Child of Flame (Page 214)

The path grew steeper, clambering up goatlike along the side of a ravine, and brought them to a plateau where oak wood gave way to brush. Three goats fled into the forest at the approach of the dogs. Two Fingers moved forward cautiously into range of a watch post, somewhat the worse for weathering: its plank roof had fallen in. A cistern lay beside it. He sipped at its waters, declared them good, and they refilled their waterskins while Alain clambered up to the topmost part of the wall, finding that he could, with care, use his injured hand to grip. When he found a safe vantage place and beckoned, they climbed up beside him.

Stumps of trees littered the hillside, giving way downslope to an extensive grove of olive trees and, farther down, irrigated fields woven together with an elaborate pattern of canals. The town itself lay on a rise. Massively fortified with earth walls and a wooden palisade, it looked impregnable to Adica’s eyes, yet the figures that walked its ramparts wore the crested helmets and animal masks that marked the soldiers of the Cursed Ones. Some of the houses in the village lay in ruins, burned or torn down, and a few human figures labored at the tannery and in the fields, stooped with misery and despair. Fresh scars marked the earth just outside the rampart. Adica shuddered: she knew that the Cursed Ones had a habit of throwing the dead bodies of their slain enemies in pits, like offal, thus condemning their souls to haunt the living for eternity since the souls of the dead could not pass on to the Other Side without the proper ceremonies and preparation. She caught sight of a flock of hummocks, like sheep, to the north. There, almost out of sight, lay the tombs common to the tribe. They, at least, did not look disturbed. But in their midst she saw the uprights of a stone loom, and tiny figures standing guard. The Cursed Ones held the path in and out of Horn’s country.

“Horn and her people will have taken refuge in the caves of her ancestors.” Two Fingers made no other comment on the devastation.

They negotiated the broken walls of the watch post and fell back to the safety of the oak wood. Both Two Fingers and Laoina knew this trail well, although it was cunningly hidden and disguised by a series of dead ends, deadfalls, switchbacks, and false turnings. They came finally to a limestone outcropping where a cave mouth gaped, but Two Fingers led them past this inviting opening and down over the rocky slope, until with his spear he swept aside the heavily weighted branches of a flowering clematis. A small opening cleft the hillside, barely large enough for an adult. Two Fingers got down on hands and knees and clambered in without hesitation. Laoina waited, indicating that the others should go first. After commanding the dogs to wait, Alain followed the old man into the hill, more confident now that he had regained some feeling in his hand.

Adica crawled after them. The rock closed over her head, and, very quickly, darkness blinded her. It was slow going because of her hesitancy, but she heard the movements of the two men ahead of her and Laoina behind and in general the going was fairly smooth. The tunnel forked to the right, and suddenly she heard whistling and moaning: narrow shafts thrust skyward, a pipe for the wind. The tunnel dipped, hit an incline, and at the base opened out. By now it was pitch-black. She groped, found Alain’s body, and held on to him as Laoina came up behind her. Night had never bothered her, nor her visits into the tomb of the ancient queens under the tumulus, but this place, narrow and clammy, had a presence that weighed uncomfortably, as though the earth itself had consciousness.

“Come,” said Two Fingers, as Laoina translated. “Hold one onto the next, and follow me. There is a trap we must work around.”

“You don’t think they’ve laid in others since the attack?” asked Laoina.

“It may be. But I have certain charms upon me that will warn me.”

So it proved. Three times he stopped them. Once, she heard a hissed conversation, words exchanged, and they were allowed to pass through a bottleneck so narrow that she had to squeeze sideways to get through. A hand brushed her head, checking for the telltale topknot worn by the Cursed Ones, and let her by without further molesting her. It was a good place for an ambush. She was blind as a mole; she could not even see her own hands in front of her face. How the others moved with any sense of confidence she couldn’t imagine, and yet wasn’t all their work as the Hallowed Ones, learning the secrets of the great weaving, itself like groping forward in darkness?

None among humankind knew the extent of the Cursed Ones’ magic. They could call fire from stone and earth from water; they could cause wind to arise from flame and water to leach out of the air. They knew the power of transformation, and they could coax elementals from their hiding places among the ordinary places of the Earth. For this power they paid a price, and they paid it not just with their own blood but with the blood of their enemies.