That night was our time of fear, despair, struggle, endurance. Somehow Orsya held to life, and I kept going, carrying her. Now and then the sword would blaze, but I dared not wait to see what followed. The sky was dawn-gray when we came through a pass, blundered through. We looked down into wild lands. Somewhere, farther on, might lie the Valley. But for us both now there was only one need—water.
“Water—” It was not a plaint, that word from Orsya, but, I realized with an inward leap of hope, recognition!
“Left, now—”
I wavered to the left, downslope. Brush tore at me and my burden, and I was so weak with weariness that, had I fallen then, I do not believe I could have come again to my numb feet. But when I did stumble forward, it was near a small cup into which fed the merest thread of spring.
Laying Orsya on the ground, I used my paws to splash and throw that precious liquid into her face, along as much of her body as I could. When she stirred I could have shouted aloud my relief. Then I pulled her closer to that small basin, and she plunged her head and as much of her shoulders into it as she could, lying there unmoving as she soaked it into her skin, regaining so its vitalizing energy.
Then she raised her head and sat up, to put her feet into its freshness. This was an act of magic as great as I had ever seen, for the body which had been so light and withered as I carried it, grew firm and young again under my eyes. I half lay now on the opposite side of the pool, sure she could care for herself, so drugged with fatigue that I could not have kept from sleep if Dinzil himself had appeared before me.
I awoke to a kind of singing in which there were sounds which might be words but which I did not understand. The hum was soothing, and held off any terrors night in these haunted wilds might hold—for it was the dark of night which I saw when I opened my eyes. Orsya, much as she had been when we journeyed into the land of the Dark Tower, sat there, facing her candle-horn, holding out her hands to its light as one warms oneself at a fire.
But when I remembered the Dark Tower, then there returned to mind all else, so the content of those first moments was lost. I sat up abruptly, looking over my shoulder, for we were still in the cup of the pool and behind us the Heights from which we had come, wherein Kaththea might still wander lost.
“There is no going back!” Orsya came to me. As she had done to show me Kofi, she knelt behind me and put her hands upon my temples. So I “saw,” that the land behind us was a-crawl with the forces of the Shadow, that they were uniting for some great thrust. I knew without her telling that the thrust would be at the Valley. My allegiances, so long divided, I still could not reconcile. I was torn two ways—Kaththea and those to be warned.
“This is not the moment, nor the hour, nor the day, on which you can stand battle for Kaththea. If you return into that cauldron of danger, then you shall have wasted your strength and what gifts you have for naught. Indeed, you may do worse; did not Dinzil hint that in you he might find yet another tool? Will he not be more inclined to try that since he can no longer control Kaththea? You might be a rich prize—” Orsya reasoned.
“How know you what Dinzil said to me?” I interrupted.
“While you slept you dreamed, and while you dreamed, I learned much,” she returned simply. “Be assured, Kemoc, your sister has stepped beyond the limits where you can call to her.”
“There are powers; they can be sought.” I closed my mind, or tried to, to that fear.
“But not by you. You know too little to be properly on guard; you might lose too much. Now must be your choice: Throw away all by going back, or take your warning to the Valley.”
She was right, but that did not make her words any easier to accept. I had failed, and for the rest of my life I must live with that failure. But, matters now going as they seemed to be, that life would probably not be long. Best spend it doing all I could to withstand the Shadow.
We had to keep to water, which made us vulnerable. Yet I would not do as Orsya urged and leave her to follow alone. I knew too well what might happen to her. I had lost Kaththea through ignorance—for I might have given her my own blood and so won her back—but I was not going to be responsible for Orsya’s loss also.
She kept the horn tight against her. It glowed still and gave us light. And, she told me, it had other properties for our protection. But I disliked using it, for power draws power, even if they are of opposite natures.
At dawn we huddled in a niche between two large boulders. The thin rill we had followed from the pool linked here with a larger stream and first Orsya lay long beneath its surface, drawing restoration into her. Once we roused from uneasy dozing, hearing a ring of hooves on stone. I pushed into a crack from which I could see below. Men rode there—not on Keplians, but on Renthans. They might be a scouting party from the Valley, was my first thought, until I saw their banner and read the device on it as one borne by a follower of Dinzil.
But they would be welcome in the Valley, thus opening a door for their fellows. . . . In me now was born a need for speed, to deliver the warning. Orsya’s hand touched my paw.
“They ride from, not to, the Valley,” she said. “But it is true that times grows short for all of us!”
How short we realized as we moved on. Twice we crouched in hiding as parties of the enemy went by. Once some shadowy things which glowed and left a putrescent odor on the air; then, three Gray Ones who loped with a fast, ground covering stride.
Orsya found food for us, things which she routed from under stream rocks and which I crammed hastily into my mouth and tried neither to think on or taste, as I manfully chewed and swallowed. We kept to the stream which luckily ran in the right direction. Shortly before sundown Orsya pointed to a vee of ripples.
“Kofi?”
“No, but another of his people. Perhaps he has news for us.”
She trilled and twittered as she had with Kofi, and then turned to me with a slight frown.
“The forces of the Shadow are spread widely between us and the Valley. They await some word for attack.”
“Can we pass them?”
“I do not know. You swim, but not well enough to take the deep ways.”
“If I have to, then I shall. Show them to me,” I told her grimly.
She seemed very doubtful. But after further twitter speech with the Merfay, she shrugged. “If it must be, it must—”
But we were not to reach her “deep ways.” From nowhere, there converged on us shortly after what looked to be, by the troubling of the water, a large school of Merfays. They treaded water about Orsya. I heard their small cries which must have been delivered with great vigor to reach my ears.
“What is it?”
“My people are coming—”
“They have joined the Shadow, then?”
“No. They still believe they can make peace and go their own way, if they pay a price to those they fear the most. That price is you and I. They know we travel the river and their magic I cannot hope to elude.”
“You can hide. Surely the Merfays will show you where. I can take to the land again.” I was impatient to get on. There was an urgency which burned me as a fever.
Orsya did not appear to hear me. She had turned back to those splashes and ripples and was once more twittering. “Come—” She moved downstream, the invisible Merfays, judging by the disturbance, falling in on either hand as an escort.
“But why? You said—”
“Not far. There is a side way, partly underground . . .”
“Through the tomb caverns ?”
“Perhaps it is an outer section of those. But not the portion we saw before. It is one my people do not know.”
We did not go much further before the Merfay ripples darted ahead; Orsya paused and held out her hand to grasp that beastly paw which now marked me.