He became aware that his mother was speaking. But there seemed to be some barrier between her and him that kept him from comprehending her words. It was as if the air was too dense in this pavilion, or the fragrance of the flowers too strong. And still she spoke, smiling throughout, gesturing gently toward him, toward Varaile, toward herself. He strained to hear. And at last he understood. “Do you know this woman, Prestimion?” the Lady was saying. “Her name is Varaile, and she lives in Stee.”
“I know her, yes, mother. Yes.”
“She has the bearing of a queen.”
“A queen is what she will be,” said Prestimion. “My queen, who will live beside me at the Castle.”
“Do you mean that, Prestimion? Tell me that you do.”
“Oh, yes, mother. Yes, I do. Yes!”
When he woke in the morning the dream was still burning in his mind, as true sendings always do. Septach Melayn, who was the first to come upon him, looked at him strangely and laughed, and said, “You appear to be in another world today, my friend.”
“Perhaps I am,” said Prestimion.
It was necessary, though, for him to return to this one. They were still many days’ journey from the southern coast, and there was no time to waste if he hoped to overtake Dantirya Sambail.
The last of the yellow sand now lay behind them. So was the desert aridity of Ketheron. The air was soft and moist here, warm and velvet smooth, the hills thick with greenery that had a waxy sheen, the sky often darkened by rain-clouds, though the showers were always brief. They were moving now toward the tropical regions.
Three singular landmarks marked the point of transition.
The first, in a place where the road veered upward suddenly out of the flat plain and delivered them into a country of craggy hills, was what seemed initially to be a solitary mountain that loomed to their left, but which quickly revealed itself to be an entire mountain range, a long gray wall that rose with surprising abruptness from the terrain surrounding it. Atop the great base rose a host of smaller rounded peaks, each one the exact image of its neighbor, that swarmed along its elongated summit in chaotic and bewildering profusion.
“It is the Mountain of the Thirteen Doubts,” said Maundigand-Klimd, who had made himself the custodian of their maps during this journey. “Its many peaks look just like each other, and one pass leads only into another, so that a traveler attempting to cross the mountain must invariably get lost.”
“And will that happen to us?” asked Prestimion, wondering if the Procurator might at this moment be wandering around amidst those identical stone humps.
The Su-Suheris shook both his heads in that unnerving way of his. “Ah, no, lordship: we go past these mountains, not over them. But their presence to the east of us tells us that we have taken the correct road. We must look now for the Cliff of Eyes, which will be coming upon us very soon.”
“The Cliff of Eyes,” said Septach Melayn. “What in the name of the Divine can that be?”
“Wait and see,” said Maundigand-Klimd.
When they found it—and sharp-eyed Septach Melayn was the first to spy it—there could be no doubt of its identity. It was a stately mountain of some whitish stone that stood by itself, rising conspicuously above the highway just to their right; and its entire face was bespeckled with a multitude of large, deeply inset oval-shaped boulders of some dark shining mineral, scattered across it like raisins in a pudding. The effect was of a thousand stern black eyes peering down at passers-by from the mountain’s white face. Gialaurys made a flurry of holy signs at the sight of it, and even Prestimion felt a shiver of something like awe, or even fear.
“How did this happen?” he wanted to know. But no one offered an answer, and he knew better than to expect one. Who could say what force had shaped the world, or for what reason? One did not inquire into the nature and motives of the Divine. The world was the world: it was as it was, a place of eternal delight and mystery.
The Cliff of Eyes seemed to watch them for hours as they rode past its eerie flank.
“And soon,” said Maundigand-Klimd, bending over his map, “we will be at the Pillars of Dvorn, which mark the boundary between the central sector of Alhanroel and the south.”
It was just before dusk when they reached them: two great blue-gray rocks, ten times the height of a man and tapering upward to sharply pointed tips. They stood facing each other with the road running straight as an arrow’s flight between them, so that they formed a kind of ceremonial gateway to the lands beyond. The rocks were rough and convoluted on their outer faces but smooth and flat on the inner ones, which made it seem as if they were the two severed halves of a single great structure.
“There is magic here,” Gialaurys muttered restively, and offered another swarm of holy signs.
“Ah, yes,” said Septach Melayn, with a playful lilt to his voice. “There’s a curse on the place. Every twenty thousand years the rocks come crashing together, and woe betide the wayfarers who happen to be passing through the gateway just then.”
“So you know the old legend, do you?” asked Maundigand-Klimd.
Septach Melayn swung around to face him. “Legend? What legend? I was only having a little sport with Gialaurys.”
“Then you reinvent what already was,” said the Su-Suheris. “For indeed there was an ancient Shapeshifter tale that said just that, that these were clashing rocks, which had moved before and someday would move again. And, what is worse, that the next time they did, it would be a great king of the human folk that perished here between them.”
“It would, would it?” said Prestimion, smiling jauntily and letting his gaze travel quickly from one great rock face to another. “Well, then, I suppose I’m safe, because, although I’m certainly a king, no one yet would call me a great one.” And added, with a wink at Septach Melayn, “But perhaps we should look for some other route south anyway, eh? Just to be absolutely safe.”
“The Pontifex Dvorn, my lord, caused magical plates of brass to be installed on each side of the road, inscribed with runes to protect against just such a thing,” Maundigand-Klimd said. “Of course, that was thirteen thousand years ago and the plates have long since vanished. You see those shallow square indentations high up on the walls? That was where they were, or so it’s said. But I think our chances of passing through safely are excellent.”
And indeed the Pillars of Dvorn remained in place as the royal caravan went past them. There was a distinct change in the look of the land on the far side, a greater density of foliage in response to the increase in warmth and humidity, and the hills there were smooth, rounded humps instead of hard jagged crags.
Maundigand-Klimd’s maps showed no settlements within fifty miles of the Pillars. But the travelers had gone no more than ten minutes’ journey when they came upon the ghost of a road leading off the main highway toward a cluster of low hills to the west, and Septach Melayn, fastening his keen vision on those hills, announced that he could make out a row of stone walls midway up, half buried beneath thickets of strangling vines. Prestimion, his curiosity piqued, sent Abrigant off with a couple of men to investigate. They returned fifteen minutes later with the report that a ruined city lay hidden in there, deserted except for a family of Ghayrog farmers who made their home amidst the ancient buildings. It was, so one of the Ghayrogs had told them, all that remained of a great metropolis of Lord Stiamot’s time, whose people were massacred by Shapeshifters during the Metamorph Wars.