“I hope so,” said Luap soberly. “I feel nothing but promise here, a promise of peace and—with enough hard work—security. If you have definite warnings—”
“No,” said Arranha. “Nothing definite, and not really a warning. Just the awareness that what you don’t know can kill you.”
“We’ll learn,” said Luap, feeling confidence rebound in him. “And the first thing, I suppose, is to map the inside of this place, and find another outlet. Surely there is one.” He gestured. “Shall we go back inside?”
Down the stair, under the arch, into the great hall. With their footsteps behind him, he could feel it a procession, almost a homecoming. He led them past the dais, into the corridors behind. To his surprise, he remembered clearly which turnings he had made, both on his own and with Gird. Both Arranha and the Rosemage were more uneasy than he felt; his courage rose as he perceived himself the boldest of the party. He chose a downward-trending ramp at one turning, and found himself in an unfamiliar passage.
“Listen!” The Rosemage held up one hand. They all held their breath. A distinct musical plink repeated at irregular intervals. “Water,” she said finally. They followed the sound along the passage to an opening in one wall; it gaped a few handspans wide and high, dark within, unlike the regular doorways they had seen so far. Luap put his hand through, made his magelight, then looked. A chamber as large as the common dining hall in Fin Panir held clear water . . . he could not tell how deep, but he could see the stone below it clearly. Its surface lay within reach of his hand. Above, the chamber rose higher than the passage ceiling, marked here and there with the dark stain of dripping water. From a line around the chamber, Luap saw that the water rarely if ever rose as high as the opening in the wall. He stretched his hand down and touched the surface: ice-cold. He sniffed it: pure, with no hint of salt or sulphur.
“We need not fear thirst,” Luap said. He stepped back; Arranha and the Rosemage both leaned in to look, kindling their own light. “Now if we can find a lower entrance—” He was sure a lower entrance existed. It must be there. Farther down, they found a great room that could only be a kitchen, with hearths and ovens cut into the stone. Here was a draft of cool air, sweet and fresh, from the chimney shaft. Another passage, that seemed darker, less full of that sourceless light. Luap headed for it. The spiraling stair had been darker . . . did all the outside ways begin where the light failed?
The passage ended in a blank wall; Luap was not surprised. Nor was he surprised when his own light revealed the same incised patterns on the passage wall to one side. He traced them carefully as before, and as before the wall melted away, letting in a fresh breeze, pine-smelling. The opening let in abundant light; Luap thought two horsemen could ride through it abreast. They looked out onto a narrow terrace supporting great pine trees, and heard the cheerful gurgling of water among rocks below. One tree, larger in girth than Luap could span, stood square athwart the opening . . . clearly it had grown there since someone last used the passage. Luap edged past it, and came out into the sunlight. Some small animal let out a squeak and fled upslope, a flurry of gray fur, hardly seen. High above a hawk squealed; Luap could not see through the pines where it flew.
“With running water so near, why store water inside?” asked the Rosemage, coming out into the sun. “There’s enough in there for three rivulets this size.” She had moved to the lip of the terrace, and was looking down into the minute creek, which made far more noise than its size suggested. Then, before Luap could answer, she had moved lightly downslope and skipped across, a matter of hopping on two rocks and grabbing the drooping branch of a bush on the far side. She climbed out of Luap’s sight; he followed her, out from under the pines, and then realized how narrow the place was. The Rosemage stood atop a cottage-size boulder at the foot of a rock wall that matched the one they’d come out of. He looked up . . . and up. Those soaring red walls, so near and high that he could not see the flat shoulder of the mountain, or its higher forested crown, delighted him even from below. Nothing had ever looked so impregnable, so defensible. Once inside, no imaginable army could possibly harm him or his people.
Chapter Twelve
Once they came out of the passage, Luap began to wonder if he would ever get his companions back inside. Arranha clambered up and down the narrow cleft in which they had come out, observing the angle of the sun and attempting (as near as Luap could understand it) to determine from that where they were. The Rosemage followed the water up to its source, a crack beneath a wall of stone, and then down to its joining with the larger stream Luap had been able to see from above a stream that ran almost sunrising and sunsetting. She came panting back with her hands full of red berries, having seen, she said, two deer, fish in the stream, frogs and strange shapes of rock she wanted Luap to look at.
Luap followed her down the streambed. It felt like returning to childhood, when one could explore a new corner of the garden, or a stretch of meadow or woods. Surely he should be more careful, he thought, nearly turning his ankle on a loose stone, but he could not imagine how, in this unknown land, he should know what hazards to watch for. The walls on either side ended as suddenly as the walls of a building; he found himself looking across a wider space, with a noisy stream racing down to his right, to the facing wall. Low bushes, some laden with berries, tufts of a coarse tall grass, and—on this side of the narrow valley—no trees. The trees—more pines and others he did not know—filled the space between the stream and the foot of the opposite cliff.
The Rosemage touched his shoulder. “The deer . . . there.” He followed her pointing finger and saw four of them, tails twitching nervously, ears wide. Then three of them returned to browsing. They seemed larger and grayer than the deer of Fintha, but he was not sure . . . everything seemed larger here. He gazed down the valley. On either side, high walls of red rock shut out any distant view. The valley seemed to widen somewhat at its lower end. He saw more trees there, many that were not pines. Up the valley, it narrowed, the walls closing in; it seemed to be cut off by another wall of rock. He tried to remember what he could see from above, but he could not make sense of it.
What he did understand was the sheer size of it. From above, the larger valley had seemed a narrow slot, hardly wide enough to walk in, but he thought an archer would just be able to shoot across it. Hard to tell, with the steep slopes of broken rock below the cliffs, but if it were level . . . it would be large enough to farm. He tried to convert its irregular slope and shape to something approximating the teams and selions by which traditional fields were measured. At least they would have plenty of stone for building, if the day came they wanted to live outside the—he wondered what to call it, that vast hall understone. Castle? No . . . more a fortress, a stronghold. Stronghold: he liked that.
He imagined stone-walled cottages nestled against the walls, fields terraced and leveled, green with young grain, fruit trees trained against the foot of the cliffs. In his mind, laughing children played in the noisy stream, scampered along the narrow paths between plots of grain and garden vegetables, climbed the great rocks. He saw the harvest festival, with everyone gathered in the great hall, and a feast prepared in that huge kitchen; he could smell the food even now. He imagined caravans coming and going from Fin Panir, bringing news of the Girdish lands, bringing those who wanted to study Gird’s life, taking back the freshly copied scrolls, the memory of great beauty.
“Luap!” That was Arranha, who had now made his own way down into the larger valley. “I think I know something of where we are.”