“So what are we going to do?”
Ingold pointed with his staff toward the narrowing maze of crevices and hanging valleys at the end of the vale of the Dark, a great ruinous confusion of old avalanche scars, split and faulted from the rock. “There should be a way up there,” he said calmly, pausing in the vine-entangled shadows of the seamless black wall.
“You’re kidding,” Gil said, aghast.
“I never kid, my dear.” He started off up the talus slope.
Gil stayed where she was for a time, watching him disappear up the curve of the land. The ground rose and buckled oddly around the featureless wall of the black foundation, but whatever upheaval had disrupted it had been so long ago that the geology of the valley had settled around it. That in itself bothered Gil—the thing was so old, so incredibly old. Eons had rolled by since some arcane power had founded it here, so that the very shape of the lands and seas had changed. More fossils caught her eyes. My God, she thought, this place was a tropical swamp when this was wrought. How long have the Dark Ones inhabited the earth, anyway?
Who could ever tell, since they didn’t have a bone in their floating plasmoid bodies? And yet they had intelligence, the intelligence to sink shafts, to build these dark pavements at their heads and have them endure for millennia with very little appearance of decay. They were intelligent enough to work their own kind of magic, different from the nature of human magic, ungraspable by any human brain. They were intelligent enough to keep tabs on the convoy, to know where Tir was, and to know why he had to be put out of the way.
Arms folded, Gil stood for a while in the lengthening shadows and meditated on the Dark.
After a time she looked up and saw Ingold again, appearing and disappearing among the twisted confusion of boulders and huddled trees at the end of the valley. Some primordial cataclysm had broken the side of one of the guardian peaks of the valley, leaving a wilderness of split granite and bottomless chasms, and time had overlaid the ruin with plant life grown far too large for the vertical rocks. The result reminded her vaguely of a Chinese painting, with full-size trees sprouting unconcernedly from the sides of cliffs. But this was messier, fouler, darker; here dead trunks had fallen to rot in gullies bristling with dead white spikes below the crumbly footing above. She could see Ingold’s brown mantle shifting along impossibly narrow rock ledges high on the faces of those cliffs,
Ingold saw her looking and paused, flattened to the rock behind him. “Come up,” he called down to her, his voice echoing faintly among the rocks. “There’s a trail.”
What the hell, Gil sighed. You only die once.
Gil had never liked heights. Scrambling over the treacherous footing, she envied the wizard his six-foot staff, for in places the ledges narrowed to inches, and in others cascades of vines sprawled over the trail and masked any hint of the footing underneath. She found herself backtracking a dozen times, scrupulously avoiding looking up or down or anywhere but at her own scratched hands when a promising ledge petered out or a slit between two huge rock faces became too narrow to be passed, or too choked with rotting foliage that could house any number of creatures less Lovecraftian, but certainly as deadly, as the Dark. She wondered if there were rattlesnakes in this world—or, for that matter, poisonous snakes without rattles.
She finally caught up with him in the mouth of a dark slit in the rocks, after a precipitous scramble around the convex face of a boulder on a ledge over a nightmare maw of tangled thorn and broken stone. She was sweating and gasping in the afternoon heat and fighting for balance on the sandy, crumbling ground. The shift of the sun over the backbone of the Rampart Range had thrown the chasm into deep shadow. Ingold was barely visible but for the pale blur of face and beard and the bright glitter of his eyes.
“Very good, my dear,” he greeted her mildly. “We shall make a mountain climber of you yet.”
“The hell you will,” she gasped, and looked back down behind her. If there was any kind of trail she’d come up, she was damned if she could see it now.
“We should be able to follow this chasm up toward the top of that ridge there,” he went on, pointing. “Once over the ridge, we should be nearly to the snow line and, I believe, out of reach of the Dark for the time being. With luck, we should be able to pick up another trail on the other side that will lead us down to the Vale of Renweth, and hence to the Keep of Dare.”
Gil calculated the distance as well as she could in the deceptive clarity of the mountain air. They seemed to have climbed above the drifting haze of the valley; things seemed blindingly clear up here, and the slanting shadows altered the apparent positions of peak and ridge. “I don’t think we’ll make it by dark,” she stated doubtfully.
“Oh, I don’t either,” Ingold agreed. “But we can hardly spend the night in the valley.”
Gil sighed resignedly. “You have a point there.”
The wizard jabbed his staff cautiously at the loose rock hiding the foot of the trail, and a boulder curtsied perilously, sending a little stream of gravel and sand down across their feet and over the edge of the trail. Muttering to himself about the advisability of taking along a rope next time, coupled with imprecations against the unseen Raiders in the valley below, he began to scout cautiously for an alternate route. While he did so, Gil turned to look back over the cliff, appalled anew at the suicidal ascent she’d just made. Her gaze wandered to the valley below them and was held there by a queer, cold feeling of shock.
“Ingold,” she called quietly. “Come and look at this.”
Something in the note of her voice brought him scrambling and sliding to her side. “What is it?”
She pointed. “Look. Look out there. What do you see?”
Viewed from above and behind, the land wore a different aspect, the angle of the sunlight westering on the mountains changing the perspective of that darkness-haunted place. From here the symmetry was obvious, the nuclei of the long-overgrown woods lying in some kind of pattern whose geometry was just beyond the range of human comprehension, the stream beds following courses that held the echoes of perverted regularity. The clinging mats of the ubiquitous vines took on a curious appearance from this angle, the shifts in their color and thickness disquietingly suggestive. Almost directly below them the great rectangle of pavement lay, and its position relative to the anomalous mounds of black stone that thrust through the foliage became suddenly, shockingly, clear to a woman trained in the rudiments of archaeology.
Ingold frowned, staring down at the distorted counterpane beneath them. “It’s almost—almost as if there were a city here at one time. But there never was, not in human history.” His eye and finger traced the mathematical obscenity of a curved shadow in the weeds, the queerly obtuse angles faintly visible in the half-hinted relationships between stream and stone. “What causes that? It’s as if the vines grow thinner in places … “
“Buried foundations,” Gil softly replied. “From the looks of it, foundations so deeply buried that they leave barely a trace. The trees are more stunted on that line because their roots cannot go so deep. Look, see the line of that stream? And yet—” She paused, confused. “It looks so planned, so regular, but it’s not like any city I’ve ever seen. There’s a layout—you can see that in the angle of the sunlight—but the layout’s all wrong.”
“Of course,” the wizard said mildly. “There are no streets.”