"I'm tired. This could go on forever."
"Mmm." Luap leaned on the opposite wall, and looked down at his scuffed boots. He felt as if the stone were leaning back against him.
"We'll go back." Gird sighed. "I'd like to know where this is—which mountains. Dwarves would know."
"Would they?" asked Luap. "If it doesn't come out somewhere, maybe they never saw the outside. . . ."
Gird snorted. "They had to, to take out the stone they cut. And I've heard they know stone by its smell and taste . . . that a dwarf will know a rock brought from leagues away. The gnomes could do that, and they said dwarves could too." He pushed himself off the wall. "Well. Back we go." He led the way again, and Luap came behind, trying not to look back over his shoulder at what might follow the clangor of their voices. "You found a good surprise, Luap, I'll give you that. Not like before, indeed." He led on at a good pace, and soon they came back to the great hall; they could hear their footsteps ring in it before they arrived, as if it were a bell.
Luap let out breath he had not realized he held. "How did you know your way?" He could ask, now that they were safe.
Gird's brows rose. "You didn't? You count the turns, the doorways you pass, keep track of lefts and rights—"
And this was the man who formed half his signs wrong in writing, whose brow furrowed over a page of clear script, who could not reckon except by placing objects in a row and counting them. Luap managed not to shudder or glance back through the doorway. "And now?"
"Mmmm." Gird looked around, up, around again. "I would still like to see the
outside
of this rock."
And I
, thought Luap fervently. He opened his mouth to say "Then we'll go back." and shut it, for Gird was strolling with perfect assurance—or what looked like it—down the hall toward the arches. He had never heard Gird pray, and he did not hear him pray now—but he was sure that pause before Gird walked under the arch with the High Lord's sigil had in some manner been a request for permission. He himself did not run to follow, because (he told himself) it was disrespectful—he walked, quickly and quietly, and was in time to see Gird standing straddle-legged at the foot of a narrow curving stair that rose into the first darkness he had seen in this place. Gird turned and gestured.
"Come
on
, Luap; if it didn't scorch me, it's not going to hurt you." Luap would have liked to be sure of that, but stepped gingerly through the arch, his heart pounding. It had
not
been there before, and now he had walked through it, and—he glanced back, to find the hall just as visible, just as empty, just as silent as before. From this side, too, the arches stood clear, each with its holy symbol.
Gird had already started up the staircase, grunting a little. Luap sighed and followed. He might as well. If something happened to Gird, he could not go back without him. The stair rose in a spiral around a central well; Luap tried to keep a hand on the wall, but felt that the stairs tipped slightly inward. The staircase had no railing; his stomach swooped within him like a flight of small birds. His legs began to ache. From silver light, they passed to dusk, and then to dark. Gird stopped abruptly, and Luap almost ran into him.
"Why is there no light here?" His voice sounded flat, almost as if they were in a tiny closet, then it rang back from far below.
"I don't know." Luap felt grumpy, and his voice sounded it.
So did Gird; he heard a grumbling mutter, then: "Well,
make
some, then." That was a concession. Luap called his light, dim enough after the gloriously clear light below, and close above Gird's head the stone sprang into vision, arced into a shallow dome, scribed with patterns as intricate as any below. Within Gird's reach was a doubled spiral; Gird reached a cautious hand toward it.
"You know that?" asked Luap.
"Gnomes used it." Gird's broad peasant thumb traced the spiral in, then out, missing none of the grooves. He looked up, and said, "At your will." Not to Luap; Luap's hair rose. Suddenly a gust of cold air swirled in, and he felt the sweat on his neck freezing. Above the red stone vanished, and out of a dark gray sky snowflakes danced down upon them. "Blessing," said Gird, and climbed on. Luap followed, pushing against the gusting wind and shivering in the cold.
He came out over the lip of the opening onto a flat windswept table of red stone. Gird crouched an armslength away, back to the wind, eyes squinted, hair already spangled with snow. Luap looked around. He had never seen anything like their surroundings. They seemed to be on the flat top of some mass of stone, like a vast building. To one side—in that storm he could not guess the direction—rock rose again, a sheer wall as if hewn by a great axe. On the other sides, their table ended as abruptly. Snow streaked the rock, packed into every crevice, but swept clean of exposed surfaces. Its irregular curtains cloaked more distant views, but gave tantalizing hints of other vast rock masses.
"Not a place I'd expect to find elves," said Gird. "Not a tree in sight. Gnomes and dwarves, though . . . I'm surprised we haven't seen them."
Luap shivered. "If we stay here, they'll find us frozen as hard as these rocks."
"Not yet. I've never seen any place like this—or heard of it, even in songs."
Luap sighed, and climbed the rest of the way out, shivering, to crouch beside Gird. "Probably no one ever saw it before." At Gird's look, he said, "Human, I mean. Gnomes, dwarves, elves, yes." He squinted, blinked, and realized that the snow came down less thickly . . . he could see downwind, now, to the dropoff and beyond. . . . "Gods above," he murmured. A wet snowflake found the back of his neck and he shivered again.
"Uncanny," said Gird. It was the same voice with which he'd come down from the hill before Greenfields, quiet and a little remote. As the last of the snow flurry wisped past, scoured off the stone by the incessant wind, Gird stood and looked at the wilderness around them.
It seemed larger every moment as the veils of falling snow withdrew, and a little more light came through the clouds. Vast vertical walls of red stone, cleft into narrow passages . . . Luap realized that Gird was moving toward the edge of their platform, and followed quickly.
"Don't get too near—"
"—the edge. I'm not a child, Luap." A gust of wind made them both stagger and clutch each other. Gird pulled back and glanced upward. "Nor a god, to stand in place against such wind. I will be careful." He looked back and up. "There are trees—up on that next level—" Luap squinted against the wind and saw an irregular blur of dark and white, that might have been snow-covered trees. He looked into the wind, and saw the edge of cloud, with light sky beyond it, moving toward them, visibly moving even as he watched. He nudged Gird, who turned and stared, mouth open, before turning his back to the wind again. "A very strange place indeed, you found. Not in the world we know, I daresay."
As the cloud's edge came nearer, the wind sharpened, probing daggerlike beneath Luap's clothes. He found it hard to catch his breath, but he no longer wanted to retreat to the safety of the magical place . . . he was too interested in the widening view. Light rolled over them from behind, as the cloud fled away southward and let sunlight glare on the snowy expanse. Luap squinted harder, suddenly blinded. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he stared until his body shuddered, reminding him of the cold.
Wall beyond wall, cleft beyond cleft, stacked together so tightly he knew he could not tell, from here, where those clefts led. Stone in colors he had not imagined, vivid reds and oranges, and far away a wall of stone as white as the snow—unless it was a snowfield on some higher mountain. And a distant plain, apparently almost level, glaring in the sunlight until his eyes watered.
"Not good farmland," said Gird. Now even he shivered; he swung his arms and added, before Luap could replay, "Now let's get back in; I'm famished with cold."
They struggled back against the wind, eyes slitted, and found the entrance by almost falling in. Luap led, this time, and nearly fell into the stair's central well when his boots slipped on inblown snow. He did not care. He felt that something had opened, inside his head, a vast room he had not known he owned, furnished with shapes he had not know he wanted to see until he saw them.
Beauty
, he thought, setting one foot carefully after another.
It's beautiful.
Behind him, he heard Gird's comments about the impossibility of farming in land like that with inward amusement. He had nothing against farmland; he liked to eat as well as anyone. But these red rocks, streaked with snow were not meant for farmland. Trumpets rang in his head. Banners waved.
Castles
, he thought. And then again:
Beauty.
And then, slowly, inexorably,
Mine. My own land. My . . . kingdom.
As in a vision, he saw the arrival of his people, the mageborn, saw them come out into the sun atop that great slab of stone, saw the awe in their faces. He went down slowly, step after careful step, listening to Gird behind him. He did not notice how far they had gone before the cold wind no longer whistled down the central well; he simply assumed, he realized later, that the entrance would close itself.
He waited for Gird to reach the bottom of the stairs, and let Gird lead the way back into the hall. "I wonder if it's the same every time you go up," Gird said, in the tone of one who would find it reasonable if either way. Luap almost turned and went back to find out, but restrained himself. He could come again, alone: he could find out by himself if his land (he thought of it already as his, without noticing) was there. He didn't notice that he had not responded until he realized that Gird had stopped and was peering at him. At once he felt the heat in his face, as if he had been caught out in an obvious lie. But Gird said nothing about that.
"You must have been cold," he commented. "And now your blood's coming back: your face is as red as raw meat. Mine feels like it too." And indeed he was flushed, almost a feverish red. Luap felt an unexpected pang of guilt.
"I'm sorry—" he began, but Gird cut him off.
"Not your fault. I'm the one insisted we stay out up there so long. Brrr. It may be spring in Fintha, but it's winter here—let's go back, unless you have a magical feast hidden here somewhere."
"Alas, no," said Luap. He led Gird back to the center of the pattern on the dais, and reached for his power, this time with confidence. It seemed but a moment, a flicker of the eyelid, and they were once more in the cave's inner chamber. Gird coughed, and the cough echoed harshly, jangling almost. Luap led him out, with a concern more than half real, to their campsite just inside the cave's entrance. Their horses, cropping spring grass outside, paused to look, and Gird's old white horse whuffled at him.
Outside, the day had waned to a moist, cool evening. Luap built up the fire quickly, noticing that Gird still shivered from time to time.
"Are you all right?"
"Just cold." He sounded tired as well as cold. Luap wondered if that way of travel, which he found exhilarating, felt different for the one who was taken, like a sack of meal in a wagon. "I don't
like
caves," Gird said, peevishly. "They all have
something
. . . this one that chamber, the gnomehalls their secret passages and centers, and gods only know what in that place you found, whatever it is." He hitched himself around on the rock, and spread his hands to the fire Luap had built. "And I'm still not sure why you showed me that. Do you know yourself?"
"Not really." Luap put the kettle on its hook, and added more wood to the fire. He should have brought a keg of ale. That would have kept Gird from asking awkward questions . . . but Gird being Gird might have thought that a suspicious thing to do. "I thought you should know about it; I thought it should not be a secret."
"Umph. It was meant to be a secret, I'd wager. Meant to be, and kept a secret, all those years, until you stumbled into it. And that's something I've always wondered about—" He coughed, a long racking cough, and Luap offered him water. Gird gulped a mouthful, and coughed again. "Blast it! You'd think I was an old man, hacking and spitting by the fire." Luap said nothing, in the face of Gird's shrewd gaze. "So . . . is that what you think?" Luap managed a shrug he hoped looked casual.
"You're older than I am, but Arranha is older. To us you're just Gird." Not quite true; others had commented, this past winter, on that same enduring cough.
"That horse has slowed down," Gird said, jerking a thumb at the white blur standing hipshot just outside the cave. "He hardly moves out of an amble, these days." Luap looked at the horse, and met dark eyes that looked no more aged than a colt's. Gird never admitted anything unusual in his horse, but everyone else realized that it had never been a stray carthorse. Where it had come from, no one knew, but Luap had heard more than one refer to it as "Torre's mount's foal."
"Horses age faster than men," Luap said, ignoring the snort from the cave entrance. "And you were willing to sit out in that snowstorm longer than I was."
"That's true." Gird prodded the fire with a stick; sparks shot up, and shadows danced on the cave walls. He looked around. "It was homelier with an army in it."
Noisier and smellier, Luap thought, remembering quarrels and hunger. Now they had plenty of food, warm dry clothes without holes, warm blankets to sleep in. "Sib's ready," he said, lifting the lid on that aromatic brew. "We'll be back to a town tomorrow." If he was lucky, Gird would not get back to his previous topic. He dipped a mugful for Gird, another for himself, and set the loaf by the fire to warm. They had an end of ham, the mushrooms they'd gathered on the way, a handful of berries, a few spring ramps. Gird drank his sib in three gulps, then held his mug for more. Luap served him, silent and hoping to remain so. He offered a slice of warm bread, with a slab of cold ham. Gird took it as silently, and bit off a chunk.
Silence lasted the meal, then Gird belched and sighed. "Strange place. A long way from here or anyplace I ever saw. They don't look like the mountains near the gnome princedom. Elves . . . dwarves . . . they will not thank you for sharing their secret, when they find out."