He looked at Seri, whose face he thought mirrored his own astonishment. “It’s—beyond words,” she said. “I can’t imagine why the dwarves don’t live here—why it’s not full of the rockfolk.”
He started to say perhaps they didn’t know, then remembered the dwarven symbol in the stronghold’s great hall. Of course they knew. And had they abandoned this—this vast beauty of stone so strong that it sang even to mortals? “Perhaps they loved it too well to tunnel into it,” he said. “As the horsefolk leave some herds free-running.”
“Perhaps.” Seri stared awhile longer, then shook her head sharply. “Well. We’re not going to build a trail straight down this. We’d better look for a place where we can. Maybe where the water comes down. . . .”
They worked their way east, staying close to the edge and looking over at intervals. This canyon narrowed rapidly at the bottom, while the upper levels were still far apart, and soon Aris spotted a sheer cliff with a waterfall. “That won’t work,” he said. “Even if it’s passable from above, imagine that in a storm—it would wash out any trail we built.”
They headed south and west again, crossing their own tracks, and found a place where a dry wash wrinkled the surface, deepening rapidly toward the edge. “It will be another cliff,” Seri predicted. But when they looked, some flaw in the rock had formed a great fissure. Broken chunks the size of buildings stepped down toward the desert below. Aris looked at it doubtfully.
“I supposed we could try—go down as far as we could—”
Seri snorted. “We shouldn’t be stupid twice in one year. We’ve already gotten into trouble—or what could have been trouble—when we used that robbers’ trail without thinking about it. We’re supposed to be Marshals—now think. If we go down, and can’t get back up—”
“I could use the mageroad,” Aris said, for the sake of argument. He enjoyed feeling more daring than Seri, rare as the chance was.
“If you slipped and cracked your head,” she said, “I couldn’t use it, and couldn’t heal you. No—let’s find some way to recognize this from below, and then figure out how to go around.”
“From Dirgizh?”
“Right. From the old caravan route they spoke of. Now let’s see. . . .” She lay flat, her head over the edge of the cliff, and looked toward the fissure, then the stream below. “It would be nice to have a grove of trees—”
“No trees.” Aris said. He sat, his legs dangling over enough space to stack five cities cellar to tower, and looked over at the facing cliffs. Their fissure seemed to line up with a skinny spire of rock, much thinner than the Thumb, on that side. He pointed it out to Seri; her eyes narrowed.
“Yes . . . but from down there the line will be different. Let’s see . . . we can see the stream, so if you stood on this side of it—”
“We should be mapping this,” Aris said suddenly, wondering why they hadn’t thought of that. Before she could remind him that they had brought nothing to map with, he said, “I know—we can’t. But if we draw it on the stone several times, we should be able to remember it.” He rolled back from the edge, and broke some brittle sticks from one of the stiff, spiny bushes that dotted the upper plateau. They drew what they saw, until both agreed on the proportions and shapes, and could reproduce it anew.
By then it was late afternoon; they would have trouble making it back to the pine wood by dark, let alone back to the stronghold.
“No one can see us use the mageroad here,” Aris said. “Let’s do it.” Seri nodded, and he found a sand-covered stretch, back from the edge, and graved the pattern carefully with his stick. The late-afternoon wind howled up the cliff, blowing sand into the pattern even as he drew it; he had to rework the pattern with deeper grooves, and then decided to mark it out with pebbles instead. Seri wandered about at a little distance, looking alternately at the great space below and beyond, and at the curious black hill behind them.
Suddenly she stiffened, and said, “Aris!” He looked over, to see her staring back at the confusing jumble of rock near the upper end of the little valley.
“What?”
“Something moved.” She backed toward him.
“Look out!” he said sharply; she had nearly stepped on the end of the pattern he had completed with pebbles. She looked down, moved aside.
“Sorry,” she said. Her dagger was out, he noticed with some astonishment. “Aris, something’s over there—”
“Too far to bother us, if you let me finish the pattern and get us on the mageroad.”
“I don’t like it,” Seri said. Aris placed the last three pebbles, stood, and took her hand.
“Then we’ll leave. Come on, Seri, it would be stupid to wait here for whatever it is; it’s getting late, the sun will be in our eyes—”
“Oh, well.” She relaxed suddenly, and stepped carefully where he pointed. “It’s probably only one of those wildcats—”
And they were back in the great hall, where their arrival brought bustle and excitement, and a summons from Luap to tell him what they had found.
“So this is what we think, sir,” Aris said, summarizing their long report. “We need to approach from the lower end, both to locate the old caravan route east, and to find out if that water we saw is good. Then we’ll need to consult with the best stone-carvers—you know I can’t do that—and it will take at least a season of work to cut a passable trail for pack animals, and make sure it doesn’t fall. If we can go now to the Khartazh, and find out about the caravan, perhaps next summer—after the fieldwork’s done—work could start on the trail down. And the trail from here to the upper valley, and the trail out to Dirgizh, which really should come first.”
“But what about the distance overland to Fintha?” Luap asked. “Won’t you need to go all the way to Fintha to be sure that’s where it comes out?”
“Well go to Fintha, surely,” Aris said. “But we think the horse nomads will tell us about the eastern end of the trail—and the merchants in Dirgizh and the next town south may well know about this end. Convincing someone to try it may be difficult . . . but I’ve noticed the merchants show an interest in renewing that old trade.”
“With your permission,” Seri put in, “we’d like to start by going to Dirgizh, as soon as possible, and follow the old caravan route east—then turn north and see if we can find our notch.”
“How long do you think that will take?” asked the Rosemage.
“Hands of days,” Seri said. “We don’t know until we’ve gone. But it must be done sometime—”
“And then we’d go to Fintha,” Aris said. “Take our horses, and go visit the horse nomads . . . they liked us well enough before.”
“What you’re telling me,” Luap said, “is that it will be more than a year before we have a way for a caravan to come here—let alone before one actually comes. Two years, more like, or even three. . . .”
The Rosemage shrugged. “When we started, remember, we didn’t know if anyone would ever discover an overland route; I think even three years sounds remarkably quick.”
“The question,” Aris said, “is whether this is worth all the effort. People will have to work on the trails instead of other things—”