The second day was a repetition of the first, as was the third. Karal's eyes grew sore from the reflection of sun on snow, and from the red eyes that met his every time anyone—except the shaman and An'desha—turned to face him, the others must be suffering the same. The cold, dry air made his lips crack and chap, and his throat sore. After the second day, Lo'isha gave them each a little vial of aromatic oil to moisten their lips with, and advised them that they might want to anoint their whole faces. Karal took him up on the suggestion; Firesong resisted at first, but by midafternoon, with his cheeks flaming from wind-chapping, he had given in and done the same.
Karal lost track of time; he was either riding or sleeping—too much of the former, not enough of the latter. The landscape they traversed was always the same; not quite flat, but close enough for a young man from the mountains, rolling hill after snow-covered, rolling hill, with scarcely a tree or a bush in sight except where they marked the passage of watercourses or the location of a spring. The cold numbed all of him, and he never was really warm except the moment that they awoke him. Firesong looked miserable, Silverfox looked resigned, and only An'desha and Lo'isha seemed to thrive.
But then, this is—was—his home.
The gryphons rarely appeared, and when they did, they were fixated on the goal and could talk of nothing else. At last—after how many days he could not tell, that goal loomed up on the horizon.
It was singularly unprepossessing, for something they had chased across half a continent—an odd, melted stub of silvery-gray rock, poking up out of the top of yet another rolling hill.
Then, when it didn't get any closer, he realized that it must be much larger than he had thought.
Then he finally spotted the tiny dots of more Shin'a'in swarmed about the base, and the equally tiny dots of two gryphons circling it, and he understood how large it was.
There was a long pile of something dark against the snow at the foot of the Tower-rich, turned earth. It looked as if the Shin'a'in had been digging for something.
The closer they got, the more his skin crawled. The Tower simply didn't look melted, it had been melted. The great force that fueled the Cataclysm had made the rock of the Tower run like liquid wax. And they were about to play with forces worse and more hazardous than the one that had done this, weapons that the Mage of Silence, who had created this, thought were too dangerous to use!
What am I doing here? he thought, aghast.
It would not be the last time he had that thought.
They rested and slept for what remained of that day and all suicidal to the next night; it would be stupid, and perhaps suicidal to enter the Vault with their minds fogged with fatigue. But the moment the sun rose, so did they, and one of the Sword-Sworn led them to the opening the Shin'a'in had been working on since this expedition had been decided on.
The old door to the Tower lay somewhere beneath several hundred tons of melted, fused rock. The Shin'a'in had taken a more direct route to the Vault beneath the remains of the Tower. There must have been hundreds of them working on it to get it done in so short a period of time.
They had burrowed down in a long slanting tunnel into the side of the hill supporting the Tower, straight to the ancient Vault wall. That was only stone blocks mortared together, and the mortar, after so many centuries, was old and weak. Urtho had never bothered to put any sort of armoring or defensive measures on the wall of the Vault—after all, anyone who got this far would still have to dig a hole in the full sight of the guards, the army, the Kaled'a'in, the gryphons....
Not likely.
The Shin'a'in, with advice from the miners of k'Leshya, and additional help from the gryphons, had been working nonstop; together they had made an impressive tunnel, chipped out the weak mortar between the stones, and pried out enough of the latter to create an entrance fully large enough for Treyvan and Hydona, not to mention Florian, who insisted on coming below as well. The other Companions were perfectly happy to remain outside and rest, and Karal caught them casting many glances askance at Florian as he prepared to descend the precipitous tunnel with the party of mages. They all had lanterns, but the light didn't help the feeling of being trapped beneath tons of earth and stone. The tunnel itself had been shored up quite expertly, and for a moment Karal wondered where they had gotten the timbers.
The gryphons, of course. They must have flown them in from k'Leshya.
A formidable task, equal to the task of digging this tunnel.
Karal concentrated on keeping his breathing steady, reminding himself that as long as his lantern flame burned brightly, there was more than enough air down here for them all to breathe.
At least I'm not cold. There's no wind blowing. There's no snow-glare.
How much longer does this tunnel go on?
He hadn't begun by counting his steps, but he started at that point. Fifty... one hundred... one hundred and fifty shouldn't they have reached the wall by now?
His chest felt tight; was the light a little dimmer? The flame of his candle a little lower?
:Karal. I'm right behind you.: The voice in his mind warned him, so when a head bumped against his thigh, he didn't jump and screech. :It's all right. There's air, and if anything happens, I can Jump you out.:
Immediately the invisible bands tightening around his chest loosened. of course! Altra could get him out, even if the roof collapsed! He relaxed, and the flame in his lantern brightened again. Or perhaps it had never been dimming in the first place.
"We're at the Vault."
The shaman's voice, muffled by all the other bodies between him and the Shin'a'in, alerted him so that he didn't run into An'desha when An'desha stopped.
The line ahead of him shuffled forward, step by step. "Watch yourself," An'desha warned, as the light from his lantern caught on the regular shapes of stone blocks. "There's debris in the way."
An'desha moved forward and vanished into a hole a gryphon could barely squeeze through. There was a litter of stone pieces and other debris in front of the hole, as if it had just today been made. Perhaps it had!
He stepped over the edge of the hole, following the gleam of light—and stepped into another world.
The floor was smoothly polished white stone with a pattern, a compass rose of eight points inset in it, made of a rose-colored granite. This was a large, round room with white stone walls that rose in a conical shape to a point about two stories above their heads. Hanging down from the center by a silver chain was a large sphere of crystal, which shone softly in the reflected light from the lanterns.
Karal stared at it in awe.
"What is it?" he asked. "A weapon? Something like a Heartstone?"
Firesong shook his head as he also stared; they stood in a loose circle with their mouths agape, gazing upward. Finally Treyvan laughed, and said, "Much sssimplerrr," and called out a word in a language that was not quite Shin'a'in and not quite Tayledras.