“You are very much a success,” Zephy said to Thorn when they were alone. “Toca worships you, and I think Elodia finds you very interesting, young as she is.”
“Well, what else could they think of this handsome face, so beautifully scarred in battle? The children are not without taste.”
“You’re a horrible Cherban.”
“Zephy, the four of us are coming very close in our minds. Tra. Hoppa sees it, she watches us with that funny little grin. It’s as if some force is increasing, the longer we are together.”
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. A force that made the thoughts of each increasingly open to the others. And a force, too, that had strengthened Zephy’s dreams until they were vivid and unsettling. She dreamed of Meatha’s face in the darkness and woke overcome with grief. And she began to dream of other things, some frightening, and some as wonderful, as full of light, as the vision in the tunnel.
In the dark dreams she thought she woke inside an enclosure, dank and sunless, a place that felt so evil she shuddered and drew back. Each time she dreamed it, she would see nearly lifeless creatures lying like cadavers on narrow shelves and feeling without hope, without sense of any kind, and yet as if something within them lived, a brief flicker . . .
And then again she would be on a path of smooth white stone like something poured and hardened that wound its way up the mountain between the rough black lava; she would be climbing eagerly. Or she would be in a cave of sparkling light, with water cascading around her catching the glint of the sun, and there would be ice falls where the foam of the water broke, and she . . . Oh, they were dreams that made her wake with a lilting hope and wonder. And once she dreamed she stood by a crystal pool and saw Meatha coming toward her.
Then there were the other dreams of Meatha, dreams she did not like to remember.
Sometimes the others touched one of her dreams so they would wake knowing the same agony or joy that she had felt. But it was Thorn who, when she had a particularly bad dream of the dark place, gave her comfort when she woke, coming outside the cave to sit with her in the early dawn and hold her close against the fear that swept her. She knew he had seen, had felt the same fear and revulsion she did.
“We have seen the captive Children,” he said quietly. “There is an evil there . . .” he looked at her steadily.
“An evil we must battle with every strength we can find.”
Then Elodia, sleeping with her head cradled on Nida’s, saddle, woke in the night to tell Zephy more about the dark cave—an enclosure made half of earth and half of stone walls, she thought—and the feeling of almost-death was rank and terrifying. Never a demonstrative child, Elodia pushed her face into Zephy’s shoulder and shook with dry weeping, this stoic little girl who always seemed so in control of herself. And she kept repeating, “I felt sick—so sick.” She stopped crying, her face white, and looked up at Zephy. “It was like something had hold of me from inside myself, making me the same as dead.”
“The drugs,” Thorn said later, “the drugs the Kubalese use.”
“In Carriol,” Tra. Hoppa said, “such drugs are well-enough known, dechbra and wellshing and epparoot. And MadogWerg. They make the mind sleep, make it unwilling to wake itself. They were given to stop pain; but when the pain was past, they were taken away again with great suffering. If they are used too long, they can kill. There were no roots or herbs to counteract their effects. But a Child of Ynell could make one whole again, make a mind want life again, by the strength of his thought. Some were trained for that work; it is harsh and very demanding, to reach in like that. It saps the strength of those who are able—and too few are able.”
“But drugs,” Zephy breathed. “How can they make spies of the Children, train them to spy, if they must keep them drugged?”
“Maybe that’s part of the plan,” Thorn replied, “to sicken them first, then bring them back when their will has been destroyed and they won’t resist any longer.”
Zephy stared at him and felt sick.
“It could mean permanent damage in their minds,” Tra. Hoppa said. “It could mean that some of them can never be whole again. The force that springs from that place, the way you two describe it, seems to me more than the cruelty and lust of the Kubalese—something even darker. Could those Children, perhaps one among them, have grown so twisted with the drugs that he has already turned his mind to the bidding of the Kubalese, turned to darkness itself?”
“It feels like that,” Thorn said. “More devious even than the Kubalese.” He rose and turned away from them to stare out through the fog toward the shrouded mountain. Then he left them, needing suddenly to be alone, climbing the rocky barrier.
Soon he was above the fog, looking down to where it lapped like a white sea to cover the land below. He thought of what lay ahead of them, and he knew he wanted to go into it alone. Yet he knew, too, that the girls had strengths he did not have. What lay ahead was a terrifying foe that took the body and mind from within. If there was only one thing that could battle that darkness, it might take the strength of all of them together. By their own stubbornness they must reach into those minds. Would they have the strength, even together?
Thorn could not judge Zephy’s powers, not now, they had come too close. Their minds met now so easily that he could not be sure what was her own power and what his—or what had grown out of their increasing solace in each other.
Who was to say that all of them would not end up bound in a living death like those they dreamed of, laid out on cold stone slabs, their minds taken from them?
The fog was beginning to blow around him, to move higher on the mountain, though lower down it was still so thick it covered Ere. Soon wispy fog had surrounded him, and he found it somehow soothing.
Something dark moved in the fog above him, high on the rocks. He stood looking, alarmed. There—the fog curled back; he could see the outstretched neck, the dark muzzle, the great wings, the Horse of Eresu snorted in alarm and thrust upward, his wings taking the sky . . .
He was gone, into the fog-drowned sky.
Thorn stood staring, his heart pounding.
Then he climbed upward, scraping his leg so the pain came sharp. When he could go no farther for sheer cliff, he stood on a narrow, jutting rock no wider than his arms’ reach. He knelt and saw the sharp round hoofprint. One print where the Horse of Eresu had struck the hard earth between stone as he leaped away.
When he returned to the valley enclosure, the donkeys were pressed against each other nervously, staring up at the mountain from which he had come.
And Zephy stood waiting for him. She put out her hand and took his hand quietly. “What did you see?” she breathed. “Something—something wonderful and—some thing winged, Thorn. Near you. I felt it, I felt you turn. But it was gone too soon, it was gone . . .” Her eyes were tragic with the loss.
The passion of the vision, of her intensity, gave him a passion for her, too, so he wanted to take her hi his arms. He stood staring down at her, his blood rising. And then Toca came running, shouting, his tousled pale hair every which way and his face wet from the scrubbing Tra. Hoppa had been giving him. Thorn saw Elodia, too, by the cave entrance, watching intently. Toca slammed into Thorn, his eyes huge. “Show me what you saw! Show him again, show him to me!” he demanded. And, when Thorn had, “More of him! I want more. Make him come down here!”
“I can’t make him, Toca, it’s only what I saw.” What did the child think, what interpretation had he found in that six-year-old mind for the ability they had? “It’s only what I saw, not what I can make it be.”
The little boy looked unbelieving. “I can,” he said, almost sullenly.