The Farwalker's Quest Page 23

  “Cloudspear,” it said. “The mouth of the mountain. Come united. A message is caught in a throat.”

  Like water through a gap in a boat hull, reason flowed back into Ariel’s mind. She asked the darkness, “That’s what the telling dart said?”

  “What was outside is known or has fallen behind you. The inside still speaks.”

  The darkness receded. The image of Cloudspear remained like a glimpse of the sun in eyes that have closed.

  When it, too, faded, Ariel found herself sprawled near the dead cherry tree. Dressed once more in the form he had taken in life, Misha sat cross-legged near her. One of his hands gleamed a wet red. The other raised a—

  Knife blade! Ariel jerked away. Her alarmed motion woke her, casting her to the muddy bank of the creek where her dream and her night’s sleep had ended. The dream sent one last image, almost too late. It wasn’t a knife in Misha’s hand after all. He’d gripped only a large pale feather.

  Now, two days later, Ariel splashed upstream next to Zeke, wondering what kind of mouth could belong to a mountain. It might be a source of uncanny noises, like blowholes in sea cliffs. Or it could be a cave, a big crack, or lips formed of stone. Perhaps such a mouth could speak of lost treasure or open to reveal the Vault. She just hoped it wasn’t able to bite.

  Feeling as though one set of teeth nipped at her heels while another waited ahead, Ariel looked over her shoulder. She couldn’t see very far.

  “Ask some of these rocks if anyone’s behind us,” she suggested to Zeke. “And how close.”

  Without stopping, he pointed ahead. “I’ll try when we get to that outcrop. We’ll be more hidden there, and the big ones are easier to hear.”

  To drown her worries and help lift her waterlogged boots, Ariel began humming the song she’d sung for Scarl and Zeke. She tested some new phrases under her breath.

  Walk where the nightmare leads,

  Looking for Cloudspear.

  Follow the water’s path.

  Don’t walk, but run.

  Rainwater running now,

  Dripping from Cloudspear.

  Look for the mountain’s mouth

  Far from the sun.

  “How do you keep doing that?” Zeke asked. “Thinking up fresh words, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. They just show up in my head. But they don’t rhyme much.”

  “They don’t need to.”

  Ariel wasn’t sure she agreed. She preferred songs that rhymed. But this one fit well with the rhythm of her feet.

  Zeke’s outcrop was farther away than it looked. By the time they arrived, the afternoon had begun to wane. Nibbling dried fruit, Ariel tried to sit still and rest. Even a few moments without motion made her nervous. She was too certain Gust or his Finders dogged them.

  Zeke patted the stone bluff tentatively, as if greeting a strange dog. He gave Ariel an embarrassed glance.

  “Don’t listen, okay? My songs don’t sound as good to people as yours.”

  “I want to hear, though. I would never laugh, Zeke, honest.” She couldn’t talk him out of his self-consciousness. Finally she stuck her fingers in her ears and said, “All right, all right. I’ll hum to myself.”

  When his lips stopped moving and he approached her, looking glum, she unplugged her ears.

  “The stones here aren’t very friendly.” He sighed. “But there are definitely people behind us. ‘People crawling everywhere,’ it told me, ‘like ants.’ It was complaining, and that’s all I could get it to say.”

  “Fine,” Ariel grumbled. “We’ll crawl away and leave it alone.” With an anxious glance downstream, she led on.

  Tucked as they were in a fold of the land, twilight arrived early. Clouds settled onto the peaks, where tendrils of mist glowed in the last light.

  “Let’s go up there for the night.” Ariel pointed to a ridge above.

  Zeke looked dubiously at the treacherous slope and then back the way they had come.

  “I know we’ll be visible from farther away,” she added. “But we can’t sleep in the creek, and I’m sick of being down in this crack where we can’t see things sneaking up.”

  When she insisted, Zeke gave in. They hauled themselves up to a hollow protected from the worst of the wind. Darkness flowed uphill behind them, so their new vantage revealed nothing but night. They wound themselves in their blankets and huddled close to share warmth.

  Ariel woke to raindrops slapping her face. Next to her, Zeke mumbled and pulled his blanket over his head. Lightning flashed. In that half second of vision, Ariel saw angry swirls of storm trapped against the higher peaks to the east. Thunder rolled as though the mountains were falling around them.

  Clutching Zeke’s arm, she pressed her face against him. “I hate thunder.”

  “I’d rather have thunder than—”

  A threatening new sound tore the night. Ariel bolted upright. A roar like an overstoked fire rose from below, accompanied by the hollow clunking of rocks.

  “I think that’s the creek!” Ariel said. Another flash of lightning gave them a glimpse. Rushing gray water scoured the streambed, clawing high up the banks. Neither Ariel nor Zeke had witnessed a flash flood before, but both knew the fury of storm-driven waves.

  Ariel tugged her damp blanket tighter. “If we’d slept down there,” she said, awed, “we’d be drowned.”

  “Or at least swept away. I won’t argue the next time you pick a campsite. That must be a Farwalker skill.”

  Zeke cocked his head. Ariel’s ears caught it, too. Someone downstream was shouting.

  “They’re close, Zeke!” she exclaimed.

  “Not for long, if they’re caught in that water,” he said. “Nothing we can do now, anyway, except hide. It’s way too dark to start walking.”

  Early the next morning, the two picked up their blankets to hurry away. Obstacles had only begun to emerge from the gloom, so Ariel and Zeke couldn’t move fast, but by the time the sun cleared the horizon, they’d put several more miles under their boots.

  When they crossed a scree field beneath a bluff, Ariel touched Zeke’s arm.

  “Think one of these cliffs might tell you how much farther to Cloudspear?” She was starting to fear it would never appear.

  He turned, halted, and groaned.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” Ariel whispered, when she’d followed his gaze. Two figures tracked a slope they had crossed themselves not an hour before.

  CHAPTER

  33

  By midmorning, capture seemed inevitable.

  “I don’t see how we can outrun them,” Zeke said, panting. He and Ariel jogged as often and as rapidly as the landscape would allow, but each time they crested a hill and looked back, their pursuers loomed closer. They were men, it was clear now. They weren’t moving as fast as Scarl would, Ariel thought, but the men must have run sometimes, too.

  She convinced Zeke to keep fleeing. The bleak hills offered nowhere to hide, and she would rather drop from exhaustion than turn to face defeat. Her silent appeals to Misha proved fruitless. The ghost had not appeared to her since their last frightening encounter.

  As Ariel and Zeke trotted past the base of a cliff, its face hid them briefly from those behind. Zeke peered up. The basalt’s geometric columns formed a jagged staircase of stone.

  “Quick, let’s try to climb this,” he said. “I’ll give you a boost.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “If we can reach the top before they spot us, maybe they’ll pass underneath. Then we could double back and escape.”

  “If we don’t, they’ll just wait at the bottom until we both die of thirst!”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Zeke grabbed her as if to toss her to the first shelf, willing or not. Deciding she’d rather die of thirst than become a prisoner again, she accepted his help.

  They rapidly gained the lowest ledges. When the climbing became harder, Zeke slipped past Ariel, finding it easier to pull her from above than to push from below. He sang under h
is breath as they climbed, presumably pleading for permission or help. Snatches of his voice spilled down to her, but so softly that she wondered if the stone could hear him at all.

  Before they had scaled more than a dozen feet up, they got stuck. The narrow steps in this staircase were farther apart than they looked from below. Slippery moss clung in cracks that suggested the stone couldn’t be trusted—it might fall off in slabs. While Zeke searched for handholds over his head, Ariel clung to the wall, trying to keep panic from shaking her limbs. She wanted to check on their pursuers, but she hardly had space to swivel and look without tumbling off backward.

  “The stone thinks we’re brave to climb up here,” Zeke gasped. “But it doesn’t know how it can help.” He turned his voice back to song.

  Ariel slid one hand down her calf to the bone needle tucked in her sock. Though she no longer needed it, touching it still gave her strength.

  “Zeke,” she said, not really expecting to break through his focus. “I’m climbing back down. They only want me. They’ll let you go, maybe. Stay here.” On solid ground, she could fight. If she surprised them, perhaps she could stab her broken needle into somebody’s eye.

  She reached carefully with one leg to the foothold below.

  “I don’t know what trouble you’re brewing up there, Ezekiel, but come down at once!”

  Ariel recognized the voice before she could turn to its owner. “Storian!”

  “Ariel? Is that you? I wasn’t sure from afar.”

  “Wait!” cautioned Zeke. “Who’s that with him?”

  Heedless, she scrambled down, tumbling the last feet into Bellam Storian’s arms.

  “I’m so glad to see you’re unharmed.” He embraced her and then held her at arm’s length. “Not unharmed after all,” he added. “You look battered, poor thing.”

  Zeke’s warning belatedly found a hold in her mind. Ariel’s eyes jerked to the second man. Even older than Storian, he leaned on a staff and reached to rub one of his knees. Something about his shoulders looked familiar, but she was certain he was no one from home. More important, he was nobody she’d met in the desert with Gust.

  Ariel turned back to Bellam. He looked worn, thinner, and bent, but the sight of him still flooded her with homesickness.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I will return the same question to you,” he replied. “The two of you led us on a bit of a chase. These tired old legs are about to give out.”

  “We didn’t know it was you. Zeke!” She tipped her head up. “Aren’t you coming down?”

  “He’s just being careful,” Storian said. “I can’t say I blame him, with all the ill that’s afoot. The last time I saw him, he was searching for you. He succeeded, that’s clear.”

  “I must interrupt,” said the other man. “It was hard for me to hear that my grandson may have stolen a child. Is it true?”

  “You’re Scarl’s grandfather?” Ariel cried.

  “Answer my question before I will claim him.”

  Ariel tugged a lock of her hair. “Well, he did snatch me,” she said. The old man put a hand over his eyes.

  “He was trying to help, though.” Zeke slid down from his ledge. “To protect her from murder.”

  The grandfather drew his palm from his eyes to his lips. “This tale grows more grim in the telling. First Liam goes missing, now this.”

  His name was Derr Storian, he told them, when they’d all settled to rest. It was something he owned that had flashed in the sun yesterday—an oblong tube like a hollow rolling pin. Glass gleamed inside. When Derr raised it, Ariel could see his eye through the glass, looking twice as big as it should.

  “Old men have old-fashioned tricks,” Bellam explained. “We saw you through this from afar, Zeke, but I couldn’t tell who you had with you or where you thought you were headed. I feared you were looking the wrong way for home. But it took us a while to catch up.”

  “And to make sure you hadn’t drowned last night, too,” Derr added.

  “We heard you shouting,” Ariel said. “We thought you were Gust.”

  At their blank looks, Zeke offered, “He wants to kill us. That’s who we were running away from.”

  Confusion and alarm creased both elders’ faces. “We did no shouting,” began Derr.

  Bellam broke the air with a clap. “Stop. I believe you both learned your lessons better than that. This is no classroom, but I must ask you to recite the story properly, from the start. Don’t leave anything out.”

  Ariel’s fingers rose to her collar and the green story bead there. The gift from Bellam had found its own story, she realized. She just didn’t know yet how it would end.

  The two Storians listened in disbelief while she and Zeke described their adventures with Scarl. When she admitted that they’d snuck from Hartwater, Derr gazed doubtfully southward. In turn, the old men explained that they’d visited Libros, hoping the Storian there would have news of the darts—or that two Finders would show up with Ariel.

  “But we found Liam’s home in disarray,” added Derr, “and few of his neighbors would talk.”

  Ariel told them that, according to Scarl, Liam Storian had received a dart of his own, but that his mark on hers had since vanished.

  “He’s dead, then.” Derr sighed. “Despite the dart’s warning.”

  Ariel exclaimed. “You know what it says?”

  Bellam gave her an apologetic look. “Only the outside. I told Derr what I knew, and I’d memorized the symbols I didn’t. We worked those out together. I’m sorry, Ariel. I never dreamed the summons was intended for you. With the Finders after it, I thought you’d be best off not knowing anything the dart said. Little good my caution did.”

  She waved off his regret. “So tell me that part of the message!”

  “It said, ‘It is past time for the Vault to be found. Come take up this challenge no later than Beltane. Timekeeper is counting. Expect riddles and risk.’”

  “When’s Beltane?” Zeke asked.

  “Mayfest,” Derr replied. “Five days from now. Of course, it won’t matter, since we haven’t the rest of the message inside.”

  Afraid they wouldn’t believe her, Ariel shared what she’d learned in her nightmare. They greeted her revelation with astonished excitement. Derr assured her that Cloudspear rose not far away.

  “We could get there tomorrow,” he said.

  Despite legs that were already trembling, she insisted they go far enough to glimpse it that day. When she crested a hill a few hours later, the view beyond stopped her breath. Flags of mist fluttered from a black spike of stone lording over the valley. Moisture gleamed on the rock like the blood of gored clouds.

  Tears of relief pricked Ariel’s eyes. She didn’t need Derr, climbing slowly behind her, to introduce Cloudspear.

  Coming up alongside her, Zeke pointed, not to the spire but lower on its flank. A black slit gaped there.

  “The mouth of the mountain,” Ariel murmured. “At last.”

  The Storians pleaded old bones and tried to dissuade her from trekking farther that day. Nothing would do but for her to keep going until she’d reached that frowning mouth.

  By then, all four were footsore, and their shadows had merged with the twilight. Although much wider than tall, the cave yawned over their heads as they entered. They dropped their gear just inside, amid a rubble of rock.

  “Are there great rooms back in there?” Ariel asked, peering into the blackness.

  “I’ve never come in,” Derr replied. “According to stories, it slips around the flank of the mountain, breaking through now and then like the tunnel of a great mole.” He nodded toward the northwest. “The true mouth of the mountain opens that way, facing Libros. Most people would say we’ve come to the tail end instead.”

  “If there’s truly a message here for you, Ariel,” said Bellam, “we may have to pass all the way through to find it.”

  “We can’t without torches,” Derr said. “We can walk to the mouth on
the outside instead and collect fuel on the way. We’ll have to take care where the ground falls in, like that.” He gestured. Over their heads, the ceiling was cracked and riddled with chimneys. When the moon rose, its gleam trickled through them, the only relief from the dark.

  Before they all lay down to sleep, Zeke slipped past the puddles of moonlight to sing softly in the cave’s complete darkness. Too tired to await the results, Ariel found a smooth spot away from the cave mouth and out of the chill mountain wind. Her eyes closed. In the cave’s spooky echoes, she hoped not to dream of Misha or anything else.

  Not enough hours later, Ariel woke with a start. A glow reflected around her, too near to be sunrise. The Storians hunched alongside a small fire.

  A well-honed instinct for danger spiked in her mind. Her shoulders jerked up. “What are you doing?”

  Her voice woke Zeke. He blinked, his face rubbery.

  “Nothing to trouble your own rest,” Bellam said softly. “Old bones just don’t sleep when they’re driven so hard.”

  Ariel imagined the fire shining for miles, a bright eye in its socket. “If the others are still after us, they might see it!”

  “They’ll only see that you’re no longer alone,” Bellam soothed her. “They won’t dare attack you with us here.”

  Zeke’s hand clamped her elbow. She followed his gaze to the gloaming outside.

  A single person approached. From his shape, she could see it was Gust.

  CHAPTER

  34

  A whimper escaped Ariel. She leaped to her feet.

  The old men moved less quickly. Bellam rose to stand at the cave’s mouth, his hands on his hips. Derr retreated to join Ariel and Zeke.

  “It’s all right,” he murmured. He hefted his wooden spyglass like a club. “Looks like he’s alone. Even with a weapon, he can’t just walk up and take you.”

  “That’s far enough,” Bellam announced.

  Just outside, Gust took several steps more. “How about a ‘good morning’?” he called.

  “No point in playing games,” Bellam replied. “Go back where you came from and save us all trouble.”