Refreshed and somewhat more in command of herself, Kelsie looked back. The entrance to the underground world was centered in a scatter of fallen stone. Again her memory leaped to that similar ruin on the Scottish hillside. Had they come through another gate?
“Where are we?” she asked in a half whisper which seemed to be all she could voice at that moment.
She saw a trace of frown beneath his helm where it crossed above his brows. He arose and turned slowly, pivoting where he stood. Then he raised his sword and pointed to a way on her right.
“That is Mount Holweg. And this is to the north. We may have come farther than the Valley patrols have ridden. The shadow lies always north and east.”
She sat where she was, considering him. Before this venture had begun he had been only one of the men who had been soldier sentries for the Valley. He was younger than Simon Tregarth and slighter. Yet she did not doubt that in his way he was as expert at this game of weapons and spells as the man she had first met—that other displaced from her own world. Only she wondered, now that she had time to think about his relationship to the monstrosity they had confronted in the tunnels below, about his past. At least he had been able to assure her of one thing—that they had not gone through another gate—back there among the fallen stones.
“He knew you—” she began abruptly, determined to make what sense she could of those words they had exchanged below.
To her surprise her companion shook his head.
“He knew Tolar.” There was a straight line to his mouth, a slight forward jut of his chin as if he were fronting an enemy once more. “I am not Tolar—
“Then why—?”
For the first time he stopped his roving survey of the world around them and spoke directly to her:
“It seems that a man can be born again even if he has passed the last gate of all. I have some proof that perhaps I was once one Tolar who fought the Dark in the long ago—and lost. If that be so then perhaps this life is a chance to right the swing of the scales and be another man. For, I swear it by my name giving, I am Yonan, and not he who went down to defeat then—
“But you remember—” Kelsie dared not deny that anything was possible in this world. “You called that… that thing by name!”
“I remember… upon occasion,” he agreed somberly, and then changed the subject with a swift question.
“Can you journey on, Lady? We are still too near to that!” He was reaching down one hand to pull her up to her feet, his bared sword still in his other so he used his chin to point to that unwholesome appearing tangle of fallen blocks through which they had come.
“Yes!” All at once she was remembering, too, not distant times but the rasti and the Thas. The one who named himself Rhain was gone with his shadow army, but surely the creatures he had left behind were just as deadly in their own way. However, could she go on? The gem had so drained strength out of her that she wondered if she could keep her feet to reach even the first tree of a small copse which lay in the direction they now faced.
She made it, accepting only now and then the grasp of his hand on her arm. Though the water of the stream had revived her in part she was aware now of a great hunger and her temples throbbed with the pain of a headache as if she had striven at some task which had been nearly at the limit of her strength.
“Where do we go?” she asked then. “I don’t think I can go far.”
His still bared sword pointed to some small plants growing in between the trees toward which he had been urging her.
“That is illbane. Even a power hunter of the Left Hand Way would avoid such as that. We can lay up in their protection until—” his voice trailed away and she asked more sharply:
“Until what? Do we head back toward the Valley with your mountain as a guide?”
“Can you go?”
His return question startled her and then she remembered the compulsion which had sent her in the beginning on this trail across an unknown country thick with danger. Deliberately she turned to face the distant mountain. There were the beginning banners of sunset forming to the west but she had no thought of starting out to retreat in the dark.
.Kelsie took one step and then another, instantly aware of the movement of the gem which had begun a swing from right to left across her breast. Rising in her was still that need for pressing on, not backward to such safety as there might be in this country, but rather on in the opposite direction.
Reaching up she strove to take the chain into her fingers, to tear it away, throw it behind her. But her hands shook and she could not get grip which would serve. That chain might have been well greased the way it slipped away from her attempted hold.
“Can you go back?” Yonan had stopped at the edge of the copse to which he had guided her. He was behind her but no more than a sword length so. For that was all the space she had won.
“No!” Once again she tried to free herself from the chain, the gem of which was growing hotter so that she could feel its warmth through her clothing. A punishing warmth which would allow her no mercy.
“I can’t. It won’t let me!” Kelsie felt a rise of anger in her hot against the stone, against Yonan, against all this world which had so entrapped her.
“Then let us to such shelter as there may be,” he sounded impatient and she turned again ready to burst forth with bitter words. He was already showing his back to her, intent upon advancing along the line of those plants he had named a most powerful weapon against the Dark which they knew. She had seen dried stalks of illbane, crushed leaves, kept carefully in the Valley—the greatest resource a healer could harvest.
It was Yonan who was harvesting the plants now. He had taken off his plain helm, shedding with it the under cap of mail with its swinging strips to be pulled across the face before battle. His hair, curled down upon his forehead, was dark with sweat, though he was much lighter of countenance than the other men she had seen. Now he grasped a handful of leaves, crushing them between palm and fingers and then raising the mass to smear across his forehead leaving traces of thick green behind its passing.
Not knowing what he was doing but mat it might just relieve some of the pain of her aching head, the weariness of her body, Kelsie followed his example. The sharp clean scent of the bruised leaves did clear her head from the last remaining memory of the stench of the underworld and she felt more alert, firmer of purpose than she had when she had come out into the open.
Yonan carefully plucked two larger leaves from another plant and wrapped the wad of herb within those, putting it in the pouch at his belt. And Kelsie again followed his example.
The trees of the copse were not too close together as to refuse them a way, though they needs must twist and turn for opening wide enough that they might get through. But they broke out at last into a circle of open land around which the copse appeared to form a wall. Yonan had sheathed his sword and Kelsie wished for their packs which lay behind somewhere in the Thas burrows. Her hunger had grown and she could see not even any berries which would take the edge off that growing pain.
“What do we eat?” she asked Yonan. After all he was far more used to tramping the countryside. He took out not his sword but a long knife and went to the nearest of the walling trees on the trunk of which there was a growth of green-brown stuff as big as his hand. Carefully he hacked the parasite loose from its support and then divided it into halves, holding one out to her. She hesitated and heard him say: