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Seventeen

He'd have one last look around for Gwyn, and then he'd try to get some sleep. Kal had taken his farewell of the slender dark-haired figure standing watch at the entrance to the Cave. His father had a strange fey air about him tonight—unusual for him. Kal shrugged. Must have been his soldier's sense, duty-bound to action, honed again to a fine edge by the dark tide of events that had engulfed the Holding. And much indeed depended on his vigilance. At least he had Dhu for company. The fellhawk had nestled himself in a comfortable cornice in the rocks above the mouth of the Cave.

Kal felt overcome by exhaustion, a deep bone-weariness, his eyelids so heavy it seemed a wonder that he had managed to feel so alert and unsleepy just scant moments ago. He had been reassured by his father's presence, that quiet self-possession that rendered him master of any task or situation, whether it was repairing a broken wheel, or setting a fractured bone, or sitting guard over the few remnant survivors of the bloody slaughter that had swept over his native clanholding.

For the first time, Kal had noticed a broadening of the streak of grey that silvered the raven-black hair on the back of his father's head, just above the nape of the neck. This patch of grey was a birthmark of his, one that he had passed on to his son Kalaquinn, though not to Brendith. Kal smiled. Ah, Brendith, dear brother Bren, sleeping soundly right through the terrifying visit of the night drake. Knowing him, even the Trump of Narses couldn't rouse him from his slumbers. Galli was just the same. Indomitable sleepers, the both of them, even now in this moment of highest danger, when all their lives seemed to be hanging in the balance, awaiting the inevitable assault, awaiting the grim blasts of the hunting horn.

From inside the entrance, Kal slowly swept the cavern with a careful eye, pausing over the dormant forms, holding each for a moment in his gaze before moving to the next, searching again for Gwyn. He was nowhere among the body of Holdsfolk rapt in sleep. This was his second time searching for him here. Kal frowned and shook his head, then stopped beneath the smoke hole by the fire's dying glow. He pulled at his chin and let his mind stray, finding it impossible to shake the pitiful image of his father's fragility and haggard wornness. An oddly sorted weight of compassion and insecurity had fallen on his heart. Enbarr's threats down the smoke hole seemed to still hang in the air above the broken remnant, a dull ring in Kal's ears punctuated by his own heartbeat. How would they survive—these few, now his concern? These so few . . . His heart throbbed. How could he carry them? Chandaris, still on a stretcher, here by his feet, whimpering and restless in his sleep. And Laloke, to whom he had given his rowan, and her brother, and his own brother Bren, and mother . . . Galli . . . Marya . . . Gwyn. And Gwyn—where had he disappeared to? Kal's gaze returned to the great pillar by the Cave's mouth. Creases of worry had lined father's face, creases he had never seen before—deep fretting runnels, like ravines set in ageless rock worn by the unrelenting course of time.

Suddenly, Kal's feeling of tiredness was sloughed off. How could he sleep, while father kept watch alone? He would find the wayward Mommick, wherever he was—he had to be somewhere—then join Father again to keep him company. Kal pulled a fresh torch from a small pile of them that lay to hand beneath the wickerwork dovecote, with its lone pigeon, cooing mournfully in its ward of deepened darkness. Kal held the torch to the feeble coals, smouldering yet in the firepit, and it leaped into life.

"What's that? Is that you, Kal? Everything all right?" Athmas looked up blinking from his pallet, startled from his fragile sleep by the unexpected burst of light.

"Hush, Athmas! Nothing to be alarmed about. Go back to sleep. Don't worry."

Kal had hardly turned away from Athmas before the man had relapsed into the measured rhythm of his rest. Behind him, one of the children cried out in the grips of a nightmare. Kal glanced back that way, and with a sharp pang mumbled a prayer of protection under his breath. All fell silent once again, except for the rattle of snores and the plaintive croodling of the wounded pigeon.

The torch illumined Kal's way to the side chamber wherein lay Wilum's body, enveloped by the close-clinging blanket of darkness, now that the single taper in its sconce upon the wall had failed. Even before he reached it, Kal sensed the sweet-smelling oil with which the women had anointed the old man's head. He stepped around the corner into the chamber itself, where all the nooks and crannies caught the probing glow of fresh torchlight, unveiling the thick pall of darkness.

Still no sign of Gwyn. He half-expected to find the crippled boy had slipped back to hold his station by the slain Hordanu during the time he himself had been speaking with father. Gwyn was like that, a notorious fixture at a death bed, when he seemed, his eyes glazed over and impassive, to enter into silent communion with the hidden world of spirits, who were said to throng the farther mist-wreathed shores of Lake Nydhyn, the Birdless Lake.

"Oh, that mist-headed Mommick!" grumbled Kal, as he turned to leave. In the wheeling torchlight, a small twinkle caught his eye. Its sparkle blinked out at him from the ground at the far end of the room. Whatever it was, it reflected the light that streamed unevenly from his torchbearing hand, for as soon as he moved his arm to the left, away from it, there was nothing to be seen but a gloomy patch of blackness. There it was again, when he drew his arm towards it once more—as slight as a single fading firefly. Kal moved forward. The thing lay just inside the entrance of a passageway that radiated out from the tapering end of the chamber. To the right of it, at chest height, gaped the hole down which Relzor had shoved the sack of manuscript scrolls, before fleeing from the scene of his terrible crime. Strange to think that a mere few hours separated life from death, that a short while ago Wilum had lived and breathed and given counsel to his decimated clanfellows. Now he lay there lifeless, while Relzor gloated somewhere down in the valley below, safe under the protection of his newfound master.

Kal stooped to feel the ground with his fingers and found something small and round, hard to the touch. Two such things. He picked one of them up and recognized it as a marble. Two marbles, by the welkin! In the centre of each of them were embedded two crossed flakes of silver—the reason they had reflected back the light of his torch. The floor of the passage had turned soft here, earthen rather than rocky, and Kal thought he felt a breeze playing ever so slightly through the tunnel, tugging gently at the oily flames that curled up from the pine pitch of his torch.

There were footprints, fresh ones, soft-shod. They were Gwyn's, Kal could tell, judging by the impress of his club foot and the highland cut of the footgear, just as he was sure the marbles belonged to the boy. Kal shot a quick glance down the tunnel. Gwyn's tracks continued on into the unlit murk, disappearing into the black beyond of the passageway. What could he be doing, the crazy pixie-led Mommick? Kal's mind turned to the countless rueful stories of men led to their lonely ruin deep in the labyrinthine bowels of the earth by the beckonings of hidden folk, who in their subterranean lairs nursed their ill will towards creatures of light. Gwyn knew he was not to leave the confines of the Cave of the Hourglass. Why had he gone into the tunnel? Certainly, he was a curious lad, but it was not like him to disobey.

Kal lit a second torch, which he left in its bracket on the wall near the opening, and took a few tentative steps forward, taut and wary, sweeping the passage with his eyes. As far as he could tell, the tunnel continued on straight in an oblique direction towards the left, without dipping or rising. There seemed no harm in going on a bit farther. What if Gwyn was in trouble? He might even be lost already. Kal paused a moment to listen. There was nothing but a deep silence. For an instant, he lost his nerve and glanced back to the chamber, bathed in the soft torchlight, supposing that it might not be ill-advised at this point to fetch Galli or Bren or Thurfar Fletcher. But then, why disturb them from their sleep? Surely, Gwyn would not have gone far. He must be close by. Besides, the way back was straightforward enough. He would venture just a bit farther, and see what he could find on his own, before he turned back.

He followed Gwyn's tracks for another sixty paces, looking back time and again to the torchlit mouth of the passage. The footprints were evenly spaced, but a shorter stride than Gwyn would normally have taken. It struck Kal as odd. It was as if Gwyn was walking tentatively, in slow measured paces. At the verge of his torchlight, Kal saw a staggered step in the tracks. The lad must have stumbled. As Kal approached, he saw a second set of tracks between Gwyn's misstepped footprints, still progressing at an even and unbroken pace, just as Gwyn's had until now. Of course, it dawned suddenly on Kal, Gwyn had been following someone else's tracks down the tunnel! But whose? Kal stooped to look more closely. The strange footprints were a man's, unshod, but small and narrow. Gwyn had followed the footprints of the stranger, walking in them, making a game of it, his own heavy footfalls obliterating the smaller prints, until here, where he had stumbled.

"Gwyn, what were you thinking? Where have you gone?" Kal spoke into the darkness farther down the tunnel. He stood and hurried along, fear for his young friend goading him on.

Now the ceiling sank to half its previous height. Kal was forced to stoop, bent over, while thrusting the torch out ahead of himself. Still Gwyn's tracks, sometimes overlapping the stranger's, stood out, shadowcast in the soft floor. Kal had keyed himself to them like a bloodhound, when he came to a fork in the tunnel.

The tracks had disappeared on the threshold of this underground crossroads, the ground having become hard, like the stone floor of the main chamber. He thrust his torch inside each of the branching tunnels, looking for some clue as to where Gwyn was headed. Kal was all for having a try at the right-hand route, for it seemed to him that the last traces of the footprints were skewed in that direction.

Then again, in that moment, he caught the small glinting reflection of light, now familiar to him. It was some four or five strides on, inside the left branch of the fork. Kal pushed in and stooped to seize the tiny glass ball, its silver flecks winking in the torchlight. "Aye, he's surely lost his marbles," Kal whispered in the close passage. "Must be a hole in the lad's pouch. Or he's left a trail—Yes, the clever fellow!" He lunged on through the gap with the marbles clutched in his palm and in ten more paces was relieved to be able to lift up his back and stretch his frame to its full height, for the ceiling rose here, even as the walls widened.

Kal looked again at the marbles glinting in his hand. There was no more trail of footprints to follow on the hard tunnel floor, but Gwyn had gone this way. There was no doubt. The tunnel just ahead cut sharply to the left, disappearing around a bend. He looked again at the marbles he held, stooped and placed one in the centre of the path by his feet. The way back. He broke into a jog, the torch before him bobbing as he shot around the corner. The floor disappeared. Kal caught himself short at the lip of a yawning hole. He teetered, his arms windmilling, letting go of marbles and torch.

The next thing he knew, his feet had slipped, and he was in a free fall, his arms and legs flailing in the empty air. The torch plummeted down, cartwheeling before him, lighting up the ghastly underground cavern into which he had fallen. In sheer terror, Kal screamed again and again at the top of his lungs. It was a timeless moment, drawn and stretched out of proportion, a moment that held an exquisite distillation of horror for Kal, who felt his life balanced on the shapeless boundaries between time and eternity.

He would be dashed to pieces against an underground rock or impaled on the needled point of a stalagmite. Wheeling in the air, he braced himself for it. The light vanished. His body struck something soft and yielding. There was a splash and then silence. He was immersed in a weightless blackness. Water. At least it felt like water. He struggled to regain the surface, not even sure which way was up, his unprimed lungs aching for air. He was dazed, and the totality of the darkness around him was overwhelming. Disoriented, Kal treaded water for a moment to clear his head. Then, when he had struggled free of the straitening cobwebs of shock and found himself intact, a dreadful panic, fostered by the coal-black lightlessness, seized him. Here he was, floundering in deep water with no idea how he might even begin to make good his escape from it. And it was warm water—odd for a pool buried deep in the mountains. Like bathwater, not right somehow. Perfect for some fell creature of the dark. And it was fast-flowing, sweeping him along in its current. Kal found himself too stunned to swim against it. An acrid smoky smell filled his nostrils, and it took him a moment to realize it must be the doused torch.

All at once, almost before he'd had half a chance to catch his breath, he found himself cast down another terrific drop, thrust down a pitch, steep and sudden. It was savage, a world of turbulent rushing fluid sightless sound that swept away all vestiges of control from him, pushing him farther into the innermost parts of Mount Thyus, sealing him in its dark mysterious tomb. Again, it seemed from the sudden headlong violence of the fall that death awaited him. Again, he was plunged into a depth of water in utter darkness. He broke the surface, gasping for air. This time there was no fighting current to contend against beyond the pool churning beneath the roaring flood. At once, Kal began to tread water. His mind struggled to grasp some wisp of reassurance, struggled to encompass this further battering descent into a lower level yet of the black netherworld into which he had been pitched. With a great effort, he tried to fend off the despair that pulled at his heart. A feeling of frenzied desperation swept over him with redoubled force, like an irresistibly powerful tidal surge. He could not tread water forever. He must reach firm ground or perish in the attempt.

"Help!" he yelled out repeatedly, in crazed half-awareness that it could only be a gesture of futility. "Help . . . help . . ." The echoes were deep and ample in their resonance. It must have been a huge cavern. He was a tiny figure in a vast landscape, its shape and extent inscrutable to him. And what if all the sides of this cavern were steep and admitted of no handhold or ledge, precipitous walls enclosing an underground sea? There would be a gradual weakening, a slow barely perceptible sink into the everlasting waters of forgetful death. And if he did manage to crawl free of the water? What hope in the world would he have without the blessed gift of light? Not a glimmer of it here. Not even a suspicion of it.

It was the darkness that made everything doubly and trebly hopeless. The damnable darkness. Heavy and oppressive. Kal felt hedged and choked by it, as if it were a sensate malevolent creature, a bizarrely endowed spider, which caught its hapless victims by emitting into the air a miasma of inky blackness, spinning it out with the merciless efficiency of a predator from its bodily store of darkness.

Kal turned back to the only source of sound about him. He thrashed around underneath the chute of water down which he had spilled. He tried climbing back up to the vaulted chamber, where he had first stumbled to his doom. But the footing proved too steep and slippery, and the flow of water too strong and fierce. At length, he began to feel blindly with his fingers around the rocky margins of the rushing waters that tumbled down from above him.

If only he'd summoned Galli or Bren first. He cursed his foolishness. If only Mommick had stayed put. Then there would have been no doom of darkness to swallow him up. If only . . . if only . . . if only . . . With a woeful sense of his own littleness, Kal marvelled at the combination of circumstances that had laid the groundwork for his fateful plunge into darkness. He pounded at the black face of the rock with his fist, asking why, again and again, asking why. It was exhausting, all this raging, coupled as it was with his feeling of powerlessness. At length, the sterility of his railing against fate came home to him, and he left off pounding the rock. His fury spent, Kal began to sob quietly, giving himself up to convulsions of self-pity.

Time passed and he regained a fragment of self-control. He searched by feel for a low spot where he might get some handhold and lift himself up onto a ledge. For the first while he met nothing but sharply defined vertical abutments of intractable rock, no matter how high he strained to reach with his hands. He grew tired and dispirited once again, more disconsolate now than angry or hysterical. Again he sought to sate the pangs of loneliness and desolation by screaming, screaming until the flux and reflux of his echoed cries grew cloying and unwelcome to his ears, a vain mockery of his desperate straits.

"If you want me to do your work, if you want me to be the guardian of your Howe, you've got to save me. Why make me Hordanu if I'm to perish here in this rotten hole?" he cried, resting a while by grabbing hold of an outthrust knob of rock that came to hand. With this outcry, Kal's sense of abandonment subsided, his passion abated. Phrases and melodies from the orrthon welled up in his heart. He sang quietly, his voice ringing over the dark waters in strange harmony to the ceaseless thunder of the unseen cataract. He grew quiet again and resigned, then scuttled on, like a crab, following by touch the sheer sides of the underground lake. Somewhere soon he would find a way out of the water. It seemed to him that slowly he was turning some kind of a corner. He had swum so far now that the sound of rushing water no longer filled his sense of hearing. This unnerved him, for now above the gathering silence he could hear the limpid echoes of his own splashing and thrashing around in the water.

At length he discovered a break in the walls of rock—a place for him to rest. It came as a shock to him at first to leave the warmth of the pool. The air was cooler. Kal shivered and wondered if he might not be better off back in the water. He must move to keep warm, explore, wend his way back to the light somehow. It seemed to him initially that he had found a good stretch of passably clear ground, for he was able very carefully to stand and walk without bumping into rock. But where, where might he go in this blinding blackness without stumbling and falling into an even deeper pit? He had not resolved a thing, it seemed, by dragging himself out of the water.

Kal stood in the still darkness, dripping. In the pocket of his breeches, something bulged uncomfortably against his skin. Kal awakened to it and remembered what it was. On an impulse he dug his hand into his pocket to clutch the Pyx, drawing it out slowly, the only remaining connection to his past life in this pit of darkness. No sooner had he pulled it free of the sodden fold of his pocket than the whole place was transformed, suffused with a wondrous iridescent glow. The half-moon of the Pyx shone in Kal's hand, its greenish tint of chrysoprase casting a shimmering gossamer of colour on the darkling scene, like a summer's moon that has sucked up the greening resplendence of ripening crops in order to shower it down again from the sky above. It was a friendly light that hinted by its softly tinted warmth at the verdant meadows of the upper world, like a splendid lantern of moonspun brightness.

Kal was astounded to be able to scan the area around him, marvelling at what he saw. Walking along a ledge that rose around the rim of the large pool, he could make out stalactites sparkling like slender crystal vases from the ceiling above the water, which lay in eerie repose here in the very bosom of Mount Thyus. The stalactites added their slow-dripping burden of water to the larger flow that rushed from the upper level down which he had slid just a short while ago. He had walked back far enough now to see and hear the spot, and was amazed to realize how far he had fallen and how strong was the water that flowed down the course. Even so he decided to try remounting it, now that he had light, and gingerly made his way along the wall of the cavern to the edge of the chute. He held the Pyx aloft. The broad torrent of water flowed down a steep slope from a large opening not twenty feet above where he now stood on the narrow ledge. The water roared past him down the stone face and fell crashing into the surface of the black pool shrouded in darkness below.

Fiddling for a moment with the chain of the Pyx, he fixed it around his neck and then scrabbled from firm ground into the downpour, clawing at the bed of the rushing waters, desperate for purchase in the slick course of its fall. The light of the Pyx swayed and wavered in the buffeting surge, like a storm lantern battered by wild concussions of wind and rain. Kal could scarce draw breath above the spray. He had nothing to grab on to, just a slick sheet of stone that the flow of ages had worn down to a polished smoothness. He slipped, try as he might to climb higher. His fingers tore at the wet rock, but he could find no purchase. His foot slipped and he was swept away, falling headlong back into the eddying pool that footed the waterfall.

But the light? The light! What had happened to the Pyx? Kal found himself plunged into a sea of darkness again, many times more frightening now that he had been given a taste of saving light. With the bitterness of stark fear in his mouth he clawed around his neck with his fingers. The chain, but no Pyx. The Pyx had broken free of the chain. Kal grew frantic. A madness swept over him. He thrashed about, wild for a hint of the Pyx's gentle gleam. Nothing. Nothing to be seen. Pitch blackness. The pouring spout of waters filled his ears with its din. He had to find it. He had to, or else die. Taking a deep breath, he dove where he supposed it must have sunk. The warm water swirled around him. It tugged at his clothes, binding them around his arms and legs. Kal felt closed in, confined, as if slimy tendrils had curled around his limbs. For a dreadful moment he supposed it was yffarnian water ivy. But he was too desperate to care. He fought to push himself deeper. He caught sight of a faint tumbling pinpoint of luminescence down deep below him off to the side and receding into the murky depths. His pulse quickened. Another instant and he might not have noticed the glimmer of its light at all. No time to surface for another breath of air. He must try to reach it now, before it faded from sight. Kal feared his lungs would burst even before he could touch the Pyx.

The surge of panic dispelled all calculation, his circumstances giving him no choice. Fear propelled him towards the glow of the Pyx. There, he was almost there. The Pyx floated, tumbling slowly before him, so close. His hand reached out to clutch it. Another arm's length . . . The Pyx his again . . . Nothing else mattered . . . His head grew light. His lungs were ready to burst. He had to have air. And then, his consciousness slipping and senses reeling, he no longer felt the need to scream for air, no longer ached sharply for it. His whole being began to succumb to a louring cloud of narcotic blackness. So this was what it was to die . . .

His thoughts dissolved into a haze, even as his fingers clamped themselves around the cold half-moon of light. In that instant, his body tumbled, was caught up and swept away in the grip of a surging wall of water—an irresistible underwater current carrying him in its flow farther into the depths of Mount Thyus.

 

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