Bell Mountain (The Bell Mountain Series) (28 page)

The one thing he couldn’t control, and couldn’t fight, was a sense of being exposed. Like a spider crawling across a spotless tablecloth, he thought, with no hope of escaping notice the moment someone chanced to look in his direction, and no sooner seen than killed. He felt more exposed here than he’d ever felt on the plain. This sensation preyed on him and turned every trick of the wind, every echo of a footfall, into a nameless menace.

“Losing my nerve, Dulayl—that’s what’s wrong with me,” he said. “Next thing you know, I’ll be praying like that poor old man. His nerve’s just fine, thank you!”

Sometimes he looked up at the dense cloud that concealed the journey’s end. God lived in a cloud like that, he thought, or so the children of Geb believed, thousands of years ago, according to the Book of Beginnings.

That’d be a laugh on me, he said to himself, if God lived in this cloud and I walked right into it!

And God would prove to be the biggest of all the killer birds, with gaping beak and burning eyes, and a man and his horse would go down in a single gulp.

Jack woke to a sense of having passed through some moment of indescribable sweetness, but he couldn’t remember what it was. A dream that blew away like smoke the moment he stirred his eyelids—no hope of calling it back. He looked up into a pearly sky that was like a bowl of milk.

Ellayne was already working to restart the fire, still huddled in her wolfskin. When Jack sat up, she turned and grinned at him.

“What a s-s-sleepyhead!” she said, with her teeth chattering a little. “I don’t know how I slept at all last night, but I did.”

“Look at the sky,” Jack said. Now that he was up, he felt the cold. “I wonder if it’s going to snow.”

“That’s not the sky. It’s the cloud.”

“Oh.”

Ellayne got the fire going, fed it, built it up. Jack stared into the cloud. It covered the whole sky.

“I hope we’ll still be able to see once we’re inside it,” he said.

“King Ozias and his men went into the cloud and came out again.”

“I’m just thinking it’d be too bad if we couldn’t find the bell once we were up there.”

“I’d give anything for a cup of hot tea, with honey in it,” Ellayne said.

Jack helped her stoke the fire. Once they’d had their breakfast, a mountain squirrel, and then moved around a bit, they stopped shivering.

“I think we’d better leave Ham here,” Jack said. “There’s grass for him and some shelter if the weather turns bad. We don’t need to be carting a load of firewood to the top. This is where we’ll stop again when we come back down.”

Wytt popped out from a cozy nest he’d made among the baggage. He chattered at them. Ellayne chattered back, and he came to her. She picked him up and held him.

“You don’t have to come up to the top, Wytt,” she said. “We’ll be coming right back down again.”

He replied with a long string of barks and whistles.

“He’ll do as he pleases. He always does,” Jack said. “Maybe he can keep Ham company.”

“Do you really think we should leave Ham?” Ellayne cast a worried glance at the donkey, who was feeding again.

“It’s only for a little while. He might be afraid inside the cloud.”

“We might be afraid, too! But I suppose you’re right.”

They made their last few preparations, dressing as warmly as they could, taking nothing with them but the big knife and a couple of stout sticks. Jack wished they had some rope, but they didn’t. The last thing he did was to hobble the donkey and kiss its muzzle.

“We’ll be right back, Ham,” he said. “You rest. It’s your day off.”

Wytt hopped away from Ellayne and burrowed into her wolfskin. Just his face stuck out. He blinked at them and showed his teeth.

“That’s that, then,” she said.

And Jack said, “Let’s go ring the bell.”

As the new day crept up on the high peaks of the mountains, all the broad lands below them still lay wrapped in night.

The rivers flowed as always, seeking the sea; and the sea’s waves lapped the shore; but these things knew no season. All along the Imperial River, the towns and ports lay with their doors shut and their streets deserted. No laborers toiled on the docks; no herdsmen gathered their herds together; no carters drove their carts along the roads. In the great city of Obann, a few watchmen in a few great houses yawned and looked forward to the sunrise when their watch would end. Soon enough the towns, the villages, the farms, and the logging camps, and the great city itself would rouse to the rising of the sun, and the people would go about the business of another day.

For Jack and Ellayne, high up on the mountain, the day had already begun. While the people in the lowlands slept out the remainder of the night, Jack and Ellayne followed King Ozias’ trail.

The going was steep, now, very steep indeed, and they soon felt it in their legs. No more grass grew anywhere; the only sign of life was lichen plastered to the rock. All under their feet was bare rock, here and there carved with Ozias’ signs to keep them on their way.

“We’d never make it if we had to deal with ice,” Jack said, already panting a little. “I thought there’d be ice. There’s snow on peaks that aren’t as high as this.”

“I think we might be on the south side of the mountain by now, or near enough,” Ellayne said. “Maybe this part gets too much sun for there to be ice.”

Jack thought that sounded like rot, but didn’t feel like saying so. There should be snow and ice, but there wasn’t—that was all he knew. Anyway, talking made him realize how hard it was to breathe up here. There was something wrong with the air. Breathing it was like drinking weak tea: it didn’t quite satisfy.

When you looked up, you could see the trail vanishing into the great cloud. It was like the kind of thick fog that sometimes hung over the river in the early morning. Jack prayed it wouldn’t be any worse than that.

“How much longer, do you think, before we’re in the cloud?” Ellayne asked. Jack turned to answer her—to snap “How should I know!”—but what he saw, when he turned, made him stop in his tracks.

Below and behind Ellayne he could hardly see anything at all—nothing but a smoky murk that swallowed up the trail they’d just passed over, the nearby mountains, and the sky.

“Well?” said Ellayne.

“Never mind,” Jack said. “We’re already in it.”

Toiling all through the night, Martis feared his strength was almost spent. He plodded on, wasting no extra energy in speech or even thought. He was like a man walking in his sleep—until Dulayl woke him by neighing shrilly.

And the bray of an ass answered him.

It took Martis a moment to remember that the children had a donkey with them. Then he realized that the sky was grey now instead of black, and he could see. Somehow he’d missed daybreak. He really must have been asleep on his feet. But now he was awake, and suddenly filled with fresh strength.

“Hello!” he cried, and that cry echoed and rebounded all around the mountain. He recalled hearing somewhere, sometime, that it was dangerous to raise one’s voice while high up on a mountain. He took the echoes as a warning not to do it again.

The ass brayed, Dulayl replied, and Martis pressed on swiftly. In a few moments he came upon a sheltered space where grass grew, and a hobbled donkey wandered from tuft to tuft, feeding. The animal watched him now, twitching its tail and its long ears.

“Is there anyone here?” Martis said, careful not to be too loud.

It was obvious that the children had left the donkey behind and gone on to the summit without it. Martis saw a pile of firewood, the remains of a campfire, and a little heap of baggage, blankets mostly. He knelt by the campfire and felt the ashes with his palm.

Still warm. He’d made good time overnight, and closed most of the gap between himself and the children. They couldn’t be very far ahead of him. He sighed.

“We’ve done it, Dulayl!” he said. “We’ll have a drink of water, I’ll have a bite of bread, and then I’ll catch up to them. I’ll be there when they ring the bell—if there is a bell.”

He let go of Dulayl’s reins and sat beside the fire. He’d lost his own water bag, but the children had left one behind. Very thoughtful of them. When he reached for it, something fiercely jabbed his hand. He snatched it back, thinking only that he’d been bitten by a snake. He saw blood.

But it was not a snake.

A fierce little face with red eyes glared at him, a hairy face with sharp teeth. It belonged to a tiny caricature of a man, that stood on two legs and menaced him with a little sharp stick with his blood on the tip of it.

Such things could not be. They were the stuff of delirium. Nevertheless, there it was. And it hissed and chattered at him.

For the moment, Martis went mad. He cried out and tried to seize the creature, to crush it to death in his hands. Still chattering, it eluded him.

Martis dove for it on his hands and knees, flailed at it, cursed it; but it was too agile for him. Sometime before Martis’ fury burned itself out, the creature got away from him altogether—either went into hiding, or simply ceased to exist. By the time Martis came to his senses, gasping for breath on all fours, there was no sign of it. Dulayl and the donkey, meanwhile, had both backed away from him and were now watching him intently from a safe distance.

“There’s a curse on every step of this journey,” he said to the animals. “But let me be cursed myself if I give it up here!”

He crawled back to the water and quenched his thirst, and had the presence of mind not to drink too much.

“Dulayl! Wait for me here. Make friends with the donkey, and eat your fill of grass. I’m going after those children. And if you see that imp, or whatever it is, stamp it under your hooves.”

He found the sign that put him on the trail, and went on without looking back. His hand throbbed where the little fiend had stabbed it.

What—imps, fiends? What superstitious pap was this? And from a man who was the First Prester’s intimate! Martis wondered at himself.

But there was no denying that he’d seen the thing, and imaginary beings don’t jab a man’s hand with a stick.

Martis, with his weariness thrown off like a cloak, strode up the trail. Above him hung the perpetual cloud of Bell Mountain. Inside it somewhere were the two children.

He was to stop them from ringing the bell. “Under no circumstances is that bell to be rung,” were Lord Reesh’s exact words. It had been a long time since Martis had thought of those words.

He had to catch up to the children before they could ring the bell. “If it is ever to be rung, that decision will be made here, in this office, by me or my successor.”

Reesh’s words drove him like a whip. He would have been running, had the way not been so steep.

He knew what his master would expect him to do when he found the children. He had his mace with him.

But why was Reesh so frightened? He didn’t believe in God. What did he think would happen if the children rang the bell? Why send his assassin to prevent it?

The unanswerable questions chased Martis up the mountain toward the waiting cloud.

Snow crunched under the children’s feet. It was hard, frozen snow, and they didn’t sink into it—not even to their ankles.

Jack worried about missing signs. You couldn’t see them if they were buried under snow. Then again, there wasn’t much you could see. The cloud hung heavily. Jack could see Ellayne, who was almost alongside him, and the snow directly under his feet, and whatever rocks and boulders chanced to loom on either side. You could see about five steps ahead and another five back, and that was all. The cloud swallowed up everything else.

“Slower, Jack!” Ellayne hissed at him. “We don’t want to walk off a cliff.”

“I’m trying to find the next sign,” Jack answered.

“What is that?”

Straight ahead rose a low pile of stones. When they were close enough to see it clearly, they realized it was a pile made by human hands. The heavy stone on top was in the shape of a spearhead.

“This must be the sign,” Jack said. “See—it’s pointed the way we were going.”