Final Passage (The Prisoner and the Sun #3) Page 3

  A chorus of distant barks prompted Iliff to look out from their crevice. Garott dwellings extended away from them in small swells, their low doors standing between vertical lengths of hewn wood, like the entrances to mine shafts. Pathways fell steeply with the landscape, down toward the river, where metal rang out and smoke billowed black. Iliff tried to push his awareness out over the settlement, but he was still harrowed. His focus kept returning to the commander on the cliff wall, who was having his men perform a second sweep of the ravine.

  “What do you feel of the settlement?” Iliff asked.

  “There is a woman here,” Skye whispered, “gentler than the others. She tends to her husband, who is ill.” She pointed out a nearby dwelling, whose mound was perhaps a bit larger than those around it.

  Iliff peered out again and looked to either side. Away to his right, a guard emerged from the settlement with two dogs leaping against their tethers. Garott dogs were lean and foul, but excellent trackers. The moment the guard steered them through the gate, Iliff and Skye left the crevice. They moved quickly, both of them monitoring the sentry, who remained preoccupied with the ravine. The low entrance of the dwelling angled away from the gate, and Iliff and Skye were soon before the door and hidden from view.

  Skye knocked softly.

  Footfalls sounded from below ground. Soon the door cracked open and dark eyes slanted toward them. The woman was young. The small hand she brought to her chest held a cloth, black with moisture. Fearful recognition spread over her face. She turned, as though planning her escape back into the darkness, but before she could move from the door, Skye extended her hand.

  “Please,” she said. “We are from the west, yes, but we come as friends.”

  Though the woman’s torso still twisted toward the descending steps, she hesitated, her wary gaze flicking between them.

  “Your husband is ill,” Skye said.

  A faint light crept into the woman’s eyes.

  “I can help him,” Skye said.

  “Yes?” the woman whispered.

  * * *

  The man lay on a pallet, his body oily with perspiration. A candle sputtered on a table beside him. Skye went with the woman to the bedside, while Iliff lingered behind them. They were in a large room, he saw. Vertical beams rose in a quadrangle. On one of the walls, just above a long table, were mounted two swords with a shield beside them. The dwelling held a certain integrity, Iliff thought, but it also carried the stale breath of illness.

  Iliff looked to where Skye knelt. He watched her palpate the man’s neck, then lay her hand over his heart. She tilted her head as though listening.

  “How long has he been ill?” Skye asked.

  “More than a fortnight,” said the woman.

  As Skye nodded, her eyes began to shine blue in the gloom. Iliff felt the shared space inside him expand, and in the next moment, the room swelled with soft light. The woman looked up, eyes alert and fearful, then quickly back to her husband. She crouched near his head. The light that emanated from Skye soon faded into the man, and for several moments, a soft halo lingered over his body. At last this light faded, too. Iliff listened to the man’s breaths deepen and become rhythmic.

  “Ogden?” the woman whispered, stroking her husband’s dark temple.

  Skye stood and took a small bundle of herbs from her gown. “When he awakens, brew this into a tea,” she said. “Give it to him in sips. Do so again in the morning. By tomorrow night, he will be well.”

  The woman’s eyes glistened as she took the herbs. She looked to her husband, who rested peacefully now, his body cool, then back to Skye. Iliff noticed that the air they breathed was lighter now, as though a cleansing wind had pushed through. The woman stood up cautiously, the hard angle of her cheek damp with tears. Slowly, she reached for Skye, then clutched her fast, her sobs thin and quiet.

  Iliff smiled as he looked on them. It was only in the split second between the hard strike and swooning darkness that he realized their presence in the settlement was no longer a secret.

  Chapter 4

  Voices.

  Iliff heard voices.

  But they were jumbled voices, clamorous and muted at once, as though emerging from the depths of some cavern pool to echo along the stone walls for a moment before submerging again.

  He tried to concentrate, to discern the voices from one another.

  Little by little the words began to cohere, the phrases take form.

  And Iliff realized that these voices in the dark were not new to him. They were old, familiar voices, called up from his past. He heard the raspings of the old man from the prison, telling him of other worlds beyond the walls, of a Sun. He heard the mixer’s stern barking and Yuri’s pleas for caution and restraint. These were joined by the beguiling promises of Euclid, the round man in the gold mine. Now Troll’s voice rumbled and boomed around him. Soon it was the troubled King Iliff heard, then Lucious’ sneering voice, full of hatred and fear.

  And though each voice was different, though each one recalled different memories, Iliff felt a certain empathy for them all.

  At last he heard the voices of Skye and Tradd, and his heart swelled with his great love for them. But when he reached out, their voices slipped back into the darkness, deeper and deeper, until they merged once more with the jumbled thrum, far below. And Iliff understood that he was losing them, that he would lose them for good if he failed in the quest he had embarked on so long ago.

  If you choose to go forward, it must be to the Sun, she had told him. It will seem the longest, most perilous road, but all others lead to despair.

  Now, in the deep darkness, Iliff felt the truth of Adramina’s words. All these people who had risen up, who had belonged to his life and quest in some form or another, were either gone or leaving, even those he loved dearly. He had already known despair. Profound despair.

  But to lose Skye and Tradd…

  “Where are you?” he demanded of the Sun. “Why do you continue to hide?”

  First you must seek me. Then you must come to know my nature. And finally may you see me.

  In his disembodied state, Iliff fought with the riddle. He had sought the Sun. Still he sought it. But what to make of the second part? How could he know the Sun’s nature if he had never seen it? And yet it seemed he would never come to see it unless he first understood its nature. Put in such a way, the idea of getting to the Mountain, of beholding the Sun, seemed less attainable to Iliff than ever. And yet Salvatore had done it somehow…

  “You are closer than you believe.”

  Adramina. The living words flowed around him like the fragrant tresses of her hair.

  When Iliff opened his mouth to answer, all of the voices rose again from the deep, but as one. And the one voice that broke the surface was more familiar to Iliff than all of the others, because the voice he now heard was his own.

  “But I’ve seen nothing,” he said.

  “Another wall,” Adramina said. “There is another wall.”

  “I’ve seen no wall.”

  The final word, wall, echoed around him, becoming loud before breaking apart into the many voices again and submerging. And he was submerging, too, he saw. Falling into that great depth, just as he had fallen into Adramina’s dwelling so many years before. When Adramina spoke again, it was as though her voice was falling with them, swirling amid the others.

  “This wall you cannot see with your eyes,” she said.

  * * *

  Iliff’s first thought upon opening his eyes was that he was looking down on the man Skye had healed. Ogden was his name? The man was awake now, but his face appeared gaunt and stern.

  “He is conscious,” spoke Ogden.

  A woman’s face appeared, the one who had led them into the dwelling, and Iliff realized that he was the one on his back and that the man and woman were standing over him. Iliff blocked the candle light with his hand. Beyond their heads he could make out the two swords and shield on the far wall, and he understood that he was
in Ogden’s bed. Fear gripped his insides.

  “Skye…” he moaned.

  The woman disappeared from her husband’s side. “Skye is seeing to some others,” Ogden said. “Here.”

  Stooping, he dug his arm beneath Iliff’s shoulder and sat him up on the side of the bed. Iliff’s vision swam for a moment. He reached for the back of his head, his fingers soon encountering a hard knot, tender to touch.

  “Your presence surprised my men,” Ogden said.

  Iliff recalled the blow to his head and understood that the dogs had tracked their scent to the dwelling. The guards had entered in stealth—the same guards who had attacked the hunting party last winter.

  “Skye,” he said, this time more urgently.

  “You needn’t worry,” Ogden said. “They did not harm her. My wife got between them in time. She told my men of the healing.”

  Iliff sensed he was telling the truth, but remained on his guard. The woman returned and pushed a warm cup into his hands. She spoke shyly. “Skye wanted you to drink this when you awoke.”

  Iliff lifted the cup to his lips and sipped the steaming brew that tasted bitter and tannic. But soon his stomach stirred with warmth and his head began to clear. He suddenly felt how hungry he was.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Ogden and his wife remained standing before him, both of them looking on him with a kind of fascination, it seemed, as though he were a wild creature suddenly made docile. Iliff lowered the cup and thanked them once more.

  Ogden furrowed his brow. “You do not remember me.”

  Iliff shook his head.

  “Three times I saw you outside your gate, and once did our swords clash.” He spoke hard, but without malice.

  And then Iliff realized that this man who Skye had healed was the former Garott captain, the present leader of the settlement. It had been so chaotic the night of the Great Battle, but he remembered seeing the flash of a captain’s armor when he and the rest of the Fythe guard had broken through the Garott’s line inside the township. In the place of armor, the captain now wore a coarse, belted tunic that fell to his knees. Iliff watched the man’s slow paces, which seemed to measure the length of the room. He wondered whether the stagger in his gait was Troll’s doing.

  Iliff cleared his throat. “Listen to me, the man who felled your general—”

  “I know,” Ogden said, raising his hand. “Skye has told me everything.”

  Iliff relaxed a bit, his thoughts turning to Skye’s uncle, Lucious. Lucious who still recognized no one, who walked the town each afternoon with his shuffling steps and vacant gaze, a nurse at his elbow. It pained Iliff to see him in this state, not only for Lucious’ sake, but because he so often felt that he was observing a former aspect of himself, a fanatical aspect that never came to understand its ruinous nature.

  “We’ve no intention of moving our settlement nearer the township, in any case,” Ogden was saying. “But we do welcome your trade. Food and medicines to start. In exchange we will forge horse bits and shoes, for Skye says you’re in need of both. I’ve shown her the foundry, and she has approved the quality of our works.”

  Ogden stopped and looked over his shoulder as if to ensure his wife was still absent before turning back to Iliff.

  “But I need to know something,” he said, coming nearer. “One soldier to another.”

  “Yes?” Iliff said. “What is it?”

  “Why come? Why risk yourselves as you did?” Ogden stood over him. His dark eyes, which had likely known only strife and treachery, seemed to be trying to understand a thing heretofore beyond his experience. They glinted with suspicion.

  “Because we are a community now,” Iliff said. “Fythe and Garott. We wish it to remain so.”

  “But what of her?” Ogden glanced to where Skye’s cloak hung neatly from a peg. “She did not tell me, but I know who she is. I know that her mother was the queen who fell beneath our…” His eyes faltered for a moment. “And yet she comes not to avenge, but to aid and heal us?”

  Iliff’s love for Skye swelled again, just as it had in his dream.

  “She misses her mother, yes,” he said. “She still speaks of her. But the Queen understood the unity of your races. She understood that there was no solution in your warring. Skye seeks the fulfillment of that understanding, and in this way she honors her mother best.”

  Ogden said nothing. Iliff tried to read the contours of his face, made hard by the candle light. Ogden paced the length of the room again, stopping before the mounted swords on the wall. Iliff stiffened, uncertain whether his legs would support him should he need them suddenly. But at last Ogden turned and called into an adjoining room to ask whether some food were ready. From the low doorway, Iliff smelled threads of wood smoke and broth.

  Ogden returned to the bedside and stood looking down at Iliff. “What can I do?” he said at last.

  “The trade is a start …”

  “Yes, yes, but what can I do for her?” Ogden looked again to the cloak. “She has returned me to life and now I am duty-bound to repay the deed in kind. It is the law. Tell me, what can I do?”

  Iliff thought for a moment before speaking.

  “If you know the whereabouts of the Queen,” he said, “send orders that her remains be placed in a boat and set adrift on the Great Sea. She should not be left to wander the wreckage of her former Kingdom. She should be with the King and all those she loved in life and all those fallen since.”

  Ogden nodded gravely and lifted his fist to his chest. “On my word, it will be done,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  Some mornings later, Ogden and the rest of the settlement stood before the gate to the ravine. Skye and Iliff’s horses had been brought down from the ridge days before, and now a Garott youth led them from a stable near the river and handed over the reins. As Ogden spoke his thanks and good wishes, Iliff marveled at how the settlement’s granitic atmosphere of suspicion from just days before had all but dissolved. Of course this had been mostly Skye’s doing. She had healed many in their time here, and now almost all in the settlement were well.

  As Iliff watched Skye embrace Ogden’s wife in farewell, his thoughts returned to the dream as they had so many times in the last days. A great sadness welled inside him. If he could not find the wall Adramina had spoken of, the wall that concealed the way to the Mountain, the Sun, he would lose her.

  They departed on their homeward journey, riding through the morning. Around noon, they crossed a stream and rested their horses. Ogden’s wife had prepared roasted meats and herbs wrapped in bread, still warm. Iliff shook out the blanket and Skye set out their meal.

  “You have been quiet,” she said once they were settled. “Does something trouble you?”

  Iliff shook his head.

  She continued to look on him.

  Iliff began to shake his head again, then reminded himself that to keep the truth from her was to put up another wall still. He wiped his mouth with his kerchief and tucked it away.

  “I had a dream while I slept,” he said. “And yet it was not a dream, not exactly. It was voices inside me, Skye. And one of the voices I heard was yours and another one Tradd’s, and I felt that… that I was losing you both.”

  “Losing us to what?”

  “To this world, I suppose,” he said, looking around them. “This world that is so strange and wonderful, and yet where nothing lasts. Rivers shift, trees turn brittle and fall, loved ones succumb to war and illness and the simple passage of days.”

  When he looked up, he half expected to find Skye thin and drawn, her demise hastened by its mere mention. But she sat straight, her gaze, though pale, remaining strong and attentive.

  “When I first set out from Adramina’s dwelling,” he said, “when I climbed the roots to the tunnel that was to be my passage into the world, I did not know whether the Sun was near or far. In all of the years since, in all the places I have journeyed and seen, there have been times when it has seemed very close, and at othe
rs very distant. And now that we are free of our obligations to the township…” He sighed. “I don’t know, Skye. In this dream that was not a dream, I heard Adramina say that we were closer to the Sun than ever. And yet in our travels these past years, we have seen and heard nothing. And that concerns me.”

  “Perhaps we’ve not been looking in the right places,” Skye said.

  “Adramina spoke of another wall,” Iliff said, nodding his head. “But she says this one is beyond seeing.”

  Skye closed her eyes, and shortly Iliff felt the space in his chest, the space they shared, open and expand. Upon closing his own eyes, he was immediately aware of the grass beneath them, the trees overhead, the horses beside the stream, then shortly the hills and dales they had traveled over and through, and many they had not, and all of the Garott settlements for many miles.

  And still the sphere of their shared awareness grew. It soon reached beyond Iliff’s own capacity, and he felt that he was lost within it, having become too small or perhaps too large. He held to the one distinct feeling that was Skye and rode the great swell onward and outward. But there came a point at which it could go no farther, and in Skye’s effort, it began to fray at the edges, its wispy threads fluttering before the barren Hinterlands to the east and the forest Iliff and Troll had once traveled through to the south. It broke apart westward as well, against the tumble of feral wilderness. To the north, the threads simply wandered over cold winds and sea mist, until they too drifted apart and were lost.

  Iliff opened his eyes and was suddenly on the blanket again, Skye before him. But the face that looked on him seemed paler, the skin around her eyes drawn tighter, as though the exercise had left her with less vitality than when she had begun. She moved her gaze from his and stood, straightening her gown.

  “Here,” she said. “Let us walk.”

  They packed the blanket and food and led the horses from the stream. They did not mount them now, but guided them along. It felt strange to Iliff to be stepping over the same grass and beneath the same trees he had just experienced moments before in his mind. He looked again to Skye, whose face frowned in thought.