On the next stretch, they came out on rock that looked, Seri said, like cake batter or custard that had stiffened in pouring. It did not look like honest rock, Aris thought, and wondered what had formed those loops and layers. At least it didn’t shift underfoot, and the angle of the corrugated surface made climbing easier. The slope eased; they could walk upright again, between odd little columns of the strange stone. Here Aris agreed—they looked exactly like the last bit of batter from a pan, dripping crookedly to one side or the other.
The game trails disappeared into a grassy meadow thick with late wildflowers—tall blue spikes and low red stars. Bees hummed past them busily. On their right, still higher cliffs rose; they seemed to be crossing a terrace that might, Seri thought, come out above the valley they sought. They could see a similar cliff face to their left; between, they assumed, lay the tumble of broken rock they’d been unable to climb.
From the meadow they passed into a pine-woods of trees smaller than those on the canyon floor, and came at last to a clear view of the upper valley. On either side, sheer cliffs rose from a level floor of green. A ribbon of silver wavered down the valley: a creek. They hurried down the slope before them, so much gentler than the one they’d climbed.
“It’s odd that the rocks don’t look the same on either side,” Aris said. On the west, the same rose-red solid stone, streaked dark with ages of weather, looked exactly like the stone found so far in the main canyon. But the eastern cliffs were subtly different—an oranger red, more mottled than streaked, conveying, he thought, some weakness in structure.
“I wouldn’t make my home in that,” Seri agreed, as usual, with the thought behind his words. “But that grass, and that stream—think of this for horses. It’s perfect.” She bounded down the last of the slope and ran out on the grass, only to fall on her face.
“Seri!” Aris ran after her, and tripped on the deep sand just as she had. She was up already, her expression rueful.
“Sand,” she said. “It’s not a terrace like ours at all.” Aris, face down on the sand, eyed the patch of green before him.
“And that’s not real grass, either. Sedge.”
“Oh, well, it’s got water.” Seri strode off toward the creek, and he followed her. When he caught up, she was laughing. “Water, I said! Look at this—it’s hardly a knuckle deep.”
“Soaking the sand,” Aris said. He looked all around, at the sheer walls, the almost-level floor of sand, the glisten of water that had looked like a real stream. “A very strange valley indeed.”
It was, he thought later, as they examined it in more detail, like a flattened miniature of the main canyon. Its sand floor was not as level as it had looked from above; it had miniature grassy terraces, small dunes of open sand, little sedgy bogs near quicksand, even a small cluster of trees whose triangular leaves sounded like gentle rain in the breeze. They spent the afternoon working their way up the valley; the stream deepened upstream, against their experience, and acquired a gravelly bed. To the east, a tributary valley opened, but they could see it was blocked at the upper end by a sheer cliff. The way out to the south lay, if anywhere, up a ravine garish with orange stone and odd black boulders. They pushed themselves into that climb, unwilling to spend the night in the valley, though neither could say why.
They looked back once, from a terrace about halfway up the ravine, to see the valley looking once more like a level swathe of grass. Just above the ravine, they found a sloping pine wood . . . and more sand.
“It’s softer than rocks to sleep on,” Aris offered, when Seri’s lip curled.
“And harder than rocks to walk on, and we do more walking than sleeping. It will take us longer to go where we need to go,” she said. But they made a pleasant camp that night anyway, enjoying the knowledge that no one—no one at all—knew exactly where they were. Their small fire crackled and spat with the fat pine-cones and resinous boughs; the water they’d brought up from the valley tasted sweet with their supper of hard bread and cheese.
“Two of the most dangerous, alone, in our valley: we should take them.”
“No. One is the healer. We need him, for the prince’s downfall.”
“Then the woman—”
“We cannot take one without the other, not without giving warning. Patience, trust the prince’s weakness, and wait. Vengeance long-delayed is all the sweeter.”
“The woman is dangerous, I tell you,” the complainer said. “There’s an uncanny stink about her, something like the old priest had. She doesn’t like the valley; she senses something—and that against our strongest protections.”
“Then we will have the prince distract her,” the leader said. “She will do us no harm if she’s busy somewhere else—or worried about something apart from our kind of danger. She is Girdish; such mortals concentrate their minds on practical matters, and dislike magery. If she senses something, let her think it is only that of other mortals, no more.”
The next day Aris led the way out of the pine grove onto an open upland; to their left, a curious conical hill of rough black rock looked like nothing either of them had ever seen. Far to the west, they could see the mountains beyond Dirgizh. Ahead, they knew, was the drop from their block of mountains—but which was the best way?
Seri pointed to the black peak. “If we climbed that we could see more.”
Aris shrugged. “It’s higher ground that way. We might find rock instead of this sand.” For the lower ground had small dunes of windblown sand, difficult to walk on.
They found the gentle slope toward the black hill much easier than the day before. Soon they were walking on rock again, rippled and curved like mudbanks in a stream. More and more of the land around them came into view. Looking back toward the upper valley and the main canyon, they could see only a jumble of red rock, cut with sharp blue shadows. The mountaintop above the stronghold stood out clearly, but not the canyons between. Southward, they began to see a lower plain beyond the mountains . . . and the high white cliffs of another mountain range to the east. Finally, as they walked among the jumbled black boulders of the black hill’s base, they could see an edge.
Seri cocked her head at the black hill now close above them. It looked as if it were made of a pile of loose black rocks, some room-sized and most smaller. “Do you think we can climb that, or will it be like climbing gravel?”
Aris looked south, at a distant blue shadow he thought might be more mountains very, far away. “Do we need to, now? I think we can find our way to the edge of this without it. I wonder how far that cloud or mountain is. . . .”
Seri looked. “More than a day’s travel. In this air, more than two.” She scrambled up the steepening slope of the black hill, dislodging a shower of rough black rocks, and slid down again. “Not worth it, you’re right. I wonder what the dwarves would call this kind of rock.” She picked one up, and hit another, experimentally. The one in her hand broke, and she yelped. “It makes sharp edges,” she said, holding out her gashed hand.
“And you want me to heal it for you,” Aris said, shaking his head. “Will you ever learn to wear gloves?” He laid his hand over the gash and let his power heal it.
“Peasants don’t wear gloves,” Seri said scowling, but her eyes twinkled. She shook her hand, looked at the rock, and shrugged. “Come on—we’d better get this done today. I’ve got to work on those junior yeomen—or whatever we decide to call them—when we get back.”
They came to the edge before midday, an edge even more impressive than the drop from the mountaintop into the western canyons. Swallows rode the updraft, the wind whistling faintly in their wings, and veered away as the two came to the edge and looked out. Aris thought he had never seen anything so beautiful; a vast gulf opened before them, with nothing to bind the sight until the line where earth met sky. He knelt to peer over the edge, cautiously. A sheer drop he could not estimate, then spiked towers, then steep slopes and finally rubble flattening gradually to the glitter of a fast-moving river. He looked along the river’s path, and saw that it disappeared into sand some distance downstream. Upstream—the breath caught in his throat. Upstream he could see what this cliff must look like—its match on the far side of the river rose from the sand, all shades of red, rose, and purple, and looking eastward he saw those walls converge. But above the red rock—where only blue sky arched in their canyons—were higher cliffs of gleaming white.