Black Jade. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ wood and building a fire with a fervor that kept away his gut-churning fear of bears. But he must have remembered the great white bear that had attacked us on a similar pass in the Morning Mountains – as did Master Juwain and I. We said nothing of this maddened animal that Morjin had made into a ghul, for we did not wish to frighten the children, or ourselves. I prayed that no ghul-bears – nor snow tigers nor any other beasts directed by Morjin – would find us here. It was enough that we still had to fight our way through this rugged terrain and through the Rhymes that were our map to it.

      We sat for most of the night by the fire. The ground here was too steeply sloped and rocky for reclining, and too cold, too. And so we made cushions of our sleeping furs and huddled together with our cloaks thrown over us as a sort of woolen tent. Estrella sat between me and Atara, and fell asleep with her head resting against my side. Maram’s back pressed firmly, and warmly, against my own. In this way, we propped each up and kept away the worst of the cold.

      I slept only a little that night, and Master Juwain and Kane did not sleep at all. At times, in low voices, they discussed the meaning of the Way Rhymes; at other times they sat in silence as they looked up at the stars. I kept watch on these bright points of light as best I could. But I must have dozed, for I awakened in the deep of night to the weight of Kane’s hand gently shaking my shoulder. He stood above me uncloaked, and he pointed up at the constellations spread across the heavens.

      ‘Look, Val,’ he murmured. ‘The Ram is about to set.’

      In the biting cold, we roused the others and broke camp. This required little more work than heaping a few handfuls of snow upon the fire’s coals and tying our rolled-up sleeping furs to the backs of the horses. We breakfasted on some battle biscuits and a little cold water to wash them down. And then we waited.

      As the last stars of the Ram set behind the western horizon, a faint light suffused the world and touched the mountains around us with an eerie sheen. At a nod from Master Juwain, we lit the torches that we had readied for this moment. And then without wasting another breath, we set out up the road and into the tunnel.

      None of us knew what we would find there. The tunnel’s starkness and long straight lines were almost a disappointment. The road through it seemed good and solid, and the horses’ hooves clopping against the paving stones sent echoes reverberating up and down around us. The light cast by our oily torches showed a tube seemingly melted through the mountain’s rock. The curving walls and ceiling above us gleamed all glassy and black, like sheets of obsidian more than fused granite. Maram guessed that the Ymanir must have once burned this tunnel with great firestones, for those shaggy giants had once ranged through most of the White Mountains and had built through them underground cities, invisible bridges and other marvels. Surely, I thought, this tunnel must be one of them. As we made our way down its gentle slope, I could see no end to it. Who but the Ymanir, I wondered, could carve a miles-long tunnel out of solid rock?

      ‘How I do miss Ymiru,’ Maram called out into the cold, still air. ‘He was a broody man, it’s true, but the only one I’ve ever known bigger and stronger than I. A great companion, he was, too. If he were here, I’m sure he could explain the mystery of this damn tunnel and what we’ll find when we come out on the other side.’

      ‘But we have the Rhyme for that,’ Master Juwain said to him. ‘Why don’t you recite it?’

      ‘Ah, you recite it,’ Maram said to him. ‘My head has never worked right at this accursed hour.’

      ‘All right,’ Master Juwain told him. And then he intoned:

      And through the long dark into dawn,

      The road goes down, yet up: go on!

      ‘Shhh, quiet now!’ Kane called out to us in a low voice. ‘We know nothing about this place or what might dwell here.’

      His words sobered us, and we moved on more quickly, and more quietly, too. It was freezing cold in this long tube through the earth, though mercifully there was no wind. After a few hundred yards or so we came upon yellowish bones strewn across the tunnel’s floor and heaped into mounds. At the sight of them, Maram began shaking. The bones did not, however, look to be human; I whispered to Maram and the others that a snow tiger must have holed up here, dragging inside and devouring his kills. This did little to mollify Maram. As he walked his horse next to mine, he muttered, ‘Snow tigers, is it? Oh, Lord, they’re even worse than bears!’

      The smell of the bones was old and musty, and I did not sense here the presence of snow tigers or any other beings besides ourselves. And yet something about this tunnel seemed strange, almost as if the melted rock that lined it sensed our presence and was in some way alive. As we moved farther into it, I felt a pounding from down deep, as of drums – but even more like the beating of a heart. I wondered, as did Master Juwain, if the tunnel’s obsidian coating might really be some sort of unknown gelstei. All the gelstei resonated with each other in some way, however faint, and a disturbing sensation tingled through the hilt of my sword. It traveled up my arm and into my body, collecting in the pit of my belly where it burned. It impelled me to lead on through the smothering darkness even more quickly.

      ‘Val,’ Maram whispered to me through the cold air, ‘I feel sick – like I did in the Black Bog.’

      ‘It’s all right,’ I whispered back. ‘We’re nearly through.’

      ‘Are you sure? How can you be sure?’

      We journeyed on for quite a way, how far or how long I couldn’t quite tell. Our torches burnt down and began flickering out, one by one. We had brought no oil with which to renew them. And then, at last, with the horses’ iron-shod hooves striking out a great noise against cold stone, we sighted a little patch of light ahead of us. We fairly ran straight toward it. Our breath burst from our lungs, and the patch grew bigger and bigger. And then we came out of the tunnel into blessed fresh air.

      We gathered on a little shelf of rock on the side of the mountain. A cold wind whipped at our faces. Spread out before us, to the north and east, was some of the most forbidding country I had ever seen. Far out to the horizon gleamed nothing but great jagged peaks covered with snow and white rivers of ice that cut between them. No part of this terrible terrain seemed flat or showed a spray of green.

      ‘This can’t be the Valley of the Sun!’ Maram cried out. ‘No one could live here!’

      In truth, even a snow tiger or a marmot would have had a difficult time surviving in this ice-locked land. Snowdrifts covered the road before us; this little span of stone seemed to dip down along the spine of a rocky ridge before rising again and disappearing into the rock and snow of another mountain.

      ‘We must have made a mistake,’ Maram said. ‘Either that or the Rhymes misled us.’

      ‘No, we made no mistake,’ Master Juwain huffed out into the biting wind. ‘And the Rhymes always tell true.’

      And Maram said:

       And through the long dark into dawn

      The road goes down, yet up: go on!

      ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘we went through that damn tunnel, and if we go on any farther, we’ll freeze to death. There’s nothing left of this road, and I wouldn’t follow it if there were. And there are no more Rhymes!’

      But there were. As Kane again warned Maram to silence, Master Juwain said, ‘Yes, be quiet now – we have little time.’

      And СКАЧАТЬ