The Southern Trail (Book 4) (21 page)

Several minutes later they reached an opening in the forest, and Marco saw that a narrow band of sunlight was reaching down to the forest floor in a nearly straight line stretching north and south.  The opening had a beaten dirt and stone path in the center, a veritable highway compared to most of the other byways he had seen since leaving the ruins of the city of Rurita.

“This is the road they take,” Nestor used the term ‘road’ liberally.  “Shall we go look at their camp?” he asked.  “It’s just a little bit further.”

Marco nodded his assent, and they passed through the sunlight and re-entered the shade of the forest on the other side.

They walked for five minutes, and Nestor raised his hand to point to the right.  Marco looked, and saw the camp.  A number of trees had been thinned away among the forest, and the weeds and bushes that grew under the canopy were also absent, or trampled down.

“It’s empty.  They’re gone,” Nestor stated the obvious.

“I’m ready to find them,” Marco said as he stood.  “Thank you Nestor,” he said as he turned to his guide.  “I can go on from here.  Go back to Corinne and your village, and get on with your life.”

“Thank you for the mercy you’ve shown us,” Nestor said to Marco.  He held out his hand; they shook, and then he departed.

Marco stood and watched him go, then went to the camp site.  He found four fire pits, all of them filled with ashes.  There were no coals, there was no warmth coming from the pits – the camp had emptied out hours before, at the very least.  The ground was trampled with numerous boot prints, making it impossible for Marco to determine if the princess had been there.  He found a broken leather strap, and a few other pieces of evidence of habitation, but nothing definitive about Ellersbine.

He gave up searching the campsite, and went back to the trail, then returned to the major trail, the corridor that ran north and south.  He realized that he had no evidence that his quarry had gone south; he had just presumed they were headed in that direction.  The ground was stony and compact, leaving no clear evidence of traffic where his trail crossed it.  With his head down, Marco began to slowly walk south, looking along the verge and trying to spot soft patches of soil where tracks might have pressed into the soil.

His search took only one hundred yards distance to find boot prints on the side of the trail, heading south.  The prints looked relatively fresh, made within the past day it appeared.  He went back north and searched to make sure there was no evidence of anyone having gone in that direction as well, but a search up the road covering twice the distance of his southern search found only older prints pointed south.

Satisfied that he knew which way to go, Marco started jogging along the southern path.  It ran straight, rising and falling with a gently rolling forested landscape for two miles or more, then began to twist and amble as the terrain grew rougher and the mountainous region reasserted its nature.

Marco struggled to maintain his pace as sunset began to fall.  He slowed down to a walk, both hands on his hips, breathing hard.  As he walked he scanned the ground along the sides of the narrower trail as it climbed the vertical ascents in zigzagging and valley hugging slopes, and spotted the ongoing procession of boots that reassured him his quarry was moving in the same direction he was.

As long as there was sunlight to follow, Marco walked along the trail.  When darkness became complete, he stopped and worked his way into a leafy thicket of bushes above the trail.  He lit his hand, the brightness of the palm and fingertips producing enough illumination for him to root through the supplies Corrine had offered.  He found a ham sandwich, its bread compressed into a thick, chewy wrap around the meat after the day of traveling inside his pack; despite its mistreatment, the sandwich proved to be delicious – savory and tender.  Marco alternately took bites of the meat and sipped spring water from his finger, as he wondered how long it would take him to catch up to the kidnappers who were ahead of him.

Marco lay on the ground and fell quickly asleep.  He dreamed of a scattered collection of his adventures – cutting off his hand to avoid the possession by Iago’s evil energy, facing the Echidna in the loathsome cavern, struggling through the caverns of the underworld in his bid to return to the surface, and jumping through the air in his desperate attempt to defeat Iamblichus.

He awoke with a start to the feel of rain drops pelting him.  The sky had been clear when he had laid down, but clouds had invisibly moved overhead, hidden by the thick canopy of tree limbs while he slept, and now they were releasing their heavy load of moisture upon him and all the land around him.

There was a trace of dawn’s early light trying to reach though the eastern sky, he saw, but not enough to be of value to him.  Marco raised his hand and concentrated, then raised a dome overhead, a protective shield that blocked the rain from further soaking him, too late to keep him from shivering momentarily.  He gave a sigh, aggravated by the unexpected discomfort, then focused his attention on his use of the powers contained in his hand.  He closed his eyes, then tried to call upon the energy to simultaneously maintain the shield overhead while also producing light from his hand.

The energy did nothing for several seconds, then abruptly flickered forth with a feeble light, one that continued to flicker.  Calling upon the sorcery to do two things at once was not an easy task, something that was barely within the scope of his largely self-taught control.

Marco looked down at his knapsack, then looked over at the food supplies Corrine had given him; the bag was wet, and in the flickering light from his hand it appeared to be moving.  He crouched down to examine it, holding his hand low to provide as much illumination as it could, and then saw to his disgust that swarms of ants and other insects had discovered and begun devouring the food he had been given.  His delicious supply of food for the next several days was ruined.

Frustrated by the loss of the food on top of the rain that had awoken him prematurely after his uneasy sleeping nightmares, Marco raised his hand in frustration and allowed his sorcery energy to explode outward in an expression of all that he was dissatisfied with.

The light from his hand burst into a nova-like brightness, and the shield overhead turned bright, then expanded exponentially.  The shield thunderously flew outward and upward.  The trees immediately around him were knocked flat to the ground; they all were laid down, pointing outward from where he crouched, as the shield bulldozed them out of its way in its rushed growth, before it weakened and dissolved at a distance of a hundred yards away from him.  In the meantime, the top of the shield flew upward, growing larger and retaining its integrity as it flew through the air, rising faster than any bird Marco had ever seen take to the air.  It was a glowing disk of energy that rose high, then higher, then reached the rain clouds above, still intact.  The shield opened a circular hole in the clouds, an extraordinary event to witness, one that revealed the faintly lit dawn-colored upper reaches of the atmosphere above the cloud cover.

Rain resumed falling upon Marco, who looked up in surprise and shock at the results of his temper tantrum.  He’d not unleashed such power since he had hammered upon the sorceress at the palace in the Lion City.

The land was cleared around him, a weak beam of sunlight was falling upon him through the hole in the clouds, and the rain continued to fall upon him and his ruined supply of food.

He shook his head slightly as he closed his eyes.  Marco let him mind go blank, then stood and picked up his backpack, without any of Corrine’s food.

The ground seemed to shiver suddenly.  Marco threw his arms out in the air, wind-milling them to keep his balance for a few seconds until calm returned to the earth.  He stood and waited, fearful that the quake might repeat, but after a long minute all was calm, and Marco proceeded to resume his travels through the rain.  His initial travel was a slow process of climbing over the prone trunks of fallen trees, punctuated by sliding and slipping in the rivulets of rain water that turned the road into a muddy quagmire.

By the end of his first hour, Marco finally straddled a tree trunk for the last time, and saw the trail he wanted to follow curving away through the rain.  The path ahead descended as it went around a bend, so that he could see no more than another hundred yards ahead.

With a shrug of his shoulders, Marco repositioned his pack, then started stamping through the puddles, resolutely determined to travel as fast and far as possible during the day.  The rain would wash away tracks and traces of the passage of the travelers in front of him, yet it would also be likely to slow them down, if not even possibly pin them down in one spot for a day.

As he rounded the curve, Marco saw that much to his surprise, the trail took a sharp turn ahead and disappeared into the mountain.  A tunnel, clearly manmade, with roughhewn sides and ceiling, sank at a gentle angle of descent, a pitch black opening that appeared to be his only option to follow.

Chapter 15

Marco stepped into the mouth of the tunnel, and progressed inward far enough to be protected from the rain.  He looked behind him at the grey curtain of rain that reduced the visibility outside the stony enclosure, then he turned to look at the absolute darkness that was ahead.  The path offered no other option than to descend into the underground; he prayed that it was only the underground, and not another dreadful journey down into the underworld land of the dead.  He had no wish to suffer that experience again.

There was no choice on what to do.  There was only a puzzle – it made little sense for a lightly-traveled country trail to have a lengthy tunnel carved in order for the path to go through a mountain that seemed no different from the many others that the path had simply gone around or gone over.  The tunnel was a massive piece of work, and it could not be justified by the amount of traffic that the path carried.

But it was the only way he had to go, mysterious and inexplicable as it was.  He happened to look down and saw that the prints from several pairs of boots were evident in the muddy floor, and that sealed the deal.  He began to move forward, each step taking him into a slightly lower part of the tunnel, and an imperceptibly darker area.

Marco waited until he was several yards into the cave, when its opening had become only a pinprick of light behind him.

He stopped walking, and called loudly, shouting down the tunnel.  “Ellersbine!

“I’m on my way!” he shouted.  He knew it was very unlikely that the princess would hear him shout, and he knew that if her captors heard him he was putting himself at a disadvantage.   Yet he wanted to do it, and felt better for having done it.

He continued on, and stopped five minutes later to light his hand.  It produced a surprising profusion of light, much more than he had expected.  He looked at the appendage and saw that the entire surface was glowing with the warm golden color that it naturally held.  All the covering that Iasco had placed around it to hide it had disappeared, presumably blown away by the explosion of power that he had unleashed in his tempestuous outburst in the forest at the start of the day.

That would present a problem in the future, he knew.  He’d have to resort to wearing gloves constantly once again, but for now it made his trip through the cave easier.

The tunnel was growing larger as he walked through it, he realized.  It was both wider and taller than it had been at the opening.  He had a real distaste for tunnels, he decided, a distaste that he hadn’t held before he had fought the Echidna and traveled through the underworld.  He hoped the tunnel would come to an end quickly, and provide an exit back out into the world above the surface.  Even if it was a rainy, dreary day outside, it would be preferable to traveling underground.

He walked a few more steps when it struck him as odd that there not only would be a tunnel built for such a small, seemingly insignificant trail, but that it would be such a long tunnel as well.  A typical traveler would almost have to have a lantern and candles to be able to travel through such a lengthy excursion underground.

As he began to ponder the nature of the tunnel, there was a sudden creaking and rumbling noise overhead.  He looked upwards and saw that the ceiling was a whirling mass of darkly glowing, colored seams of stone.  It was shocking; just moments before he thought the stones overhead had been a uniform mass of dark gray.

It was the sign of a volcano, he realized.  “Gawail, I need you,” he said softly, remembering the pixie’s conversation with the volcano they had encountered on the trip back from the Echidna.  Even without the need to address the threat of a volcano, Marco wished he had the pixie as a companion on the long journey he was slogging through; Gawail had been loyal, companionable, and fearless when he had joined Marco and the others in the pursuit of the Echidna.

There was no Gawail there to help him though, and the roof’s seams of colors, deep yellows and oranges and brownish reds, were beginning to move faster.  He needed to get through as quickly as possible, he realized, and he started sprinting before the roof fell down and blocked his way through.

Marco ran as fast as he could, hoping to find the end to the area of the threatening roof.  There seemed to be no end, however.  After a long, frantic sprint, the roof suddenly sagged downward several feet, paused, and then began to descend again.

Knowing that he was about to be crushed to death, Marco desperately raised his hand and created a protective dome.  He had seen how futile such a dome could prove to be against superior force, as in the case of the sorceress at the Lion City palace, whose dome had been crushed by his own emotional efforts.  But there were no other options for the moment.

He kept running, the dome hovering overhead as the ceiling settled lower and lower above him and in front of him.  Twenty yards further down the road, the ceiling fell far enough to graze across the top of his dome.  He felt the impact of the contact; it felt as though he personally was holding up the weight.  In some unknown fashion his sorcery magic was transferring the stress of the situation to him.