This time his mind clung to the pattern and the remembered place; almost before he could think, they had arrived. He did not know which face to watch. The Rosemage, to his quick glance, seemed almost turned to stone. Her face paled, then flushed; her eyes widened. Arranha, too, seemed stunned to silence.
Luap repeated the same prayer he had uttered the first time he came, and heard Arranha and then the Rosemage repeat it. Then he led the way off the dais.
“We can talk now,” he said quietly, looking back. They had said nothing but the prayer. They were looking up, around, faces as full of awe as Luap had wished. The Rosemage brought her gaze back to him.
“It’s—impossible,” she said, shaking her head.
“That’s what I thought the first time. That I had dreamed it, perhaps. But Gird saw it too.”
“If the gods did not make this, they blessed it,” said Arranha softly. “I have never felt such presence, not even in the Hall in Fin Panir when Esea blessed Lady Dorhaniya’s belief.”
Is that what happened? thought Luap. He felt uncomfortable thinking of Dorhaniya in this place.
Arranha had moved down the hall, slowly; now he approached the arches at the far end. The Rosemage stayed near the dais. “Do you know what this is?” called Arranha, his voice louder than any Luap had heard in this place. He was pointing at the arch with the harp and tree entwined.
“Gird said it might be an elven symbol,” Luap said.
“As you should well know,” Arranha replied. “And the other—that is surely dwarfish. And you did not think to ask them?”
Luap felt his face burning. For a moment he was not sure what to say, but the great place eased him, as it had before. “Gird saw what I saw; it was his decision. Perhaps he was upset enough with me that I had used magery to bring him.”
Arranha did not reply, but walked, as Gird had, through the arch with the High Lord’s circle above it. Luap followed, and behind him he could hear the Rosemage coming.
“Up those stairs,” Luap said, “is a land unlike any I’ve seen. Bare red stone, deep canyons with trees and rivers—” He had not actually seen the rivers, but where there were trees, rivers must be also. “Not good land for farming, Gird said, but I think it would support a small number.”
“Mmm.” Arranha looked at the stairs. “Shall we go up, then?”
“Certainly.” Luap led the way, wondering again why the light that filled the hall and passages below did not extend to this. Because it was an entrance? As before, the sound of their boots on the steps echoed off the floor below, and as before they came to a darkness close above their heads. But this time Luap called his light before it was too dim to see, and pointed out to Arranha the whorls and interlacements Gird had noted. He himself, this time, put his thumb in the groove and traced the interlocked spirals in and out, and Arranha prayed.
When the ceiling close above them vanished, Luap half-expected the snowy blast of his first visit. But even here—wherever here was—spring had come, and warm sunlight spilled down the stair. Only a light breeze stirred his hair as he climbed the last few steps and came out to the view he remembered so clearly.
It was still there. He had been afraid, in some corner of his mind, that it was less majestic than he remembered, but in the clear cool sunlight that land lost none of its grandeur. The vast blocks of red stone, the endless vista of stone and sky. He could see farther than before, but still had no idea where the place lay, or how deep the canyons were.
Arranha and the Rosemage reacted as he had hoped. “It’s . . . like nothing I’ve seen anywhere,” Arranha said. “Certainly it’s not anywhere near Fintha, nor down the Honnorgat valley as far as I’ve traveled, nor like anything I heard of Aarenis or Old Aare.”
“It’s so—big,” the Rosemage said. Luap glanced at her. Few things ever seemed to daunt her, but this did. “Even the sky seems bigger. And how do you get down from this, or up into those trees?”
Where Gird and Luap, in the cold and snow, had seen what might be the bristling thatch of a forest above another level of stone, now the forest showed clearly. It seemed to stand on the topmost level of the stone, far above their heads or across great crevices on other blocks, as if Luap’s imagined city of castles were roofed with trees and not slate.
“We didn’t stay long enough to find out,” Luap told the Rosemage. “It was snowing when we got into the open, and though the snow ceased, it had been blown away by a bitter wind. We were glad to get out of it.”
“And you never came again, to explore?” Arranha asked. He had put back the hood of his cloak, and turned his face up to the brilliant sunlight. With his eyes closed, and his arms held out, he looked to Luap a little like a bird drying itself after rain.
“I had no time,” Luap said, “and no reason. I suggested to Gird that he allow me to bring the mageborn here, when all that trouble started. But you know what he thought of that.”
“Mmm. Yes.” Arranha opened his eyes, as bright and penetrating as hawks’ eyes. They seemed to have absorbed the brilliant light and now it poured from them. Luap blinked. It must be something to do with being the Sunlord’s priest. Arranha stared in all directions, as if looking for something in particular. “I don’t feel anything dire,” he said finally. “I see no sign that anyone inhabits this land. Do you?”
Luap shook his head. “It felt empty to me from the first. That’s why I thought it would bother no one if we came here.”
“Lady?” asked Arranha of the Rosemage. “What can you sense about this land?”
“Its size,” she said, her voice still muted by the land’s effect on her. “It is so large, so empty . . . it does not care about us at all, did you realize? Everywhere in Fintha or Tsaia, there’s a sense—I think the elves call it taig—that the land is almost aware, that it cares what we do. I’ve heard the farmers say a field is generous, faithful, or that another field is bitter and hard-hearted. When I had sheep, I felt that way myself at times, held in the land’s palm. Nothing so grand as Alyanya’s notice, but perhaps some of her power running over into the land itself. But here—” she shook her head. “If this is even in Alyanya’s realm, it would be hard to think so. This land has no interest in us, in our welfare; it is neither generous nor mean. It has its own affairs, and what they are I cannot imagine.”
“Does it frighten you?” asked Luap.
“No. Not as a threat would. But that indifference feels strange; I did not know how I had depended on our land’s sensitivity until I felt nothing like it here.”
“I felt it as cleanliness,” Arranha said. “As if this were newmade land, its stone washed clean by light and water on the first day, untouched by history. And yet it feels old, at the same time. I wonder if it is just untouched by our history—we have no little stories about this rock or that, about who chased a stray cow into which canyon—and so we feel it has no history. Surely it must.” His face sobered. “And surely we should know that history, however strange it is, before we lay our own upon it. As there are metals that must not touch, for they cause corrosion in each other, so there may be histories that must not be laid one upon another.” He looked from one to the other; Luap wanted to argue that expression, but could not. Then Arranha sighed and shook his head. “No—I feel no menace here; the Rosemage is right. But it is in the nature of Esea’s priests to seek knowledge and more knowledge, the god’s light upon ignorance. We expect trouble to come from ignorance more than malice—our weakness, as Gird showed, but nonetheless trouble can come from ignorance. Here is a land—a great land, as the Rosemage has said—about which we know nothing, not even how to find our way to water. So I have qualms, which will probably be foolish in the end.”