The Stone of Farewell (110 page)

“I know you must feel quite lost, pretty Marya,” Aspitis said softly. “Do not fear. I promised that I would keep you safe.”

She felt herself yielding, becoming pliant. Her strength seemed to be draining away. She was so tired of running and hiding. She had only wanted someone to hold her, to make everything go away....

Miriamele shivered and pulled away. “No. It is wrong. Wrong! If you do not let him go, I will not stay on this ship!” She pushed out through the door, stumbling blindly.

Aspitis caught her long before she reached the ladder to the deck. The sea watcher Gan Itai was crooning quietly in the darkness above.

“You are upset, Lady,” he said. “You must lie down, as you said yourself. ”

She struggled, but his grip was firm. “I demand that you release me! I do not wish to stay here any longer. I will go ashore and find my own passage from Vinitta.”

“No, my lady, you will not.”

She gasped. “Let go of my arm. You're hurting me.”

Somewhere above, Gan Itai's song seemed to falter.

Aspitis leaned forward. His face was very close to hers. “I think there are things that must be made clear between us.” He laughed shortly. “As a matter of fact, there is
much
for us to talk about—later. You will go to your cabin now. I will finish my supper and then come to you.”

“I won't go.”

“You will.”

He said it with such quiet certainty that her angry reply caught in her throat as fear clutched her. Aspitis pulled her close against him, then turned and forced her along the passageway.

The sea watcher's song had stopped. Now it began again, rising and fading as Gan Itai murmured to the night and the quiet sea.

“They
are getting close,” Sludig gasped. “If your Farewell Stone is more than half a league from here, little man, we will have to turn and fight. ”

Shaking the water from his hood, Binabik leaned forward across Qantaqa's neck. The wolf's tongue lolled and her sides heaved like a blacksmith's bellows. They had been traveling without a stop since daybreak, fleeing through the storm-battered forest.

“I wish I could be telling you that it is near, Sludig. I do not know how much distance remains, but I fear it is most of a day's riding.” The troll stroked Qantaqa's sodden fur. “A brave run, old friend.” She ignored him, absorbed in drinking rainwater from the hollow stump of a tree.

“The giants are hunting us,” Sludig said grimly. “They have developed a taste for man-meat.” He shook his head. “When we make our stand at last, some of them will regret that.”

Binabik frowned. “I have too little size to be a satisfying morsel, so I will not waste their time by being caught. That way, no one will be having regrets.”

The Rimmersman steered his mount over to the stump. Trembling with the cold, parched despite the pelting rain, the horse was heedless of the wolf a handsbreadth away.

As their steeds drank, a long rumbling howl lifted above the wind, blood-freezingly close.

“Damn me!” Sludig spat, slapping his palm against his sword-hilt. “They are no farther behind us than they were an hour ago! Do they run fast as horses?”

“Near to it, it is seeming,” Binabik said. “I am thinking we should move deeper into the forest. The thicker trees may slow them.”

“You thought getting off the flatlands would slow them, too,” Sludig said, reining his reluctant horse away from the hollow stump.

“If we live, then you can be telling me all my incorrectness,” Binabik growled. He took a tight grip on the thick fur that mantled Qantaqa's neck. “Now, unless you have been thinking of ways to fly, we should ride. ”

Another deep, coughing cry came down the wind.

 

Sludig's sword swished from side to side, clearing the brush as they pushed their way down the long, wooded slope. “My blade will be dull when I have greatest need,” he complained.

Binabik, who was leading the string of balking horses, tripped and fell to the muddy earth, then slid a short way down the hillside. The horses milled nervously, confined to the path Sludig had hacked in the swarming undergrowth. Struggling to keep his balance in the mud, the troll got up and tracked down the bridle of the lead horse.

“Qinkipa of the Snows! This storm is never-ending!”

They took most of the noon hour to make their way down the slope. It appeared that Binabik's reliance on the forest cover had been at least partially correct: the occasional howls of the Hunën became a little fainter, although they never faded completely. The forest appeared to be growing thinner. The trees were still huge, but not as monumental as their kin that grew closer to Aldheorte's center.

The trees, alder and oak and tall hemlock, were garlanded in looping vines. The grass and undergrowth grew thick, and even in this queerly cold season a few yellow and blue wildflowers lifted their heads up from the mud, bobbing beneath the heavy rain. Had it not been for the torrent and the biting wind, this arm of the southern forest would have been a place of rare beauty.

They reached the base of the slope at last and clambered onto a low shelf of stone to scrape the worst of the mud from their boots and clothing before riding once more. Sludig looked back up the hillside, then lifted a pointing finger.

“Elysia's mercy, little man, look.”

Far up the slope but still horribly near, a half-dozen white shapes were pushing their way through the foliage, long arms swinging like Nascadu apes. One lifted its head, the face a black hole against the pale, shaggy fur. A cry of thundering menace rang down the rainy hillside and Sludig's horse pranced in terror beneath him.

“It is a race,” Binabik said. His round, brown face had gone quite pale. “For this moment, they are having the best of it.”

Qantaqa leaped from the shelf of stone, bearing the troll with her. Sludig and his mount were just behind, leading the other horses. Hooves drummed on the sodden ground.

 

In their haste and ill-suppressed fear, it was some while before they noticed that the ground, while still overgrown, had become unusually flat. They rode beside long-empty riverbeds that were now filled anew with rushing, foaming rainwater. Here and there bits of root-gnawed stone stood along the banks, covered with centuries of moss and clinging vines.

“These look like bridges, or the bones of broken buildings,” Sludig called as they rode.

“They are,” Binabik replied. “It means we are nearing our goal, I hope. This is a place where once the Sithi had a great city.” He leaned forward, hugging Qantaqa's neck as she leaped over a fallen trunk.

“Do you think it will keep the giants at bay?” Sludig asked. “You said that the diggers did not like the places that the Sithi lived.”

“They do not like the forest and the forest does not like them,” the troll said, gentling Qantaqa to a halt. “The giant Hunën seem to be having no such trouble—perhaps because they are less clever, or less easily frightened. Or because they are not digging. I do not know.” He tilted his head, listening. It was hard to hear anything over the relentless hissing patter of rain on leaves, but for the moment the surroundings seemed innocent of danger. “We will follow the flowing water.” He pointed to the new-grown river hurrying past them, laden with broken branches knocked loose by the storm. “Sesuad‘ra, the Stone of Farewell, is in the valley beside the forest's ending, very close to the city Enki-e-Shao'saye—on whose outskirts we are sitting.” He gestured around him with his stubby, mittened hand. “The river must be flowing down to the valley, so it is sense for us to accompany it.”

“Less talking, then—more accompanying,” Sludig said.

“I have been speaking, in my day,” Binabik said with a certain stiffness, “to more appreciative ears.” With a shrug, he urged Qantaqa forward.

They rode past countless remnants of the vast and long untenanted city. Fragments of old walls shimmered in the undergrowth, masses of pale, crumbled brick forlorn as lost sheep; in other spots the foundations of eroded towers lay exposed, curved and empty as ancient jawbones, choked with parasitic moss. Unlike Da‘ai Chikiza, the forest had done more than grow into Enki-e-Shao'saye: there was virtually nothing left of this city but faint traces. The forest, it seemed, had always been a part of the place, but over the millennia it had become a destroyer, smothering the elaborate stonework in a mass of snaking foliage, enfolding it with roots and branches that patiently unmade even the matchless products of the Sithi builders, returning all to mud and damp sand.

There was little inspiration in the crumbling ruins of Enki-e-Shao'saye. They seemed only to demonstrate that even the Sithi were bound within the sweep of time; that any work of hands, however exalted, must come at last to ignoble result.

Binabik and Sludig found a clearer path running beside the river bank and began to make better time, winding their way through the rain-soaked forest. They heard nothing but the sounds of their own passage and were glad of it. Just as the troll had predicted, the land began to slope more acutely, falling away toward the southwest. Despite its swerving course, the river was moving in that direction as well, the water gaining speed and becoming possessed of what almost seemed like enthusiasm. It positively threw itself at its banks, as if desiring to be everywhere at once; the gouts of water that flew up at obstructions in the river bed seemed to leap higher than they normally should, as though this watercourse, granted a temporary life, labored to prove to some stern riverine deities its fitness for continued survival.

“Almost out of the forest,” Binabik panted from Qantaqa's bobbing back. “See how the trees are now thinning? See, there is light between them ahead!”

Indeed, the stand of trees just before them seemed poised at the outermost rim of the earth. Instead of more mottled green foliage, beyond them lay only a wall of fathomless, featureless gray, as though the world's builders had run short of inspiration.

“You are right, little man,” Sludig said excitedly. “Forest's end! Now, if we are within a short ride of this sanctuary of yours, we may shake those whoreson giants after all!”

“Unless my scrolls are none of them correct,” Binabik replied as they cantered down the last length of slope. “It is not much distance from forest's edge to the Stone of Farewell.”

He broke off as they reached the final line of trees. Qantaqa stopped abruptly, head held low, sniffing the air. Sludig reined up alongside. “Blessed Usires,” the Rimmersman breathed.

The slope abruptly fell away before them, dropping at a much steeper angle to the wide valley below. Sesuad'ra loomed there, dark and secretive in its shroud of trees, a bony thrust of stone standing far above the valley bottom. Its height was particularly apparent because it was entirely surrounded by a flat plain of water.

The valley was flooded. The Stone of Farewell, a great fist that seemed to defy the rain-lashed skies, had become an island in a gray and restless sea. Binabik and Sludig were perched at the forest's edge only a half-league away from their goal, but every cubit of valley floor that lay between was covered by fathoms of floodwater.

Even as they stared, a roar echoed through the forest behind them, distant but still frighteningly close. Whatever magic remained to Enki-e-Shao's aye was too weak to discourage the hungry giants.

“Aedon, troll, we are caught like flies in a honey jar,” Sludig said, a tremor of fear creeping into his voice for the first time. “We are backed against the edge of the world. Even if we fight and stave off their first attack, there is no escape!”

Binabik stroked Qantaqa's head. The wolfs hackles were up; she whimpered beneath his touch as though she ached to return the challenge floating down the wind. “Peace, Sludig, we must be thinking.” He turned to squint down the precipitous slope. “I fear you are right about one thing. We are never to be leading horses down this grade.”

“And what would we do at the bottom, in any case?” Sludig growled. Rain dribbled from his beard-braids. “That is no mud puddle! This is an ocean! Did your scrolls mention that?!”

Binabik waggled his head angrily. His hair hung in his eyes, pasted to his forehead by the rain. “Look up, Sludig, look up! The sky is full of water, and it is all being dropped down on us, courtesy of our enemy.” He spat in disgust. “This is perhaps become an ocean now, but a week ago it was a valley only, just as the scrolls say.” A worried look crossed his face. “I am wondering if Josua and the rest were caught in low ground! Daughter of the Snows, what a thought! If so, we might as well make our stand in this place—at the world's end, as you call it. Thorn's journey will stop here.”