Artemis Invaded (16 page)

Ring's only response to Adara's greeting was to shuffle his feet. Up close his physical oddities were more obvious. He avoided not only eye contact, but looking directly at anything. Although the group must have been traveling for weeks, he retained a certain unhealthy softness that was at odds with his large frame. This fleshiness extended to his hands, which were overlarge, and his lips, which were thick.

He was holding one hand over his eyes but Adara knew this wasn't to keep the out the sunlight, but to block visual stimuli. Ring was precognate, the gift both powerful and unpredictable, so that every step the man took was through a maze of shifting probabilities.

Adara would have loved to learn more about what brought her mentor and his companions to this isolated place, but she took pity on Ring. Her questions could wait until they were safely in camp.

“We're almost to the top of the worst of the trail,” she said, moving to the front of the group. “After that, there's a lovely meadow where you can mount up again. We have a good campsite under the trees, so our gear isn't in plain sight.”

“That's wise,” Bruin said approvingly. “Where are Terrell and Griffin?”

Ring spoke, his voice flat, yet the words very precise. “In the heart of the mother from whose womb death was born too late to give life. Who yet will bear death or life, depending on the father's song.”

Bruin looked apologetically at Adara. “He's been saying things like that for weeks. Nonsense, I would say, except that we know better than to dismiss what Ring says without consideration.”

Adara had been distinctly startled by Ring's words. “Not nonsense, not all of it.” She placed a gentle hand on Ring's arm, patting him reassuringly. “The part I don't understand makes my blood cold. Let me get you to camp. Griffin and Terrell are inside the mountain. The seegnur had a complex there.”

“Like the one on Spirit Bay?” Bruin asked, clucking to his horse.

“Not quite,” Adara hedged. She didn't want to explain here in the open. “I didn't fetch them before coming to meet you because I wanted to make sure that whatever message you carried was for all of us.”

Bruin chuckled. “And here I thought it was because you were so eager to see your old Papa Bear.”

Afraid she had offended him, Adara sputtered reassurances, but Bruin waved her down. “No need to worry, ladybug. You haven't hurt my feelings. I'm glad to see you haven't lost the good sense I spent so long drumming into you.” He turned to the other man, “Ring? Can the others hear what you have to tell or is it only for Adara?”

“Tell? Tell?” Ring looked puzzled. “Ring must be here, else disaster will come, but tell?”

Adara felt no impatience. The hulking man seemed almost a boy in his confusion. She turned to Bruin. “Bruin, the day that you can't locate an established camp in a little bit of wood is the day we tuck you into a rocker by the fire. You'll find meat and drink waiting. Help yourselves. Sand Shadow and I will get the others.”

Without waiting for her mentor's reply, she sped up the hillside, lightly as a cat, and loped through the tall grass toward the tunnel into the mountain. Sand Shadow ran alongside, a sleek shadow of palest gold.

*   *   *

Griffin could hardly believe his ears when Adara told them that Bruin had arrived—bringing with him none other than Ring.

“Kipper, too,” Adara said as she all but herded Griffin and Terrell out of Leto's complex. “I don't know anything more than that—only that Ring was adamant that he needed to be here. I directed them to our camp, then came to get you.”

Despite his pleasure at the thought of seeing Bruin, along with a very real curiosity as to what could bring both the hunter and Ring all this way, Griffin found pulling himself from his researches almost painful. He thought about suggesting that the visitors come to him, so that he wouldn't waste any time, but a lingering sense of priorities made him put the suggestion aside.

Bruin had welcomed Griffin into his home when Griffin was an unknown quantity. He had continued to offer him advice and support—as well as food, drink, and shelter—even after Griffin had proven potentially dangerous. Asking Bruin to attend upon Griffin's pleasure, when doubtless Bruin was finally having a chance to relax after a long day on the trail, would be beyond rudeness. So, promising Leto he would be back, Griffin followed Adara and Terrell down the tunnel.

The air outside the cavern held the freshness of early evening. After the stale air within Leto's complex, the scents of pine and wind-stirred grass were intense, the colors of grass and the purple hues of shadowed mountains vivid. Birds darted over the meadow, probably chasing insects, chattering to each other with such animation that Griffin felt he'd understand them if he listened just a moment more. It felt good to walk so that his legs stretched out, rather than picking his way from console to console, so good that Griffin almost regretted when they reached the camp.

“Kipper located where you pastured your own horses and Sam the Mule,” Bruin said after greetings had been exchanged. “He took our horses over to join them. All but Ring's are from Helena's herd originally, so I think they'll get along fine.”

“Molly will make sure of it,” Terrell said with a laugh, “although Midnight will think he's in charge. I see you've made yourself at home. Thanks for setting the journey cake batter on the fire. Do you mind business while we eat? We're alive with curiosity as to what brought you here—but I'm starved!”

Bruin leaned back against Honeychild, sipped from a tin travel mug filled with the mint tea they kept steeping in a jug in the stream, then gave a shuddery sigh. “I can only tell what little I know. Some weeks ago, a runner arrived in Shepherd's Call with a note from Lynn. The note said that Ring had been speaking of things she couldn't understand, other than that he was insisting that dire things would happen if he didn't reach you three as quickly as possible. She'd been putting him off, saying she had no idea where you were. All she knew was that the Trainers—they've kept in touch—said you'd left Spirit Bay some time before. That apparently stopped Ring's nagging—Lynn's word, not mine—for two days. Then he started insisting that I knew where you were, that I could take him to you.”

Adara nodded. Before they had left Spirit Bay, she'd written Bruin telling him in terms only he would understand where they were going.

“Lynn asked me to come at once, to see if I could quiet Ring. I did so, sending my boarding students home earlier than planned, because I had a feeling that I wouldn't be back to Shepherd's Call anytime soon. Brought Kipper, of course, because he's living with me now.”

“And you were right,” Adara prompted gently, “that you wouldn't just be going to Lynn's, speaking with Ring, and coming home again.”

“And I was right,” Bruin agreed. “I couldn't make any more sense out of what Ring was saying than Lynn could, but we've all reason to know that his nonsense makes good sense once you know how the parts fit together. If he felt it was urgent for him to get to you, then it was urgent to me, too.”

They all nodded and looked where Ring sat leaning against a tree, his eyes firmly shut. Griffin remembered how Ring had told Lynn to catch the fish to lure the bear, so that the bear would come to Lynn's stronghold. That fish had been Kipper; the bear, Bruin; two people Ring had never met and so apparently could not put a name to. Yet for all his lack of clarity, Ring had been right. The bear—and his companions—needed to hear what Lynn had to say. Without the information they had garnered from Lynn and her band, they would have gone into Spirit Bay unwarned about the Old One and …

And, oh, how different the future would have been …
Griffin thought.
The Old One might yet be pursuing his twisted experiments beneath Mender's Isle, and the rest of us? We'd either be dead or prisoners.

The problem with Ring was that he saw reality in so many configurations—including visions of scenes that he himself might or might not understand—that something as simple as writing a note based on his information was impossible.

“So what does Ring need to tell us?” Griffin said.

He didn't expect a reply. Indeed, he'd thought Ring was asleep, but Ring's deep, flat voice rang out immediately, though his eyes remained screwed shut.

“If Ring is not there,” he pointed with unerring accuracy in the direction of Leto's complex, “there is no hope. Slavery will come again. Many, many, many will die in body, many more in soul. Even if Ring is here…”

He lifted a big, almost flabby hand, then, holding it palm down, rocked it back and forth as if it were a scale that would not settle.

No one spoke. After a long pause, Ring continued. “If the cats do not breathe in the dusty orb, if the thread does not learn that it binds tightest when it is knotted firmly into itself, if the dreamer does not wake from the visions, then even with Ring, with Bruin, with Kipper, still there will be disaster.”

Something in how he slumped back made clear he was done speaking.

Bruin said, “So there is still something for me and Kipper to do?”

Ring breathed out so hard that little droplets of spit sprinkled the air. “You can go without causing disaster, but if you stay and are prepared to walk trails unimagined in all your years, then, yes, there is something for you to do.”

Griffin wanted to ask more. “Cats” could refer to Adara and Sand Shadow, but the dreamer, the thread? Did they also refer to those two? They had jointly dreamed of Artemis. Or did this refer to him and Terrell? Maybe the dreamer was Leto. She had slept for five hundred years and struggled daily against her sense of what should be, rather than accepting the new reality.

Terrell touched Griffin's arm, shaking his head. “Ring is completely exhausted. I think, too, speaking is harder for him than you imagine. I suspect that each word he speaks subtly changes reality for him.”

“Yes,” Griffin said, nodding slowly. “I can see what you mean. Words—even carefully spoken words—nail ideas into place. Worse, not everyone is going to interpret a concept the same way.”

He winced. “It's a wonder Ring speaks at all.”

Bruin said softly, “For a long time he didn't. His mother, Narda, came to talk to me about Ring when she learned I would be his guide. Apparently, Ring didn't speak for so many years that everyone assumed he was mute. When Ring did start speaking, it was in full sentences, all very carefully crafted, and mostly regarding very concrete matters, such as what he wanted to eat or not eat. It was only a year or so before he helped Winnie and Mabel to escape that he began to express himself on abstract concepts.”

“A good thing,” Adara said. “If the Old One had realized what Ring was capable of he would never have been so careless.”

Griffin felt a sudden shock as ideas connected. “The Old One was breeding the adapted in the hope that he would hit on someone who could operate the equipment the seegnur left behind. Now Ring insists he has to be here—and he indicates that his reason for being here is connected to the mountain … to Leto's complex. I wonder if the Old One crafted better than he realized.”

He glanced between the complex and Ring.

“Not now,” Terrell interjected firmly. “Didn't I just finish saying that Ring needs a break? He's been on the road for days. Ask him tomorrow. If his reason for coming here is connected to Leto, then I suspect you won't have trouble getting him there—you'll have trouble keeping him away.”

Griffin nodded, but even as he settled down to a game of marbles with Sand Shadow and Adara, he could feel his impatience growing, fed by a strong sense that time was running out.

*   *   *

When they heard the voices, the Old One held up a finger for silence. Although the language being spoken was one neither of them could understand, by listening they could still learn something about whoever was in the subterranean facility. After a few minutes, Julyan felt certain there were three people, all male. When they moved, there was a splashing sound, so, although the complex was no longer completely flooded, it was still wet. After a while, he became aware of a regular thudding in the background.

They crouched, listening, until the voices became fainter. Then the Old One lowered himself into the hole. When his feet had located the rungs of the ladder built into the wall, he paused only long enough to indicate that Julyan should follow, then vanished into the gloom. His progress was so silent that Julyan guessed he had used the old sailor's trick of lightly grasping the side rails and sliding down, rather than climbing. There was no splash, though, so the Old One must have perfectly controlled his descent.

He would,
thought Julyan, a trace resentfully. He chose not to slide, not trusting that he would be able to stop as silently, but his soft-soled boots were nearly soundless against the rungs. When he reached bottom, he discovered that the tunnel was no longer flooded, although a thin layer of sandy mud remained.

I never noticed, but the floors must have been built at an angle, so water would run off to the sides. Makes sense, if you're going to build a complex that's partly under water, as well as underground.

The tunnel was dark. None of the lanterns that had been hung along the walls during the Old One's tenancy seemed to have survived the flood that had surged through these corridors when the Old One had sought to drown his enemies.

And drowned a fair number of his allies—or at least lackeys—instead,
thought Julyan. He pressed down an uncomfortable thought that perhaps the Old One had intended those drownings to rid himself of those who had witnessed various aspects of his peculiar breeding project. It would be very much in character.

The Old One was just visible in the gloom, a slim, dark shadow against greater darkness. He pointed down the corridor to where a faint yellow light showed, then turned and began walking in that direction. Julyan followed, curiosity driving him as much as any fidelity to the Old One—curiosity not only about the nature of these newcomers, but as to what the Old One intended.