The Bitterbynde Trilogy (28 page)

She clambered down and found Sianadh sitting on the rocky floor of the cave behind the waterfall, his shaggy head tilted back. He was studying the doors intently.

A marvelous eagle with a seven-foot wing-span dominated the archway directly over the meeting of the portals. Proud and regal it was, with eyes that glittered. Every pinion was carved in fine detail. The rest of the arch was covered with all manner of birds and beasts represented accurately, in masterly design. The doors themselves were framed with twining leaves and bore extensive runic inscriptions. These, the man was trying to decipher.

“I be certain that these runes hold the key,” he yelled against the torrent's rage. “There must be some trick or password to open these doors. I propose we remain at Waterstair for as long as it takes to discover the key.”

At these words, an odd sensation gripped his companion: a shuddering coldness. She ran out of the cave into sunlight, but it was several minutes before the sickness passed. When she returned, the Ertishman was still staring at the doors, oblivious of her erstwhile disappearance.

“The writing on these doors be not Ertish or common Feorhkind,” he shouted, “nor any I have seen. It is some ancient high script, from which our younger languages, mayhap, have derived. Reckon I have a fair chance of figuring it out. I be not unlearned. Then we open the doors, dig out as much as we can carry, and return to the city. We sell what we have brought, deck ourselves out in fine and courtly array, and bring my nephew Liam and his most trusted comrades back here to excavate the rest.”

The city
. People would stare, in that place, and revile a deformed waif. But then again, all hope lay there—perhaps a cure for skin poisoning, perhaps yellow-haired folk in the street crowds—relatives, name-givers.

The girl went off to gather fresh food. The unidentified fruits, after being picked, lasted only for half a day before they withered. But they were delectable, and she craved them with a hunger she had never known, as if for the first time she tasted truly nourishing provender, food that made her limbs wake to a tingling strength that penetrated to the very roots of her hair. The closest fare to these delicacies had been the passionfruit near fuath-haunted Fincastle's Mill.

As she finished piling up the provisions for their next meal, the sound of the waterfall drew her. She walked upstream to look at it again, to marvel at its power and beauty. “Waterstair,” Sianadh had called this place—a name deciphered from the barely legible word scrawled on his map. Imrhien noticed now that above the fall's lip the escarpment rose even higher. On a cliff above the cataract, long threads of water hung glinting like the tinsel on Persefonae's gowns. This was indeed a many-stepped stairway. Perhaps there was another entrance up there, behind or beside the higher waterfall. Although Imrhien's feet were still chafed and bootless, curiosity motivated her. The vine-covered, creviced cliffs would be easy to climb, worth exploring. She found a toehold and kicked into it.

From the top of the cliff, between the sun-washed tops of the trees of the river-vale below, a bird's-eye view opened. To the east, hills rolled away for miles toward a hazy horizon. In the west, the dark mass of the pine forest marched grimly into a violet distance.

The sky opened out overhead. Six thousand feet high, the clouds that Stormriders called “altocumulus castellanus” were unfolding vertically in towerlike extensions. Above this skyscape of salt-white castles, fibrous cirrus streamed across the sky in feathered filaments, as strong jet streams at thirty thousand feet swept ice crystals from the clouds.

But at Imrhien's back there was no view, for it was blocked by a rearing face of soil and stone, draped with greenery. It was the second step, rising nearly as high as the first, and the river spilled vertiginously over it on its way down from the melting heights of cold Crowsteeple. A long pool footed this upper cataract, a pool in a granite bowl with sheer sides and no path leading behind the gush. But a glorious vine spilled over the rock face, bearing clusters of perfumed purple pearls. While gathering them in handfuls, Imrhien discovered, behind the cascade of leaves, an opening.

This was no confining, lightless hole like the capuchin's tunnel, but a tall, clean passage of split rock lit by glowing ears of fungus that clung to the walls. As she followed the corridor's curve, the sound of applause grew loud in her ears. She had begun to believe that she approached a hall filled with thousands of clapping hands, when it turned out to be merely water, falling from a height. After rounding the last bend, Imrhien brushed past a stone pedestal and came face-to-face with a crowd.

As still as stone, she stood gaping.

As still as stone, they stared back at her.

The cul-de-sac terminated in an airy, high-roofed cavern in the rock beneath the upper falls. Light slanted in through some high vent, in long crystals and golden splinters, and illuminated the occupants—a concourse, a multitude of forms and faces that might have been the source of the applause.

Of stone they were fashioned.

Stark stone, rich jet-black obsidian glossed with highlights—that was the mode of one-half of the gathering. The other half glistened pristine, with a snow-on-snow whiteness. All the figures stood as large as life, and as realistic, for they were marvelously chiseled. Kings and queens, armored knights, tall-hatted wizards, and all manner of foot soldiers—pikemen, bowmen, axemen, others with spears or swords—posed betwixt four crenellated towers only ten feet high. These towers, atop which stone birds perched, stood positioned at the corners of a quartz-mounted stage, a platform faultlessly inlaid with a checkered marquetry of black marble alternating with niveous onyx. Utterly still they posed under the silver hair of the falls. Yet flickering shadows subtly lent them false animation.

After long moments their visitor approached, prowling warily among the statues. She was like a coiled spring, ready to bounce up and flee should any unseelie activity erupt.

Oddly attractive, the figures possessed some indescribable alien quality in the sense that the sudden, swift movements of birds and the breathing of fish and the navigation of migratory seabirds are foreign to humankind yet also closer to the world's elemental forces. Perfect were they in every detail, and although there clung about them an invisible breath or emanation, an intangible quality that betokened great age, no sign of age defaced them; no water-blur, no chipping, stain, or growth. To touch them was to touch cold silk, so fine-grained and polished were the surfaces.

Each profile, each trapping and ornament, stood out as crisply as a carving that had been finished only an hour since. One would have expected to see the cavern's floor littered with stone-dust in flakes and slivers, yet it remained as clean as though it had been freshly swept.

So exquisitely delineated was the hair of their heads, the pointed petals of the rowel spurs, the thong-lacings on sword-belts, every ring and rivet of the chain mail, the pinnacles and crockets ornamenting the kings' scabbards, the long graceful draperies, the pointed shoes, the jeweled cauls covering the hair of the two queens and the veils fluttering down their backs like translucent sheets of water—so lifelike it all was that, save for their immobility, the figures might not have been stone at all, but frozen in death.

No giant doors frowned upon this rough-hewn cavity, but glassy quartzlike pebbles studded the walls at random. By the archway opening onto the passage from which she had just entered, there rose a pedestal in the shape of a salmon. On its head, the fish carried a waterlily, and in the centre of the open flower lay three left-handed gauntlets, unpaired, and—like the statues—unimpaired. Intricate runic patterns flowed over the overlapping metal joints on each finger. The fish-scales of the cuffs shone as if newly oiled. At odds with such extraordinary craftsmanship, they had been fashioned from cheap metals—red copper—miraculously untarnished—blue andalum, and yellow talium. Imrhien picked up the copper one, examining it with a half-formed intention to take it back for Sianadh to see. A sidelong glance at the centuries-wise stone multitude made her think better of the idea. She replaced the cold metal thing and departed.

<>

These signs, among the few Imrhien had learned, were the closest approximations to the message she was trying to communicate. Yet they were far from satisfactory.

“I swear,
chehrna
, that my next task after these doors open will be to teach ye every word I know of handspeak. What ails ye? What have ye found?”

By dint of drawings in the dirt and copious, extravagant gestures, the girl eventually described what she had seen on the cliff top.

“Kings-and-Queens?” Sianadh's eyes lit up. “Big statues on a game-board? What were they made of—gold and jewels? I must climb up and see.…”

His companion shook her head, intending to convey they were not golden or bejeweled and that he, with a cracked rib, should not risk a climb. The latter point he realized soon enough when, with a roar of agony, he gave up his mountaineering attempt, having achieved no greater altitude than eight feet.

Imrhien made a hand-sign of doors opening. Surprisingly, he grasped her meaning.

“Aye, of course, lass. Ye're saying there might well be another entrance up there—doors hidden in the walls, to open for whosoever moves the game pieces rightly. Aye, that's it! I reckon 'tis a test of worthiness for those who would open the doors to the treasure. Only the cunning deserve to succeed. Winning must be the key. Can the pieces be moved?”

They were too heavy. She shook her head, then remembered the gauntlets. Her thoughts churned.
The statues would move if prompted by a hand that wears one of those gloves. The obvious solution!

Frustrated, unable to give expression to her inspiration, the girl stamped a foot in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Eloquently she appealed to Sianadh with her eyes.

He grasped her chin in his hand, gently.

“Ye have my word on it—I shall teach ye the 'speak. But first I be wanting to teach ye the playing of Kings-and-Queens. Fortunate ye be, for ye're looking at the best Kings-and-Queens player in all of Finvarna, which bountiful country—may I tread her green turf once more afore I die, and may that death be by drowning in a barrel of vintage Lochair Best—which country be renowned for the skill of its inhabitants at the Battle Royal. Unbeaten, I be. If ye get those pieces in checkmate, then by some clever mechanism a door may open in the side of the cliff, and ye and I shall soon be rich beyond our wildest dreams. And I cannot speak for ye, but my dreams be wilder than a creel full of fur-spitting gray-malkins.'

Sianadh took a cake of ocher clay and drew some squares on a flat rock beside the river. Sticks and pebbles masqueraded as sovereigns and battle-hardy warriors.

“This be a checkmate layout,” he said, setting the pieces in position to demonstrate. “The woods have captured the king of the stones.”

<>

“Nay, ye do not need to know how it is arrived at. Only move the pieces from each army into this position that ye see here. Memorize it. It should suffice.”

<>

“But up there on the cliff ye have no opponent. Ye cannot play Kings-and-Queens by yerself.…” <>

“Yes what?” Exasperated, the Ertishman flushed to his ears. “Are ye telling me that ye have an opponent up there?”

<> It was an intuitive guess.
A powerful spell has been woven about the game pieces. Success will not be gained easily
.

Sianadh expelled a capitulary sigh and rolled his eyes.

“The object of the contest,” he began, “be to knock off the other person's king before he knocks off yours.…”

Hours elapsed. Absorbed in strategies there in the faded jade shade of the glade, the two companions were not aware how swiftly time fled by, as silent as a silver horse on dainty cloven hooves. Night overtook them, and they must sleep.

The next day, Imrhien climbed the cliff and made her way to the gallery of the stone figures. The waterfall's applause seemed fainter, a muted hush as of the wind through distant woodlands. Why this should be so was a mystery. It was as though something had caught the attention of the water, which, having for centuries hurtled carelessly over the cliffs, had now focused its awareness on its surroundings—as though Waterstair had drawn breath and were waiting. Timidly she stepped to the fish pedestal and took up the gauntlet of talium, cold and ganoid. Its casing slid over her slender hand like a shell encompassing some pale and vulnerable sea-creature. The game pieces watched, with mineral eyes.

The girl expected that at any moment something shocking might occur—the crowd would come alive and attack her, rend her to shreds with their blades, run her through with their spears—or the cavern wall would gape and a ghastly hand would whip out and snatch her up to be devoured, or the roof would collapse, entombing her forever in the dark, with the statues pressing in on her, leaning hard against her rib cage until the last breath was crushed out.

Drawing courage like a sword, she walked across the tiles to an infantryman in ice-white mail who, spear in hand, stood guarding the alabaster queen. There was no face for her to look at, only the bleached visor of his sallet. At his back the tall lily-queen, proud-visaged, stared ahead as at some distant cloud-palace—a formidable lady.

An impulse to beg for indulgence, if not mercy, welled up in the girl, but she bowed in lieu of that and, with her gauntleted left hand, pushed the queen's guard in the back. At once a slot opened in front of him, with a slight sound of stone scraping on stone, barely audible over the sigh and silk-rustle of the falls. He slid along it with a faint clockwork whir and halted at the next square. The slot closed smoothly and clicked.

Imrhien had not been slow to react. She had gone flying off to the side of the cavern. Braced against the wall, she fixed the game pieces with a wide-eyed stare. After a pause, another grating noise eventuated. The black queen's infantryman had matched the white's move. Almost it seemed the two repositioned soldiers glared balefully, brandishing their weapons as though they would lift them, strike, and lift again, and then the ringing clash of battle would commence. Would they bleed milk and ink?