For a short time, too short a time, all three of them forgot the impending visitation.
30—Mistress Mantelby Investigates
It was almost eighteen years after her parents died that Marool Mantelby, riding in an open carriage in the Riverpark at Sendoph, saw a group of young men escorted by attendants from House Genevois. Marool knew of House Genevois though she had never obtained a Hunk from there. Madame never seemed to have one available. Still, Marool enjoyed looking at the strings of novices and graduates, shopping for companions for her later years. Though she had several companions currently being readied for destruction and no immediate need of additional personnel, in this particular group was a young man whose face, quite visible through its transparent veil, intrigued her. There was something about it that was evocative, and for a moment she thought perhaps he was a nephew, one of her sisters’ children.
As though he felt her stare, he looked up, returning her measuring look with an almost sneering arrogance. He was large and well built and handsome. She liked the cock of his head, that nervy, totally disrespectful stance she found appealing. She went home thinking of him.
She thought of him often over the next few days, scouring recollection as she tried to think who he resembled, happening upon long-repressed memories of her parents, as the child Marool had understood them through fourteen years of covert, obsessive observation. One memory jostled another, which bumped another yet, and she began waking in the night, heart pounding, gasping for breath, pursued by nightmare terrors which, except for a horrific vision of her father’s dead face, vanished before she was even awake. “Marool,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident … “
Finally, after waking three times in one night, she decided to put an end to it by finding out for herself how it was that her parents and sister had died. Everyone had said it was an accident. Her dream vision cast doubt upon that, ripping away almost two decades of complacency to reveal something horrid. If her family’s deaths had been purposeful, she needed to know who had done it, and why.
The mountains of Newholme were not what one thought of as mountains in an Earthian sense: wrinkled, rocky land which, aside from being wrinkled and rocky, was not much unlike other land, that is, solid. The mountains of Newholme were not solid. Every prominence was drilled through with holes, bubbles, passageways, pits, and caverns. Every range was a speleological nightmare of twisting ducts, narrow channels, and precipitous galleries, most identifiable as volcanic in origin. No effort had been made to map the ramified and interpenetrating layers.
Only a few features of the wilderland attracted casual visitors: the Glittering Caves near Naibah; the Cavern of the Sea east of Nehbe; and the Combers, northwest of Sendoph, where an enormous set of lava tubes lay parallel, their southeastern sides eaten away by continual, grit-bearing winds to leave curling waves of rock, an eternal surf intent upon an unseen shore.
Water had penetrated into the Combers and eaten holes into the unseen tunnels below. Winds blew through the holes to make music that trembled up through the feet and could be sensed as a vibration in the bones of the leg or a shivering in the groin. Strange, pallid growths filled in the tunnels, expanding upward and sideways, some of them with tentacles and solar collector leaves and hollow stalks through which the fluids of the world could be seen pulsing.
On the surface, each comber was a linear world, uncrossable by anything without sticky feet to crawl on the underside of a vaulted overhang. If one climbed up the closed side, one could cross to the lip that curved to slick knife edges hanging twenty or thirty meters above the razor-edged fragments below. One could walk along the inside of a comber or clamber about in the soil-filled area between combers, and while doing so, one could fall through into any number of pits and deadfalls. For these and other reasons, people rarely found cause to go to the Combers.
Marool Mantelby’s family had met their deaths among the Combers, and Marool decided to go see for herself. No matter what people said, Marool’s parents would not have gone on a picnic, they would not have gone anywhere together without some strong and so far unfathomable motivation.