It took a long while before the storm passed, and afterward I was unable to eat. Dallan helped me dress and gather the furs together, and then we went on in the direction Tammad had taken earlier. I had my shield tightly in place, hiding as cowards usually do, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed too as I would have preferred. Once we left the corridor of folded rock we entered a small gallery, black gaps of empty air surrounded by the glow of stone. Just past the middle of it toward the far end stood a dark outline, which waited until we had almost reached it before turning and disappearing through one of the wall gaps. Dallan and I also reached the downgrade and began to descend, but why any of us were doing it was beyond me. There was supposed to be a magical cure for all of our troubles at trail’s end, but I don’t think even Dallan believed that any longer. I had never believed it, but if I’d had to make a choice, I would have believed in the magic sooner than in the cure.
We continued on down through the winding darkness, and after another few hours it became obvious that it was a good thing Dallan had forced me to eat not long after we first started. My head had begun to ache and I wasn’t feeling well, and the chill of the darkness had been working at the same time to enter my bones. I just kept walking over the pebbled rock that had begun to feel like knives under my feet, saying nothing to Dallan except for refusing more to eat. The somewhat amusing thought had come that maybe there was real magic down there after all; if I caught something terrible and died, all my problems really would be solved.
I was almost staggering by the time we reached the bottom of the last downslope. I’d been fuzzily wondering how much longer I could go on without Dallan noticing something, when I noticed something myself. At the end of the thirty-foot corridor in front of us a stronger light source than the constant, faint rock glow could be seen, and the barbarian had stopped at the corridor’s end without ranging ahead as he’d been doing. Dallan took my arm to speed up my sore-footed progress, looking ahead rather than at me, missing the muttering I was doing that even I couldn’t quite catch. When we got to the place where Tammad was waiting I thought I was even more confused than I felt, but blinking didn’t chase the sight away. Another slight downslope led to the floor of a cavern of sorts, but the cavern wasn’t dark and it wasn’t empty. Wide, picture-window gaps all around the outer walls led to open air, making the area look like a dinner hall rather than a cavern, and what seemed to be lazy, puffy clouds rested on the rock floor all around the depression in the center of the room. Rising from the depression was a marble stand, five feet high and containing two things: a golden casting of a big man’s hand closed into a fist, and the sword which was held in the fist by the blade. The sword blade was shining silver rather than gold, its hilt so encrusted with what seemed to be jewels that it surely would have been painful to hold it and swing it. The thought of pain made me groan out loud without meaning to, and the barbarian stirred where he stood to my right as Dallan put his arm around me in concern.
“It is the storm which gathers in the outer air that gives the woman pain,” he said so softly to Dallan that he sounded almost diffident. “We had best hurry and stand before the Sword so that we may return her quickly to the depths of the mountain where she will be protected from its fury.”
“Yes, let us hurry,” Dallan agreed after a strange pause, as though he had meant to say something else and had changed his mind at the last minute. I hadn’t noticed that the outside skies were darker than they should have been by daylight, and I hadn’t realized that I was being affected by a coming storm. I wasn’t noticing or realizing much of anything right then, but hurrying sounded smart even to me.
Dallan helped me along as the three of us started for the Sword and its pedestal, the barbarian walking close to my right but not touching me. I think he understood that Dallan would probably have drawn on him if he’d tried helping me as well, and I don’t think he disagreed with the viewpoint. The barbarian looked expressionless rather than calm, Dallan looked grim and not at all pleased, and however I looked couldn’t have been that far from their appearances. It was the first time in more than a day that we were able to see each other clearly, and we discovered that we hadn’t been missing anything. I limped along between them, trying to keep my thoughts lucid, but wasn’t leaving much luck with it. My mind was fluttering in all directions, and the thing of most concern to me seemed to be the worry that we’d get wet passing through the grounded clouds. I stepped into the clouds with the two men because I was given no other choice, and suddenly became delighted that I wasn’t getting wet. The clouds swirled around our feet and legs and waists, and had a strange,, dry smell to them, making me wrinkle my nose and bringing frowns to the men. We moved two steps through them, then four, then discovered that the clouds were growing fingers. The fingers grabbed at us and held us back, trying to keep us with them even though we didn’t want to stay. Dallan and Tammad slowly began to fight with the clouds, but I didn’t get to see how the fight turned out. Between one breath and the next I had returned to the darkness.
9
It was a glorious day, bright with sunshine and warmth and filled with the clean air that comes after the dawn-rain. I had stayed out of sight during chore assignments, and then had left the house and hurried out of town, eager to climb the hill-mountain and stand at its top again. On its side facing our town the hill was no more than any other hill, perhaps a bit steeper but certainly no higher; on its far side, though, the hill was a true mountain, sweeping down and away through empty air for what seemed like miles. I loved standing right at its top, high, high above the tiny valley so far below, feeling the wind blow my hair about and tug at my long wraparound skirt. Standing on top of the mountain was like suddenly being alive after spending endless time in the death of town-dwelling, and I couldn’t stay away from it for long without needing to go back. The feeling was pure compulsion, and I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d wanted to.
“So you’ve run away again,” a voice said from behind me, startling me. “Aren’t you tired of being punished for not doing your chores?”
“I don’t get punished,” I said without turning, knowing who it was. He was after me again, and after all I’d said and done trying to discourage him.
“You .should be punished,” he said, having heard my words despite the wind’s nearly blowing them away. “If you were punished you would learn not to try avoiding what has to be done, and there would be less resentment toward you from everyone else.”
“They don’t resent me, they’re awed by me and maybe even frightened a little,” I answered smugly, stretching my arms out toward the lovely, empty air. “I can fly and they can’t, but they wish they could; they wish they even had the nerve to try.”
“They resent you,” he said with that calm certainty that always set my temper aflame. “They resent the fact that you can and they can’t, and you don’t even try to make them like you. You sneer at them and laugh at their shortcomings, and always make sure they know how much you can do that they can’t. One day you’ll get them so angry they’ll hurt you.”