Even the outdoors smelled bad enough, Rap thought. Those heaps of drying seaweed over there would make good bedding, the villagers said.
Right now a bank of shingle would make good bedding. The kelp, when he was led to it, proved to be springy and less smelly than he had feared. It crackled and popped in his ears when he moved, but he was not expecting to move much.
He closed his eyes and indulged in one last-long-slow—yawn. And was asleep.
Gathmor shook him awake in pitch darkness. “Sh!”
“Huh? What time is it?”
“Sh, I said! ‘Bout midnight.”
Rap noted Jalon kneeling, half up, grumpily rubbing his eyes. “What’s wrong? Won’t be dawn for hours.”
“We’re going to leave now,” Gathmor whispered. “On the tide. ”
“But . . . Oh!” Down on the beach lay the village’s four dugout canoes, one of which Gathmor had borrowed earlier, and then returned. ”Steal . . . ?” Blurred with sleep, Rap tried to imagine the amount of labor involved in making a dugout canoe with stone tools.
“Ride the tide to Puldarn,” Gathmor added in a determined whisper. ”We’ll be there by nightfall.”
Rap was not going to steal a canoe.
Rap was not going to Puldarn. Rap was going to Zark.
But to tell Gathmor that would mean a brawl, and he didn’t feel like fighting a jotunn right now, in the middle of the night. The seaweed crackled and crunched as he raised his head, although he didn’t need to do that to see.
“No we won’t.”
Now it was Gathmor who made the “Huh?” sound.
“She’s posted guards,” Rap mumbled. “Six of them, on the beach. They’ve got spears and axes.” He lay back and crackled himself comfortable again. “And they’re all awake,” he added with sleepy satisfaction. He rolled over and went back to sleep. Gathmor ran off a string of nautical obscenities.
He didn’t think to go and see for himself.
4
The western descent was taking longer than the ascent had, which Inos considered unfair. The food was running out and the nights were cold and there was nothing to see except endlessly winding walls of rock. The valley widened, it brought in tributaries, and it steadily descended; it just would not arrive anywhere.
Wolves lived in those hills and howled after sundown; Azak had reported bear tracks. He chose defensible campsites on principle, being a distrustful man.
On the fourth night of the descent he found a cave that had once been an arched gateway into a small castle, most of which had been swept away or overthrown by old floods. Mud had settled around the rest until little was now visible above the grass and bushes; but the barrel roof of the adit was there and one end was blocked by rubble. Azak insisted he could hold it singlehanded against an army.
Inos and Kade huddled together through yet another frigid mountain night, wrapped up in their two blankets like a single load of laundry. Azak did not seem to sleep at all, sitting crosslegged by the fire, scowling at the darkness of the valley outside. He said afterward that he saw eyes out there once, but the howling never came really close.
Chilled and stiff, the travelers settled for a quick snack of dates and stale bread at first light, then broke camp. The valley had perversely narrowed again. Its beetling walls still clutched the nighttime chill, holding the sun at bay and filling the air with blue shadow. Even the mules seemed glad to be on their way.
The road they had followed down from the pass continued, broken here and there where it had been washed away or buried. The scale of it fascinated Azak. He had been speculating on what great king or sorcerer could have attempted such a work, for much of the roadbed was paved with huge slabs, and other parts had been chiseled out of bedrock, and six men could have ridden it abreast. It leaped chasms on rainbows of masonry as graceful as arrows’ flights. In its prime it must have been a marvel. He tried to estimate how many had labored for how long to create it, and seemed awed by his answers. It must be more than a thousand years old, he pointed out, and it would obviously last as long again. Yet perhaps he and his companions were the first to travel it in centuries.
Even when buried in soil, the highway had often resisted tree roots. Then it formed a ribbon of turf snaking through the forest. Conifers had dwindled; here the valley was filled with hardwoods. The frothy white stream had become a river of stature, still flowing strangely milky water.
Nothing like a mule ride to shake out the last crumbs of sleep. “These eyes you saw,” Inos said. “Were they mundane?”
Azak chuckled throatily. “I’m still here, my love.” Not demons.
They had talked the old tales to tatters. Azak believed in the demon hypothesis. Someone in that awful war had released demons, and a few still lingered, preying on hapless travelers, but not so many that they caught everyone who came through. Not much anyone could do about demons except hope to stay out of their way.
Inos did not like the idea of demons. She preferred the invisibility story, which said that Ulien’quith had rendered all pixies invisible, and their descendants lived on like that still, under their own warlock. Azak scoffed at that. If pixies were at all like other men, he said, they would have long since used their invisibility advantage to conquer the whole world.
Now Inos was beginning to fashion a theory of her own—that the missing travelers were ensnared by curses of nonarrival. This valley, for example, never seemed to be getting to anywhere. Perhaps she and Kade and Azak would ride down it forever, or until they died of old age.
She was just about to mention that cheerful possibility when the travelers rounded a bend and saw their first pixie standing in the middle of the road. The flash of Azak’s sword alarmed his mule. The others reacted along with it, and for a moment there was confusion. By the time the animals were calmed, though, their riders could see that the danger had been over for ten centuries.
They rode cautiously forward to inspect the solitary figure. Weathering had pitted the grayish surface and blotched it in white and yellow lichen, but all the details and features were clearly visible still—a perfect statue of a youth running; naked because whatever garments he had been wearing had long since rotted away. Silt had washed in around him until now he was buried to the ankles, and the grass stalks waved around his knees. He could not have been much older than Inos, and the face he raised to the mountains ahead seemed to her to be filled with stern resolution, a determination to conquer no matter what the cost.
Inos reined in the lead mule and dismounted. Kade remained in the saddle, four mules back, and pulled out her breviary so she would not appear to be looking. Inos had seen much worse than mere nudity among the statuary in Rasha’s bedroom. Azak had come to stand beside her and would be noting her reaction. She must demonstrate the sophisticated attitude of an Imperial lady. It was only stone, no excuse for prudery. So that’s what they look like?
“A messenger,” she said sadly. “Running to warn someone?”
“Or a coward running away?”
“No.” Sorrow soaked into her bones like the damp of the gloomy valley. The shadows chilled her heart—a road going nowhere, traveled by no one, a boy turned into a monument to a lost cause.
“That is not the face of a coward,” she said. “The eyes are strange . . . pixie eyes?”
“They’re sort of elvish,” Azak said, “set at an angle. But not big enough. And sort-of-elvish ears, too, but not pointed enough. He’s too brawny for an elf. They’re skinny. Too much chest for an imp, and not enough for a dwarf. And that stepped-on nose looks faunish. A little bit of everything. I suppose he was a pixie.”
Inos saw nothing wrong with the nose. Not every man looked good with the eagle beak of a djinn.
She moved closer, until she was between the figure and the peaks, so the unseeing eyes glared right at her. The gray stone, roughened by centuries of rain and wind, was yet eerily realistic, like a living man coated in mud.
“Turn back, pixie,” she said. “They can’t hear your message. They won’t come to your call.” She expected Azak to make fun of her, but he seemed to have caught the same dark mood.
“The Accursed Place may have worse things to show us yet.” She shook her head. “Nothing could be sadder than this. Go home, pixie, back to your loved ones. Tell them the war is over.”