Winterbirth (46 page)

It laid clammy fingers on his face and sent damp tendrils down into his lungs. The smell of a hundred stagnant years pressed upon him.

Anyara and Rothe came in. Varryn led the way up the stairs. Ess'yr followed, and then Orisian. He discovered what true darkness meant. They went in single file. Orisian fell into a numb rhythm, the distant weariness of his legs growing but not troubling him. He could tell that the stone beneath his feet had been worn smooth. The tread of centuries had bowed the steps. He could hear the others before and behind him. In the lightless tunnel, as black as a distillation of night, patterns began to swirl and writhe inside his eyes. He could not catch them, for they faded when he tried to turn his gaze upon them. And in his strange, lost state of mind, he wondered if it was the Sleeping Dark he would see if he could hold one of these fleeting glimpses. Perhaps that was what lay beyond the wall he was burrowing through. His stride faltered. He almost tripped, and came to a halt.

'Orisian,' snapped Rothe from behind them, 'keep going, keep going.'

He took another step up into the darkness and the shapes were gone.

'Do not stop,' Ess'yr was calling back from above.

Do not stop, Orisian thought, and came back to himself with a dizzying sense of immediacy. He felt a fluttering in his chest, the sudden bloom of fear. He reached out and brushed the wall. It steadied him, told him the world was still there even though he was blind. He began to climb again. The minutes dragged by. Orisian's legs were flimsy twigs, a mass of aches. He thought of his father, brother, mother without being able to recall from one moment to the next what he had thought. For a while he felt Inurian walking at his side. The feeling passed. Inurian was behind him, he knew. They all were, save Anyara and Rothe. He had come loose from everything he had known like a boat slipping its mooring and riding the current out into a limitless sea.

There came a point when the thought was clear and certain in his head that he could go no further. He must stop, let the exhaustion in his legs and lungs abate. Then, without warning, it was over. There were no more steps and he stumbled forwards into a flat passageway. Ess'yr and her brother were standing together, waiting for Orisian and the others. He could see them. Ahead, there was a sliver of white daylight that shone in his eyes like a blade of white fire. Robbed of the mechanical rhythm that had sustained him, he slumped against the wall, sliding down to the cold floor. Anyara came and sat down beside him. Rothe stayed on his feet, but grasped his thighs and bent forwards, his chest heaving.

Ess'yr gazed down into the black pit they had climbed out of.

'They do not follow,' she said.

'I thought that was the whole point,' Rothe gasped.

Varryn had moved on. He was silhouetted in the opening for a moment, then stepped outside.

'Come out,' he called.

Ess'yr went first. With the last vestiges of his strength Orisian rose and he, Anyara and Rothe followed the Kyrinin out. The daylight was harsh. The wind blew sudden, cold air on to their faces. They gazed up in silence at the landscape before them. They had emerged amongst a great chaos of boulders that hid the entrance to the stairway. A bleak valley ran away from them, rising gradually between stone-crowned ridges into the heart of the range. Not a tree was to be seen as the land mounted in buckled ramparts towards the towering peaks of the Car Criagar. The summits were muffled in clouds. A narrow, fast-flowing river - the Snow - cut its way down the valley between boulders and tussocks of sharp grass, rushing towards the waiting falls somewhere out of sight.

'What a place,' muttered Anyara.

The wind was keen, and carried a wintry edge, but it filled Orisian's chest and washed the stale, dead air of the stairway out of him. His head spun, his skin tingled as if his blood was only just starting to flow once more.

Varryn glanced around. 'Rest,' he said, pointing towards a small dip in the ground close by. 'For a little.'

They sat on the ground. Orisian pulled at the rough grass. Varryn was murmuring to Ess'yr, his mouth close to her ear. She left him and walked slowly towards the river. She knelt by the water for a long time.

Orisian could not take his eyes off her. She undid the thongs that held her clothing and raised her tunic up over her head. Her naked back was white and flawless, revealing every lithe movement of the muscle and bone beneath the skin. She raised handfiils of water in her cupped palms and spilled them over her face and head. It ran down her back and matted down her hair.

He saw Ess'yr lean forwards and dip her face, then her whole head into the river. He glimpsed the pale curve of her small breast as it brushed the surface of the water. When she straightened again, she did so violently, flicking her head and loosing a shower of droplets. She held her hands to her face. It all looked like grief.

'She was his lover,' he heard Anyara say at his side.

'I see that,' he snapped. 'I'm not stupid.'

He at once put his arm around his sister, ashamed of his vehemence. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When Ess'yr came back from the river the rims of her eyes were red, but she was eerily calm.

'We must move on,' she said.

'I cannot,' said Anyara.

'Nevertheless,' whispered Ess'yr. She stooped to take up her small pack, bow and spear and walked off, heading north into the wilderness.

Orisian stood. Varryn was following his sister. Orisian watched him for a moment or two.

'Anyara, Rothe,' he said, listen to me. Whatever happens from now on, no one is left behind.' He looked at each of them in turn. 'Do you understand? Enough loss. This is our fight, not theirs,' he gestured towards Varryn. 'The choices are ours to make. And I will not leave anyone else behind.'

First Anyara, then Rothe nodded. Orisian could see the trace of surprise in his sister's eyes. I am not quite the brother she knew, he thought. I am not quite the person I knew myself.

'Let's go, then,' he said.

'Fill your waterskins first,' said Rothe.

The water of the Snow was icy cold.

They climbed steadily, trudging over tussocks and heather. They followed as close to the river as they could. Sometimes for a short distance they were forced to work their way around boggy patches of ground, but always they came back to the edge of the rushing water. It rained a little. The temperature fell quickly and the rain-drops turned to a wet sleet. White smudges appeared on their clothing, but melted away in the blink of an eye. The sides of the valley grew steeper and shed their thin covering of turf and grass, exuding boulders and sheets of rock. The sun was hidden behind a flat grey sky that deadened sound and light. Even what little vegetation there was took on the muted shades of the rock and cloud.

Each of them was lost in their own thoughts. Orisian's legs took each monotonous step unbidden. He felt himself to be huddled in some corner of his mind, longing to forget for a time all that had happened. This was a place he knew, the same place he had found himself when the Heart Fever had picked apart the seams of his life, but it was none the easier for having been there before. He told himself again and again that Inurian might not be dead. He lifted his eyes briefly from the ground. Ess'yr, a little ahead of him, was shivering as she walked. She must be dangerously cold, after her strange, ritualistic bathing in the river, he thought. He knew better than to suggest that they stop.

They came to a broad expanse of moss and rushes - the Snow's source - where they could go no further without climbing on to higher, exposed ground. As they laboured upwards the wind sharpened its teeth and the sleet drove almost horizontally across the slope. They had to lean to keep their footing. Great rock out-crops reared from the hill like the heads of gigantic creatures frozen in the act of tearing their way out from the earth.

When at last they emerged on to the brow of the ridge, a gale greeted them. Orisian lifted an arm to shield his eyes. What he saw was almost as unsettling as the buffeting wind: the true Car Criagar showed itself. For as far as he could see through the sleet and wisps of low cloud, there were bare slopes and peaks jostling against one another to reach up into the sky. The highest reaches were almost white with accumulated snow and ice. Varryn set off in that direction, into the barren heart of the Car Criagar.

They kept to the lee side of the ridge as much as possible, but as they climbed higher it became more difficult to find a path among the eruptive, cold-shattered rocks, and several times they had to cross on to its exposed face. There, the wind shook them and they slipped and stumbled, scraping hands raw on the sharp stones. The ground plunged precipitously away in vast scree slopes. Clouds were spilling from the peaks ahead, boiling off into the vast spaces of the sky. They had neither the clothing nor the strength needed for such a battle with the elements, yet Varryn led them remorselessly onwards and upwards.

At last the ridge broadened and opened out into the shoulder of a mountain. The ground rose in a great sweep broken only by occasional gullies and granite boulders. Lines of snow lay across the slope, and the wind strung it out from every hummock. There was a brief pause, then Varryn turned his back to the gale and set off around the mountain's flank.

The light began to fade. Varryn halted beside a massive boulder that lay on the mountainside like the discarded toy of some giant's child. A diagonal fissure divided the stone, running a split through the lower two thirds of its body. The Kyrinin gestured at it wordlessly.

'You don't mean us to spend the night here?' said Rothe. 'The cold will kill us.'

'Wind kills first,' Ess'yr replied for her brother. 'This is shelter. We will be close, share warmth.'

'No fire?' Anyara asked.

Varryn's only answer was to upend the bark tube he kept embers in. Cold ash was all it held.

'There's nothing to burn anyway, I suppose,' Anyara murmured.

They pressed themselves into their unyielding crib. Though the crack was deeper and wider than it appeared from without, it was an oppressive space. There was no room to lie down, and all they could do was slump against the stone. The weight of rock above and around them filled Orisian with a grim anticipation of being crushed in his sleep, but then finding even a moment's sleep in such a resting place seemed an impossibility. The bodies of his companions blocked out most of the light. As Varryn, the last of them, scrambled into place Anyara murmured, 'This is some kind of nightmare.'

It was the longest night of Orisian's life. The five of them stayed wedged in the hard centre of the stone, their bodies shaken by occasional shivers as the night touched, and then retreated from, its coldest hours.

Ess'yr had been right, though. The heat they shared kept the fatal chill at bay. Through the long hours he could feel her body against his; her shoulder on his, the length of her thigh stretched alongside his own.

Once or twice he thought he felt the warmth of her soundless breath upon his cheek and though he could see nothing, he imagined her face there, so close that a tilt of his head might be enough to touch it.

It seemed an eternity before a diffuse light came seeping through the clouds. Staggering out into the open, Orisian groaned at the pain and rigidity in his joints. The wind had died. Formless banks of flat grey cloud now concealed all the high peaks, but he could feel their insensate mass lurking behind the veil. He gouged and rubbed at his legs with his numb hands, hobbling about like an old man. The others looked just as exhausted and battered as he felt, except for Varryn: he appeared as alert and rested as if he had slept in perfect comfort.

'How much further is it?' Orisian asked.

'Hours,' said Varryn.

The weather was a little kinder to them that second day. There was hardly any wind, and instead they had to contend with clammy banks of cloud that drifted across the slopes. At such moments they could see no more than twenty or thirty paces ahead.

Enclosed within a narrow world, with sight and sound stifled, the threat of the hidden landscape felt more imminent than before. Few of Orisian's Blood came here. To climb so high into the Car Criagar at this time of year was something none but the foolhardy would attempt. The great chain of mountains had a grim reputation, for its inhabitants - the Kyrinin who roamed its forests, the great bears that lurked in its wildest corners - as much as in its own right. And there were the ruins: the remnants of cities built when the Gods still watched over the world. There were tales of adventurers who had come seeking relics of those distant days and found only death of one kind or another. Sometimes the mountains killed them, sometimes pits or crumbling walls amongst the ruins, sometimes wild beasts.

Orisian could not say how far they travelled that day. In the afternoon, the weather turned against them.

The wind returned and what began as a light snowfall gathered strength until a fully fledged storm was threatening to engulf them. They came over a rise and paused on the crest. The wind clawed at their clothes and snatched the breath from their mouths. Snow flew at them. Orisian bowed his head and winced.

'There,' cried Ess'yr above the buffeting wind.

Below them, across a vast flat sweep of land, lay a city. A gigantic crag rose to one side, its highest reaches lost in storm, and spreading out from its foot a sprawling network of broken walls and streets and crumbled houses: Criagar Vyne. In its decay and dereliction, in its utter possession by the mountains and by the turbulent sky, it was as if the rock of the earth had broken chaotically through the surface to express a memory of what had once been in this place. It was a sight so barren that Orisian felt a vague horror of it stirring within him.

'Who could live in such a place?' shouted Rothe.

'Huanin, once,' Ess'yr replied, 'a
na'kyrim,
now.'

Varryn was already striding on, descending towards the ruins. Ess'yr followed him. Anyara glanced uneasily at Orisian.

'We've come this far,' Orisian said, shielding his eyes from the stinging snow with his hand. 'There'll be some shelter, at least.'