Changer of Days (12 page)

“I’ve never been to Kheldrin,” he said, holding up both hands in mock self-defense, “but I know a song about a Khelsie caravan and a singing rock…”

“Singing rock?” said Kieran sharply, turning his head. “Borre mentioned something about a singing rock last night. What is this place?”

“I passed it once, on my way south,” said Shev. “It isn’t a place I’d have wanted a closer look at. Nobody has said anything definite about it in terms of a passage to anywhere—but there is a song about it…and singers often cast into song truths they don’t wish to discuss out loud.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose nervously with his hand. “I’ve seen Khelsies but once,” he said slowly, “a handful who seemed to have done the impossible—they emerged from the Staren Pan in broad daylight, and were alive to tell about it. They spoke our language—after a fashion. But I dreamed of them after, and they were not pleasant dreams. There is something truly…alien…about that folk.”

“No more than we seem alien to them,” said Anghara, who had recovered enough to join the conversation.

Shev gazed at her with something like awe. “To live with them for two years…I don’t think I could have done it.”

“Are you sure…” began Keda again, twisting her fingers together.

“There is no other way,” said Anghara quietly, but with an iron conviction.

Shev took a deep breath. “Then,” he said levelly, “I will show you the way.”

I
t had taken many words—some harsh, at the last, spoken in private between husband and wife—but in the end it was arranged. Keda would stay behind in the tavern, discharging their responsibility to the landlord until Shev returned…and Shev would ride with Kieran and Anghara, guiding them to the singing rock.

They reached the landmark in three days. The wind and the sand had sculpted a stone obelisk with a narrow oval eye at the top, an opening which drew a constant sighing wail from the wind threading through. That sound, the otherworldly lament of the wind, had been a travelling companion for some time before they sighted the rock itself, and Anghara had hated it. Kieran could see her shuddering every so often in the high saddle on her camel. Now he could see the imprint of Kheldrin on her, the easy balance of a rider used to the jolting rhythm of the desert beasts—and wondered at it. But Anghara, whom the sound took inexorably back to Khar’i’id and the memory of Gul Qara, didn’t trust herself to tell him the story. Not here. Not yet. Not after every promise of Gul Qara seemed to have been buried in the dungeons of Miranei.

She was doing very little to guide her mount, and when Shev’s and Kieran’s stopped, next to the eye-stone, Anghara’s lurched to a standstill beside them with a disgruntled comment. Anghara looked up briefly. “Here?”

“So the song says,” Shev said. Despite the levity of his tone, his face was drawn and serious. For him, the shadows in the gray rocks beyond were full of staring golden eyes.

Kieran hesitated; this was the point beyond which mistakes became deadly, and he knew very little about what lay ahead. He had to take too many things on trust—on trust, or not at all. But after that brief hesitation he lifted his head and his eyes sparkled with determination. This, upon reflection, seemed as good a place as any to plunge into the unknown. “Well, here goes,” he muttered, casting a yearning glance toward the familiar land they were leaving, whose chief attraction quite possibly lay in the fact it was not Kheldrin.

Shev leaned over to lay a hand on Kieran’s arm. “Be careful, your sister could not bear to lose you again.”

Kieran grimaced. He planned to be as careful as he could, under the circumstances. He wished he had more idea of what he had to be careful about. “We will,” he said aloud, choosing not to bring up his misgivings with Shev. “Take care of Keda.”

“You sound as though you don’t mean to come back.”

“Oh, I do,” said Kieran, quite adamantly. “Just as soon as I can.”

“Well, then, good luck,” said Shev after a short, awkward pause. “May the Gods be with you.”

He’d looked away to Anghara, and didn’t see Kieran glance back over his shoulder, and shiver. There would indeed be Gods with them in the mountains, but they were hardly the tame, benign Gods whose protection Shev had been invoking.

Shev didn’t wait to see them go, nor even turn to watch them take the first step into the mountains. He’d wheeled his own camel and urged it into a ponderous run, turning his back resolutely on the two by the singing rock. There were some things a man would rather not set eyes on. He didn’t have the Sight, didn’t even come from a family in which it ran, but sometimes it was given even to ordinary mortals to sense something of that other world in which the Sighted moved. And there was something about the young pair setting off on this journey that raised Shev’s hackles. It might have just been the distant memory of half-forgotten Kheldrini traders, alien and golden-eyed, who had made such an impression on a little boy long ago—but even had Shev never set eyes on a Kheldrini he would have sensed something about Anghara’s going. Roisinan-born, Kheldrin-fostered, she had become the link binding together the shattered shards of a world, a world whose fate turned on that first step she took into the shadows of the mountain.

There was a path, but not for long. As he saw it vanishing onto bare rocks, Kieran’s heart sank. Had the old songs been no more than a trap, set to lure the unwary and the reckless to their death? But then Anghara peered ahead and pointed, “There is a ledge,” she said. “Look.”

It was steep and worn, but it was the only way they had. They forged ahead, single file, Kieran in the lead followed by Anghara and the pack camel. The ledge twisted and turned, following the cliff face, until it presented them, some hours later, with a triple fork. From this point one path ran level, straight ahead of them, until it folded out of sight behind an outcrop of rocky shale; one climbed steeply upward, even more tortuous than the one they had been following; the third, deceptively gentle, dipped subtly downward and vanished into the shadow of a gigantic overhanging rock. Kieran stopped, peering down the alternatives.

“I wish I could trust this level one,” he muttered darkly. But he trusted nothing in these mountains, and an easy path laid out at his feet was instant cause for suspicion. “The one going down…it’s too early to start descending. So it’s this, or uphill. What do you think?”

Anghara’s eyes, when she looked up, were oddly muddy, and her face was flushed as though with fever. “Left,” she said, speaking as if it took a great effort to do so. “Up.”

Kieran turned his camel in that direction, ignoring the snort of disgust the animal offered when presented with its rider’s choice.

They were lucky that time. Not only did the path straighten out on a high shoulder after a while, but they also discovered a shallow cave which housed a coy spring, well hidden in the darkness deep inside the cavern’s maw. It slopped over the edge of a shallow rock basin and quickly vanished into a crack in the stone. There wasn’t much of it, but it was fresh and clean, and Kieran camped by this place, taking the time to refill all of their water bags. There was no guarantee anything like this would offer itself again once they crested the mountain and began descending the parched slopes on the Kheldrini side.

The decision at the fork seemed to be the last rational one Anghara made. The next time she told Kieran to choose one fork over another, they lost two days while they extricated themselves from a pathless stony wilderness; and the time after that, she chose a trail which led them to an unequivocal dead end, where a massive cliff face stared them down. After that, she left it to Kieran; and even if she did offer an opinion Kieran took it reservedly, going with his own judgment. He was worried—he had believed, somehow, that her mind would begin clearing as they drew closer to Kheldrin. Not that he was a competent judge, but it seemed to him that, if anything, she was getting worse. Her arm wasn’t healing; and, driven by something stronger than herself, she had tried again to commune with her Gods through a blood offering. This time Kieran had been on his guard, and prevented her from doing major damage, but he had felt the agitation in the air around him even as he pulled the black dagger from her hand. Suddenly afraid at what Gods cheated of a sacrifice could do to them, so vulnerable and exposed on the mountain, he had pricked his own thumb with the tip of the dagger and offered the blood welling up from the puncture into the swirling wind.
Take it…take it…but let her be…she is not strong enough to stand against you…

He’d had to turn back and calm a distraught Anghara, and in the chaos he had forgotten his action. Later, remembering what he had done and curious as to the total absence of any pain or discomfort, he’d looked for the small self-inflicted wound—and was thoroughly terrified to discover no trace of it. Just to be on the safe side, he packed the black dagger away amongst his own things, keeping it out of Anghara’s hands. The next time he might not be watching; she could kill herself. Still, an odd uneasiness persisted at the back of his mind. He wished he didn’t feel as though he had just burned Kerun’s holy incense in a profane place.

But all this Kieran could rationalize on some level, and accept—it was devotion due to different Gods. The first real shock, the first sense of how deeply Anghara had been changed by her Kheldrini years, came when she rose one morning and donned the golden robe and the two
say’yin’en.
For a moment, Kieran could only stare. He was well aware of what Khelsies looked like, and there was nothing in Anghara of that narrow face and golden eyes—and yet, and yet…The soul that looked out of Anghara’s familiar wide gray eyes belonged to a stranger. She said something, her tone imperial, her language the harsh guttural syllables of an alien land.

“Come back,” Kieran said simply, and, for a wonder, it seemed to work. She blinked, lifted an arm as though suddenly curious about the golden silk of the sleeve in which it was encased. When she looked his way again she was Anghara again—his Anghara, her eyes soft and troubled. “I don’t remember…” she began, and then her voice petered out into silence.

“It’s all right,” he said gently. Coming closer, he peered curiously at the great globes of yellow amber around her neck. “What do these mean?”

He seemed to have grasped intuitively that they meant something—he had never even considered the possibility they were mere ornaments. Anghara, with a pensive half-smile, stroked the massive old
say’yin
al’Jezraal had given her during the Confirmation Ceremony, and told Kieran of Al’haria, its
Sa’id,
and the Hariff clan which had taken her as one of its own. This went on, in fits and starts, during the entire day; Anghara would begin something, lapse into silence, and finish that story (or, as like as not, begin another) at some later stage. All kinds of things Kieran hadn’t known about emerged during these confused tales, even that which she thought she could never tell him—the black desert called Khar’i’id, known as the Empty Quarter, and the oracle which lived there; the death of Gul Qara, and its testament; the raising of a new oracle by the sea. Even, finally, about the touch of a God’s wing, and the gift al’Khur had given her. The gift of resurrection. Much of this came out in tangled and convoluted ways, leaving Kieran to piece it together as best he could—but one thing was immediately obvious. Kheldrin had been far from a simple sanctuary for a deposed queen. It was built into Anghara now, a part of her. Kieran began to understand how her inability to sense those whom she had, in spite of herself, called to her, would wound her bright spirit. Rendered powerless through ignorance and lack of skill when it came to Sight, he was unable to do anything except stand back and watch it bleed.

The mountains were bleak and harsh. Little grew there, other than a few hardy lichens, the same lifeless gray as the stone on which they were anchored. There was the occasional brave attempt of a tree to gain a foothold, but all were twisted and stunted and if they had ever been green, it was only a memory. And it all seemed to go on forever; once, on a pinnacle from which he had a clear view to all sides, Kieran felt his heart sink when he could see nothing but more broken, empty gray ridges unfolding in any direction he looked. He hadn’t wanted Anghara to see, and he hurried them from that place—but she knew, somehow. It was one of her good days, lucid and clear, and she smiled at him from her camel with the sweetness he remembered of old.

“Are you sure that anything exists beyond these mountains?” he asked, offering a tired, slow smile in return.

“We’ll make it,” she said, gazing at him with steadfast trust. “And the Kadun…is beautiful.”

Their mounts were also beginning to suffer. They were vociferous in their complaints, and one of them, although Kieran could discover no physical reason, began to limp badly—it seemed, out of protest. Their pace slowed to a crawl. Their water supplies dwindled, and they came across no more friendly springs hidden in the shadows—only, once, a weeping cliff with a thin film of moisture upon the bare stone. The camels discovered that, and stood licking at the cliff face; Kieran called a halt, and spent a few frustrating hours trying to rig a way to collect enough of the precious fluid to fill at least one of their empty water bags. That he succeeded was a tribute to ingenuity and perseverance, and Anghara had been herself for long enough to tell him so. But the next morning she seemed to have forgotten, withdrawing from him, muttering incomprehensible invocations to alien Gods in a language Kieran didn’t understand.

As they drew closer to their destination, Anghara was plagued with odd hallucinations—visions conjured up before her by her churning mind. Once she stopped Kieran and pointed with a shaking hand to a bare rock peak, wailing that she could see the towers of Miranei and they must have gone around in a huge circle. Another time she stared into the distance, speaking softly of sea-sculpted red rock, a fishing village nestled against the cliffs, and a great Standing Stone upon a tall pillar above the ocean. All she could see in reality was more tumbled and broken lifeless gray stone; but such were the words she chose, even Kieran thought he could smell distant salt in the air and hear the sound of breakers upon the foot of the oracle’s pillar. And it seemed as though there had been a touch of Sight in that particular instance, because by evening Anghara was racked with pain and fever, incoherent, completely unable to continue her journey the following morning. Kieran could do little other than make her comfortable and wait it out.

By this stage they were already descending, their path following a decided downward slope. Kieran expected no miracles from the Kheldrini desert when they reached it—at least not until they found someone qualified to deal with Anghara’s plight—but at least they would be out of these bare, soul-numbing mountains, and in the land of country Anghara, at least, knew tolerably well. It would make the burden lighter if they could find someone with the knowledge to help. His very helplessness drove Kieran, even if he was heading for the one place he would never have wished to see under ordinary circumstances. But he could see Anghara was suffering, and he could feel that pain in himself. By now he would have done almost anything if he knew it would help.

The end came unexpectedly, and Kieran, who was so used to seeing gray rock on every side, was slow to realize what his eyes were showing him. They emerged from under a huge overhanging rock and found themselves on a narrow plateau, whose horizon was a distant line where sky met smooth coral dunes, with the occasional wind-sculpted spire of red stone.