Black Jade (19 page)

'The Star People surely know a paradise that we can only imagine, the Elijin and Galadin, too,' Master Juwain told us. 'That is, they would if not for Angra Mainyu and those who followed him. Their way, I'm afraid, is still our way, and we call it the Left Hand Path.'

Here he nodded at Maram. 'And now you have all the clues you need to unlock these verses.'

Maram thought for a long few moments, pulling at his beard as he looked out at the blue sky and the even bluer lakes gleaming beneath it. And then he pointed west at the longest of them and said, 'All right, then, surely we are to espy a
drakul
lake, and of all these waters, only that one looks very much like a dragon -or a snake. And, see, two streams lead down into it, or rather away from it, past those saw-toothed hills. They
do
look something like tongues, I suppose. And so I would say that we're to follow the southernmost stream, to the left.'

'Very good.' Master Juwain said, nodding his head. 'I concur.'

Our course being set, we hiked back down the hill and sat down to a lunch of fried goose eggs and wheat bread toasted over a little fire. Then we checked the horses' loads and led them around the base of the hill topped by the castle rock. We worked our way through thick woods, and up and down the ravines that grooved the hill's slopes. Finally we came out into the valley of the lakes on the other side. We made camp that evening in clear sight of the dragon lake to the west of us. Its two tongues, of dusk-reddened water, caught; the fire of the setting sun.

It took us most of the next day to reach this lake, for we had to forge on past other hills, lakes and ground grown boggy from all the water that collected here. But reach it we did, and we began our trek through the dense vegetation of its southern shore. We paused for the night in a copse of great birch trees. We smelled the faint reek of a skunk and listened to the honking of the geese and the beating wings of other waterfowl out on the lake. The next day we walked on until we came to the stream told of in the Rhymes. We followed this rushing rill toward its source south, and then curving west and north. The hills around us grew ever higher. In this way, over the next two days, we made a miles-wide circle and came up behind the great massif that we had sighted from the sandstone castle. And then, as the Rhymes also told, we came upon a road that snaked back and forth still higher, winding up through barren tundra toward what seemed a snow-locked pass between two of the massif's mountains.

'Ah, I don't like the look of this,' Maram said as we stood by our horses looking up at the white peaks before us. 'It's too damn high!'

'But we don't have to go
over
the pass,' Daj said, 'just through it.'

'I don't care - it's still too high. It will be cold up there, cold enough to freeze our breath, I think. And what if there are bears?'

He went on complaining in a like manner for a while before he turned his disgruntlement to the road we must follow up to the heights. It was an ancient road and seemed once to have been a good one, built of finely-cut granite stones taken from the rock around us. Some of these stones, though worn, were still jointed perfectly. But time and ice and snow had riven many of the stones and reduced the road in places to no more than a path of rubble. Below us the road simply vanished into a wall of forest and the dark earth from which it grew. We could detect no sign of where this road might come from. Above us the road led on: through the mountains, we hoped, and straight to the Brotherhood's secret school.

'Well, I suppose we should camp here for the night,' Maram said.

'No, I'm afraid we must go up as high as we can,' Master Juwain told him, pointing at the great saddle between the two mountains. 'You have the verses - give them to me, please.'

Maram nodded grudgingly, then recited:

Approach the wall round Ashte's ides
–

There wait till dark of night subsides;

If sky is clear, at day's first light

Go deep into a darker night.

'But we
have
approached the wall!' Maram said to Master Juwain.

'Not close enough. The essence of these verses, I think, is that we must be ready to move quickly at the right moment. Now let us go on.'

And so we did. Our slog up the road was long and hard, though not particularly dangerous. As Maram had worried, it grew colder. The road passed through a swath of pines and broke out from tree-line into tundra. Ragged patches of snow blanketed the side of the mountain and covered the road in several places. We had to break through the crust and work against the snow's crunching, cornlike granules. Our feet, even through our boots, smarted sharply and then grew numb. The wind drove at us from the west in cruel, piercing gusts. But the sky, at least, was a great, blue dome and remained perfectly clear in all directions. And the sun comforted us for while - until it dropped behind the sharp-ridged peaks of the mountains farther to the west. Then it grew truly cold, enough to ice our sweaty garments and find our flesh beneath them. By the time we set to making camp at the crest of the road, we were all miserable and shivering.

Maram pointed at the pass, where the road disappeared into a dark tunnel cut through the white wall above us. And he said, 'We would be warmer if we slept inside
there.'

'We would,' Daj agreed, 'but the Rhyme says that we're supposed to wait out
here.'

'The damn Rhymes,' Maram muttered. 'They make no sense.' 'But that's just it,' Daj said, 'we're supposed to make sense
of
them.'

Atara began unloading some faggots of wood from one of the packhorses, and she said to Maram, 'It
would
be warmer in the tunnel. If there are any bears on this mountain, I'm sure they've made lair there.'

'Bears?' Maram said. 'No, no - surely they've come out of their winter sleep and have gone down to feed on berries or trout. Surely they have.
They
at least have sense.'

He set to unloading wood and building a fire with a fervor that kept away his gut-churning fear of bears. But he must have remembered the great white bear that had attacked us on a similar pass in the Morning Mountains - as did Master Juwain and I. We said nothing of this maddened animal that Morjin had made into a ghul, for we did not wish to frighten the children, or ourselves. I prayed that no ghul-bears - nor snow tigers nor any other beasts directed by Morjin - would find us here. It was enough that we still had to fight our way through this rugged terrain and through the Rhymes that were our map to it.

We sat for most of thjnight by the fire. The ground here was too steeply sloped and rocky for reclining, and too cold, too And so we made cushions of over sleeping furs and huddled together with our cloaks thrown over us as a sort of woolen tent. Estrella sat between me and Atara, and fell asleep with her head resting against my side. Maram's back pressed firmly and warmly against my own. In this way, we propped each up and kept away the worst of the cold.

I slept only a little that night, and Master Juwain and Kane did not sleep at all. At times, in low voices, they discussed the meaning of the Way Rhymes; at other times they sat in silence as they looked up at the stars. I kept watch on these bright points of light as best I could. But I must have dozed, for I awakened in the deep of night to the weight of Kane's hand gently shaking my shoulder. He stood above me uncloaked, and he pointed up at the constellations spread across the heavens.

'Look, Val,' he murmured. 'The Ram is about to set.'

In the biting cold, we roused the others and broke camp. This required little more work than heaping a few handfuls of snow upon the fire's coals and tying our rolled-up sleeping furs to the backs of the horses. We breakfasted on some battle biscuits and a little cold water to wash them down. And then we waited.

As the last stars of the Ram set behind the western horizon, a faint light suffused the world and touched the mountains around us with an eerie sheen. At a nod from Master Juwain, we lit the torches that we had readied for this moment. And then without wasting another breath, we set out up the road and into the tunnel.

None of us knew what we would find there. The tunnel's stark-ness and long straight lines were almost a disappointment. The road through it seemed good and solid, and the horses' hooves clopping against the paving stones sent echoes reverberating up and down around us. The light cast by our oily torches showed a tube seemingly melted through the mountain's rock. The curving walls and ceiling above us gleamed all glassy and black, like sheets of obsidian more than fused granite. Maram guessed that the Ymanir must have once burned this tunnel with great firestones, for those shaggy giants had once ranged through most of the White Mountains and had built through them underground cities, invisible bridges and other garvels. Surely, I thought, this tunnel must be one of them. As we made our way down its gentle slope, I could see no end to it. Who but the Ymanir, I wondered, could carve a miles-long tunnel out of solid rock?

'How I
do
miss Ymiru,' Maram called out into the cold, still air. 'He was a broody man, it's true, but the only one I've ever known bigger and stronger than I. A great companion, he was, too. If
he
were here, I'm sure he could explain the mystery of this damn tunnel and what we'll find when we come out on the other side.'

'But we have the Rhyme for that,' Master Juwain said to him. 'Why don't you recite it?'

'Ah,
you
recite it,' Maram said to him. 'My head has never worked right at this accursed hour.'

'All right,' Master Juwain told him. And then he intoned:

And through the long dark into dawn,

The road goes down, yet up: go on
!

'Shhh, quiet now!' Kane called out to us in a low voice. 'We know nothing about this place or what might dwell here.'

His words sobered us, and we moved on more quickly, and more quietly, too. It was freezing cold in this long tube through the earth, though mercifully there was no wind. After a few hundred yards or so we came upon yellowish bones strewn across the tunnel's floor and heaped into mounds. At the sight of them, Maram began shaking. The bones did not, however, look to be human; I whispered to Maram and the others that a snow tiger must have holed up here, dragging inside and devouring his kills. This did little to mollify Maram. As he walked his horse next to mine, he muttered, 'Snow tigers, is it? Oh, Lord, they're even worse than bears!'

The smell of the bones was old and musty, and I did not sense here the presence of snow tigers or any other beings besides ourselves. And yet something about this tunnel seemed strange, almost as if the melted rock that lined it sensed
our
presence and was in some way alive. As we moved farther into it, I felt a pounding from down deep, as of drums - but even more like the beating of a heart. I wondered, as did Master Juwain, if the tunnel's obsidian coating might really be some sort of unknown gelstei. All the gelstei resonated with each other in some way, however faint, and a disturbing sensation tingled through the hilt of my sword. It traveled up my arm and into my body, collecting in the pit of my belly where it burned. It impelled me to lead on through the smothering darkness even more quickly.

'Val,' Maram whispered to me through the cold air, 'I feel sick - like I did in the Black Bog.'

'It's all right,' I whispered back. 'We're nearly through.'

'Are you sure? How can you be sure?'

We journeyed on for quite a way, how far or how long I couldn't quite tell. Our torches burnt down and began flickering out one by one. We had brought no oil with which to renew them And then, at last, with the horses' iron-shod hooves striking out a great noise against cold stone, we sighted a little patch of light ahead of us. We fairly ran straight toward it. Our breath burst from our lungs, and the patch grew bigger and bigger. And then we came out of the tunnel into blessed fresh air.

We gathered on a little shelf of rock on the side of the mountain. A cold wind whipped at our faces. Spread out before us, to the north and east, was some of the most forbidding country I had ever seen. Far out to the horizon gleamed nothing but great jagged peaks covered with snow and white rivers of ice that cut between them. No part of this terrible terrain seemed flat or showed a spray of green.

'This
can't
be the Valley of the Sun!' Maram cried out. 'No one could live here!'

In truth, even a snow tiger or a marmot would have had a difficult time surviving in this ice-locked land. Snowdrifts covered the road before us; this little span of stone seemed to dip down along the spine of a rocky ridge before rising again and disappearing into the rock and snow of another mountain.

'We must have made a mistake,' Maram said. 'Either that or the Rhymes misled us.'

'No, we made no mistake,' Master Juwain huffed out into the biting wind. 'And the Rhymes always tell true.'

And Maram said:

And through the long dark into dawn

The road goes down, yet up: go on
!

'Well,' he continued, 'we went through that damn tunnel and if we go on any farther, we'll freeze to death. There's nothing left of this road, and I wouldn't follow it if there were. And there are no more Rhymes!'

But there were. As Kane again warned Maram to silence, Master Juwain said, 'Yes, be quiet now - we have little time.'

And then he recited:

Through mountains' notch, a golden ray:

The rising sun will point theway.

Before this orb unveils full face

Go on into a higher place.

'Into
that?
Mararm cried out, pointing at the icy wasteland before us. 'I won't. We cant. And why should we hurry to our doom, anyway?'

'Shhh, quiet now,' Kane said to him. 'Quiet.'