The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“No more,” he echoed, pressing his face into his hands as his temple throbbed and his skull seemed likely to split open. But despite his pain, he had a message to deliver. “Can you help them? Some still live, beyond the tunnel, but they are trapped. Can you help them?”

“Come,” said the voice. “The council must decide.”

It shuffled away, but he had to call after it.

“I can’t see to follow you.”

“See?”

“I am blind in this darkness.”

It said nothing, and he tried again.

“The light above that blinds you, that you call the Blinding, is what I need to see. This place, where you can see without light, it is a blind place to me.”

Out of the blindness cold fingers grasped his arm, tapped the armband, and jerked back. “Poison water!” It hissed and gurgled and went still, as though that touch had poisoned it.

He waited, and after a bit it spoke again.

“Such talismans we make no longer. The magic flees after the great calamity. Hold to me and follow like a young one.”

He reached out, grasped its cool hand, and trusting that it did not mean to lead him to his doom, he stumbled after it as it moved away with a strange rolling gait into a blackness so profound that he might as well have been walking into the pit.

The earth trembled beneath his feet, rocking him, then stilled.

“What was that?”

“The earth wakes,” said his guide. “The wise ones shift their feet, and the deeps tremble.”

“Ah.” His head was hurting badly again, and so they walked for a long while without speaking. He had to concentrate on walking; because each step jolted the pain in his head to a new location and back again, he came to dread the movement although he had no choice but to go forward.

After a long, long time he had to rest.

“I must drink,” he said to his guide, “or I will fail.”

“Drink?”

“I thirst. I must have water or some wine or ale, something to moisten my tongue and body.”

“Wait here.” The creature let go of his hand and before he understood what it was about, he heard it scrabble away over or along the stone and knew himself utterly lost.

He had no choice but to trust it—otherwise he certainly would die—so he lay down on the stone and slept. It woke him an unknown time later and put into his hands a bowl carved out of rock and filled to the brim with a brackish but otherwise drinkable water. When he had drunk it down, his head didn’t hurt quite so badly and, although his stomach ached with hunger, he could go on. They walked on for what seemed ages upon ages or a day at least up above where the passage of the sun and the moon allowed a man to measure the passing of time. Time seemed insignificant here, meaningless. Twice more the stone shuddered and stilled beneath and around them, causing him to pause as he swayed, heart hammering with instinctive fear, although his guide seemed untroubled by the shaking.

The second time, as the shaking subsided, he heard the noise of a distant rockfall, a scattering and shattering echo upon echo that propelled in its wake an avalanche of memory in his own mind: He remembered two young men with wiry black hair and short beards, surefooted as they climbed across and up a vast swath of rockfall that had long before obliterated one slope of a valley.

“Shevros!” he breathed. “Maklos.”

There had been another man with them, and two more companions, but to think, to struggle to name them, made his head throb.

“Come,” said the guide, tugging him along.

They walked for another day, perhaps, or so he guessed because in addition to the pain that crippled his head he was now growing weak with hunger and again faint and irritable with thirst. The darkness ate away at him until it filled him and he was empty, even those sparks of memory lost in that vast ocean where night reigns and indeed a thing beyond night because night is elusive and transitory and this blackness had no beginning of end. The armband abraded his skin where the last of the salt water still stung, and at last when they stopped for him to rest again—the skrolin needed no rest—he slipped off the armband and rubbed the inside with the filthy loincloth he still wore which had dried while he walked. He blew on it until it felt dry and clean—as clean as anything could be under such conditions—and eased it back up on his arm.

“Come,” said his guide, stamping twice on the ground as though impatient, and it seemed the stamp and the low rumbling growl that came from deep in the creature’s body performed as an incantation, or else it had been the irritant of the salt that had poisoned the armband, because a soft glow rose from the metal and the darkness retreated.

He stared in amazement. They stood in a high tunnel whose ceiling was perfectly round while the path they walked on was level. No natural cave would appear so regular. If an arrow forged out of the iron had been shot by a giant’s bow and pierced stone, it might bore a shaft such as this.

“Come,” repeated his guide. “We are close.”