just around the corner when I went out to piss,” he explained. “Clanless folks use it to extend cauf, when they can’t afford as much of the real
thing as they’d like. It won’t hurt us, and it even has some of the same energizing effect if you don’t mind your cauf having a bitter edge.”
“One problem solved,” Avall chuckled, as he sank down and tugged off his boots.
“Here come the others,” Rann prompted, even as a noise drew Avall’s attention that way.
The first thing they noticed was that every single member of the returning party was even wetter and muddier than Avall and Rann had managed to get themselves. Bingg looked like he was trying not to grin. Lykkon looked by turns almost giddily happy and pensive—which was becoming typical for him.
Myx passed them cauf as well, which evoked the same commentary as before. “You lads look like you have a lot to tell,” Avall observed, noting that Bingg was divesting himself of his muddy boots and sodden tunic. “Why don’t you go first, then we’ll brief you?”
Lykkon and Riff exchanged glances, as though trying to determine who should take precedence. Riff was older, but Lykkon was kin to the King.
Finally, Lykkon cleared his throat. “Do you want the good part first, the bad part first, or—?”
“Start with the bad,” Avall advised, leaning back against a cushion with his arms folded across his chest. “We also saw something troubling.”
Lykkon nodded. “I have to start with a good thing, though. We made it to the top with no problem, and you can see pretty well up there, since the trees are no more than a fringe around a lake that fills the top, about which more anon. In any case, there’s a finger of stone up there that wasn’t hard for someone light and nimble like Bingg to climb, which he did. He could see the whole place, and you’re right: This is an island, almost round, and almost exactly in the center of the lake. The cliffs that ring it are much of a height, too, though I think they’re less steep to the east.”
“Nothing bad so far,” Avall murmured, surprised to find himself getting drowsy.
“No,” Lykkon agreed. “Not here—not that we saw. But on the opposite shore—well, it’s a good thing I had a distance lens with my gear, and that I took it. I used it to survey the other side pretty thoroughly, and I saw something moving over there. I was hoping for deer or mountain goats. What I saw, unfortunately, was geens. Not a lot, but there’s what looks like a trail over there going from one of the caves up to the top of the cliffs, and I saw several going up and down it. In other words, they have a nest over there. Which means—”
“Which means,” Avall finished for him, “that we don’t have free license to make landfall just anywhere—assuming we can even get there.”
“Which assumes we can’t get somewhere else entirely with the gem,” Myx added from where he was tending Kylin, who had evidently soiled himself, to judge by a sudden whiff of foul odor.
“I may try that sooner rather than later,” Avall sighed through a sip of cauf. “Probably right after lunch, which I’d hope would be right after we finish these reports.”
“Sounds good,” Lykkon agreed, which prompted Riff to start sorting through a pile of large wet leaves he had brought with him—which in turn produced a handsome fish as long as his forearm. He had already beheaded and gutted it.
“Part of the good news,” Riff offered dryly. “Actually, there’s quite a lot of that. As we said, the top of this place is a large pond or a small lake. More to the point, it’s warm—even steaming in places—so we’ve got a nice place to bathe. Even better, the water precipitates salt there, so we’ve got a source of that as well.”
“And the fish?” Rann inquired.
Bingg looked smug. “Twig spear, and luck. Of course I had to go in after it, which explains me being wet, and then I wound up having to scramble up a muddy bank, which explains the rest.”
“We found another stream not far off,” Avall informed them. “We won’t lack for fresh water.”
“And what else did you fellows learn?” Lykkon inquired, after the fish had been spitted and set to roast above the fire.
“Like you lads,” Avall began, “good news and bad.” And with that, he told them about the long-necked creatures in the lake.
“Don’t think I want to do this,” Avall grumbled a hand and half later when, full of fish and well-watered wine, he wiped his knife on the hem of his shirte and scooted back from the fire pit, around which he and his companions had lunched. It was midday now, and getting remarkably warm—so much so that they’d all shed their tunics and boots, and Myx and Riff had doffed their shirtes as well. Without clan colors to differentiate them, the lot of them looked more like brothers than ever, save for Riff’s fair hair and stockier build.
“What did you do with the fragments?” Avall continued, looking pointedly at Rann.
Rann reached into his pouch and produced a smaller one, made from a scrap of bandage sylk. “I gathered up the obvious bits as soon as I could. When I get time—which should probably be soon—I need to give the rug a thorough going over in case anything got left there that might cause trouble later. What kind of trouble,” he added, “I don’t know. But it strikes me that even small shards of the gem might cause problems if one got in the wrong place.”
And with that, he passed the pouch to Avall.
Avall weighed it in his hand, then scowled and undid the twist of string that was the bag’s only closure. He did not tumble the contents into his hand, however, but set the sylk on a flat stone between his legs and peered down at what he had just revealed.
The gem had been the size of the first joint of his thumb—the size of an eyeball cut in half. Almost a perfect oval, it had also been red with a bluish cast in certain lights, and its depths had held sparks like frozen flame, somewhat like an opal but more brilliant. The surface had been smooth, like a polished river rock.
Now it had been shattered—yet even the fragments displayed symmetry. Though struck with a jeweler’s hammer almost in the center, the stone had not dispersed into random fragments as glass would do, and certainly not in a way that suggested the impact they had suffered. Rather, it had shattered into a series of smaller ovals as though one had taken the master gem and sliced across its width to produce disks of varying thickness, all of them oval in cross section. There were five major ones, plus three slivers so thin they were almost transparent, one of which had broken.
“The question is: Where do I begin?” Avall mused.
“I’d say start with the smallest that still looks viable,” Lykkon suggested. “The very thin ones might be too thin. The others … we have some evidence that the strength the gems display depends on their size.”
“We also have evidence that some are better at some things, some at others,” Avall gave back. “In any case, I suppose your idea is as good as any. Though with my luck, it probably contains memories of Kylin’s madness now—as well as Barrax’s and Rrath’s.”
“Are you going to blood yourself?” Bingg asked anxiously. “And do you want some of us to … bond with you, just in case?”
Avall shook his head. “Yes, to the former, since so many variables have changed. As for the latter: No. But if anything happens, you know what to do.”
And with that, he took a knife he had borrowed from Lykkon and made a tiny incision in the heel of his left hand. Blood oozed forth, though very little, for Avall was being careful. Nor was he letting anyone know how frightened he was. It did no good—unless one had actually experienced firsthand the madness that dwelt in the gem.
He had. And Zeff had, when he’d tried to force Avall to reveal the gem’s secrets all those days ago. That had been terrible, but at least he’d been able to divert some of his horror to a productive end—if wreaking violence on the body, mind, and soul of another human being was productive. In any case, he’d thought even then that the gem might not have been quite so eager to drag him down to death as heretofore. Or maybe it was simply that he had been distracted.
A deep breath, and he selected the smallest viable fragment—it was roughly one quarter the thickness of his little finger—and gingerly picked it up, th
en dropped it into his other palm and closed his bleeding fist around it.
Reality shifted, as it always did. Time slowed, but not as suddenly as once it would have done. And there was, indeed, the expected eager surge of energy, hard on the heels of which came the expected warning, and the expected awareness of lurking death. That death was reaching for him, too, but it was as though it had lost some of its force. No! It was more as though something now lay between him and it, like a layer of ice between a skater and deep water. He let his mind touch that layer experimentally. It felt—if that word could properly be used—like Kylin. Or perhaps it sounded like Kylin or looked like him. It was as if a tiny layer of Kylin’s most essential self had been frozen, then shaved off and inserted between. He pushed at it with his mind—and heard on another level entirely, Kylin groan and call out something unintelligible.
That shocked Avall so much he almost withdrew himself from the gem. Instead, he tried to focus on what he was supposed to be doing: seeing if the thing could jump him—them, rather—away from wherever they were and back to the war it was their responsibility to rejoin.
With that in mind, he tried to relax, to center his awareness on two things alone: the lay of the land as he perceived it and the need to return to the war.
And felt nothing unusual whatever.
He tried harder—and achieved no more.
Harder, trying with all his considerable mental might to picture the camp as he had left it, with the Council Lords gathered in conclave on what must now be noon on the day Zeff’s ultimatum had been supposed to expire.
