strength and concentration to continue putting one foot in front
of the other and to reach out with her hand for one more pull
up. Garth helped her when he could, but there was seldom
room to maneuver, and they were forced to make the ascent
one behind the other.
They saw caves in the cliffs from time to time, dark openings
that yawned silent and empty. Stresa pointedly steered his
charges away from them. When Wren questioned him about
what lay within, the Splinterscat hissed and declared rather
pointedly that she didn’t want to know.
Midafternoon finally brought them to the bottom of the fis
sure and the narrow defile that lay beyond. They stood on flat,
solid ground again, aching and worn, and looked back across
the south end of the island to where it dropped away in a rolling,
misted carpet of green jungle and black lava rock to the azure-
blue sweep of the ocean. Blackledge rose above them to either
side, craggy and misted, stretching in an unbroken wall until it
disappeared into the horizon. Seabirds circled against the sky.
Sunlight appeared momentarily through a break in the clouds,
blinding in its intensity, turning the muted colors of the land
below vibrant and bright. Wren and Garth squinted against its
glare, enjoying the warmth of it against their faces. Then it
faded, gone as suddenly as it had appeared; the chill and damp
returned, and the island’s colors became dull again.
Turning away into the shadow of the fissure, they began to
climb toward the mouth of the narrow pass. Then they were
inside. The cliff rock rose all about them, a hulking, brooding
presence, and wind blew down out of Killeshan’s heights in
rough, quick gusts like the sound of something breathing. It was
cold in the pass, and the Rovers wrapped themselves tightly in
their cloaks. Rain descended in sudden bursts and was gone
again, and the vog spilled down off the rocks in opaque waves.
Twilight had descended by the time they reached the fis-
sure’s end. They stood at the rim of a valley that stretched away
toward the final rise of Killeshan, a green-etched bowl settled
beneath a distant stretch of forestline that lifted to the barren
lava rock of the high slopes beyond. The valley was broad and
misted, and it was difficult to see what lay within. The faint
shimmer of a ribbon of water was visible east, winding through
stands of acacia-dotted hills and ridgelines laced with black
streamers of pitted rock. Across the sweep of the valley, all was
still.
They made camp in the shelter of the pass under an over-
hang that fronted the valley. Night fell quickly, and with the
sky so completely screened away the world about them turned
frighteningly black. The silence of dusk slowly gave way to a
jumble of rough sounds-the intermittent, barely perceptible
rumble of Killeshan, the hiss of steam from cracks in the earth
where the heat of the volcano’s core broke through, the grunts
and growls of hunting things, the sudden screams as something
died, and the frantic whispers as something else fled. Stresa
curled into a ball and lay facing out at the blackness, less quick
to sleep this night. Wren and Garth sat next to him, anxious,
uneasy, wondering what lay ahead. They were close now; the
Rover girl could sense it. The Elves were not far. She would
find them soon. Sometimes, through the black and the haze, she
thought she could catch the glimmer of fires like eyes winking
in the night. The fires were distant, across the valley, high on
the slopes below the treeline’s final stretch. They looked lonely
and isolated, and she wondered if the perception was an accurate
one. How far had the Elves come in their move away from the
Four Lands? Too far, perhaps? So far that they could not get
back again?
She fell asleep finally with the questions still on her mind.
They set out again at daybreak. Morrowindl had become a
gray, misted world of shadows and sounds. The valley fell away
sharply below them as they walked, and it was as if they were