The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

NINETEEN

They had gone a long way by noon and stood at last where they could see an unnatural formation marring the hills below them. Where the hills dropped to the flat valley, the cleft between two separate hills seemed to have filled in: the broad mound was wider than any of the surrounding, rounded hills; it was grassed over, but it was flat on top and out of keeping with the rest. Was this their destination?

As they travelled, their sense of foreboding had grown stronger, drawing them on. Never had their attention wavered, not once had any of them gazed off across Kubal and wondered if they were going in the right direction. They had simply followed that feeling of darkness that had increased, that depressed them now so each was quiet and withdrawn,, staring down on that wide mound.

Thorn knew Zephy was frightened, her brown eyes were dark and calm, but she had begun to bite her lip at one side so it was drawn in, in a twisting pucker. Elodia seemed to have become hardened; the line of her face looked more determined. Toca was the same as always, a sturdy little boy following Thorn unquestioning, steady as earth.

They waited until it began to grow dark before they continued, coming at last to a shallow ravine where the donkeys could be hidden. It was nearly bare, though one end was blocked by a small stand of brush that would break the view of it from below. Tra. Hoppa could stay here with the baby—and with Toca, too, perhaps. Thorn dug out a trough below a trickle of water that came down the hill so it would collect for drinking. He settled the donkeys among the brush, and the children helped Tra. Hoppa hide the packs in brush, too.

They made a cold meal hastily, during which Toca made it clear that he was not to be left behind. Slowly, Thorn took up one waterskin, the knife, the rope. He looked at Zephy, and she nodded. There was no point in delay, it would only make them edgy. They could rest the night and start fresh, but none of them would sleep. They had the runestone, they had all the help they could have. He kissed Tra. Hoppa on the cheek and turned away.

When they started down the hill, the feel of darkness met them like a wall so all of them wanted to draw back. Thorn took Zephy’s hand, and when he turned to look at her, she was too calm and very pale. He wanted to say, Stay here, stay safe. But he knew that he could not. She had committed herself just as he had. She was biting her lip again. He stopped and put his arms around her and held her close. Her warmth dizzied him, he wanted desperately to stay with her there and keep her safe, to find his own safety with her. They stared at each other, stricken.

When they reached the mound between the hills, they could see no opening. Thorn began to wonder then if this was a natural formation after all. But the sense of darkness was too strong, and all of them had begun to catch glimpses of stone slabs and still figures, like mist across their vision. Over and over it came, the two places seen at once, the real and the vision seen together as the sky darkened and night came down.

There was no visible way into the hill. They skirted it expecting a door and found none. They examined the grass-covered earth where it rose abruptly from the valley floor like a wall, but there was only earth and grass. They climbed the hill then, uneasily.

On top it was like a flat field, with tufts and hillocks and rabbit holes. Nothing more, no opening. And the black rabbits themselves, long-tailed, wily creatures, darted away across the hills as they approached, then paused to watch them.

Then at last, in a hill removed from the mound, they found a narrow cleft like a scar, a wedge into which Thorn went alone to find a larger opening inside, then a tunnel and at the end of that a door, dirt encrusted and heavy. He pulled it open slowly, scraping dirt.

Beyond was darkness. He struck flint to a candle, then went cautiously along the bare tunnel, moving at last into the dark mound. The others followed him.

Once through the tunnel, they found themselves in a larger passageway that all of them recognized from the visions. Shallow indentations along the walls held stone slabs and silent figures. The shock of finding in reality what they had seen in the visions made them silent; reality and vision seemed confused suddenly, their minds could not cope.

Then Elodia stepped forward and laid her hand on the bare arm of a child her own age; and they all started at the sense of warm skin, of living flesh.

‘The stone!” Elodia breathed, her intensity like a knife. At once Thorn was beside her laying the jade in her hand; they touched hands and touched the runestone to the figure, willing the child to wake.

She was a pale, fragile girl of about Elodia’s age. Her skin seemed almost transparent, as if her life was frailly held, indeed. She stirred at last, and her face seemed to go whiter with the effort she made. Her chest rose in barely visible breathing; then a movement down the passage made them start. A greasy light came from around a corner of the passage and grew brighter. They could see the flame of a torch approaching.

They snuffed the candle and drew back into the smaller tunnel, clustering against its wall to stare toward the approaching light. They could hear a faint scuffing and an occasional grumble as if the torchbearer was not happy at being pulled from a cozy place, to walk the damp tunnel. If he was after them, if he had heard them, he was not being very quiet about it.

As he reached the first niche he stopped and leaned over. They could see him clearly now, a big Kubalese bending almost double to lift a child to sitting position and hold a cup to its lips. At niche after niche he stopped; but when he reached the little girl she drew back from his grasp. She must have refused the draft, for after a moment he growled in agitation, shook her, then held the cup again, her head higher this time. At last he grunted with satisfaction, released the figure carelessly, and came on down the passage.

When he had done all the sleeping figures and gone on, they followed him, moving in the opposite direction from the sleeping girl. Surely he was giving fresh drug. Now all would be harder to awaken. How often did he make these rounds? Was he the lone keeper or were there others? Passages opened both left and right, and Thorn knew they could easily become lost. It was time to act. He unsheathed the knife, loosed the rope from his belt, handing it to Zephy, then slipped ahead.

It was all done so fast, his thought to hers, no time to panic. Thorn loved her in that quick moment when she leaped ahead with him, steady and fast, never faltering; he crouched behind the Kubalese, jumped, plunged his knife in as Zephy flew to wind the rope around the soldier’s feet and pull it taut. The man cried out, Thorn found his face as he fell and muffled him, and he was down heavy as lead across Thorn’s legs. Zephy was binding him, but Thorn steeled himself and cut the man’s throat. They were safer that way.

“He might have told us something,” Elodia said, coming up. There was a quantity of blood. They all felt sick.

“He might have lied, too,” Thorn answered. He righted the torch and handed it to Toca. Then they moved the nearest figure, a half-grown boy, into another niche beside a young woman, and the three of them were able, just, to lift the Kubalese up onto the slab. The blood was slippery, and they were splashed with it, wiping it off on his clothes before they left him.

Now ahead of them lay half a dozen figures that had not had their dose from the cup. The cup itself Thorn protected carefully for there was an ample draft left that might somehow be useful.

Again they tried to awaken a drugged sleeper, and again there was a stir from the young woman, but she did not open her eyes. As they became more sensitive to the sleepers, they began to experience their need, their crying out for that draft that Thorn carried, an aching hunger that tore at them all in its intensity. They experienced the longing nearly as if it were their own, which perhaps weakened their own determination as they tried to rouse the Children of Ynell. But the need was stronger in some than in others, and in those from whom it came the weakest, their efforts to arouse were most rewarding.

After some time they had amassed a small band that followed them like sleepwalkers down the corridor, children and adults ambling, blank-eyed. Among them was Clytey Varik.

Thorn and Zephy, Elodia and Toca proceeded silently, their mental effort turned to reassuring those who followed, to keep them following, to make them yearn for life . . .

They found that the narrower tunnels leading off the main corridor were short for the most part, some going into empty rooms or caves and others simply stopping; some with a few niches, but most unoccupied. Most of the drugged Children had been kept in the corridor where they were easiest to get to. At the far end of the corridor was the place of most danger.

For by reaching silently forward together, by feeling outward together, sensitive to each other and to what lay ahead they had been able to see into the mound’s depths. And at the end of the corridor was a room where the MadogWerg leaf was brewed in a cold-still, and where two Kubalese guards played at a game of dice sticks. Thorn could feel Zephy’s fear of the place, of the guards, and feel her hatred too and her rising determination to aggression that was very like his own. He could feel Elodia’s singleness of purpose so finely steeled that her abhorrence and tenderness were shielded. And Toca—Toca simply went on, made his stoic effort one-minded, following Thorn. Thinking nothing of good or bad or distasteful, but simply encrusted with a small fierce discipline, soldier-like and so touching that Thorn, in spite of himself, put an arm around the little boy’s shoulder, then knew at once that Toca was better left untouched just now, that the shield was not that impenetrable.

The sleepers who had not been roused must be attended to later, yet the mental strength of the four to wake them was waning. Thorn thought that without the runestone they might never have been able to do it—might not yet, he thought. Won’t be able to if I don’t stop dreaming and pay attention to where we are. For the brewing room was around the next curve.

The possible plans were several, but they chose to divide the two guards. When they saw the wooden door ajar and the candle burning within, they all slipped back down the tunnel save Thorn, who moved quietly in the shadows to the other side of the opening and stood still.

When the mumble of voices continued and the click of dice and sticks did not cease—and when their minds were touching—Thorn thought that he was ready; and down the tunnel in the darkness Elodia let out a scream that made the blood go cold. A scream of pure terror that he had felt her building, getting ready to deliver, for some minutes. It was so good a scream he wanted to laugh with the pleasure of it, but there wasn’t time; the two guards boiled out. He caught the second in the knee, in the groin, felt him twist, pulled his arm behind him, and heard the other shout where he had bolted down the corridor into the children. Thorn stabbed again, felt the guard go limp, and pelted after the first, found him fighting rope and girls and Toca in a melee so confused it was all Thorn could do to sort out the right thing to hit, afraid to use the knife. The drugged Children stood looking on, like shadows.

When they had the man down, Thorn decided to let him live, tie him and question him. The man was gone in drunkenness; Thorn could smell the liquor. Disgusted, but glad for the advantage it had given them, he tied him well, and they dragged him onto one of the slabs.

Now the brewing room was empty. They made quick work of the MadogWerg, mixing the ground leaf with dirt, then burying the whole mess. There was quite a lot of it, the dry, bronze leaf crushed to a fine powder, and some not yet crushed, gathered into small sheaves, the round separate leaves quite beautiful, just as Tra. Hoppa had described—the most potent of all the drugs.

They poured the brewed liquid into the Kubalese’s liquor cask. A little welcoming draft for the next Kubalese who came along. But Thorn saved back that in the cup, he did not know why.

The drugged Children who had followed them stood clutched together like moon-moths in the doorway, clinging to each other. Thorn brought them in, pushing, gently cajoling until they were seated, close together still, on the lower bunk. Nine of them, frightened and pale and confused—even the four adults—by the lantern light and by being awake and walking, by the world which they all seemed to have forgotten. When they smelled the reek of drug from the cold-still, they stared toward it longingly until Thorn tipped it over with one blow and smashed the tin cups and the tubing under his heel. Then they looked terrified indeed, whether at his violence or at the destruction of the still, no one could be sure.

The cave was fairly large, with the table in the middle next to a supporting post, the bunks by the door, clothes on pegs, and a tangle of things at the back—crocks and barrels and a small cooking stove like an iron pot, with a bit of chimney that attached to three tubes in the dirt ceiling. Thorn examined these. “They’re no bigger than rabbit holes,” he said admiringly. “And there were plenty of rabbit holes up there. A little bit of smoke, carried off by the wind . . .”

There were half a dozen black rabbit skins hanging, dry, on one wall, and rabbit carcasses, dried and smoked, hung from the main beam of the room. Zephy opened a barrel to find it filled with golden-colored grain. “Would we dare to eat the food? We’ll have to feed the Children. They wouldn’t have drugged all this; they must have needed it themselves. What did they feed the Children? Besides the . . . besides the MadogWerg. It must have been liquid, they were hardly awake,” she said, touching a big iron pot. “They had to feed them, Thorn, they would have died otherwise.”

“Could you make some soup?”

She and Elodia set about it at once, tipping water from a barrel and adding the grain and dried rabbit and some tammi and kebbel-root. The fuel for the stove was dried cow dung, hot burning, that filled a linen bag. She wished she had milk for the children.

The Children’s eyes had followed her as she investigated the room, and at the words MadogWerg they had seemed to tense, their faces to harden and to become slyly eager—the most alive they had looked since they had been awakened. She could feel their thoughts, their increasing desire for the drug as they came more fully awake and felt the sharp pangs of withdrawal. She felt, with them, the ugly quick pains in her body, in her legs and hands. She should have felt sorry for them, but she could feel only repulsion. She wished they could be shut away, she realized with shock. Oh, how could she think such a thing. She stared at Clytey Varik’s blank face, and felt a horror at her own emotions. Yet the Children were so like something dead that the feel of them, sick and negative, was almost more than she could bear. It was as if their very spirits tainted everything around them with a heavy intensity of lifelessness, with such a pall that joy and love were made somehow indecent in the presence of their intense death-wishing.

She looked up and found Thorn watching her and knew they had shared this. And she knew that their very sharing was repugnant to these drugged, sick Children. She felt a passion to get away from them, and then a gripping pity that made her turn and stare at them, so she almost cried out in agony at what they were.

As one, Toca and Elodia rose, and the four of them took hands and stood as before touching the runestone and trying to waken the Children more completely, awaken them to life, to wholeness. They breathed such passion into their effort, into the Children, breathed the very souls of their spirits into them. But they pulled away at last exhausted, near dropping with fatigue and discouragement; for the Children had remained as they were, their eyes and spirits willfully unseeing; blank and defiant.

Now Thorn looked at Zephy for the first time without that spark of challenge and assurance. He seemed to have lost hope suddenly. She stared at him with chagrin. “They don’t want this,” he growled angrily. “They don’t want to be better. We can’t make them want it, we’re not strong enough.”

“We are! You’re stupid to say we can’t! You’ll undo everything!”

“Undo what? They’re dead—they’d be better dead. Look at them! They want to be dead!” He swung to face the silent row where they crouched on the bunk, staring dully. “Look at you! You’re nothing. You’ve lost your very souls, you’ve let them be taken from you. You can’t even fight for your life! All you want is a morass to wallow in. To die in!” He turned away furious, his eyes dark with anger and his fists clenched as if he would like to hit them.

And Zephy, watching the Children with apprehension, saw the blonde young woman’s eyes go clear suddenly, saw her looking back at Thorn with life in her face. Zephy caught her breath, cried silently to Thorn, saw him turn and take the woman’s hands.

The woman looked at Zephy now, and smiled. Tremulous, uncertain, but aware. Very much aware. Thorn pressed the stone in her hand and they held it, the three of them. Zephy could feel the change then, could feel that now, at last, the bodily pains and depression did not matter, that something else stronger had taken hold. That life had returned, the stubborn eagerness for life.

At last the woman said her name, Showpa, and that she was of Quaymus. And they set about, together, bringing the others back. For with Thorn’s anger, all of the Children had begun to reach out, to feel out toward his strength. And toward the runestone. Had begun to fight at last.