Martyr's Fire (8 page)

Instead of answering, the puppy shifted his weight and settled for a nap.

“Not so soon,” Thomas warned his small friend. “We can’t let this time go to waste. He no doubt pays a great price for our freedom.” Thomas shook off the memory of Gervaise’s scream outside the church above. What had happened to the old man? Was he still alive? Nothing would come from worrying. Better to honor the man and his sacrifice by following his instructions.

“Our journey begins.”

Thomas took his first halting step with courage, the result of three things: the calm from realizing the priests above did not know where he had vanished, the promise of an explanation when he found the burning water, and, strangely, from the puppy blundering into his legs each step he took. A companion, no matter his size, made the eerie silence easier to bear.

Thomas took his next step into a rough stone wall. His groping hand prevented any injury to his face, yet Thomas recoiled as if he had been struck. Any sudden contact, gentle or not, created awesome fear in this pitch-dark place.

Thomas pushed himself away, then thought again, and brought his right shoulder up to the wall.

“I’ll feel my way along,” he told the puppy, simply as a way to break the tension that brought sweat in rivers down his face despite the damp chill. “It will give me warning of twists and turns.”

Thus, his fingers became his eyes.

Thomas patted the wall as he followed it, grimacing at real or imagined cobwebs. He stubbed his fingertips raw against outcrops of stone and stumbled occasionally against objects on the ground. Twice he patted empty air—as much a fright as the original contact against stone, and each time discovered another turn in the passage. He counted each step, remembering the strange message about a leap of faith. The puppy stayed with Thomas and did not complain.

Upon his sixtieth step, Thomas paused. There was nothing to indicate a leap of faith. What had the old man meant?

Two steps later, Thomas reached for the stone wall ahead of him and found nothing.

“Another turn,” he muttered to the puppy. “This cannot be what the old man meant. Then why not warn me of the previous two? The shock of many more will kill me more surely than those priests.”

He slowly began to pivot right, when a low, angry noise froze him.

It took a moment, but Thomas identified the echoes as growls of the puppy at his feet.

Thomas relaxed.

“Hush,” he spoke downward, then moved to take his step.

The puppy growled again, with enough intensity to make the skin ripple down Thomas’s back.

“Easy, my friend.” Thomas knelt to soothe the puppy. The growling stopped.

Thomas stood and moved again. This time the puppy bit Thomas in the foot and growled louder.

“Whelp! Have you gone crazy?”

Thomas reached down to slap the puppy for his insolence, but couldn’t find him in the dark.

He groped farther, patting the ground. First behind him, then to his side, then—

Ahead! The ground ahead had disappeared.

Thomas forgot the puppy. He patted the wall on his right, found the edge of the corner and slid his hand downward, finally kneeling to reach as low as possible. Where the corner met the ground, it was no longer a corner, but a surface that continued downward below the level of his feet.

The skin on his neck now prickled in fear.

“Beast,” he cried softly. A whimper answered him.

Thomas, on his knees in his blindness in the dark, crawled backward two more paces, then eased himself onto his stomach.

Feeling safer on his belly, Thomas inched forward again, feeling for the edge of the drop-off with his extended right hand. When he reached it, he kept his hand on the edge, but shuffled to his left, determined to find the width of the unseen chasm.

Seconds later, he found it, joined to the left wall.

Thomas was too spent with the jolts of fear to react with much more than a moan of despair.

“How deep?” he asked the puppy. “How far ahead to the other side?”

Thomas crawled ahead as far as he dare. With his dangling hand, he reached down into the blackness.
After all, perhaps this drop is a mere foot or two
, he thought.
I could be stuck here forever, afraid to step downward
.

His exploring hand had found nothing. Even after drawing his sword and extending it to reach farther, he could not prove to himself that the drop was only a shallow ditch.

Long minutes later, he raised his head from the ground again. He knew he had three choices. Leap ahead and trust the chasm was narrow enough to cross. Drop into the chasm and trust its bottom was just beyond his reach. Or retrace his steps.

Thomas called the puppy closer and tried to find his ears in the darkness. The puppy found his hand first and gently licked as though cleaning his master. Thomas suddenly realized the puppy was licking away blood from his damaged fingers. He’d been so tense he’d not noticed when his skin went from raw to broken.

How could he possibly overcome this barrier?

Thomas shouted and listened for an echo. Would that tell him anything? Not enough to make any kind of decision about how deep or wide the chasm was.

A tiny flicker caught his eye.

Thomas almost missed it, so much had he given up on using vision to aid his senses.

He blinked, then squinted.

Five minutes passed.

Another minute. There! The flicker again. It brightened, then dropped to nothing. Thomas strained to focus and pinpoint its location. Ten agonizing minutes later, another flare, hardly more than a candle’s last waver before being suddenly snuffed.

It dawned slowly upon Thomas.

A flame.

Burning water?

He was seeing the light of a far-off flame, light that flared rarely and softly. Light that reflected and bounced off the passageway across the chasm.

Thomas raised himself and sat, knees huddled against his chest. The puppy leaned against him, whining occasionally, growling for no apparent reason in other moments.

A phrase echoed through his head.
“Make the leap of faith.”

Why had the old man been so urgent with those five words? Why had he repeated those words and no other part of his instructions?

“Make the leap of faith.”

It reminded him of part of a conversation he’d once held with Gervaise. To pass time, Thomas spoke aloud to the puppy.

“During the quiet of an early morning,” Thomas said, “Gervaise told me this: ‘No matter how much you learn or debate the existence of God, no matter how much you apply your mind to Him, you cannot satisfy your soul with a decision based on proof.’ ”

The puppy rested his chin on Thomas’s upper thigh.

“The old man said there must come a time at the beginning of your faith when you let go and simply trust, a time when you make the leap of faith, something much like a …” Thomas faltered as he suddenly realized the significance of Gervaise’s repeated words.

He finished the thought silently.
“Something much like a leap into the darkness.”

The conversation flooded Thomas’s mind. They had talked often, usually in the early hours after Thomas had walked the ramparts of Magnus. This conversation had taken place barely a month after Thomas had conquered Magnus. Gervaise had talked simply of faith in answer to all of Thomas’s questions.

“It is a leap into the darkness, Thomas,”
he had said.
“God awaits you on the other side. First your heart finds Him; then your mind will understand Him more clearly so that all evidence points toward the unshakable conclusion you could not find before, and after that leap, your faith will grow stronger with time. But faith, any faith, is trust and that small leap into darkness.”

“No, Gervaise,” Thomas said aloud. “I cannot do this. You ask too much.”

“After sixty steps, you must make the leap of faith. Understand? Make the leap of faith.”

Yet how could Thomas blindly jump ahead? What lay on the other side? What lay below?

An encouraging thought struck him.

Magnus was surrounded by lake waters. Indeed, the wells of Magnus did not have to be dug deep before reaching water. And this passage was already below the surface. How far down, then, before reaching water from this passageway?

Might he drop his sword to test the depth of the chasm?

“Make the leap of faith.”

No, he could not venture weaponless.

Might he drop Beast ahead to test the depth of the chasm? Or cast the Beast ahead to test the width?

“Make the leap of faith.”

No. He knew that, while his brain compelled him to explore every
option, his heart would not let him callously do something like this to the puppy. Not to an innocent creature. Not when Beast trusted him so.

“Make the leap of faith.”

Thomas frowned. Had he not regarded Gervaise with equal trust? And if Thomas now showed such concern for the puppy, would not Gervaise show that much more concern for Thomas?

“Make the leap of faith.”

Thomas finally allowed himself to decide what he had known since recalling the old man’s words about faith.

He must leap into the darkness.

Ten times Thomas paced large steps backward from the edge of the chasm. Ten times he repaced them forward again, careful to reach down and ahead with his sword on the eighth, ninth, and tenth steps to establish he had not yet reached the edge.

“Beast,” he said as he retraced his steps backward yet again, “if leap we must, I shall not do it from a standstill. Faith or not, I doubt Gervaise would encourage stupidity.”

Thomas had debated briefly whether to leave the puppy behind. But only briefly. The extra weight was slight, and he could not bear to make it across safely and hear the abandoned whimpers of a puppy left for death.

Thomas squatted and felt for the line he had gouged into the ground to mark the ten paces away from the edge.

He rehearsed the planned action in his mind. He would sprint only eight steps—for he could not trust running paces to be as small as his ten carefully stretched and marked paces. On the eighth step, he would leap and dive and release the puppy. His hands would give him first warning of impact—how he hoped for that impact!—and at best he might knock loose his breath. The puppy would travel slightly farther, and at best tumble and roll.

At worst, neither would reach the other side of that unknown chasm in this terrible blackness.

Thomas drew a deep breath. He hugged the puppy once, then tucked him into the crook of his right arm.

“Make the leap of faith.”

Thomas plunged ahead.

At full sprint, Thomas dove upward on the eighth step and left the ground.

In the black around him, he had no way to measure the height he reached, no way to measure how far forward he flew, and no way to measure how much he dropped.

It seemed to take forever, the rush of air in his ears, the half sob of fear escaping his throat, and the squirm of the puppy in his outstretched hands.

The puppy!

In midair, Thomas pushed him ahead and released him from his hands. Before he could even think of praying for his safety, or the safety of the puppy, the heels of his hands hit solid ground, and he bumped and skidded onto his nose and chin, then, as his head bounced upward, his chest and stomach.

Time, with him, skidded back to normal, and Thomas could count his heartbeats thudding in his ears.

Was he across? Or at the bottom of a shallow ditch?

The puppy’s confused whimper sounded nearby.

Thomas coughed and rolled to his feet.

“My friend,” he said, “we seem to be alive. But across?”

Thomas answered his own question by turning around and crawling back. Moments later, his hands found an edge!

Thomas grinned in the darkness.

The next eighty-eight steps took nearly an hour. Although the occasional
flare of reflected light grew stronger and stronger, it provided little illumination, and Thomas dared not to risk another unseen chasm.

Finally, the flame itself!