Across the Face of the World (63 page)

But how to keep him busy? His captor was looking for some-i hing; perhaps he could be tempted with the lure of riches? He beckoned the man forward, down the stairway that separated the living quarters from the armoury.

The lowest level of Adunlok, in which the armoury was situ¬ated, was deserted as they walked along the corridor. Or was it? The disciple heard a noise ahead, just out of sight around the curve in the passageway. His captor had heard it too, brushing past the rotund Widuz in an instant. There, at the end of the corridor, was I he door to the lower caverns and to the womb of the Earth Mother. It was closing.

Mahnum rushed towards the door, but it closed too quickly. He was about to call out, but thought better of it; what if a Widuz warrior waited on the other side?

'Is this why you brought me here?' he asked his sweating captive, who shrugged his shoulders in answer. This man is nothing but a dead weight, the Trader thought. Time to get rid of him.

But when he came to it, Mahnum could not make the swordthrust necessary. The fat man stood there in the corridor, wide-eyed and terrified, waiting for death, but Mahnum could not do it. Images of defenceless villagers dying cruelly under the hands of the Bhrudwan warriors shimmered in the air around him. O Most High, I would rather die than become one of them.

Should I kill someone merely because they are no use to me?

Instead, he grabbed his captive by a flabby arm and pulled him into the nearest room. The door shows signs of having recently been forced, the Trader noted in passing. Inside, in the far corner of the room, lay riches, treasures beyond the wildest imaginings of a Trader, scattered across the floor and festooned on the walls. The sight quite took his breath away.

His captive was saying something, gesturing to the piles of valu¬ables. He's trying to make a bargain, Mahnum realised. That's why he brought me down here. His Trader's soul was held captive by the sight: here were undoubtedly the spoils of war, the accumulations of many lifetimes. Here was the key to abundant life. Here was everything he had dreamed of. How would that necklace, for example, look upon the creamily perfect skin of his dear Indrett?

No, none of his dreams were here in this room. Leith was some¬where in this fortress, but not here. This treasure of nations could not hold the Trader. He turned and led his still gesticulating captive back into the corridor.

'The door, the door,' he said, pointing to the end of the corridor. He had decided. His boy was nowhere in this fortress, it was time to continue the search. The Widuz word came to his mind: 'Dhuir na, Dhuir nal'

Startled at this use of the Widuz tongue, the disciple waddled towards the door under the encouragement of the sword. He could smell, almost taste, the blade a few inches from his throat. But now a new fear reached out for him.

Priests have never gone into this tunnel, he reminded himself. For good reason: it was forbidden by holy decree of the Earth Mother herself. If he were to break this prohibition, his life would be forfeit. He would lose his powers before he had truly gained them. They would feed him to her, and he would die in her ravenous belly,

I can't go through the door! his mind cried.

Behind him the sword whispered: 'You can! You can!'

He took the sword's advice and triggered the opening mech¬anism.

Leith followed Phemanderac down the winding tunnel, fearful of the inevitable pursuit. No light illuminated their passage, just the cold draught of stale air, the roughness of the rock on each side of them, and darkness black as pitch. M;y life is in his hands, he thought.

Under the immense limestone and marble mountain of Cloventop lay many dark and secret caverns, most unexplored by humans. Adunlok had been built atop a system of caverns, formed like Bandits' Cave far to the north by the patient action of acidic water on alkaline rock. Through this cave system a river still ran, entering the earth a league or so to the north of Adunlok at Rinnan Holth, the River Cave, a place known and venerated by the Widuz.

Thereafter its paths were unknown, but it emerged in Wambakalven, the Womb Cavern, almost a thousand feet directly under the fastness of Adunlok. It wound its way through Wambakalven, passing close by the light of the sun at the bottom of Helig Holth and the unspeakable mound that had grown there over the years, then ponded up at the Womb's exit.

The sombre waters of Telba Poul were continually astir as the sacred river sought various narrow pathways through the rock and into the lower caverns of Adunlok. From there the gurgling, rushing water found its way into Drozzakalven, the smallest of the caverns under the mountain. Here it rushed down the sloping floor and out through a series of rapids into Stalassokalven, the largest of them all, over fifteen hundred feet below the eyes of Adunlok.

Finally, the river emerged into the light through Anukalva, a narrow grotto that opened to the sunlight, and tumbled chill and pallid into the warm waters of Brinan Scou, the Burning Stream.

The Widuz had worked tirelessly for many years to establish a path down into Wambakalven.

Parad Matr, the road upon which Leith and Phemanderac ran, had taken them over a hundred years to carve out of solid rock. It took a circuitous route, following ancient fractures in the fabric of the mountain, down and through Geotakalven, a dry cave, to Wambakalven herself.

From the Mother's Womb there was no escape save returning up the same pathway: the Earth Mother herself forbade further tunnelling.

After many minutes of running, during which both Leith and Phemanderac accumulated a variety of bumps and scrapes, they arrived in a place where the echo of their feet rang out loudly, and they judged they were in an open space. 'We need a torch,' Phemanderac whispered to himself; some yards behind, Leith heard him clearly.

'Slow down,' he called. 'There could be pits, cliffs, lakes, anything. Keep to the path!'

'Of course!' came the amplified answer. Phemanderac halted, then took his harp from his shoulder.

'I've always wanted to do this,' he said, and put his fingers to the harp.

Beginning on the very edge of hearing, clear liquid notes flowed back and forth across the unguessed length of the cavern. The simple melody played by skilled fingers was magnified and echoed a hundred-fold, until the blackness around them was filled with noise.

'We don't have time for this!' Leith yelled.

'Just a moment! I have to get the echo interval right.'

Then the sound changed from a solid wall of interlocking notes to the repeating of a string being plucked, as Phemanderac played his tune more slowly, in time with the echo. An ineffable sweet¬ness permeated the sound, as deep bass notes alternated with a crisp, bright melody until Leith's ears rang with the beauty of it.

Now, as before, the notes began to run together into one sound; but this time it carried with it the sound of hope after loss, joy after sadness, laughter after pain; a sound that rang in the cavern long after Phemanderac stopped playing.

The thin foreigner hoisted his harp back on to his shoulder. 'Sounded fine once I got the echo right,' he said.

Sounded fine? I've never heard anything like it, Leith wanted to say, as he found his eyes brimming with tears at the same time as his heart wanted to leap from his chest. I've been in the throne room of the Most High; I've heard the music of creation. But Phemanderac was gone, invisible in front of him, his football masked by the ringing that reverberated still around the cavern. Sighing for the longing of it, Leith stepped carefully forward down Mother's Road.

Some way behind them Mahnum and the disciple froze as the sound of the harp came to their ears. But instead of the sound as it was heard in the cavern, the twists and turns of Parad Matr turned it into a frightful ululation, the death call of some departed spirit. It was all Mahnum could do to force himself on into the inky blackness and the dreadful noise. Behind him, the disciple remained rooted to the spot.

The frightened Widuz priest began to shake with terror as the sound surrounded him, coming at him from above and below, ahead and behind, settling on him like the wraith of his nightmares. He beat his arms at the air, trying to drive it away; then he lurched down the forbidden path like a drunken man, his fear of the sword, fear of discovery, fear of death itself, forgotten in the dread terror of the god he served, the god he had disobeyed. He did not realise he had entered a wide open space; for him the music remained terrible, an overbearing discord, a threat finally coming true. His unknowing feet turned off the path into the uncharted maze of blind tunnels and dead ends to the left of Parad Matr, and the sound of his vengeful god followed him.

As Mahnum ran through Geotakalven, the sound seemed to intensify, but here it was arrestingly powerful, a concordant harmony rather than the cacophony that had followed him down the tunnel. As he strode on into the blackness, his eyes picking out the pale marble of the path in the faintest of lights - perhaps the very glow of the rock - the chord hanging in the air ravished him with its grandeur, bringing the spinning heavens down, sending him soaring, bursting through the clouds like some unshackled bird. This can't be the same sound. His feet slowed to a walk; he found himself holding his breath for fear he might destroy the bittersweet purity of the chord. Then the echoes died out and silence fell.

'What is happening?' Mahnum cried. But there was no reply.

Wambakalven was lit with torches. Leith and Phemanderac blinked like waking owls in the red-yellow light. Parad Matr levelled out, snaking across the floor of the huge cavern to run beside a dark stream. Here and there great pillars rose into the air, reaching up to the far-off roof. A million encrusted jewels glit¬tered in the torchlight, precious gems polished on an ancient beach, captives of the rock formed long ago when the world was young.

'Have you ever seen anything like this?' Leith whispered. The sound of Geotakalven still rang faintly in his ears; whether from memory or reality he could not tell. But now his eyes were receiving the same message.

'Never, truly never,' Phemanderac breathed. 'There is a beauty here beyond the power of language to express. Yet I sense evil also in these caves; not authored by the maker of beauty, but from some other source.'

They wandered enraptured through the cavern. 1f these caves were in Firanes, Leith thought, we would all live underground.

'Careful,' said Phemanderac. 'These torches have been lit by someone. We must watch for the Widuz.'

As if to punctuate his words, a shout came from behind them. Both men spun around. A lone Widuz guard had seen them, and was even now rushing in their direction from the far end of the cave.

'Come on!' Leith cried, grabbing Phemanderac by the arm. Together they pelted along the smooth straightness of the road, while some distance behind a second, then a third Widuz joined the first.

At that moment, Mahnum emerged from Parad Matr into the wonder of Wambakalven. For the first time since he had entered the fortress of Adunlok he caught a glimpse of Leith with another man, many yards ahead, and in between him and them ran the Widuz guards, chasing his son. They appeared to be gaining.

'Leith!' he called, but his voice was swallowed up in the dome-shaped cavern. 'Leith!' He threw himself down the path, sprinting for all he was worth, sword at the ready.

The path veered to the right, drawing Phemanderac and Leith towards a small hill on which rested a pale light. Without breaking stride, they leapt over the stream where the road forded it, past an amazed Widuz guard, and on towards the hill that now lay in front of them.

This is the source of the evil, Phemanderac decided. Leith glanced up as he ran, and instead of a roof he could see stars, small cold pricks in a black sky. Both men realised at the same moment that they were seeing Helig Holth, the bottom of the abyss; Adunlok was directly above them; and the hill the road now skirted was not made of rock at all.

Leith cried out in horror. Of all the sights he had seen since leaving Loulea, this was the worst. It was a black smear across the glory of the cavern, a deep wound in the beauty of the earth. It was a mound of the bones of the dead, the sacrifices of centuries of obeisance to the god of Helig Holth. The reek of it choked them; it fouled the stream that wound around its base. At the apex of the mound lay the broken bodies of those most recently given to Mother Earth. Phemanderac and Leith averted their eyes, held their breaths and ran past the ghastly scene.

The long weeks of deprivation began to tell on Mahnum as he hastened along the path. His breath came in short gasps, his chest i ightened and his already heavy limbs cried out for relief. He was making up distance on the Widuz, but not as much as the ground i he guards gained on the fugitives ahead. Unless he increased his speed still further, he would lose the race.

Phemanderac cast an anxious glance over his shoulder. The three Widuz sped towards them, now almost within touching distance. Without warning, the philosopher veered to the left, ducking behind a huge rock column. As he had hoped, the exhausted youth followed his lead.

The Widuz clattered to a halt. For a moment, no one moved, yet Phemanderac could still hear the sound of running feet. The Widuz evidently heard them too, and all three warriors turned to look back down the road. Seeing this, Phemanderac grabbed Leith's arm and pulled him after, dashing across broken ground away from their pursuers.

The senior Widuz guard dispatched his two fellows to run after the intruders, then turned and himself faced this new menace. A quick assessment gave the veteran Widuz fighter encouragement. This was an older man - older even than him, the Widuz cham¬pion of many years - thin, wiry, with plenty of strength in the shoulders but obviously short of wind. Take this one slowly. Defend yourself, then wear him down.

For his part, Mahnum stood and waited for the Widuz warrior to make the first move, a necessity born of tiredness, not of tactics. It had been a long time since he had wielded a sword. Better get on with it, he thought. Every moment I pause is a moment further from Leith.