SHALLOWS OF NIGHT.
Sunset Warrior.
By Eric Van l.u.s.tbader.
ONE
*Ice*
Soaring through frigid mists and roiling clouds, he stretches fully his long wings upon the unpredictable currents. Streamers of silvered plumage, running bilaterally across his wings and cresting his majestic questing head, ripple and blur in the wind.
He banks and dips. There is a moaning in his ears. His large liquid eyes stare unblinkingly ahead at the immense eye of the setting sun, its face a broad and flattened disk, wider at the sides as if caught in a vise of immeasurable proportions.
Then thick ribbons of cloud of a metallic gray ride before it like the ghostly remnants of a once vast, victorious army, reaving it.
He banks again, deftly avoiding a treacherous downdraft, and turns his incurious gaze beneath him, through the layers of cloud and mist, to the painful twisting of the earth far below.
High peaks beaten by age and sc.r.a.ped by merciless weather, crowned in bitter frost, sealed in pearl and emerald ice, thrust their humped backs in snaking lines against the whipping winds which, forever swirling, gather layers of fine powdery snow from the mountains" slopes, turning them into rising sheets, hurling them forward, like giants striding across the barren land.
He floats over sheer gorges, frosted thickly in gleaming sheets of periwinkle ice, plumes of loose snow drifting along their flanks like smoke from a funeral pyre. His keen eyes trace the vertiginous descent from dancing ice crystaled green-turquoise-magenta in the dying light to the violent violet of their yawning and uneasy depths: precipitous chasms sliced out of the land as cleanly as if by a cruel blade of immense size. Powerful wings flutter as out of these depths now is heard the agonized groaning of shifting rock. Ozone and sulphur fill the air as the earth shudders and trembles. Shards of ice shear off in dense cl.u.s.ters with infinite slowness, hanging impossibly in mid-air, crumbling in layers until, with an abrupt and complete swiftness, they explode silently into vast spurts of hyalescent spray high in the sky that turn to rainbow arcs as they catch the last oblique rays of watery light.
He wheels in the colored, suddenly solid air, unperturbed.
Everywhere is ice and draperies of snow with only the occasional tired fist of granite or twisted schist rising like ancient tombstones in an alien desert, useless punctuation on a blank and crumbling page.
Against this inimical icescape nothing moves.The bird banks and glides in the sky, his black-irised eyes scanning the dreadful sameness of the land. Into the setting sun he flies, his majestic plumage stained a dilute scarlet and, glancing once more earthward, he sees a dark and tiny shadow limned before the glare of the ice. Muscles respond to the brain"s command and the wings dip, their silver plumage losing for a moment the scarlet wash, turning a rich l.u.s.trous gray, as he heads southward for a closer look.
Resolution of image comes far too swiftly, for the shadow is huge. Abruptly it moves and, startled, the bird wheels away from the edge of the steep precipice along which he has been flying and, flapping his wings in alarm, speeds westward, rising, gaining the high currents, diminishing into the light of the lowering sun.
Transfixed, Ronin stands at the verge of the high ice ledge staring southward, oblivious to the receding speck in the sky.
Motionless, his body tall and muscular, he appears more a statue erected to the countless legions who, throughout the myriad ages, have fought across the changing faces of this land. For here once grew lush verdant forests of giant fern and slender willow spreading their fans of feathered leaves, building dense jungles of crowding greenery and thick tangles of vines through which cocoa warriors crept and crouched, sweating, listening methodically to the shrill cries of startlingly colored birds, readying the leap, an uncoiling blur, tan and brown shadow, flickering in the filtering light, the quick silent slash, the gout of bright blood beading the foliage, the dying body of the enemy. And in another age-earlier or later, one cannot be sure-here swelled and sucked fifteen fathoms of green water alive with the riotous growth of the sea. High-booted feet tramped the stained tarred decks of wide-beamed wooden ships, long oars extending from their high curving sides, beating through air and water in hypnotic rhythm. Hoa.r.s.e shouts filled the sky heavy with brine and heat as helmed and bearded warriors prepared themselves for battle.
Layers of hard snow encrust the slippery ice of the precipice upon which he stands, feet apart and planted firmly in the frost. Unconsciously he clenches his left hand, which is covered by a strange scaled gauntlet, dull and unreflective. The wind gusts, screaming in his ears, and rushes by him, unheeded, sucked in by the crevices and piled hillocks of the plateau tumbling at his back. The air is dry and chill. The staggering sight at which he gazes longingly resonates in his mind with the supravivid impact of an ecstatic dream. And for this time, the events of the recent past mercifully dim.
For what lies before and below him, just past the beetling lip of the high ledge, is a cyclopean sea of ice. Desolate. Limitless. Awesome and electrifying.
"An overwhelming sight," said the voice quite near and behind him. And he turned slowly, as if in a dream, to behold Borros, the Magic Man.
"The true wonder is that we have been denied this sight for all of our lives." A thin and weary smile curled Borros" lips.
Wind whipped loose snow against their legs as they stood atop the ice plateau, strange creatures garbed in the one-piece foil suits they had found on the highestLevel of the Freehold before each, in his own time and his own way, breached the last metal defense of their subterranean world, cracking the outer hatch, buried in drifting snow. The suits were extremely light, skin tight along chest and arms, with filled pockets of hardware and food concentrates, vacuum-sealed, immune to the ravages of time, even a small supply of mineral-enriched fluid to refresh themselves.
These pockets ran around the suits" waists and down the outside of each leg, somehow increasing the warmth of the garments.
Ronin stared at Borros, seeing him now as if for the first time, the focus of reality at last forced upon him, and all the raw hate that he had held in abeyance for these long moments flooded back on an inexorable tide. Caught in the slipstream of sewage; shook himself, as if the motion would somehow cleanse him. He knew that he carried now within his depths an anger and a sorrow, that thus was bound to him irrevocably a hideous strength.
The Magic Man had misunderstood the gesture and he grasped Ronin"s shoulder.
"Surely you are not cold?"
His fingers moved along the foil to a fold at the back of Ronin"s neck. "Look here." And he pulled gently upward, the metallic skin stretching to cover Ronin"s head, leaving only his eyes and mouth exposed. Borros wrestled his own hood into place.
Borros turned to stare behind them, peering across the rubble of the frozen waste to the hidden Freehold, the tiny access hatch leading down and down to the world inside, a world at war now, factions struggling for desperate power.
"Do not think me a fool," the Magic Man said urgently. "But we must flee from here at once."
Tears call to Ronin and the mountains melting as he ceases to feel the bite of the wind at his eyes and lips. The sky colorless and the earth with no substance. His feet leaden. His heart pounding as it hit him searingly like the aftershock of a deep wound, the rent cauterized but the nerves still in dysfunction. At first there was no feeling at all. Numb. The body protecting itself. But there is a limit. His consciousness narrowed because he was struggling against it now. All his loves, all his friends, all the people. Gone in a wink of an eye. Just a flutter of time, the s.p.a.ce to pull two breaths and lives are snuffed like tapers at first Spell. K"reen and Stahlig and Nirren and G"fand and-the Salamander, the center of it all, still down there, alive, alive...
"Now."
Slowly, it seemed to him, he became aware of a plucking at his sleeve.
"Ronin, please, we must be off." He heard the words as if from a great distance.
They hung in front of him like lamps, separate and solid, one after another, turning on some unseen axis, their sheen...
"Chill take it! Ronin, we must go now! Before pursuit from below can be organized."Then the meaning had penetrated and he started as if from a deep slumber.
"Yes," he said hoa.r.s.ely, turned to look at Borros. "Yes, of course we must be off." His colorless eyes were clear now, their gaze sharp and quick "But which way?"
"There," said the Magic Man. And he lifted his arm in a sweeping gesture outward, over the lip of the precipice to the enormous expanse of the darkling ice sea.
There was nought but the crying of the freezing wind. The ancient rock at his face, rippling, studded with ice in pockets and rivulets, slipped away above him centimeter by centimeter. The sound was like the wailing of the d.a.m.ned. Striations made a constantly changing pattern that held his attention as he searched for foot- and handholds. Following Borros down the immense face of the cliff toward the ice sea far, far below, he felt all too distinctly the void at his back. The magnitude of its emptiness beckoned to him, the wind its siren call, ululating hypnotically, Relax, let go, feel the gentle parting of warm flesh from cold stone, to fall backward, slowly, effortlessly onto the comforting cushion of the wind, turning, to be borne away, tumbling, into the void...
An ending he did not wish.
"What, over the edge?" he had said.
A peculiar animation had come to the Magic Man"s face, a keen antic.i.p.ation.
"Yes. Yes! Do you not see?" As if he had waited all his life for this kinetic moment.
"It is the only way down to the ice sea. Our way lies south. South into the land of men."
And so Ronin had walked with Borros through the crusty snow and treacherous ice to the very edge, entirely free at last of the ties that bind every man at one time to home. Masterless but not directionless.
They went carefully along the lip for perhaps a thousand meters and then Borros slipped over the side. Without a backward glance Ronin too quit the plateau.
Ronin became aware that Borros had stopped below him. He called down but the fluting of the wind made communication impossible at this distance. Carefully he lowered himself to the other"s side.
"The way below is blocked," Borros said in his ear.
Ronin peered down through the intermittent showers of snow. Indeed, directly below them a fresh fall of snow and ice crystals layered the cliff face and it was impossible to determine the nature of the footing. Suicidal to attempt the descent bytouch alone, yet it was imperative that they move onward.
Ronin swung his gaze to their right where his peripheral vision had registered a dark area along the rock wall. Now, motioning with his head, he led the Magic Man toward its smudgy outline.
They inched along the narrow ledge upon which they had stopped their descent and soon the dark area took on definition. As Ronin had hoped, it was a cave of some considerable size and within its mouth they found a semblance of shelter from the wind and the cold.
Borros sighed deeply as he pulled off his hood. His hairless skull, faintly gleaming in the dim light, seemed peculiarly fitting for this foreign and forbidding place; its singular saffron color could almost have pa.s.sed for the patina of age.
Ronin went away from the rough rock walls to the lip of the cave. Below him the cliff dropped precipitously. Beneath the heavy fall of new snow clinging to the rock with an almost sentient tenacity there must be a way down to the ice sea. He could just make out a sliver of its surface sparkling in the lowering light. But from what he could see, there was no way of knowing, therefore no practical way down. Laterally there was only the mean ledge along which they had come. Farther to the right it disappeared into the rock face only meters from where he stood. He kicked at the snow, left plumes arcing out into the wind as he returned to the twilight of the cave.
Borros was agitated. "What are we to do?" he asked Ronin as he stalked back and forth. "We must continue the descent Already men from the Freehold will be searching for us."
Ronin"s mouth moved into the semblance of a brief, chill smile. "Do you really believe that they would allow anyone onto the Surface? They must think that we shall perish out here."
The Magic Man"s eyes darted from the cave"s opening to Ronin"s face, back again. "You do not know Freidal. Or Security. My escape-" His eyes flicked back to the cave"s mouth. "He will kill me if he catches me." His gaze pa.s.sed across Ronin"s face again like clouds across the face of the sun. "You also. If he finds me, he finds you."
"No one is after us," Ronin said flatly.
Borros pulled his hood up over his bald skull. "You are wrong but it makes no difference. Even if Freidal was not coming after us, we would still have no choice.
We must descend to the ice sea. We cannot survive long here."
"Better to die on the way down than here in the cave," Ronin said sardonically.
Borros shrugged. "Are you coming?"
He did not answer immediately but walked away from the light, into the cave"s dank interior, smelling the acrid odor of raw minerals and rock dust, hearing the whistling of the wind diminish. Yet there was sound.
Far back in the cave he dimly heard the Magic Man"s strident call but he ignoredit. He listened intently, moving purposefully, his pulse quickening. And now he was sure. Excitedly he put his arms out, hands floating through the blackness, feeling along the wall like a blind man"s.
He heard Borros calling thinly again, a forlorn and lonely sound, and he went slowly forward so as not to miss it. At last he stopped, his fingers running over the metalwork he had been searching for and his heart soared because he knew now that there was after all a way down to the ice sea. He called out to Borros.
What he had thought was the soughing of the wind had in fact been the distant sound of rushing water. The wind had been in his ears for so long that it was not until he moved farther back into the cave that he had been able to pick up the subtle tonal alteration. Even so, had he not made the long descent from the Freehold to the City of Ten Thousand Paths-the flicker of G"fand"s smiling face frozen in his mind"s eye, dissolving into the b.l.o.o.d.y wreck of the Scholar"s corpse flung along the dusty cobbles of the ancient street, eyes bulging, throat torn out by the nameless towering thing that Ronin had tried twice to kill and failed, inhuman eyes like crescent moons, a chill more deadly than a coffin of ice and a power-he never would have recognized the new sound as a torrent of water pitching headlong over smooth rock down and down in a frantic cascade. He and G"fand had encountered the immense waterfall on their way to the City of Ten Thousand Paths and its reverberations had been with them for many kilometers. It was the same sound now, merely m.u.f.fled by distance.
"Borros," Ronin called again.
They were obviously far from the cataract yet the presence of the sound was a clear indication that this cave was perhaps more than just that Ronin believed now that they were in the outermost reaches of a tunnel. He thought of Bonneduce the Last, the small, lame man, and his companion, Hynd, a creature that was more than an animal. He and G"fand had encountered the pair in the City of Ten Thousand Paths. Bonneduce the Last had a.s.sured them that he and Hynd dwelled on the Surface but had given no indication of how they had come to the City. Could this have been his entrance and egress? Ronin was certain that it was. Given that, the cave must contain a means to descend to the ice sea.
His hand wrapped around the haft.
Borros came up then.
"I have found something," Ronin told him. "Do you have tinder?""
The Magic Man reached into one of his pockets, produced tinder and flint.
Together they lit the torch.
The flame, tiny at first, sizzled pale yellow and smoked on the damp material so that they choked and, coughing, were forced to turn their heads away. The orange light leapt and quivered and, wiping the water from their eyes, they were for the first time able to see the rough and gritty walls, black ice gleaming like obsidian in the shadowed hollows, the surface streaked ocher and green, silver and pink by the exposed minerals.Everything they needed was there, hanging by the metalwork of the torch"s niche.
Long coils of rope of a peculiar material not thick but, as Ronin pulled on them, obviously more than strong enough. Beneath the ropes, small metal hammers with long heads and with these bags filled with metal spikes of unfamiliar manufacture, flattened and broader at the end through which was punched a circular hole large enough for the rope to pa.s.s through.
"And so," said Ronin, "we descend the cliff after all."
His head whipped up and his nostrils dilated as the smell came to him. They had worked hard, on their knees driving the spikes into the rock floor of the cave just inside the mouth. They had inserted the ropes and tied double knots, leaning back and pulling hard to test the fastness of their handiwork. The small bags they had tied to their suits; the hammers dangled from their wrists by short thongs. Wrapping the ropes about their waists, they had walked to the lip of the cave. Ronin let the rope drop and his fist went to the hilt of his sword.
Before, it had been a stench when the monstrous thing came for them from out of the black shadows through the dry dust and golden dimness, its fearsome visage dominated by the glowing eyes and the curved, wicked beak. His stomach heaved at the thought of its invulnerability, the desperation of his attack as G"fand lay mutilated. The smell was like a living thing then. Now it was far off but, he surmised, reachable; it was getting stronger. He let the anger and fear mingle within him until it became rage. Adrenalin rushed through his body and he clenched his hand within the gauntlet left for him by Bonneduce the Last, cunningly made from the giant claw of one of the hideous creatures. How many of them were there? he wondered fleetingly.
He began to withdraw his sword.
And felt the hand on his shoulder, heard the voice crying urgently at his side, "What are you doing? You fool, we must go now! There is no time to lose!" His hand tightened on the sword hilt. "Ronin, we must reach the ice sea!"
Instinctively he knew that Borros was correct. Their survival must come first. His battle would have to wait. And perhaps that was for the best. He wanted to be able to pick the time and the place when he would next meet the creature. But more importantly he needed more information about it if he was to have a real chance of killing it and surviving.
He let go the sword and picked up the rope, securing it once more about his waist. He nodded wordlessly to the Magic Man and they crunched backward through the snow. On the ledge the wind bit into the exposed areas of their faces as they went over the edge.
* * *He hung suspended, dangling, the rope biting cruelly into his ankle. Momentum, he thought as warily they circled him, knowing their advantage but fearing him still.
He had no weapon and of course that was the point. Because, as he had once told G"fand, learning the art of Combat meant much more than being taught to wield a sword.
His body, near naked and slick with the sweat of exertion and heat, swung along its brief orbit. Keep the body relaxed, the Salamander had told him. Work within as small a s.p.a.ce as you feel you can allow without sacrificing the momentum provided by the orbit of the swing. You understand, Ronin, that once inertia takes over you are finished because an opponent will gut you in the time it takes you to overcome it.
Other students in the special Combat cla.s.s presided over by the Salamander had attempted the cruol, that length of rope suspended from the ceiling to which one was tied head down a meter off the floor. Four students attacked with wooden staffs the length of a man"s body. No one had survived for long. However, none of the students had been trained by the Salamander as extensively as had Ronin. And none had his skill.
Because it was so terribly difficult, the cruol was now used almost exclusively for punishment. Yet up here on the Salamander"s Level it had other uses.
He kept the momentum going, consciously feeding the adrenalin flowing through his body, knowing he would need all that he could produce in the coming moments.
A staff came at him, whistling through the air. He twisted his shoulders and felt a burning down his back at the narrowness of the miss. The students fanned out, swinging at him again and again. He used his forearms to block the staffs, while gradually increasing the length of his arcs. Less and less, they found the need to advance toward him in order to make contact; they were too intent on the attack to take notice.
He swung, waiting for a peak, and for a lateral cut. He saw one coming from the left and he knew that it would be close because he was just at the peak of his arc and the student"s blow had to be fast or he would lose the advantage of the momentum.
But the staff came at him with tremendous force and it was all right because now he was beginning to arc away from the oncoming staff, his momentum picking up, and now, instead of blocking the blow, he reached for the blurred weapon, his tightening fingers slipping along its length in the slick sweat running off him. Palms burning with the friction, a blow from another staff numbing the muscles along his back. Ignore the pain. Concentrate. He used his mounting momentum and, twisting his wrists at the last instant, wrenched the staff from the startled student.
He was moving to his right with great speed now and, taking advantage of the direction of his swing, slammed the staff into the collarbone of a student on that side. He crumpled to the floor as Ronin began to reverse his arc and caught a second adversary in the mid-section so that the student doubled over, retching and gagging.
There was only one now because the one Ronin had disarmed was forbidden to interfere once he had lost his weapon. This one was wary. He would not be trappedas his fellows had been. Ronin noted that he was concentrating on Ronin"s weapon.
Then he attacked, swinging at the base of Ronin"s staff, seeking to bruise his hands.
The blows were rapid-fire so that, for every one Ronin blocked, one slammed into his knuckles. They soon turned red and the first spattering of blood appeared as the skin split and tore. The student pressed his advantage, moving in, the bright blood fascinating and irresistible. His concentration narrowed.