His thoughts reverted to the Magician. Was he really an adept of the magical arts? According to the Steegmaster, magic was a superstition of the unsophisticated. But then Torwald Steeg certainly would have regarded elementals and trolls as superstitions, and the magical control of the weather as an outrageous absurdity. On the whole it might be best to keep an open mind.
But what of Qisib’s statement that when the Magician spoke to Madig, no breath issued from his mouth? Surely that was an impossibility? How could a man utter words without breath? Niall began to experience a sense of being lost in a sea of frightening improbabilities.
Eventually, tiredness overcame him, and he fell asleep again.
He was awakened by the sound of the pigeons, and saw that the sky outside was gray. Soon after that the birds took flight, except for one who remained on the ledge, obviously unable to move under the captain’s gaze. To avoid having to watch it being devoured like a large fly, Niall crawled out of the cave and into the cold, clean wind that blew from the north.
The night before, he had noticed a pool of water in a depression on the rock ledge. This was now covered with a thin film of ice. He drank some of it, crunching the ice, then washed his hands and face in the freezing liquid. After he had dried them on his tunic, he sat on the ledge and watched the sun rise, gilding the face of Skollen until it ceased to look bare and bleak, and became beautiful. Then the light touched the slopes of the northern mountains, and turned their twisted spires into a fairy-tale landscape. Suddenly Niall understood why they were called the Gray Mountains; even in the morning sunlight, they were a misty gray that verged on blue.
When the captain — now looking replete — emerged to enjoy the sunlight, Niall decided to escape the wind, which was raising goose pimples on his arms, and went back inside. There he ate some bread and cheese, wrapped the rest of the food securely in its cloth, and tied the mouth of the haversack, having first taken out the flashlight and secured it to his wrist. Even though he now knew how to share the captain’s ability to see in the dark, he might still need a brighter light.
A few minutes later they set out. The captain went first, his climbing skills making him the obvious leader. Twenty yards into the tunnel, the wisdom of this arrangement became clear when Niall, in spite of using the stick, lost his footing on a smooth patch and slid for a dozen feet before the captain, perceiving the problem with his rearward eyes, halted the movement with his hind legs.
Fortunately, the lava under their feet was full of cracks that had formed as it cooled, and once Niall decided that it would be safer to remove his sandals and progress backwards on all fours, he felt more secure. The stick he fixed across the top of the pack by using the ends of the drawstring.
He was prepared to crawl for a long time, although it was painful to his knees. So it was a pleasant relief when, after less than half an hour, the captain halted and said: “Now we have to go down.” They had arrived at the main chimney in the heart of the mountain.
It was an awesome sight, being about a hundred yards wide. But the flashlight beam showed that its sides were even rougher and more covered in projections than the vent they had just descended. Although Nial disliked heights, he could see at once that any good climber could have made his way down it without a rope.
One thing puzzled him. Was it conceivable that the fugitives from the spider city had come this way? If so, did they know what they were seeking? For surely no one in his right mind would descend a volcano chimney merely to see what was at the bottom.
He was peering into the chimney as he lay on his stomach, holding on to an extrusion like a dog’s ear on the edge of the drop. Now he sat up, reversed his position so his feet were braced against it, and took the rope out of his pack. Not anticipating that he would need it, he had not even bothered to remove it from its container of sacking. Now he untied the rope that held it in a loop, and began to measure its length by paying it out, using the length of his arm as a measure. It took him a quarter of an hour, and he was amazed to learn that he had more than four hundred yards of the light, soft rope.
The problem, he could see, would be how to recover the rope once he had tied it round a projection. But when he explained this to the captain — in the form of an image — the spider instantly saw the answer: to loop the rope around the dog’s ear and then use it doubled. This, of course, would halve its length, but since there were so many projections, this hardly seemed to matter.
Niall expected the captain to lower himself by extruding web from his spinneret — a process Niall had witnessed many times in the spider city. But the captain preferred to crawl over the edge and then move down headfirst, walking as comfortably as on a horizontal surface. The answer, Niall realized, was that the captain was concerned in case he did not have enough silk to reach the bottom.
Niall, after stowing the flashlight in the long pocket of his tunic and heaving at the dog’s ear to make sure it was solid, lowered himself over the edge. He refused to let himself think of what was below, and took care not to let his eyes stray downward, as he moved down hand over hand, gripping the two strands of rope between the sole of one foot and the instep of the other. The spider silk stretched under his weight, but showed no sign of snapping. Since it retained a vestige of stickiness, the two strands stuck together, relieving Niall of his anxiety about what would happen if, in an absentminded fit, he released one of them.
Niall’s main problem was the roughness of the chimney. Projections and excrescences forced him to push away from the surface again and again. And within fifty feet he found his descent blocked by a jutting lump of lava so large that he had to swing himself sideways to get off it. Only then did he see a sharp edge, over which the rope was now stretched, and try to climb back. But the struggle made him so breathless that he decided to risk it, hoping that the captain would save him if the rope was severed.
With twenty feet of rope still left, he found another large projection, shaped like a wart, and was able to sit comfortably, his legs on either side of it, while he tugged at one side of the rope to free it. The stickiness was less of a problem than he expected, and it fell down and on past him, so he had to heave it back up again. Then he once more looped it over the wart, stood up, pressing the two sides together, then lowered himself carefully over the edge.
During the next two hours he repeated this procedure seven times, calculating that he must have descended about a quarter of a mile. But he was becoming increasingly tired, and once even found himself yawning. However, when he was halfway through the seventh lap, and was just beginning to wonder what would happen to his endurance if the chimney was another half-mile long, a telepathic message from the spider announcing that he had reached the bottom renewed Niall’s concentration. And when he was paying out the rope for the ninth time, the spider told him he was close to the bottom, and Niall felt immense relief.
In the last few yards of the descent he suddenly found his feet swinging inward, without a wall to stabilize them, and realized that he must be lowering himself past some kind of cave or tunnel. And since he was now so close to the bottom, he decided to risk clinging with one hand while he groped in his pocket for the flashlight. Making sure it was looped around his wrist, he shone it into the hollow. As he suspected, he was looking into another volcanic vent, which rose at a steep angle. It looked as if their descent down the chimney had been unnecessary — there was probably another entrance lower down. Niall realized that he should have asked the trolls for more precise directions.
Five feet farther down, his feet touched solid ground. He had been promising himself that when he finally arrived at the bottom he would fling himself down and rest until his limbs had ceased to ache. But this was impossible since the bottom of the pipe was blocked by an immense plug of lava with an irregular concave surface, and he was, in effect, standing on top of a hill that was fifty feet high and whose sides, beyond the first ten feet, were almost vertical. There was a gap of a few feet between three sides of the plug and the wall of the chimney.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101