A Shadow on the Glass (32 page)

The boulder smashed down on the ledge right where he had been standing. Gravel stung his face and hands, the rock bounced away and fell. Eventually it struck far below and set off a landslide that rattled away for ages.

Llian was too shocked to stand; he crumbled to his knees, looking through the dust at Karan. The rope was gone and the ledge in front of him broken away for a couple of spans, revealing the raw irregular rock beneath. The wind swirled around the end of the ridge, chilling him. Snow began to fall, then a heavy flurry blotted out everything but the blood-colored rock.

Karan measured the gap. There was no chance of him getting across now, even if she went back and helped him. Why had he just stood there like a fool?

“Well, that’s that,” said Llian. “I’m stuck here, and nothing can be done about it. You’ll have to go on without me!”

Karan’s choice was agonizing. If she fled now they’d probably never catch her. In a few days she could be home in Bannador. Home! The temptation was overwhelming.

“Go on, I’ll be all right. There’s nothing you can do anyway.”

She did not move.

Llian could not bear it. “Fare well,” he called with a cheerfulness that he did not feel. Then, turning back to her, “Hey! I’ll come to Bannador to see you and find the ending of the tale. Don’t forget the least detail.” And his beautiful voice cracked just a trifle. “I’ll miss you, Karan,” he said. “Be careful.” He turned his back to her deliberately and started walking back the way they had come.

Karan was laughing and crying. Without that she might, just possibly, have gone on by herself. But she could not abandon Llian when his back was turned. Anyway, leaving
him was as good as betraying him to his death. Even as she watched, his foot slipped and he almost fell. She clutched her breast, noticed that her heart was pounding. Llian steadied himself and went on without looking back.

“Come back,” she cried through the snow. “I won’t leave you. I think I can get across if I go down a bit, but I’ll need a hand back up.”

He turned and crept back, clinging onto every handhold. The freshly broken rock was not so difficult a climb for her, being rough and free from ice. With two hands it would not have bothered her at all, save for the precipice below. She limp-wristedly spidered her way down and across, wavered her hand up to Llian’s, missed, then he found the outstretched arm and pulled her up. His hand was warm. She was glad of his strength. It was her turn to embrace him and he didn’t push away.

“What are we going to do now?” he said miserably. “I’ve ruined…”

She put cold fingers across his lips. “Shhh! I have a last resort,” Karan whispered in his ear. “There is a track that goes further up into the mountains.”

“But you said…”

“We might be overheard. It really is a last resort, but better than the alternative.”

They hurried back along the path, Karan brushing away the tracks again. Once they had to take refuge in the scrub as the other Whelm pelted past just above. They continued on and eventually regained the plateau not far from the ruins. The snow continued to fall as they set out toward Mount Tintinnuin, but it was not heavy enough to conceal them completely.

“The path is supposed to begin east of Tintinnuin. I hope I can find it. It’s a long and hard trek, and a very dangerous one in winter. It leads south, into the high mountains. An ancient
way, no longer used. If we can conceal our tracks, or the snow falls, we may just disappear. How are you feeling now?”

“Terrible.”

Later in the morning it stopped snowing and they saw that three Whelm were on their trail, though they were a couple of hours behind. By midday the Whelm had cut the distance by half, their long legs and big feet a distinct advantage in the snow. Llian gasped as he caught up to Karan. Every movement was like a beak tearing at his side, and his face was gray. “Does the path go to Bannador?”

“You can get to Bannador this way,” she said, giving a half-truth.

“Last night you said we couldn’t carry enough food.”

“I’m thinking on it.” She said no more, knowing that her evasiveness, and the contradictions, were vexing Llian. I’m doing just what Maigraith did to me, she realized. There were two possible destinations on this path—Bannador and Shazmak, the hidden mountain city of the Aachim. But Shazmak was a secret she was forbidden to reveal, and she would not betray that secret unless they were in mortal peril. Even then, to take an outsider there would be a terrible gamble. She would not do so if there was
any
alternative.

By mid-afternoon the distance between them and the Whelm was halved again. Now Karan led them into hilly, heathy country, an unpleasant place to walk, full of spiky, scratching leaves and thorns, and they lost sight of their pursuers. Again Karan brushed out their tracks. She was beginning to get very worried about Llian, who had long ago ceased complaining, was clearly exhausted and in considerable pain. At any moment she expected him to collapse, but somehow he kept on.

They were now quite close to a tributary of the waterfall stream. Karan turned along the rocky ground beside the
stream, where the falling water had left the ground bare of snow. Then they went across, splashing in the icy water, up the other side, crossing and recrossing the branching tributaries, leaping from outcrop to outcrop, leaving no tracks, until not even a dog could have tracked them. They kept on until dark, the streams taking them further and further west, away from the path they were seeking, around the wrong side of the mountain.

At dusk they camped in the lee of a boulder, one of many strewn across the landscape, and gathered prickly heath for their beds. Dinner was bread, cheese and cold meat from Llian’s store, and water. They did not dare make a fire. As soon as the meal was ended Karan repaired to her bed, pulled her sleeping pouch around her and lay down, though she did not sleep.

She was too tired, too angry with herself and with Llian, though she tried not to show it. She went back over the scene at the ledge. If only Llian hadn’t been so clumsy, so useless! If only she had acted more quickly. Since then he had tried to be as inconspicuous and as helpful as possible, but she had ignored every overture. He had upset the equilibrium that she had achieved with so much effort—and the command of her talent and her emotions that had allowed her to get ahead of the Whelm. But really it was all her fault, for going so far off the path in the first place, days ago, for getting lost and having to take refuge in a place where her escape options were so limited.

Llian too slept badly, and each time he woke he sensed that Karan was awake as well, tense, observing him. Perhaps she was afraid to sleep, for fear of what he might do.

They rose at dawn, gnawed a little of Llian’s cold food, the stringy meat gone tooth-breakingly hard in the night, and drank tepid water from Karan’s bottle which she had kept in
her bed. Llian had left his on the ground and it was frozen solid. Her toilet consisted of a futile struggle with a comb that left her hair as tangled as before, and a few dabs of the lime perfume.

“There’s no need to go to any trouble on my account,” said Llian, jamming his hat on his head. He had had a bad night because of his injuries, and the cold which he was quite unused to.

Karan threw the comb down on the ground. “I do nothing on your account,” she said in a voice that was like the grinding of ice floes, “save curse myself for bringing you. And scatter that pile of heath away, or they’ll know we slept here.”

Not even his banishment by Wistan had felt so cold, so cruel. Llian scurried off, his face blanched. Karan swept away the marks of the camp and they set off.

They struggled along a valley, through deep snow. The weather was much worse on this side of the mountain, and it snowed all day, wet gritty granules that matted their hair to icy strands and froze in lumps on Llian’s week-old beard like wax at the base of a candle. The snow clung to their boots till each step was like lifting a brick and they constantly had to stamp the excess away. Karan grew more tired and more cross as the time passed, more withdrawn and wrapped up in her own troubles. How would she ever find the path from here, leagues away from anywhere she knew?

Next morning Karan woke to find that the weather had turned. The snow had stopped and the cloud was breaking up. Llian followed her up the valley without complaint, though he hurt all over.

Now they were confronted by an escarpment, an irregular cliff of rotten schist perhaps five or six spans high, covered
in brown lichen. Though the layers of rock slanted out of the cliff like shallow steps they looked none too safe.

“Lesson one,” said Karan. “Follow the ridge, not the valley. Have you any rope?”

Llian shook his head. “Over there looks easiest,” pointing to a place where the slope was gentler and the steps a little wider.

“Yes. If we fell there we wouldn’t be in too much danger.”

The climb was more difficult than it looked because the rock was wet and crumbly. Once or twice Karan was glad of Llian’s assistance: a steadying hand as she strained above her head for the next hold, a lift when her pack caught on a thorn bush, a leg up over the last sheer face to the edge of the escarpment. She noticed that Llian was sweating as she helped him over the edge with her good hand.

“I’ve always been afraid of heights,” he said, sitting down on a rock and wiping his hands on his trousers.

Karan turned away, looking south across a sloping expanse of snow and the flank of the mountain rising steeply to her left. Evidently he was not without courage. It would be severely tested by the end of this journey.

By the afternoon of that third day they had skirted the lower slopes of Mount Tintinnuin on the western side and were scrambling in the broken country to the south. This was an inhospitable and secret land; even Llian knew no tales about it. There was no sign of pursuit and Karan began to think that they had lost the Whelm. Now in the afternoon the sun came out, the wind turned around to the north-west, a warm wind, and soon they were sweating in their heavy clothing.

“Rain, sleet, snow and now this,” said Llian. “Winter’s late in coming this year.”

“A late winter is a hard winter. Don’t call it down on us now.”

The land was crusted with congealed rock boiled out of the mountain, bare outcrops thrust into heaps and billows like frozen foam, and riven with deep rents. Walking was extremely troublesome. They had sought the path to the south for most of the day but Karan could not find the signs she was looking for and grew ever more irritable.

“Shouldn’t we go this way?” said Llian, pointing back toward the north. His sense of direction was hopeless.

Karan ignored him. How stupid he was. She had scarcely slept the past three nights, and she was so tired that she could no longer think coherently. She plodded on dully. Just her boots were visible below the hem of Llian’s coat, so that she looked like a walking tent with a red tassel on top. He smiled every time he looked at her and, though it was not an unkind smile, it fuelled her ill-temper.

The wind died away. The air was humid and still. “We’d better find a camp,” he called, a little later. “There’s a change coming.”

She looked around. They were advancing across the south-facing flank of the mountain. Before them an island of trees separated the twisting flows, but the center of the island was smashed down by a black boulder the size of a house. Here and there the flowing rock had drawn out of its dark cocoon, leaving behind an empty tunnel that pretended to offer refuge, though they found most had collapsed and were choked with rubble and ash. The sky to the north was clear, but from the southwest a wall of olive-black clouds was advancing. The light from the setting sun was a pallid green. Lightning played continuously on the underside of the cloudbank.

“Here’s something,” Llian called, pointing toward the
small dark hole of a tunnel nearby. It was partly concealed with bushes and he had almost walked right past.

“Get some wood. I’ll start the fire,” she shouted, over the rumble of thunder. She gathered dry grass and twigs with her good arm. Llian ran to the patch of trees and began wrenching off dead branches. The advancing storm clouds overtook the setting sun. A gloomy twilight descended.

The tunnel was about ten spans broad and two high on the inside, although the mouth, being largely blocked with broken rock, was much smaller. Its length she could not tell. Karan kindled a smoky fire in an embayment a few paces inside the entrance. She no longer used her lightglass, for fear mat it might draw the Whelm to her. Instead she bound twigs together to make a torch and, holding it high, carefully checked the lower end of the tunnel. The walls were like tortured glass. The passage sloped upwards, sometimes steeply, sometimes gently, twisting and turning, but empty save for scatters of rock. Halfway along, the roots of a tree grew through the roof, making a fibrous curtain across the tunnel. White spiders and other small blind things scurried away from the light. After a hundred paces the air was stale, the floor littered with bat droppings. Further on the way was blocked by fallen rock. Karan turned back and opened Llian’s pack to see what there was to eat.

Many packets spilled out, wrapped in waxed cloth, and most still dry. Perhaps among all this bounty he had real tea too. She rifled through the packages, opened one, sniffed. Yes! Proper tea grown in the foothills above Chanthed; the aroma was unmistakable. The horrible stuff she had got in Hetchet, hard curled-up leaves of some desert saltbush, full of twigs and cobweb and red mites, was intensely bitter.