Ison of the Isles (21 page)

It took half an hour to get the mess sorted out into an orderly line. They strung reins between the teams of mules to keep them all together, then set out, Harg at the head and Brixt at the rear. Gill walked at Harg’s side, and the scout carried a lantern before them.

It was easier going than Harg had dared to hope. The floor was a frozen stream of black stone, rippled in the direction of their travel. It sloped gently downward, a little steeper as they progressed. Harg told himself it was only the slope of the mountainside, but it was hard to keep from feeling that they were going deeper into the earth.

In the blackness, there was no telling how far they had come when the scout paused, his lantern showing a branch in the tunnel ahead. Harg called out for a halt, and all down the line behind they heard the drivers curbing their mules.

“What’s wrong?” Harg said to the scout.

The man’s sharp face was weirdly lit by the lantern: his chin, the tip of his nose, his eyebrows. “There was no spot like this when I came through,” he said.

“There must have been,” Harg said, knowing it was untrue. “We can’t have gotten off track; there has only been one way.”

The scout shrugged nervously. “I can scout them both, but I know what I will find.”

“What’s that?”

“Any path I take will lead out. Any path
you
take will lead wherever the mountain is trying to get you to go.”

Harg felt a fatalistic resignation. “You choose, then.”

“That will make no difference.”

The two branches looked identical, but a wind was blowing from the left-hand one. Perhaps a wind meant a way outside. “We’ll take that one,” Harg said.

Before long, the downward slope grew even steeper, and the drivers had to rein back the mules to prevent them from going too fast. The wind picked up till it was whistling past their ears. It was warm.

“I don’t like the look of this,” Gill said.

“You have a better idea?” Harg asked. Gill was silent.

Would there be a song someday about the Ison Harg who was no Ison, who led an army down into the maw of Mount Embo? Harg wondered how the chorus would go. Something about being eaten by fire, perhaps. He could almost hear it, sung to the tune of “Seven Dead Men on the Beach.”

They had gotten some ways ahead of the main party when Harg stopped suddenly. “Shield your light,” he told the scout. The man took off his jacket and draped it around the lantern till blackness closed in. Or what should have been blackness. There were faint highlights of orange light on the rock walls ahead.

Indecision gripped Harg. “Do you think we should turn back?” he asked Gill.

The sweat on Gill’s face glistened faintly. “Would it gain us anything?” he asked.

No. Even if they reversed course, the tunnel might lead them directly back here, as long as the mountain hadn’t yet had its way.

“Give me the lamp,” Harg said to the scout. “Go back and tell the rest to wait. I’ll go ahead and see if it’s safe.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gill said.

Harg paused. “You don’t have to, Gill.”

“I know.”

For a moment, their eyes met in the lamplight. They were alone, and Harg knew he could no longer lead Gill on under false pretences. “I’m a fraud, Gill,” he said softly.

“No, you’re not,” Gill said.

“There’s something you don’t know. The dhota-nur—”

Gill put a hand on his shoulder. “Harg. It doesn’t matter. You’re still Ison to me.”

Harg wanted to confess everything, to prove his own guilt, but he couldn’t bear to lose the look of trust on Gill’s face. So he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself.”

The air grew warmer with every step down the tunnel. Soon the orange light was visible even over the lamplight.

The tunnel ended suddenly. The walls fell away on either side and they entered a huge chamber, a bubble in the rock. They walked forward across a wide ledge that descended in terraces, like a black beach ending in a drop-off. When they reached the edge, they stopped. Before them lay a deep chimney in the rock. Hundreds of feet below, at the base of the cliff, was the surface of a glowing lake. On the edges, it was crusted over, but farther out it was riddled with cracks through which light glowed. Out in the centre molten rock bubbled, flinging white-hot globs into the air. The heat was intense; Harg felt it beating against his face, the hot wind rushing past him into the chimney that continued on over their heads out of sight.

A firesnake nest. It was no place for humans.

“Why have the Mundua led us here?” Gill said. He had to shout to be heard over the rumbling and the rush of wind.

“I don’t know,” Harg answered. The heat was waking the wound in his face; it was burning painfully. The sight of the bubbling lava was mesmerizing; he had to drag his eyes away and force himself to scan the room. “There,” he said, pointing to an irregular opening in the rock wall opposite them. “Another opening. The tunnel goes on.”

“We’ll have to skirt this well to get to it.”

“Yes. Let’s check it out.”

He set out along the ledge, hugging the wall. His good eye was watering in the heat; the other one felt as if someone had jammed a glowing coal into the empty socket. He came to a halt, fists gripped tight, unable to see where he was going. “You go first,” he said to Gill, waving him on.

He followed as much by feel and sound as by sight. The pain kept tugging at his face, as if to send him off course. He had a sudden, wild thought that if he could only wash his face in the lake below, he could be truly clean.

The chamber around him was glowing, as if the rock crystals were interwoven with light. He stopped, dazzled, for he was seeing from the eye that wasn’t there. Slowly, irresistibly, his gaze was drawn toward the well, and his feet followed. Only when Gill caught hold of his arm did he stop, on the very edge of the cliff.

He saw it clearly now. Rising from the shores of the lake below were the foundation stones of great buildings, their tops now buried in the black rock above them. Bright lava lapped at their feet; for an instant, Harg saw the golden flank of a snakelike thing slide through the lake, coiled around the base of a tower.

The mountain’s power was rising through his legs. He felt magma flowing in his veins.

“Harg, what’s wrong?” Gill shouted into his ear. “What are you looking at?”

Harg pointed. “Do you see that? There was a city here once, Gill. It was buried under the lava.”

“No. I can’t see it.”

“I could do that to Tornabay,” Harg said.

There was a pause. “Let’s get out of here,” Gill said.

“You think I’m joking,” Harg said.

“No, I don’t.” Gill took his arm, trying to draw him away from the lake. With an irrational surge of anger Harg jerked away.

“Don’t touch me,” he said.

“Harg, how are we going to get the gunpowder past here safely?” Gill said.

The practical question made Harg’s mind focus, a gear slipping back into its groove. He looked around. “The heat itself won’t set it off, as long as we stay away from the well,” he said. “All the same, we’d better send everyone else through first, and bring the gunpowder last.”

They were walking again toward the tunnel’s continuation. With every step Harg felt the certainty drain out of him. The rocks underfoot were an ugly black excretion. For an instant there, Harg realized, he had actually felt like an Ison. He had known what the real ones were like: strong and sure, not scarred and ugly with old mistakes. His eye was hurting again.

Beyond the great chamber, the tunnel led upward again, and the hot breeze was at their backs. “It leads out,” Harg said, sure of it without knowing why.

He sank down on a rock, feeling like a twisted clinker left in the path of onrushing events. “Go back and tell them to come on,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

Gill was watching him carefully. “Don’t go back into the chamber, Harg,” he said.

“All right,” Harg said, though he barely heard.

Alone, he sat staring at the wall. The pain lancing through his eye made him think of how he lost it, and that made him think of Goth. The only person who had always known him through and through. And the only one who had always been perfectly consistent in his rejection.

All I have to do is win
, he thought fiercely.
If I win, they will forget everything else.

He looked back toward the glowing lava chamber. He no longer doubted which side the mountain was on. It would be on his, if only he dared to command it.

He rose and walked back toward the chamber. In the well, the lake was blinding bright, churning. He gazed with his blind eye into the white-gold heat, and again saw a flash of dazzling scales. Deep in the churning lava, a faceted eye like a gemstone was watching him. The mountain’s pulse thundered in his body. For a delirious moment he
was
Mount Embo.

The lake closed over the snake-eye. Harg looked across the chamber and saw the head of his troop emerging tentatively from the other tunnel. He signalled at them, waving them on. They saw him, and urged the terrified mules forward. He knew that they saw victory in him.

When all of them had passed through and were assembled in an orderly line in the tunnel, Harg again took the lead. It was only then he realized that he still could see, with a ghostly double vision, from his missing eye.

*

The tunnel ended just as the scout had said it did, in a slope of rubble leading down to a pine forest. Harg, Gill, and the scout went ahead to determine where they were. The fog had lifted from the top of the mountain, though it still formed a misty layer below. The sun was setting, and they could see Mount Embo’s shadow spread out before them.

“Listen,” Gill said.

From far away, the boom of artillery drifted up through the fog. “Jearl must have begun his attack,” Harg said. He did not mention the other possibility—that somehow Talley had outwitted them and fallen upon their fleet by surprise. Harg was almost superstitious about the man’s ability to counter his moves. “Rot this fog,” he said. “From up here we could see what was going on if only it were clear.”

They scrambled down the edge of the lava flow, looking for a route on around the mountain. Walking on the carpet of rust-coloured needles beneath the pines seemed almost unnatural after so long in a deformed world of rock. The trees ended when they came to a level clifftop where an outcrop of granite plunged sheer to the mountainside below. When they came to the edge, Gill gave an exclamation of astonishment.

An inshore wind had wakened, and was scattering the fog below them. They were directly above Tornabay.

It was impossible. They should still have been miles away. And yet there it lay, in a wide arc along the bay. Below the cliff they stood on, a rugged spur of mountain jutted out, an old lava ridge that split the city like a wedge. The palace rose from its farthest foot. Lamps were just beginning to show in some of the windows. The wind brought a faint smell of cooking fires.

Harg glanced at the scout to make sure he saw it, too.

“I guess we took a shortcut,” Gill said.

Harg said nothing. He felt as if an unlikely contract had been fulfilled.

Down in the harbour, a flock of merchant boats and three Inning warships lay penned. The firing they had heard was coming from the two bay entrances, where Jearl’s ships were shelling the forts that guarded the straits.

“Jearl caught three of their ships in harbour,” Harg said.

“They probably feel safe there,” Gill said.

“Safe and useless.” Harg turned to scan the ledge they stood on. It looked as if it had been placed here specifically for the purpose of mounting artillery. The palace was well within range. Even the harbour, in a pinch. They hadn’t a prayer of hitting those warships, but they could make them feel uneasy. “Go back and tell Brixt to bring up the guns,” he said to Gill. “If we can place and train them before dark, we can start shelling in the morning.”

“What about the main detachment?” Gill said. “They must be way behind us.”

“We’ll give them a little surprise,” Harg said. As Gill left, Harg turned to the scout. “Take a message to Drome Garlow for me. Tell him our position, and find how quickly he can send a force to guard our backs.” The scout looked like a small animal watching a predator go by, knowing the prey would be something far larger than himself.

The unexpected news that they were close to their goal spurred the troops to new efforts. But despite much strain and hurry, the sun was down before the guns were in place and their crews ready to set to work. Harg stood on the cliff edge watching as, across the rocky ridge between them, the palace guards lit torches along the walls. “That’s right, mark it for us,” Harg said.

“Haven’t they noticed us?” Brixt growled beside him.

Harg shrugged. “Maybe the light is in their eyes.”

Or maybe, he thought uneasily, they knew something he didn’t. He suddenly felt very exposed, out here ahead of the main force. It would be so easy for the Innings to send out a party to dislodge them from this perch. “Has that scout come back?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Brixt said.

“Shall we fire some test rounds, sir?” a gun captain asked.

It would be a good idea to get their aim while there was still a trace of light to see what they were hitting. But it would reveal their position and set off a cascade of events that would be hard to control or predict. Harg turned and looked behind them. The western sky was inflamed a livid red. Against it, the mountain was a black silhouette, waiting. A wisp of steam rose from its top.

“We’d better wait till we hear from the main force,” he said. “You have sentries patrolling, Brixt?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. No fires or lights. There’s no point in advertising where we are yet.”

They waited in silence as night deepened over the valley of the Em. The quarter moon was just rising beyond Fosk when a stir in the rear of the company made Harg jump up. Brixt was coming toward him, and the scout was at his side.

“They’re still miles away,” Brixt said.

The scout told the story. Drome Garlow’s force was camped for the night in a meadow between two fingers of lava flow. The terrain had been nearly impassable, and the troops were exhausted. Drome estimated that it would take them till noon the next day to catch up.