Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  Sophie looked less certain. "We need a rest," she told Lestovru.

  Jayjay glanced at her friend. She wasn't breathing any harder than Jay, and she didn't look particularly tired. Well, nowadays Sophie always seemed to be a little tired. Jay got off her bike and pushed it over beside Sophie, and the two of them sat down on the side of the road.

  "What's wrong?" Jay asked her.

  This time the problem wasn't tiredness. "We need to have a plan in case he pulls a gun on us," she said.

  "We rush him together. With any luck, he'll only be able to kill one of us before the other one has had time to disarm him." Jay grinned when she said it, and for a miracle, Sophie smiled back at her.

  The unspoken question hung between them: should they turn back? The situation felt wrong to both of them, and perhaps they could look around and find another guide to take them to Glenraven. Or they could spend the rest of the vacation in Italy. Or they could go home. If either one of them backed out, they were both going to have to; that fact hung in the air as well.

  The question remained unspoken. Sophie said, "I guess we'll take our chances. If he kills us, the names of those intrepid explorers Sophie Ann Cortiss and Julie Jean Bennington Pfiester Tremont Smith will go down in history, right?" Sophie glanced sidelong at her, a wry half-smile on her lips.

  The list of names hit Jay like a gut punch; she laughed, but the laughter was strained, and she caught the change of expression on Sophie's face that told her Sophie hadn't missed the reaction either.

  They grabbed their bikes and waved to the guide that they were ready. He nodded and led off.

  They struggled up one steep incline, caught their breath on the switchback, and started up again. Jay felt sweat popping out in beads on her forehead even though the air was quite cool. She thought, third time was supposed to be a charm. Steven was supposed to be the husband who made me forget the others; he was supposed to be the friend I got to live with. But he wasn't, and I know that now, so why am I dealing with it like this? She started to feel a stitch in her side, and the muscles in her legs burned. I'm running away when I should be sitting down with a lawyer and wrapping up the relationship. I should be holding my head up and going on with my life. This is running. This is hiding. Why am I doing this?

  The switchbacks followed each other in a seemingly endless series; she found herself wondering how the writers of the Glenraven guide could have ever considered the route into the country a "pass." They weren't riding through a pass. They were mountain climbing on wheels.

  When she thought of Glenraven, though, the tingle of excitement still fluttered in her gut.

  Lestovru pedaled upward, keeping his lead and managing to look like he was riding across flatland. Jayjay loathed him for that.

  They rounded another switchback. Ahead, Sophie groaned and gasped, "How much further?"

  "We are nearer," Lestovru called back.

  Nearer. That was vague.

  The air grew colder, and the breeze became stiffer and more of an obstacle in its own right. They weren't high enough to suffer from lack of oxygen due to the thinning atmosphere. Yet.

  Jayjay reached her lowest gear and still struggled, making creeping progress; she wished she had another gear or two below first.

  How much longer can this bloody road go on? she wondered.

  Then the road hit a plateau, and immediately took a sharp jag left and disappeared into a hole in the sheer stone face of a mountain.

  "The lamps, please," Lestovru said. He was short of breath, but not as severely as either Sophie or Jayjay. He didn't smile at all, or congratulate them for reaching the top as most guides would have done. After his other failings, Jayjay was curious about precisely what qualifications he presented to have convinced someone to certify him as a guide for this region.

  They switched on the bike headlights but stood for another moment, resting.

  Jay began to breathe easier.

  "Now, please," Lestovru said. "We still have some distance, and we don't want to arrive late."

  Late? Late for what?

  He slipped onto his bike saddle and took off into the tunnel. Sophie went next, and Jayjay followed, trying to remember any mention of a tunnel in the Fodor's. Her guidebook had said something about the road to Glenraven being in poor repair, but the book hadn't mentioned levitating on bicycles up cliff faces, and even with concentration, she recalled nothing about a tunnel. She hoped the writers of the guide hadn't forgotten other equally significant details.

  The tunnel rose gradually and curved to the right. The gentle incline was still punishing after the mountain road. They quickly left any sign of daylight behind them. The inside of the mountain was warmer than pedaling up the outside of it had been, but certainly not warm. Jay guessed the temperature at about fifty-five degrees.

  In front, Lestovru's light bobbled from side to side as he dodged obstacles on the tunnel floor. He had plenty of stamina, but he didn't ride the bicycle particularly well. To Jay that seemed as ominous a sign as his complete uninterest in the details of the local terrain; he had to be good at something to get a job as a guide, but she couldn't see any area in which he even met minimal expectations. So who was he? A thief? This seemed a hellish lot of work for the little money the two of them carried. Granted, if he wanted to rob them, the tunnel seemed to offer a nice location for it. He could leave their bodies lying in the darkness and it might be years before someone tripped over the skeletons. The dampness and the pervasive chill in the air added atmosphere to such thoughts; the flicker of the bicycle headlights along the rough-hewn stone walls and the grotesque shadows that darted ahead of them like madly pedaling demons began to oppress her spirit. She felt as if the mountain had swallowed her; even though she traveled uphill, she couldn't shake the sensation that she was sinking into the eternal blackness of the earth's stony mantle, never to see the light of day again.

  Lestovru made a sharp right turn, and Jay heard the sound of tires swishing through a puddle. Sophie followed, and for a moment she felt alone, abandoned, as if she were in one of those nightmares where she ran endlessly, and never got anywhere. Then she rounded the corner and got their lights in sight again, and the oppressive solitude lightened.

  But not much. They went around two more corners—a left and a right—and suddenly she realized one of those had been an intersection. The tunnel branched.

  Unmarked, it branched. She wondered if she had missed other branches because she hadn't been looking for them. She imagined lurid scenarios of the three travelers riding on and on, while their lamplight grew weaker and yellower, until one by one the lanterns went out and she and Sophie and the unpleasant, taciturn Lestovru were left listening to the echoes of their own breathing and the maddening drip of water from the walls.

  She tried to keep track of the time that passed; in the darkness, minutes stretched long and longer. They had been in the tunnel half an hour, she thought, trying not to let herself exaggerate, though it seemed half a day. She couldn't see her watch; the sleeve of her jacket covered it, and anyway, last in line as she was, she didn't have enough light to read the dial. But she wished she could. The longer the darkness persisted, the more certain she became that something had gone wrong; that the three of them had gotten off the path and were wandering through some minotaurian labyrinth.

  Then Lestovru turned at another branch, and Sophie, too, moved out of sight. Jay heard her squeak; Sophie wasn't much of a squeaker in normal circumstances. Jay slowed and peered around the corner and down the branch before following. She saw Lestovru. She saw Sophie. No danger. No disasters. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Shrugging, she followed, and instantly her stomach felt like it had been turned simultaneously inside out and upside down. She gasped, started to fall forward over the edge of a cliff she couldn't see, and then both the queasiness and the dizziness passed, and she felt fine.

  Sophie turned another corner. Her delighted, "Daylight!" echoed back through the tunnel, and Jayjay started; h
er attention snapped forward. She pumped the pedals to catch up, and as she went around that last curve, she saw ahead the first glimmer of light on a wall that was not cast by a headlight.

  Jay murmured, "Oh, thank God!" and began to pump faster. Sophie already raced toward the exit. Even Lestovru was not immune to the draw of daylight; his pace picked up as well. The demon cyclists on the walls seemed to be hurrying to outstrip the light that devoured them; the image struck Jayjay with its air of futility, and then the sunlight at the tunnel mouth threw the shadows backward where she didn't have to see them, and Lestovru and Sophie and she burst out of the tunnel onto an overlook that clung to the side of the mountain through which they'd ridden.

  They braked hard. All three sets of bike brakes squealed in unison.

  Jayjay parked her bike and found a boulder at the edge of the overlook, and climbed onto it. Below her lay a vast green valley, dotted with the sapphire of glistening lakes; with the velvet rough of two great, uncut forests; with ethereal spires of impossibly tall, delicate castles that sat on hills and by rivers and on top of little mountains, all with tiny picture-book towns nestled inside their sprawling bailey walls. The whole, ringed by the greater wall of the Alps, looked like it had been lifted in one piece from a gentler terrain and tucked into this out-of-the-way nook for safekeeping. Jay thought she could willingly lose herself in that perfect miniature of a world.

  The photo on the cover of Fodor's didn't do it justice.

  Sophie climbed out onto the rock beside her. "Incredible," she whispered. "I can't quite believe it's here."

  The sun beat down hot on Jayjay's face and the chill breeze blew against her skin, so that she was both hot and cold at once; the feeling was wonderful. She tingled and her heart raced with excitement. Come, the place whispered to her. She'd been waiting all her life to find herself in a fairy tale, and there it lay, before her. It tugged at her far more strongly than it had from a third of a world away. Here, an eager voice promised, here you will find what you've been waiting for.

  What is that? she wondered. What have I been waiting for? She had only part of an answer.

  Glenraven.

  Six

  I'm here, Sophie thought, staring down into the verdant, castle-dotted valley. She rubbed her hands along her knees and glanced at Jay, who was lost in rapt wonder. The place called to her, but its promise frightened her. Here you will find rest and peace. Its promise for her. Rest and peace.

  She knew what that meant. She would never leave Glenraven. She would die down there. Glenraven would give her the road back to Karen, or perhaps the simple silence of nonexistence.

  Rest and peace.

  The wind blew through her hair; she heard its voice in the trees that grew not far below, and in the whispering of the mountain peaks far above. The wind picked up Glenraven's refrain. Rest and peace.

  Perhaps I should have done a better job of saying good-bye to Mitch. Perhaps I should have tied up all my loose ends. Gone to see my parents. Double-checked my will.

  Rest and peace.

  She looked directly over the edge of the boulder. Straight down. Life doesn't hold on by much, she thought. Not much at all. One instant it's here, the next it's gone forever, and nothing and no one can make it last.

  She looked at Lestovru, standing impatient and dour-faced by his bicycle, unimpressed by the beauty of the scene below. Jay still stared, spellbound.

  Do I want peace and rest? Do I really?

  And she thought, yes. I do. I want to sleep at night without seeing Karen on the ground in my dreams. I want to wake and breathe freely, without the weight of sorrow crushing me. I want so much.

  Peace and rest would be enough.

  Lestovru evidently tired of waiting for them to go; he said, "If we do not leave soon, we will miss the closing of the gate."

  His voice snapped Sophie out of her gloomy reverie. Jay backed off the rock; Sophie followed. She would go on to Glenraven, even though something told her this would be her last chance to turn back. Maybe her last chance to do anything. She would go to Glenraven because it offered something she had been able to find nowhere else.

  They were halfway down the twisting road that led to the border when Sophie realized Lestovru wore weapons. He had a crossbow slung across his back, and daggers strapped at both hips.

  When had he done that? While they stopped at the mouth of the tunnel? She hadn't seen him, but then she'd been studying the panorama that lay beneath her.

  The three of them cruised, not pedaling at all; the road down the mountain was nowhere near as steep as the road up had been. Sophie's fingertips touched her brakes from time to time, and every once in a while she reached up to be sure that her helmet was still tightly in place. However, as it had been impossible to talk riding up the mountain, so it was impossible to talk while gliding down. Too many gaping holes marred the ancient pavement; too many tree branches reached across the narrow road at head height.

  Because she couldn't talk, she worried. She worried about Jay, and whatever had convinced her to take this trip. She worried about Lestovru and why she didn't feel she could trust him. Mostly, though, she worried about Glenraven. She had seen the guidebook, she had come out to find the little country, convinced such a place existed in spite of knowing better—in spite of knowing that Western Europe might have tucked Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein away in its borders, but those had all been where they were for a good long time. Nobody could have managed to sneak a new country into Western Europe past her, and Glenraven had never been there before. So why was it there now?

  She worried at her willingness to travel to a place she knew didn't exist. It had something to do with associating with Jayjay, of course. People who hung around Jayjay for too long got to see the mountain walking to Mohammed more often than they cared to explain.

  And here was Glenraven. The mountains were walking.

  Behind a tree-covered knoll, before the road dropped for the final time into the valley, Lestovru braked to a halt and slid off his bike. He was frowning. "We must now stop, before we reach the gate," he told them. "You will have to change your clothing. I brought some clothing—" he shrugged a Gallic shrug, "but I expected men. You will have to wear what I brought for you. This is just as well for the riding, perhaps. The women's clothing, it is not made for bicycle travel and even less for riding the horses. And we do not have for you the carriage. We thought…" He shrugged again and smiled. "No matter."

  "Excuse me," Jay said, "but what do you mean we have to change our clothing? We have on comfortable clothes."

  "They are not appropriate for Glenraven. You will be too…observable? Is that the word?" He stared up and to his right as if he were reading a dictionary someone had left in the branches overhead. "No. Conspicuous. You will be too conspicuous."

  "We're tourists," Sophie said, annoyance clear in her voice.

  "There are no tourists in Glenraven," he told them. Sophie found that remark bizarre.

  Jayjay and Sophie glanced at each other. Sophie could see uncertainty in her friend's eyes.

  Lestovru reached into his own pack and pulled out two bundles of clothing, holding them out to Jay and Sophie.

  Sophie shifted her pack on her shoulders. And what did horseback travel have to do with any of this? Why had they bothered with bicycles?

  Jay finally nodded, stepped forward, and took the bundle he offered her. She watched him warily. "Where do you expect us to change?" she asked the guide. "We're not going to do it in front of you."

  He shook his head. "Of course not. You will be safe enough here for a few moments…but please do not wander off. I will be down the road, behind those trees. Wait for me and I will return for you in a few moments, when you have finished dressing."

  Sophie took her bundle from him. She could just see it. He hadn't needed to rob them in the tunnel. He'd planned the robbery for his own convenience. He'd wait until they were undressed; then he would jump out from behind a tree with his gun pointed at them, and
take everything. Or worse. Maybe he didn't just have robbery in mind.

  While she stood there worrying, he jumped on his bike and pedaled down the hill and around the curve in the road. When he was out of sight, she cleared her throat.

  "This is weird, Jay."

  Jayjay stood in the middle of the road, staring in the direction Lestovru had taken. "Weird," she murmured. "Yes. It is." She shook her bangs out of her face and frowned. "What do you think he's doing?"

  "All of my guesses involve robbery, rape and murder."

  "Mmm. That occurred to me, too." Jay turned to face her. "It's too late now, really. I don't think there's any way we could get ourselves back to Italy through that tunnel without a guide. But I'm wondering about something. You didn't trust Lestovru from the time you met him. You could have said, 'I don't think we should be doing this' at any time, and I would have turned back. Why didn't you?"

  "Why didn't you?" Sophie asked. She'd been wondering the same thing, both about Jay, and about herself. She'd been doing something she knew was stupid and irresponsible and dangerous, and she knew she knew it, and she knew she ought to stop. Yet she'd kept going…and in a minute, she was going to change into the Glenraven clothes and wait for Lestovru to return. Stupid. Stupid. Why?

  Jayjay nibbled on the inside of her cheek, eyes unfocused; she stood still for what seemed to Sophie like a very long time, but which was probably only thirty seconds. "This is going to sound ridiculous," she said at last. "It probably is. But there is something in Glenraven for me. I felt it the moment I saw the book, and I feel it even more now. I had to come here."

  Sophie nodded. "I wish I could say that I didn't know what you mean. I do though." She didn't tell Jay what she thought she would find in Glenraven. Jayjay kept thinking she was going to pick herself up and brush off the pain of the past and move on. Like Mitch, she didn't understand.

  "Still, I'd rather not make it easy for him," Jay said, and when Sophie frowned, she clarified. "I know what we're doing defies all logic…but I don't want to be an easy target. Let's take turns changing."