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.”“Is that what we hear?”Ayensha shook her head.“Lightning’s voice.A waterfall.”Listening to Lightning, they walked until the passage became so narrow Kerian had to turn sideways simply to fit through.The rumbling became louder, the sky more distant, the gorge darker, the passage but a slit.Kerian’s muscles cried for rest.She had none.They ate walking, following the brightness in the distance that seemed never to come closer.At last, the voice of the falls grew louder again, deeper.Above, the slit of blue that had been the sky suddenly widened.The brightness made Kerian squint.“Noon-bright,” Ayensha said.Only noon!“Now put your back into it.We’re almost-”The gorge turned, daylight opened up ahead.With startling suddenness, they stood at the mouth of the gorge, practically at the stony lip of a shining lake.“-there.”The falls known to elves as Lightning for its flash, to dwarves as Thunder for the roar of its voice, sped from such a height as to seem poured out of the sky.Silvery sheets of water flung over a cliff, headlong and heedless as a madman running.Thunder! Its voice bellowed so loudly that it pressed against Kerian’s ears as a physical weight.In the presence of the cascading brightness and the furious roar, she found it difficult to breathe.“There,” said Ayensha, again smiling.“Nearly where we want to be.”Blinking, Kerian said, “Where? All I see is water falling.”Ayensha nodded.She set out around the edge of the lake, Kerian following.Little grew on that shore, only tufts of tough grass between the cracks in the stone.“Years past count,” Ayensha said, “the world erupted in volcanoes, fire spewing up from the belly of the world.The earth cracked, and the ground dropped down right here, so hard the river that runs must fall into this pool.Under the water, there is a vast bowl of stone made from the hot lava that hardened.”“The Cataclysm,” Kerian said, her eyes on the falling water.“No.This was before then, before anyone started naming ages or gods had much to do with Krynn.My people-” She slid Kerian a sidelong glance.“Our people have had this legend for as long as we have been.”Water fell roaring, and no conversation now was possible as Kerian followed Ayensha to the far edge of the lake.In silence, filled with awe before this wonder of the forest, the two stood beside the bellowing falls, soaked in mist and spray.Ayensha pointed downward, Kerian saw the rock dipping into shallow levels, like stairs.Water had done that, and water had done more.Behind the falling water she saw a depth, a passage running between the thunderous curtain of water and face of the cliff over which it raced.Ayensha gestured.Kerian took her meaning and followed carefully down the steps, around through a cloud of spray and into sudden darkness broken by silvery bending of light through water.Spray made the stony way slick as though it were iced.It rose by a narrow path, requiring that they hold tight to rough cracks in the stone, sometimes pulling themselves up, sometimes obliged to press themselves tight to the wall and inch along.Kerian looked once over her shoulder and froze.They were perhaps a third of the way to the cliffs height Below the water hit stone in a madness of splash and foam.Firmly, she turned back to the climb and saw Ayensha standing above.The woman did not cling to stone but stood at perfect ease within a dark crevice carved into the face of the cliff.Laughing, she beckoned.Kerian leaned her forehead against the rock wall, breathed as well as she could, gathered wit and strength, and climbed again.Ayensha caught her by the wrist and pulled her quickly inside to bellowing darkness.Kerian sensed walls and ceiling, depth and height.Behind her, Lightning fell with the voice of Thunder, shining silver ribbons twined in the darkness of shadow.She put her back to a-rough, wet stone wall, every muscle in every limb complaining with weariness.Shivering, she closed her eyes just as a golden light flared behind her lids.Ayensha held up a fat pillar candle that had been set on a flat of stone, held in place by its own wax.She handed it to Kerian and by its light folded stiff lengths of oiled sailcloth.These she tucked into a square coffer, one lidded like a case.Every seam was thickly tarred, and the case itself was lined with oily cloth.In there nestled a small pouch containing flint and steel.Beside this, a fatter pouch lay.By the shape, Kerian knew it held other candles of varying sizes.Ayensha snapped the lid shut and tucked the whole thing far back into shadows.“Now, come!” she called, her voice drowned out, the shape of the words only seen on her lips.Through a wide, high passage they went, candlelight bounding from slick stone walls.Kerian’s right arm throbbed with pain, but she said nothing, for she would not appear weak before this woman.The deeper in they went, the thinner the mist, the more muffled the voice of the falls until, at last, Kerian saw pale daylight shining.Something tall and dark came to fill the void and conceal the light.Kerian gasped, but Ayensha’s breath sighed out of her, shuddering with relief.She blew out the candle and set it high in a notch on the wall.Kerian heard only the distant voice of the falls, the whispering of the torch.Then, low, a man’s rough and ragged voice said, “Ayensha, my girl, we thought you were dead.”He held out his arms.Staggering with weariness, her breath still shuddering, Ayensha went to him.He folded her to him, bending low to hear what she whispered.Kerian heard the man groan, a terrible deep sound of grief.She saw him hold Ayensha long and close and finally turn her and take her out into the light.Alone, ignored, Kerian followed.Chapter NineNayla and Haugh, with their hounds beside, went in stealth, keeping beneath the crests of the forest ridges, and when they could, they ran, bounding over stone, leaping over blow-downs.They headed for a smith whose forge stood beside the Silver Tresses River, a branch of the White-Rage River that reached into the forest farther east than Sliathnost.He was a friend of theirs, a good man and trusty, and in the days before he knew Nayla, Haugh had been, for a long sweet summer, much closer friends with the forgeman’s daughter than with the smith himself.Frealle was her name.Nayla still wondered about Frealle and how it was that after all the years between that sweet summer and now he knew the way to the miller’s house well as though he were walking on Baker’s Lane in Qualinost, looking for a good place to buy muffins.Haugh had, in the course of his life, more lovers than most.He watched now as Nayla slipped up to the crest of the ridge, one of the hounds in her wake.The Silver Tresses was a mere shine of a thread in the east, as Nayla paused beside a tall boulder, marking how far they’d come.Wrestle, the hound, stood close.Haugh waited to see if he should follow or if she were only checking the landmark.Wind came softly from the east, smelling a bit like snow off the Kharolis Mountains.The second hound, Pounce, pushed her nose up under Haugh’s hand.Absently, he scratched her chin.He cocked an eye at the sky.The sun slid down the noonday sky.Pounce growled, her ears flat against her head.Haugh looked to Nayla and saw nothing different than a moment before, yet the hound continued to growl, and Haugh never discounted the reactions of these beasts who had been Nayla’s from the litter.He called her name.Nayla did not move.He looked left and right, up hill as far as he could see, and down.“Nayla,” he whispered.She turned, and her face shone white.Haugh ran up the hill, Wrestle behind him, and looked toward Sliathnost [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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