He spoke of this concern to no one. He might have discussed it with Arranha, in the old days, but Arranha was dead; in the days after the funeral rites, Luap found himself worrying the problem of his own mortality whenever the pace of work allowed. He was not afraid of death itself—he had proven that, he thought, in the old days, on the battlefields of Gird's war—but he wanted to accomplish something before he died. Gird would have approved, he thought. Gird, too, had dreamed of establishing a people in peace and prosperity—and that was all Luap wanted.
Always and ever, in the depths of his mind, the question tickled him: was it really not possible to hold back aging with magery? Could he not at least
try?
It couldn't hurt, surely . . . not if he took care. Even the appearance of youth or agelessness might help impress the Khartazh, and the Rosemage had agreed that anything harmless which had that effect was good.
"And how is the prince, after the death of his priest?" the black-cloaked leader asked his spy.
"He has recently thought of trying his magery—his 'royal' magery, as he calls it—against aging," the spy said. "They have told him it will not work, but he is not convinced. And now, of course, he worries more than ever about the fate of his people if he should age too soon."
"I believe he will find his magery strong enough for that," the leader said "He deserves a long and healthy life." The black-cloaked assembly laughed, their voices harsh as jangling iron.
A few days after Arranha's funeral, Luap called Seri and Aris into his office to look at the maps the ambassador had left him. Seri's eyes lit up.
"Imagine the effect of these in Marshals' training," Luap said.
"Do they have any of the old caravan route?" she asked.
"You remember I asked the ambassador that, and he said he would find out. But I have another idea. If we could find a practicable route from the upper valley down to the plain, it might be shorter and safer for caravans to come through there—and then through our canyon to Dirgizh. Then we would have someone to trade with, and a way for those who won't use the mageroad to visit."
Seri frowned. "Do we need that? It's a long way for anyone to come, and I doubt Girdsmen would . . ."
"I think they will," Luap said. "That trade used to prosper; as Fintha recovers from the war, Finthans will have more to trade. You know yourself the spice merchants do well. We could be trading now, if the Marshal-General weren't so opposed to frequent use of the mageroad . . . imagine how easily we could sell the gifts the ambassador brought. An overland route should be acceptable to the Marshal-General."
"He's right, Seri," Aris said. "He's not opposed to trade; he's encouraged the trade south into Aarenis—" Luap had not known that; he wondered how Aris knew.
"And you want us to find a way through these canyons to the old eastern route?" Seri said.
"Yes . . . and I don't know whether you should begin by finding it from outside—from Dirgizh—or from the upper valley. But you're our most experienced explorers so far."
"We'll have to start now if we're to be done by winter," Aris pointed out.
"I hadn't thought you'd start this season," Luap said. "Until we have others who can speak the Khartazh language as well, I can't spare you more than a few days at a time."
"Then we'll start there," Seri said. "Aris can teach his prentices, and I'll teach the militia—"
"And me," Luap said, smiling. "I should learn Khartazh."
"And you," she said. "But you learn faster than most."
Even so, Aris and Seri managed a short trip into the upper valley. Deciding just where to start the climb out of the main canyon was hard enough. Two approaches ended in sheer cliffs they could not climb. Finally Seri climbed partway up one of the north-running canyons across from what they thought should be the best way.
"We didn't use our heads," she said when she came back down.
"Again?" Aris grinned at the expression on her face.
"It's not funny," she said. "We don't have much time and we've wasted too much. What we need to do is follow that game trail—" She pointed. "It disappears over that knob—"
"Which is too far to the right; the valley has to be right up over that fallen block."
"And we can't climb it. Think, Aris: the animals go everywhere. We follow the game trail and keep choosing the ones that go higher."
The game trail angled sharply up the steep slope; Aris found himself grabbing for rocks and bushes to help himself climb. By the time they were above the trees, he could see far down the canyon, and back up the one Seri had come out of. Above him, Seri's boots went steadily on, occasionally giving him a faceful of dirt.
"This is a lot worse than the trail to the mountain top," he said, gasping, when they stopped for a rest.
"We have more to climb." Seri tipped her head back to look. "Gird's toes: look at that. We should be goats to get up there—and how could anyone bring a caravan down?"
Aris looked down and wished he hadn't . . . the broken rock and loose soil below looked unclimbable. "We have to find another way out: I don't want to break both legs going down this!"
On the next stretch, they came out on rock that looked, Seri said, like cake batter or custard that had stiffened in pouring. It did not look like honest rock, Aris thought, and wondered what had formed those loops and layers. At least it didn't shift underfoot, and the angle of the corrugated surface made climbing easier. The slope eased; they could walk upright again, between odd little columns of the strange stone. Here Aris agreed—they looked exactly like the last bit of batter from a pan, dripping crookedly to one side or the other.
The game trails disappeared into a grassy meadow thick with late wildflowers—tall blue spikes and low red stars. Bees hummed past them busily. On their right, still higher cliffs rose; they seemed to be crossing a terrace that might, Seri thought, come out above the valley they sought. They could see a similar cliff face to their left; between, they assumed, lay the tumble of broken rock they'd been unable to climb.
From the meadow they passed into a pine-woods of trees smaller than those on the canyon floor, and came at last to a clear view of the upper valley. On either side, sheer cliffs rose from a level floor of green. A ribbon of silver wavered down the valley: a creek. They hurried down the slope before them, so much gentler than the one they'd climbed.
"It's odd that the rocks don't look the same on either side," Aris said. On the west, the same rose-red solid stone, streaked dark with ages of weather, looked exactly like the stone found so far in the main canyon. But the eastern cliffs were subtly different—an oranger red, more mottled than streaked, conveying, he thought, some weakness in structure.
"I wouldn't make my home in that," Seri agreed, as usual, with the thought behind his words. "But that grass, and that stream—think of this for horses. It's perfect." She bounded down the last of the slope and ran out on the grass, only to fall on her face.
"Seri!" Aris ran after her, and tripped on the deep sand just as she had. She was up already, her expression rueful.
"Sand," she said. "It's not a terrace like ours at all." Aris, face down on the sand, eyed the patch of green before him.
"And that's not real grass, either. Sedge."
"Oh, well, it's got water." Seri strode off toward the creek, and he followed her. When he caught up, she was laughing. "Water, I said! Look at this—it's hardly a knuckle deep."
"Soaking the sand," Aris said. He looked all around, at the sheer walls, the almost-level floor of sand, the glisten of water that had looked like a real stream. "A very strange valley indeed."
It was, he thought later, as they examined it in more detail, like a flattened miniature of the main canyon. Its sand floor was not as level as it had looked from above; it had miniature grassy terraces, small dunes of open sand, little sedgy bogs near quicksand, even a small cluster of trees whose triangular leaves sounded like gentle rain in the breeze. They spent the afternoon working their way up the valley; the stream deepened upstream, against their experience, and acquired a gravelly bed. To the east, a tributary valley opened, but they could see it was blocked at the upper end by a sheer cliff. The way out to the south lay, if anywhere, up a ravine garish with orange stone and odd black boulders. They pushed themselves into that climb, unwilling to spend the night in the valley, though neither could say why.
They looked back once, from a terrace about halfway up the ravine, to see the valley looking once more like a level swathe of grass. Just above the ravine, they found a sloping pine wood . . . and more sand.
"It's softer than rocks to sleep on," Aris offered, when Seri's lip curled.
"And harder than rocks to walk on, and we do more walking than sleeping. It will take us longer to go where we need to go," she said. But they made a pleasant camp that night anyway, enjoying the knowledge that no one—no one at all—knew exactly where they were. Their small fire crackled and spat with the fat pine-cones and resinous boughs; the water they'd brought up from the valley tasted sweet with their supper of hard bread and cheese.
"Two of the most dangerous, alone, in our valley: we should take them."
"No. One is the healer. We need him, for the prince's downfall."
"Then the woman—"
"We cannot take one without the other, not without giving warning. Patience, trust the prince's weakness, and wait. Vengeance long-delayed is all the sweeter."
"The woman is dangerous, I tell you," the complainer said. "There's an uncanny stink about her, something like the old priest had. She doesn't like the valley; she senses something—and that against our strongest protections."
"Then we will have the prince distract her," the leader said. "She will do us no harm if she's busy somewhere else—or worried about something apart from our kind of danger. She is Girdish; such mortals concentrate their minds on practical matters, and dislike magery. If she senses something, let her think it is only that of other mortals, no more."
The next day Aris led the way out of the pine grove onto an open upland; to their left, a curious conical hill of rough black rock looked like nothing either of them had ever seen. Far to the west, they could see the mountains beyond Dirgizh. Ahead, they knew, was the drop from their block of mountains—but which was the best way?
Seri pointed to the black peak. "If we climbed that we could see more."
Aris shrugged. "It's higher ground that way. We might find rock instead of this sand." For the lower ground had small dunes of windblown sand, difficult to walk on.
They found the gentle slope toward the black hill much easier than the day before. Soon they were walking on rock again, rippled and curved like mudbanks in a stream. More and more of the land around them came into view. Looking back toward the upper valley and the main canyon, they could see only a jumble of red rock, cut with sharp blue shadows. The mountaintop above the stronghold stood out clearly, but not the canyons between. Southward, they began to see a lower plain beyond the mountains . . . and the high white cliffs of another mountain range to the east. Finally, as they walked among the jumbled black boulders of the black hill's base, they could see an edge.
Seri cocked her head at the black hill now close above them. It looked as if it were made of a pile of loose black rocks, some room-sized and most smaller. "Do you think we can climb that, or will it be like climbing gravel?"
Aris looked south, at a distant blue shadow he thought might be more mountains very, far away. "Do we need to, now? I think we can find our way to the edge of this without it. I wonder how far that cloud or mountain is. . . ."
Seri looked. "More than a day's travel. In this air, more than two." She scrambled up the steepening slope of the black hill, dislodging a shower of rough black rocks, and slid down again. "Not worth it, you're right. I wonder what the dwarves would call this kind of rock." She picked one up, and hit another, experimentally. The one in her hand broke, and she yelped. "It makes sharp edges," she said, holding out her gashed hand.
"And you want me to heal it for you," Aris said, shaking his head. "Will you ever learn to wear gloves?" He laid his hand over the gash and let his power heal it.
"Peasants don't wear gloves," Seri said scowling, but her eyes twinkled. She shook her hand, looked at the rock, and shrugged. "Come on—we'd better get this done today. I've got to work on those junior yeomen—or whatever we decide to call them—when we get back."
They came to the edge before midday, an edge even more impressive than the drop from the mountaintop into the western canyons. Swallows rode the updraft, the wind whistling faintly in their wings, and veered away as the two came to the edge and looked out. Aris thought he had never seen anything so beautiful; a vast gulf opened before them, with nothing to bind the sight until the line where earth met sky. He knelt to peer over the edge, cautiously. A sheer drop he could not estimate, then spiked towers, then steep slopes and finally rubble flattening gradually to the glitter of a fast-moving river. He looked along the river's path, and saw that it disappeared into sand some distance downstream. Upstream—the breath caught in his throat. Upstream he could see what this cliff must look like—its match on the far side of the river rose from the sand, all shades of red, rose, and purple, and looking eastward he saw those walls converge. But above the red rock—where only blue sky arched in their canyons—were higher cliffs of gleaming white.
He looked at Seri, whose face he thought mirrored his own astonishment. "It's—beyond words," she said. "I can't imagine why the dwarves don't live here—why it's not full of the rockfolk."
He started to say perhaps they didn't know, then remembered the dwarven symbol in the stronghold's great hall. Of course they knew. And had they abandoned this—this vast beauty of stone so strong that it sang even to mortals? "Perhaps they loved it too well to tunnel into it," he said. "As the horsefolk leave some herds free-running."