The racers then sprinted a winding walkway that snaked through a section of jagged rocks emerging from the cliff side like giant teeth. Prue tried to keep pace as best she could, but the young bandits-in-training were clearly more cut out for this sort of activity than she was. She’d been slacking in PE lately; a sympathetic gym teacher had been letting her do equipment inventory during class, and she was dearly out of shape. Groups of bandits, children and adults, were starting to appear from the little cracks and openings in the rock along the course, cheering on the racers.
“There!” shouted a runner; across a smaller break in the rock, spanned by a short rope bridge, was another fluttering red banner. Two boys had broken away from the pack in the sprint and had managed to cross the bridge before the others; they stood grinning by the waymark. Each pulled a knife from their jacket and proceeded to saw away at the ropes holding the bridge in place.
“Hey!” shouted a girl near Prue. “That’s not legit!”
“Anything goes!” shouted one of the cutters. One rope broke away.
“Every bandit for themselves!” shouted the other as the bridge came unanchored and fell with a noisy clatter against the rock.
While most of the pack pondered the crevice, perhaps ten feet wide, Curtis came rushing through. “On your left!” he yelled, and without giving it a second look, he leapt the small gap, landing with an OOF! on the other side. Taking his lead, several other racers backed up and made the jump as well. A few trainees flagged, winded, unable to make the leap. Prue was not to be deterred; if a schoolmate whom she’d personally witnessed being held back in elementary school gym for not being able to do a single pull-up was able to do it, so could she. Thus energized, she took a running jump.
Her foot slipped as she left the ground, and she, cartwheeling, plummeted into the crevice.
Iphigenia saw a hole. A black hole; a fissure. After a ti
me, she recognized it as the hole she’d seen in her dream: a split in the hillside, it led down into the deep, unfathomable dark. In her mind’s eye, her vision was blinded; and yet she still sensed the things that lived and breathed and grew inside the void. Creatures small and large who had existed there for untold centuries. The dark beckoned her. She followed.
In the black of her vision, a light glimmered. A glowing grain of sand. She held out her hands to it, touched it. Three rings folding into one another, cycling and spinning about a central axis. Light flooded in; her vision was returned. She realized that this thing, this glowing, radiant thing, was the clockwork cog from her dream.
Iphigenia then saw that the golden object was in the center of a larger pattern, and suddenly her perspective shifted: She was no longer the watcher, the observer, of this object, but was now commanding the center of a luminescent mandala. She sat, cross-legged, with the object held in line with her heart. Orbiting this center were four objects. Iphigenia, in her mind’s eye, immediately recognized three of them: They were the Three Trees of the Wood. The Council Tree, with its warm-grained woody trunk, stood to her left; to her right was the Blighted Tree, its limbs crooked and wizened. Above her was the Ossuary Tree, the tree to which all Mystics ascended at death. A soft light pulsed from its canopy. Below her was a thing she did not recognize; it, too, was a tree, but its identity was a mystery to the Elder Mystic. A length of bright golden filigree connected each of these objects in the mandala, one to the other, a sign of the interconnectedness of the Wood. And at its core, Iphigenia realized, was this thing she held in her hand. Like in her dream, she uncupped her palms. But the cog was gone; in its place she saw that she was holding a living, beating heart.
The heart of a boy.
Just then, darkness filled her vision again. The mandala dissipated, and in its place she felt shadowy forms encroaching, forms that would seek to destroy the thing she had in her hands—or worse, use it for their own evil ends. The forms swirled about her and snapped at her, attempting to distract her from her vigilance. Using all her power, she summoned herself from her vision and began striving to swim for the surface of her consciousness.
The darkness followed.
Prue screamed; her arms flailed.
She managed to grab hold of a frayed piece of rope that was left dangling from the anchoring structure of the bridge. Within a fraction of a second, she was slammed hard against the side of the crevice. She howled loudly at impact. Her arm felt as if it was being yanked from her shoulder socket. She clenched her eyes, refusing to look down at the swirling pit below her dangling feet. She reached up her free hand and grabbed at a chink in the rock; it held firm, and she scrambled to the lip of the crevice, where she saw a hand being proffered her. It was one of the younger bandits-in-training, a boy. She took it gratefully, and together they tumbled to the safety of the wooden platform.
No sooner had they done this than the boy was up and running, tearing after the diminishing pack of racers. Prue slapped her hands together, freeing them of rocky grit, and gave chase.
The remaining pack of racers—there were perhaps six now, with Curtis in the middle—were leaping between a series of platforms that served as the open-air vestibules for a number of bandits’ homes in the rock. The runners who were best able to get ahead were the ones most willing to risk their lives by bypassing ladders and leaping from ledge to ledge. Prue was winded at this point; her near fall had really taken a toll on her spirit. She had just climbed to the third in a series of platforms, watching the pack disappear around a rocky corner, when she heard someone whisper.
“Pssst,” came the voice.
She looked over; standing in the shadow of a long arch was a little girl, perhaps six. She gestured to Prue to follow her. Guessing she didn’t have anything to lose, Prue trotted after the girl. The arch proved to be an opening in the cliff face, the entryway to a short tunnel—so narrow that Prue had to walk sideways to get through—that let out on the other side of the rock. The little girl, reaching the end of the passage, pointed to a wooden pathway against the rock wall that led along a sliver of fissure to a distant stone staircase. Atop the staircase, Prue could see something fluttering in the wind: the fourth waymark! She thanked the little girl and began gingerly stepping out onto the walkway.
She had to walk carefully, step by step, as the path was really just two planed boards set next to each other, their ends balanced precariously in the little crooks in the rock face. They appeared to be older than many of the structures of the bandit camp; they were covered in a slick layer of moss and they bowed deeply, with a worrisome moan, at her every step. Arriving at the other side, she dashed up the stone staircase—a series of winding steps etched into the rock—and was happy to see that she was the first to arrive at the fourth waymark. The rest of the racers were clambering, one by one, up an impossibly tall ladder to arrive at the same spot. They were far enough off that Prue was able to stop for a moment, to catch her breath and take in the view.
The Long Gap, from this height, could be seen for what it was: not just a straight, open chasm in the earth, but a kind of waterless, bottomless river, complete with stems and tributaries and little inlets where hazy smoke from campfires could be seen drifting. She was nearly at a height where the ravine wall met the mossy ground of the surface, on top of a kind of pinnacle in the rock. Looking down, she noticed that the stone walkway she’d followed led down the other side of the rocky tower in quick switchbacks. It occurred to her then that the stone stairs could not have been the making of the bandits; the craftsmanship and labor involved in such an undertaking would have taken years and years. Where the bandits’ makeshift wooden structures still had green leaves sprouting from them, the stone of the staircase was bearded in bright green moss and worn in sections from heavy use. They looked like they’d been there for centuries. The absolute darkness into which the steps snaked intrigued Prue, and she almost then gave up the race to follow where they led.
Instead, she made sure the first kids to top the ladder saw that she’d gained the advantage, and then she was off, following a narrow band of rock that led back down into the depths of the chasm. The fifth flag could be seen waving just beyond a narrow gap in the rock. Prue couldn’t believe it, but it seemed she was on track to take the race.
“Elder Mystic!”
“Iphigenia!”
The voices were desperate, agitated. The old woman decided to find out what they were so concerned about. She opened her eyes and realized she was lying flat on her back, which was unusual. A crowd of Mystics, ten to be exact, hovered over her.
“You were straight out!”
“I’ve never seen you do that before.”
Iphigenia’s back was very cold, being pressed against snowy ground. However, the snow was rapidly melting and turning to water, which was making her back wet and cold. She reached her hands up imploringly; her fellow Mystics helped her to her feet.
“What happened?” asked one, a doe named Mabyn.