Kurik laughed a bit ruefully. “I should have remembered that,’ he said.
‘Remembered what?’ Talen asked him.
“Rotten logs and the like glow in the dark sometimes. ‘
“I didn’t know that.’
‘You’ve spent too much time in cities, Talen.’
“You have to go where your customers are,’ the boy ~shrugged. ‘You don’t make much profit swindling frogs.’
They rode on through the first hours of night in that faint greenish glow, covering their noses and mouths with their cloaks. Not long before midnight they reached a steep, forested ridge. They rode on for some distance and then set up camp for the remainder of the night in a shallow, wooded basin where the night air seemed unusually sweet and pure after the endless hours in the fetid stink of the dead forest. The prospect they viewed the following morning as they crested the ridge was not a great deal more encouraging. What they had faced the previous day had been dead white. What lay in store for them today was just as dead, but it was black.
.What on earth is that?’ Talen gasped, staring out over the bubbling expanse of sticky-looking black muck.
“The tar-bogs Kring mentioned,’ Sparhawk replied.
““Do we go around them?’
“No. The tar seeps out of the face of a cliff, and the bogs run on for leagues out into the foothills.’
The tar-bogs appeared to be vast puddles of shiny black, glistening wet, bubbling and stretching to a rocky spur perhaps five miles to the south. Near the far side there rose a plume of bluish flame quite nearly as tall as the spire rising above the cathedral of Cimmura.
“How can we hope to cross that?’ Bevier exclaimed.
‘Carefully, I’d imagine,’ Ulath replied. ‘I’ve crossed a few quicksand bogs up in Thalesia. You spend a lot of time probing in front of you with a stick – a long one, preferably. ‘
“The Peloi have the trail marked,’ Sparhawk assured them. ‘They’ve poked sticks into solid ground.”
“Which side of the sticks are we supposed to stay on?’
Kalten asked.
‘Kring didn’t say,’ Sparhawk shrugged. “I imagine we’ll find out before we go very far, though.’
They rode down the ridge and moved at a careful walk out into the sticky black quagmire. The air hanging above the bogs was thick with the penetrating odour of naphtha, and Sparhawk began to feel somewhat light-headed after a short distance.
They plodded on, their pace slowed by the need for caution. Great viscous bubbles rose up from the depths of the naphtha sinks around them to pop with odd belching sounds. When they neared the southern end of the bog, they passed the burning pillar, a column of blue flame that roared endlessly as it shot up from the earth. Once they had passed that blazing shaft, the ground began to rise and they were soon out of the bogs. Perhaps it had been the heat from the burning gasses spurting from the earth that made the contrast so noticeable, but when they left the bogs behind, the air seemed much, much colder.
“We’ve got weather coming,’ Kurik warned. ‘Rain at first most likely, but I think there might be snow behind it.’
‘No trip through the mountains is complete without snow,’ Ulath observed.
‘What are we supposed to look for now?’ tynian asked Sparhawk.
‘That,’ Sparhawk replied, pointing at a high cliff with broad yellow bands running diagonally across its face.
‘Kring gives very good directions.’ He peered on ahead and saw a tree with a patch of bark slashed away. ‘Good,’
he said. “The trail to the pass is marked. Let’s ride on before the rain starts.’
The pass was in fact an ancient stream-bed. The climate of Eosia had changed over the eons, and as Zemoch had grown more and more arid, the stream which had patiently carved the narrow ravine had dried up at its source, leaving a steep gully running back up into the towering cliff.
, As Kurik had predicted, the rain began in the late afternoon.
It was a steady drizzle that dampened everything.
“Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit called from the rear. “I think you should take a look at this. ‘
Sparhawk reined in and rode back. ‘What is it, Berit?’
Berit pointed towards the west where the sunset was no more than a lighter shade of grey in the rainy sky. In the ~centre of that lighter spot hovered an amorphous cloud of inky black. ‘It’s moving the wrong way, Sir Sparhawk,’
Berit said. ‘All the other clouds are moving west. That one’s coming east, right towards us. It looks sort of like the cloud those dawn-men were hiding in, doesn’t it? The one that’s been following us?’
Sparhawk’s heart sank. ‘It does indeed, Berit. Sephrenia!’
he called.
She rode back to join them.
‘It’s there again,’ Sparhawk told her, pointing.
‘So I see. You didn’t expect it to just go away, did you, Sparhawk?’
‘I was hoping. Can we do anything?’
‘No.’
He squared his shoulders. “We keep going then,’ he said.
The steep ravine wound up through the rock, and they followed it slowly as evening began to descend. Then they rounded a sharp bend in the ancient course and saw a rockslide, which was not a slide strictly speaking, but rather a collapsed wall – a place where the south face of the gap had broken free and fallen into the ravine to apparently block it entirely.
“That’s fairly intimidating,’ Bevier observed. “I hope Kring gave you good directions, Sparhawk.’
‘We’re supposed to bear to the left here,’ Sparhawk told them. ‘We’ll find a clump of limbs and logs and brush on the downhill side of the rockfall right up against the north wall of the ravine. When we pull those out of the way, we’ll find a passageway leading under the slide. The Peloi use it when they ride back into Zemoch looking for ears.’
Kalten wiped his face. ‘Let’s go and look,’ he said.
The pile of broken-off trees and tangled brush looked quite natural in the rapidly fading light, and it appeared to be no more than one of those random accumulations of driftwood and debris which wash down every ravine during the spring run-off. Talen dismounted, climbed up a steeply slanted log and peered into a dark gap in the tangle. “Hello,’ he shouted into the opening. The sound of his voice returned as a hollow echo.
‘Let us know if someone answers,’ Tynian called to him.
“This is it, Sparhawk,’ the boy said. ‘There’s a large open space behind this pile.’
‘We may as well get to work then,’ Ulath suggested. He looked up at the rainy, darkening sky. ‘We might want to give some thought to spending the night in there,’
he added. ‘It’s out of the weather, and it’s getting dark anyway. ‘
They fashioned yokes from pieces of driftwood and used the packhorses to pull aside the pile of logs and brush.
The mouth of the passageway was trianBular, since the outward side leaned against the north face of the ravine.
The passage was narrow and smelled musty.
‘It’s dry,’ Ulath noted, “and it’s out of sight. We could go back in there a little way and build a fire. If we don’t dry our clothes off, these mailshirts are going to be solid rust by morning.’
‘Let’s cover this opening first, though,’ Kurik said. He didn’t sound too hopeful about the notion of trying to hide behind a brush-pile from the shadowy cloud which had followed them since Thalesia, however.
After they had covered the opening, they took torches from one of the packs, lit them and followed the narrow ~passageway a hundred yards or so to a Place where it widened out.
“good enough?’ Kurik asked.
‘At least it’s dry,’,’ Kalten said. He kicked at the Sandy floor of the passage, turning up a chunk of bleached wood buried there. ‘We might even be able to find enough wood for a fire.
They set up their camp in the somewhat confined space and they soon had a small fire going.
talen came back from the passageway on ahead. ‘It goes on for another few hundred yards,’ he reported.
the upper end’s blocked with brush the same way the lower one was. Kring’s very careful to keep this passage hidden.
.What’s the weather like on up ahead?’ ~Kurik asked.
There’s some snow mixed with the rain now, father. ‘
‘It looks as if I was right then. Oh, well, we’ve all been snowed on before, I guess.’
‘Whose turn is it to do the cooking?’ Kalten asked.
“Yours,’ Ulath told him.
‘It can’t be mine again already.’
“Sorry, but it is.
Grumbling, Kalten went to the packs and began to rummage around.
The meal consisted of Peloi trail rations, smoked mutton, dark bread and a thick soup made from dried peas.
It was nourishing, but the flavour was hardly spectacular.
After they had finished eating, Kalten began to clean up.