Warautumn (9 page)

Rann nodded again. “More wood than we’ve got appropriate tools to work, I’d say. Something tells me we’re going to have dull swords before this is over.”

“You sound like you think we’ll be here for a while.”

“We may be—unless you can get the gem working, which I frankly doubt, given that it’s in pieces.”

“I intend to try.”

“I know you do,” Rann growled. “But we have to be realistic. If this is an island—”

“It is.”

Rann stopped again, and this time he sank down on a knee-high, moss-covered rock that protruded from a froth of bracken to the left of the trail. They’d covered almost two shots by then, and looked to be roughly halfway to their goal, though the lake was only visible as an occasional flash of blue ahead or to the left. “But how do you
know
that, Avall?” he asked wearily. “I truly don’t understand your talk of having seen it before.”

Avall flopped up against a tree, and began stripping leaves from a waist-level twig. “I saw it in a Well once,” he—almost—snapped. “As I’ve already told you. Beyond that”—he shook his head—“all I can think of is what
you’ve
already suggested: that the gems give you what you want—if you want it badly enough. And I wanted a place away from everything.”

Rann gestured expansively. “But here? How? Not that it isn’t beautiful.”

Avall let got the twig. “I had a lot of time to think about that while I was imprisoned, actually. And I think it comes down to water—or liquid, anyway.”

Rann raised a brow.

“No, think, Rann,” Avall went on quickly. “We know the gems need blood in order to activate. I’m not sure how or why
they do, but they do. We also know that they display some of the characteristics of the Wells. Blood is liquid; so—obviously—is water. The water in the Wells has to come from somewhere, and it’s not unreasonable to suppose that all water is connected at some level deep underground. So even if I haven’t been here, maybe the gems—augmented by the Well water, or something—could tell where there was a watery place that fit my notion of what I wanted. I’m sorry, Rann, I know it sounds crazy.”

“It sounds like you think the gems are sentient.”

Avall’s face went absolutely serious. “I believe that more than ever. But even if they’re not, they seem to be—mostly—benevolent.”

“Mostly.”

Avall sighed, thrust himself away from his tree, and started down the trail again, talking over his shoulder. “In any case we have more imminent problems—the main one being that we really can’t stay here. I’m not sure how big this place is, but seven young men could exhaust its resources rather quickly, I’m afraid. We’ll need to burn a lot of wood if we’re to stay warm this winter, for one thing. And we haven’t seen any sign of animals large enough to keep us really well fed; which means that Myx is probably right in that regard, too: The place is too small to support a population of, say, deer. I assume there are fish in the lake, but we’ll get tired of fish soon enough, and
really
tired of smoked fish if that’s all we have to eat this winter. And we’ll run out of sugar, bread, salt, and cauf long before that. We have to find some kind of tuber or such like—I’m hoping Lyk can help there, as I’ve never been much good with plants or farming.”

“Or we could get off this place—which would at least expand our options.”

Avall nodded again. “We’ll have to. We’ve already seen that there are more caves in the cliffs opposite ours, and the landscape looks pretty ragged there—so I think we can reach the top fairly easily. The trick is going to be getting there.”

“I assume you’ve ruled out swimming?”

“Well, we all
can
swim except Kylin, and even he can manage if someone helps him—when he’s conscious, which he isn’t. But it looks to be almost two shots from here to there, which is a fair distance, especially if we want to take anything else across. We could use logs as floats, of course, but unless we can jump there by gem power, it seems to me we’re looking at building rafts. Which brings us back to Kylin. Obviously we can’t leave him here, but, unless he comes around in some manageable way, some kind of raft appears to be our only choice.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Rann said through a grin.

“What?”

“Riff. He’s a shipwright by clan. We tend to forget that, because we’ve always known him as a soldier and as Myx’s bondmate. But he’s Ioray by birth, which is incredible luck, if you ask me. If it even is luck. I—”

He broke off. Straight ahead rose a screen of laurel twice as high as their heads and maybe two spans deep, splitting the trail neatly. “Left,” Avall decided. “It looks like the growth is thinner that way.”

“Slope’s not as steep, either.”

“Lead the way.”

Rann did. And while the land was rockier thereabouts, the undergrowth was commensurately less dense. So it was that before long they found themselves following the bottom of a defile where rocks rose higher than their heads—until they ended in the merest scrap of stony beach. It was no more than a span wide, and stretched south but not north, with boulders taking over again in the latter direction. Even so, it was enough to provide the clearest view yet of the strange place in which they were now marooned.

“Beautiful,” Rann said, sinking down on a convenient boulder.

And so it was.

Ahead and to the left, the island tapered inward to a cone at
least a shot above their heads. It was a fairly steep taper, too, but not so much it could not support a good growth of trees, mostly conifers, but also some tall broad-leafed trees neither Avall nor Rann could identify. The ground—what they could see of it—sported a lavish cover of ferns and moss, ornamented with a fine selection of wildflowers. Avall was glad to see the latter, as many wildflowers had medicinal properties. The summit was forested as well, though the trees there didn’t look to be as tall as those lower down. But there were also at least three places where naked stone showed, notably the cave where they’d sheltered, which was clearly visible. Avall sniffed the air appreciatively, only then aware that it was utterly devoid of the scent of smoke and horseflesh that had haunted his nose for days.

“Coastline curves around out of sight,” Rann observed, pointing straight ahead. “That fits with my fire-mountain theory, as does the fact there also seem to be a fair number of declivities running down from the peak. I’ll bet if we were to look down on this place from above, we’d see a many-pointed star.”

“We would,” Avall agreed dreamily. “I
have
seen it from above …”

“Later,” Rann grunted, rising to hop lightly atop a higher boulder to Avall’s right. Small waves lapped against the shore. Avall scooped up a handful of water and drank it absently. It tasted good, though with what he could only describe as a slightly “dark” flavor, with a hint of salt that made him wonder if there might not be some kind of connection to the western sea. He had started to let his gaze drift toward the curve of cliffs, when he caught a flash of movement to the left, where the island’s nearer shoreline bent around out of sight. Birds, it turned out: a considerable flock of good-sized ones wheeling and swooping, but never venturing far from land. Even as he watched, one arced down, skimmed the lake’s surface, and rose again, with what had to be a fish flipping in its talons. Which relieved some of his concern about food.

They were noisy, too, their raucous cries enough to draw Rann’s attention that way. “Rocks look steep there,” Rann observed, “which I bet means they nest there, like in the sea cliffs up past North Gorge. There’ll be eggs, if we’re brave enough to get ’em. Those lads look big enough to give a fellow a solid peck.”

“We’ll wear armor,” Avall shot back with a grin. “That may be all it’s good for down here.”

“Down here,” Rann echoed. “I—Oh, Eight,
look!
” he cried, pointing at the juncture of land and lake.

Something had risen from the offshore waters: something serpentine and senuous, and as long as a man was tall. It appeared to have a head at the end, and that head looked to be snapping at the birds. All at once the beast heaved itself upward in a leap that took its forequarters clear of the water, which revealed a thicker torso and what might be either forelegs or fins. It was too far away, at half a shot, to tell for certain.

Avall scooted back from the shore reflexively, scanning the nearer wavelets anxiously. “Looks half like a geen, half like a serpent.”

“One of those big serpents like they have in southern Ixti, maybe,” Rann offered.

Avall scrambled up on the rock beside him, and found even that not as far above the water as he would have liked. “Puts a few restrictions on swimming, I’d say,” he gasped.

Rann nodded ominously. “And let’s hope there aren’t many of them, that they’re exclusively aquatic, and that, if they’re not, they den on the mainland, not here.”

“We’ll have to explore the entire coast to confirm that last,” Avall observed. “All of us. With arms. In armor.”

“Tomorrow at the soonest,” Rann gave back, “given what we’ve still got on our plate today.” Without comment he scrambled to a higher rock. Avall followed. This one—hopefully—was higher than the water-beast’s head could reach.

In any event, it gave them a better vantage on the opposite
shore, which bent somewhat closer there. Even so, it was hard to tell much beyond the already established fact that the lake seemed ringed with what was effectively a wall of cliffs, though swaths of vegetation showed as well, as did the darker slashes of caves. “Doesn’t look like we can make landfall just anywhere over there,” Avall opined. “We’ll have to target someplace where we can actually get
up
shore as well as
on
shore. Optimally someplace we can make it over the ledge at the top.”

“Agreed,” Rann said, wiping his brow. “Want to explore that other branch?”

Avall checked the sun, which still had a fair way to go until noon. “We’ve got time.”

The other fork skirted the merest thread of beach for only a dozen spans before it was interrupted by a waterfall that slid down rocks thrice as high as either of their heads, beside which a fallen tree trunk made a convenient ladder up to the rocky rim of a small pool four spans across, which ultimately proved to be the lowest of four, all connected by cataracts. There were fish, too, but none longer than a forearm. “If nothing else, we’ll be clean,” Rann sighed, rising from where he’d been sampling the water from the last one. “And look: The feeder stream turns back toward our cave.”

And so it did. It was a much less precipitous slope, too, running a quarter shot above the route by which they had departed, though the stream kinked sharp left half a shot from the cave, so that they had to scramble through raw woods the last part of the way, and jump down a bank at the end, which put them back on the trail from which they had commenced.

Myx handed them mugs of what looked and smelled like cauf once they returned to the fire pit. He looked smug. Avall wondered why, even as he sampled the brew. It tasted odd, but not bad.

Rann scowled at his uncertainty.

Myx motioned to a clump of dried ferns spread across his cloak. “Found these just around the corner when I went out to
piss,” he explained. “Clanless folks use it to extend cauf, when they can’t afford as much of the real thing as they’d like. It won’t hurt us, and it even has some of the same energizing effect if you don’t mind your cauf having a bitter edge.”

“One problem solved,” Avall chuckled, as he sank down and tugged off his boots.

“Here come the others,” Rann prompted, even as a noise drew Avall’s attention that way.

The first thing they noticed was that every single member of the returning party was even wetter and muddier than Avall and Rann had managed to get themselves. Bingg looked like he was trying not to grin. Lykkon looked by turns almost giddily happy and pensive—which was becoming typical for him.

Myx passed them cauf as well, which evoked the same commentary as before. “You lads look like you have a lot to tell,” Avall observed, noting that Bingg was divesting himself of his muddy boots and sodden tunic. “Why don’t you go first, then we’ll brief you?”

Lykkon and Riff exchanged glances, as though trying to determine who should take precedence. Riff was older, but Lykkon was kin to the King.

Finally, Lykkon cleared his throat. “Do you want the good part first, the bad part first, or—?”

“Start with the bad,” Avall advised, leaning back against a cushion with his arms folded across his chest. “We also saw something troubling.”

Lykkon nodded. “I have to start with a good thing, though. We made it to the top with no problem, and you can see pretty well up there, since the trees are no more than a fringe around a lake that fills the top, about which more anon. In any case, there’s a finger of stone up there that wasn’t hard for someone light and nimble like Bingg to climb, which he did. He could see the whole place, and you’re right: This is an island, almost round, and almost exactly in the center of the lake. The cliffs that ring it are much of a height, too, though I think they’re less steep to the east.”

“Nothing bad so far,” Avall murmured, surprised to find himself getting drowsy.

“No,” Lykkon agreed. “Not here—not that we saw. But on the opposite shore—well, it’s a good thing I had a distance lens with my gear, and that I took it. I used it to survey the other side pretty thoroughly, and I saw something moving over there. I was hoping for deer or mountain goats. What I saw, unfortunately, was geens. Not a lot, but there’s what looks like a trail over there going from one of the caves up to the top of the cliffs, and I saw several going up and down it. In other words, they have a nest over there. Which means—”

“Which means,” Avall finished for him, “that we don’t have free license to make landfall just anywhere—assuming we can even get there.”

“Which assumes we can’t get somewhere else entirely with the gem,” Myx added from where he was tending Kylin, who had evidently soiled himself, to judge by a sudden whiff of foul odor.

“I may try that sooner rather than later,” Avall sighed through a sip of cauf. “Probably right after lunch, which I’d hope would be right after we finish these reports.”