Black Jade. David Zindell
fire. Indeed, because men forged iron ore into steel ploughshares or swords and wielded the coruscating fury of the firestones themselves, our way also was called the Way of the Dragon. It was a hard way, perilous and cruel, for it led to war and discord with the world – and seemingly even with the One. But out of such strife, Master Juwain claimed, like the great Kundalini working his way up through the chakras, would eventually emerge a higher harmony.
‘The Star People surely know a paradise that we can only imagine, the Elijin and Galadin, too,’ Master Juwain told us. ‘That is, they would if not for Angra Mainyu and those who followed him. Their way, I’m afraid, is still our way, and we call it the Left Hand Path.’
Here he nodded at Maram. ‘And now you have all the clues you need to unlock these verses.’
Maram thought for a long few moments, pulling at his beard as he looked out at the blue sky and the even bluer lakes gleaming beneath it. And then he pointed west at the longest of them and said, ‘All right, then, surely we are to espy a drakul lake, and of all these waters, only that one looks very much like a dragon – or a snake. And, see, two streams lead down into it, or rather away from it, past those saw-toothed hills. They do look something like tongues, I suppose. And so I would say that we’re to follow the southernmost stream, to the left.’
‘Very good,’ Master Juwain said, nodding his head. ‘I concur.’
Our course being set, we hiked back down the hill and sat down to a lunch of fried goose eggs and wheat bread toasted over a little fire. Then we checked the horses’ loads and led them around the base of the hill topped by the castle rock. We worked our way through thick woods, and up and down the ravines that grooved the hill’s slopes. Finally we came out into the valley of the lakes on the other side. We made camp that evening in clear sight of the dragon lake to the west of us. Its two tongues, of dusk-reddened water, caught the fire of the setting sun.
It took us most of the next day to reach this lake, for we had to forge on past other hills, lakes and ground grown boggy from all the water that collected here. But reach it we did, and we began our trek through the dense vegetation of its southern shore. We paused for the night in a copse of great birch trees. We smelled the faint reek of a skunk and listened to the honking of the geese and the beating wings of other waterfowl out on the lake. The next day we walked on until we came to the stream told of in the Rhymes. We followed this rushing rill toward its source, south, and then curving west and north. The hills around us grew ever higher. In this way, over the next two days, we made a miles-wide circle and came up behind the great massif that we had sighted from the sandstone castle. And then, as the Rhymes also told, we came upon a road that snaked back and forth still higher, winding up through barren tundra toward what seemed a snow-locked pass between two of the massif’s mountains.
‘Ah, I don’t like the look of this,’ Maram said as we stood by our horses looking up at the white peaks before us. ‘It’s too damn high!’
‘But we don’t have to go over the pass,’ Daj said, ‘just through it.’
‘I don’t care – it’s still too high. It will be cold up there, cold enough to freeze our breath, I think. And what if there are bears?’
He went on complaining in a like manner for a while before he turned his disgruntlement to the road we must follow up to the heights. It was an ancient road and seemed once to have been a good one, built of finely-cut granite stones taken from the rock around us. Some of these stones, though worn, were still jointed perfectly. But time and ice and snow had riven many of the stones and reduced the road in places to no more than a path of rubble. Below us the road simply vanished into a wall of forest and the dark earth from which it grew. We could detect no sign of where this road might come from. Above us the road led on: through the mountains, we hoped, and straight to the Brotherhood’s secret school.
‘Well, I suppose we should camp here for the night,’ Maram said.
‘No, I’m afraid we must go up as high as we can,’ Master Juwain told him, pointing at the great saddle between the two mountains. ‘You have the verses – give them to me, please.’
Maram nodded grudgingly, then recited:
Approach the wall round Ashte’s ides –
There wait till dark of night subsides;
If sky is clear, at day’s first light
Go deep into a darker night.
‘But we have approached the wall!’ Maram said to Master Juwain.
‘Not close enough. The essence of these verses, I think, is that we must be ready to move quickly at the right moment. Now let us go on.’
And so we did. Our slog up the road was long and hard, though not particularly dangerous. As Maram had worried, it grew colder. The road passed through a swath of pines and broke out from treeline into tundra. Ragged patches of snow blanketed the side of the mountain and covered the road in several places. We had to break through the crust and work against the snow’s crunching, cornlike granules. Our feet, even through our boots, smarted sharply and then grew numb. The wind drove at us from the west in cruel, piercing gusts. But the sky, at least, was a great, blue dome and remained perfectly clear in all directions. And the sun comforted us for while – until it dropped behind the sharp-ridged peaks of the mountains farther to the west. Then it grew truly cold, enough to ice our sweaty garments and find our flesh beneath them. By the time we set to making camp at the crest of the road, we were all miserable and shivering.
Maram pointed at the pass, where the road disappeared into a dark tunnel cut through the white wall above us. And he said, ‘We would be warmer if we slept inside there.’
‘We would,’ Daj agreed, ‘but the Rhyme says that we’re supposed to wait out here.’
‘The damn Rhymes,’ Maram muttered. ‘They make no sense.’
‘But that’s just it,’ Daj said, ‘we’re supposed to make sense of them.’
Atara began unloading some faggots of wood from one of the packhorses, and she said to Maram, ‘It would be warmer in the tunnel. If there are any bears on this mountain, I’m sure they’ve made lair there.’
‘Bears?’ Maram said. ‘No, no – surely they’ve come out of their winter sleep and have gone down to feed on berries or trout. Surely they have. They at least have sense.’
He set to unloading wood and building a fire with a fervor that kept away his gut-churning fear of bears. But he must have remembered the great white bear that had attacked us on a similar pass in the Morning Mountains – as did Master Juwain and I. We said nothing of this maddened animal that Morjin had made into a ghul, for we did not wish to frighten the children, or ourselves. I prayed that no ghul-bears – nor snow tigers nor any other beasts directed by Morjin – would find us here. It was enough that we still had to fight our way through this rugged terrain and through the Rhymes that were our map to it.
We sat for most of the night by the fire. The ground here was too steeply sloped and rocky for reclining, and too cold, too. And so we made cushions of our sleeping furs and huddled together with our cloaks thrown over us as a sort of woolen tent. Estrella sat between me and Atara, and fell asleep with her head resting against my side. Maram’s back pressed firmly, and warmly, against my own. In this way, we propped each up and kept away the worst of the cold.
I slept only a little that night, and Master Juwain and Kane did not sleep at all. At times, in low voices, they discussed the meaning of the Way Rhymes; at other times they sat in silence as they looked up at the stars. I kept watch on these bright points of light as best I could. But I must have dozed, for I awakened in the deep of night to the weight of Kane’s hand gently shaking my shoulder. He stood above me uncloaked, and he pointed up at the constellations spread across the heavens.
‘Look, Val,’ he murmured. ‘The Ram is about to set.’
In the biting cold, we roused the others and broke camp.