He spent the fourth night of his journey, sleeping little, amid a tumble of huge rocks at timberline. Tonight the lights of Vulcan's forge-fires appeared to Mark to be almost overhead, startlingly near and at the same time dishearteningly far above him. Near midnight some large animal came prowling near, staying not far beyond the glow of a small fire that Mark had built in a sheltering crevice. When he heard the hungry snuffling of the beast he unwrapped Townsaver and gripped the hilt of the weapon in both hands. No sound came from the blade, and the air around it remained clear and quiet. Mark could feel no hint of magical protection in its steel, yet in the circumstances the simple weight and razor sharpness of it were a considerable comfort.
In the morning there were no animals of any kind in sight, nor could Mark even find a significant track. The air at dawn was bitter cold but almost windless. During the night Mark had wrapped himself again in the sword's cloth, but now he swathed the weapon again and tied it for carrying. Then he climbed, heading up between foothills, following a dry ravine, moving now on knees that quivered from his need for food. Once he was moving, he was no longer quite sure just how he'd spent the night just past, whether he'd slept at all or not. It seemed to him quite possible that he'd been walking without a pause since yesterday.
Shortly he came upon a small spring that gave him good water to drink. He took this discovery as a good omen, drank deeply, and pressed on.
All streams were behind him now, as far as he could tell. He kept following what looked like an ill-defined trail up through the ravine. Often he wasn't sure that he was really following a trail at all. By now he was unarguably on the slopes of the mountain itself, but so far the climbing was not nearly as difficult as he had feared that it might be. There were no sheer cliffs or treacherous rockslides that could not be avoided. Even so, the going soon became murderously hard because of sheer physical exhaustion.
Mark considered ways to lighten the load that he was carrying. But it consisted of only a few things, none of which he felt willing yet to leave behind. The idea that he might be able to discard the sword, somehow, along the way had itself already been discarded. The sword was connected with his goal, and it would go with him to the end. At one point, with his head spinning, he did decide to divest himself of bow and quiver. But he changed his mind and went back for them before he'd gone ten steps.
The climb became a blur of weariness and hunger. At some timeless bright hour near the middle of the day Mark was jarred back to full awareness of his surroundings by the realization that he'd run into a new feature of the mountain. Just ahead was the bottom of a cliff face, very nearly vertical, a surface that he was never going to be able to climb… gradually he understood that there was no need for him to try.
He was standing on a high, irregular shelf of black rock, with the wind howling around him. But the day was still clear, and the afternoon sun on his back was comfortingly warm. The sun had warmed the black rocks here considerably, even if the deeper shadows still held patches of snow, and there was a chill in the wind that played endlessly in the fantastic chimneys of the cliff. Mark stood still for a time, still holding the sword and bearing his other burdens, slowly getting his breath back after the long climb. In some of the chimneys he could hear a roaring that was deeper than the wind, a noise that he thought was coming up from somewhere far below.
Mark was wondering which of the chimneys might hold fire, when his attention was caught by a place he saw at the rear of the rocky shelf, just at the angle where the clifface went leaping up again. There were signs of old occupancy back there. Mark's eye was caught by scattered, head-sized lumps of some black and gnarled substance. The lumps were of an unfamiliar, off-round shape. He went to one and prodded it with the soft toe of his hunter's boot. The object was hard, and very massive for its size. Mark slowly understood that the lumps were metal or ore that had been melted and then reformed into rough blobs.
He stood now in the very rear of a shallow half-cave in the face of the rising cliff, in a place where the sun struck now and the wind was baffled. Here there were old, cold ashes, from what must have been a very large wood fire. The ashes looked too old, Mark thought, to have any connection with the fires he'd seen up here during the last few evenings. Anyway, he d assumed, from the stories he'd heard, that what people called the lights of Vulcan's forge were something to do with earthfire, volcanic, whether or not it was the god in person who raised and tended them. Yet plainly someone had once built a large blaze, deliberately, here in this broad depression in the rock floor against the cliff. The stain of its smoke still marked the natural chumney above. The tone of the old soot was a different darkness from that of the rock itself.
In front of the abandoned fireplace Mark slumped to his knees, then let himself sink back into a sitting position. The air up here was thin, and stank of sulphur. It frosted the lungs and gave them little nourishment. At least his stomach had now ceased its clamoring for food; he had reached an internal balance with his hunger, a state almost of comfort… with a mental snap he came back to full alertness, finding himself sitting quietly on stone. Had he just started to fall asleep or what?
He didn't see what difference it would make if he did doze off for a rest. But no, there was something to do, something to be decided, now that he was here. He ought to see to that first, think about it a little at least. He'd come up here for some vital reason… ah yes, the sword. When he had warmed himself a little more, he'd think about it.
Still sitting in the faint sun-warmth of the high, sheltered place, Mark slowly began to notice how much unburned wood was lying about nearby. There were large chips and roughly broken scraps, and the half-burnt ends of logs that must once have been too big for a man to lift. He realized that he needed heat. He wanted a fire, and so he painfully began to gather and arrange wood in the old fireplace.
It should have been an easy matter to build a fire using this available material, but weakness made it hard. Drawing his hunter's knife, Mark tried to shave tinder and fine kindling but his hands were shaky, and the blade slipped from the half-frozen wood. He tried the sword and found the task much easier despite its weight and size. With the sword held motionless, its point resting on the ground and the hilt on his bent knee, Mark could draw any chunk of wood against the edge and take off shavings as thin and fine as he wanted. Then when he had his tinder and his kindling ready, his flint struck a fat spark from the rough flange of the sword's steel hilt.
The fire caught from that first spark. It burned well-alrhost magically well, Mark thought. Larger fragments soon fed it into respectable size and crackling strength. Then, after he'd rested and warmed himself a little more, he took his hunter's cup and gathered some snow from a shaded crevice, to melt and heat himself some water for a drink. Now, if only he had a little food… Mark cut that thought off, afraid the hunger pangs would start again.
He sat on the rocky ground with the unwrapped sword beside him, sipping heated water. And found himself staring at large symbols, markings so faint that he hadn't noticed them at first, painted or somehow outlined on the rock of the shallow caves rear wall. Several of the symbols had been partially obscured by the old stains of smoke. There were in all about a dozen of the signs, all of them drawn with inhumanly straight, geometrical sides; and the lines of one of them, Mark realized, formed the same design that appeared on the hilt of the sword. He took up the sword again and looked at it carefully to make sure.