Path of the Sun: A Novel of Dhulyn and Parno (18 page)

“Listen,” Dhulyn said, in the nightwatch whisper.

“Voices,” Parno agreed, in the same quiet tone. “On the other side of this hedge.”

“No, ahead of us.”

Parno slipped down out of the saddle to peer around the corner. Dhulyn joined him, sword in hand.

“Nothing,” he said, straightening. “Empty as all the others have been.” He squinted at her. “Some trick of the walls, sound bouncing?”

“Our own voices echoing back to us, you mean?”

Parno frowned. “Not very likely when you put it like that.”

Dhulyn turned until they were almost back to back. “There’s nothing likely about this place. It’s the very definition of
unlikely
.”

They turned back for the horses and remounted without saying anything more. Had the voices sounded familiar? Dhulyn was no longer sure she’d even heard them.

“We are now heading east, with possibly a finger’s worth of south—”

“And if we take this corner, we’ll be heading north, yes, my soul, I had realized that.” Dhulyn drummed her free hand on her right thigh.

“We could turn back to the last dividing of the path, take the other direction.”

“Which would turn us away from the east in any case,” Dhulyn pointed out. “So far, our working theory has led us well; at least, we have not run into any dead ends.”

“I suggest we continue, and if we don’t find another path that will take us east within, say twenty horse lengths, we reconsider.”

“Agreed.”

Dhulyn took three deep breaths, letting each one out slowly, and once more triggered the Hunter’s
Shora
. A tightening of her knees signaled Bloodbone to move forward slowly. There was no wind and none of the usual sounds of birds Dhulyn would expect from beyond the walls of the Path. The temperature was not uncomfortable, or even unseasonable for Menoin, but she did not think it had varied in all the hours they had been here.

Suddenly she coughed, blinking, and gagged slightly as her stomach twisted, and she felt as though she were about to fall. “Parno?”

“Yes, I feel it as well. Just as though—” Parno’s words trailed off as the feeling of nausea and disorientation died as abruptly as it had appeared. “Dhulyn?”

She nodded. “We’re facing east again,” she said. She looked back along the Path.

“Don’t bother,” Parno said. “The path hasn’t curved, nor have we turned a corner. We haven’t even gone the twenty horse lengths we were planning on—you can still see the corner we came around.”

And so she could. “Onward, then, Hunter’s
Shora
.”

“I’ve spoken to you before about teaching your grandmother.”

They passed several more turnoffs, including one that led into a rock garden, but as the path they were on still led them east, they did not take any of the other ways. Some minutes after the last branching to the south, Dhulyn shut her eyes.

“Now we’re going downhill,” she said. She opened her eyes again. The path ahead of them looked as level and as smooth as a dance floor. And yet her senses were not deceiving her. There was a slight difference in the way Bloodbone’s haunches tensed that told her unmistakably that they were walking down an incline.

And the ground fell out from beneath her.

P
ARNO TWISTED, thrusting out with his legs to distance himself from the flying hooves and crushing weight of his horse. Warhammer, trained for the accidents of the battlefield, would also be struggling to land well and safely. Parno’s ears popped as air pressure changed, and for an instant he felt as though he were falling upward. He barely had time to think that Dhulyn would be safe—her Bloodbone was steadier, less inclined to panic than was Warhammer—when he hit the ground hard enough to bruise. He stayed where he was, only bringing up his arms to shield his head. To roll in any direction was possibly to roll under a falling horse.

A sharp whinny, and a curse, came from his left where Dhulyn, on her hands and knees, was already moving toward him. He held up his hand.

“A moment.” He took a careful breath but found no pain in his rib cage. His arms and legs were likewise sound. He rolled until he could prop himself up on his elbow and winced, his hands pushing against thick turf where there had been dry stone a moment before. He looked around.

They were still in the Path of the Sun. “Demons and perverts,” he cursed. “What
was
that?”

“Whatever it was,” Dhulyn said as she got to her feet, “it is part of the labyrinth. Blooded Caids.” She staggered and fell again to her knees. Parno saw that on the other side of his Partner Bloodbone was only just struggling to stand. He looked around. Warhammer was over against the wall, lying half on his side. But his head was up, his eyes alert, and as Parno watched, the gray gelding hitched at himself a couple of times and wobbled to his feet.

“Whatever this sickness is, it is passing from the animals more quickly,” Dhulyn said. She was sitting back on her heels, her forehead in her hands as the world spun. Parno tried to sit up and winced, his hands going to his own head. He swallowed as his stomach twisted, and the grass beneath him seemed to want to exchange places with the stone walls of the Path. He hoped that his Partner was right, that this illness would indeed pass.

Dhulyn crawled over to him and held out her hand. Using her grip on him as leverage, she pulled herself upright until she was sitting cross-legged and could help him to do the same. Parno sucked in his breath; he was going to have quite a bruise where his sword hilt had dug into his side. Lucky it wasn’t worse. When Dhulyn grabbed his other hand, he realized what she was doing and sat up as straight as he could. The twenty-seven basic
Shoras
that all Mercenaries learned included a meditation
Shora
, intended to increase relaxation and, by strength of focus, to make the other
Shoras
easier to learn and use. Partners often performed their meditation together, and that was what Dhulyn was doing now.

He took a deep breath, consciously making sure that they were breathing together. Almost immediately he felt his heart rate—their heart rates—slow and their breathing come easier. In a moment his head stopped spinning, as if the concentration of the
Shora
was all that was needed to clear the fog from his brain. The ground they sat on made a final wobble and steadied. Everything felt normal. Parno opened his eyes.

Dhulyn’s eyes were still closed, a frown creating a tiny wrinkle between her blood-red brows. The scar that made her upper lip turn back when she smiled in a certain way was just visible, slightly paler than her own pale skin. Her eyes blinked open.

“Better?” he asked, and waited for her nod. “Do you know what it was?”

“It was like being at sea, after the typhoon hit,” she said. “After a long while in the water, I couldn’t tell what direction the waves were carrying me—even which way the surface was, at times.” She shrugged.

“We’d lost our sense of direction,” he remembered. For a Mercenary Brother, that was serious indeed. They could not afford to be turned around in the heat of battle, for example, and people with poor senses of direction rarely made it through their Schooling. The Schooling itself, to say nothing of many of the
Shoras
, further enhanced whatever natural talent a Brother might have.

Dhulyn squeezed his hands and released them, hopping to her feet in one motion, her dizziness plainly gone. She went immediately to Bloodbone, stroking the mare’s side and rubbing her face and nose. The warhorse snorted and bumped her head against Dhulyn’s shoulder, like a large cat. Parno approached Warhammer with caution, crooning the soothing noises Dhulyn had taught him, and it was a mark of how nervous the horse was that he responded to Parno with the same ready affection that Bloodbone had shown his Partner. Anything familiar was welcome, it seemed.

“My soul.” Parno looked over to where Dhulyn still stroked absently at Bloodbone’s nose. She was looking not at him but at a knob of rock that protruded from the gray granite wall not far from where she stood. “What time would you say it is?”

Parno’s stomach rumbled, but he didn’t think that “time to eat something” was the answer Dhulyn was looking for. “Perhaps the middle of the afternoon watch,” he said. “Why?”

“Because if so, then these blooded shadows are pointing the wrong way.”

 

“It must be the time of day that has somehow changed,” Dhulyn said, as she recapped the water flask.

“It’s one thing to know that your Visions show you both past and future, and that to the Crayx all of our recorded time is ‘now.’ ” Parno took the flask from her and hefted it before replacing it among his gear. “It’s another thing entirely to experience that in a matter of moments we’ve lost half a day.”

“Can you think of another explanation?” Dhulyn said. “Somehow, in passing through that spot where we seemed to fall, we have reached a place where, as these shadows tell us, it is still morning.”

“
Blooded
demons,” Parno cursed. “Will it take us that much longer to find the end of the Path, then?”

“I’m glad to hear you so optimistic,” Dhulyn said. “I don’t feel so sure we’ll find the end at all.”

Parno grinned at her. “We’ve been in worse spots.”

“Happy you think so.”

Food and water repacked, every tie, strap and girth double-checked, they set out once again, still side by side but leading their horses now, as Dhulyn felt it would be safer if the ground should once again decide to throw them down. They had not gone far down the turfed path when what looked like a marking caught Parno’s eye.

“This is something we haven’t seen before.” Parno pointed at the rock wall on his side, just above his own height. Someone using great patience and skill had chiseled a shape into the rough granite wall. It was the first human-made thing they’d seen since entering the Path of the Sun—always supposing that the Path itself was not a human-made thing.

Dhulyn reached up and brushed at the carving with her dagger before stepping to one side to view it from a different angle. “It is the face,” she said. “See here the chin? And here the nose and brows. I Saw this in my Vision the other night, when I Saw the Red Horseman.”

Parno squinted his eyes and stepped to one side, squinting. Yes, he could see it now, the shape of the lips, the little hollows that were the pupils of the eyes. A face without doubt.

“Who could have put it there?” he wondered. “Someone taller than I am, for certain.”

“Or someone on horseback, perhaps.”

“Is it a warning? Or a guide?”

But Dhulyn was already shaking her head. “I’ve Seen it twice, I think. Once when it was very clean and fresh, as if newly done, and once again, like this, the eyes empty. But that was all, nothing else, just the face.”

Parno touched his fingers to his forehead. “It does no harm to be polite,” he said when he caught Dhulyn looking at him with a smile.

“I’ll leave the courtesies to you,” she said, dipping her head in a shallow bow, but to him, not to the carving on the wall.

They set off once again, leaving the carved face behind them, still carefully choosing every path and turning that would take them east. They had gone perhaps ten spans when Parno looked up to his left . . . and stopped.

“Maybe it’s a different one,” he said. But even he could hear the disbelief in his voice. It was identical, the pointed chin, the scrubbed line of the nose, the hollows of the eyes. Even the slight scratch where Dhulyn’s dagger had scraped away a piece of lichen. She came to stand next to him, her shoulder brushing his.

“It seems you were right to be courteous.” Dhulyn’s voice twanged with anger, and Parno knew she was frightened. “We haven’t circled back,” she said. “We would have felt the change of direction.”

Parno cast about for something, anything, to say to her. He narrowed his eyes. “We based our choice of direction on the way the shadows fell,” he said. Dhulyn shot him a venomous look out of the corner of her eye. “No, listen, my heart. What if the shadows were
not
wrong?” Dhulyn turned, but she was listening now, though with a frown drawing down her blood-red brows. “What if they tell us truly?” he asked.

Dhulyn looked skeptical. “Shadows are neither right nor wrong in themselves,” she said. “They
are
.”

“Yes, exactly.” Now it was becoming clearer to him. “If the shadows just are, then somehow we’ve interpreted them wrongly. We took the position of the sun from the angles of the shadows,” he said, gesturing with his hands at an angle to show her what he meant. “We decided that the angles told us the time of day had changed after we passed through that . . . that falling place. What if we were wrong?”

Dhulyn chewed on her lower lip, turning slowly to look over the ground and rock around them. “So. If it is
not
the time of day that has changed, and this
is
the late afternoon . . .” This was Dhulyn’s Scholar’s voice, and Parno relaxed.

“Then it is the direction of the sun’s path that has changed,” they said in unison.

“East is west, and west is east,” Dhulyn said.

“Here, wherever ‘here’ is, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.”

“And we have been traveling in the wrong direction.” Dhulyn nodded, looped Bloodbone’s reins more closely around her wrist, and set off again, this time with the carved face to their right. They had gone only a few paces, perhaps a quarter of a span, when they found the turf under their feet had been cut.

Parno squatted to examine the phenomenon more closely, alert to any clue it might give them. It looked as though someone had taken a dagger and cut a design into the turf. He glanced to one side. Yes, there were the pieces which had been removed, tidily placed at the bottom of the wall.

“Well?” Dhulyn said from where she stood guard to one side.

“A moment, my heart.” The design looked familiar, rounded edges, perhaps a loop . . . Parno felt his face heat as he recognized the shape. Grunting, he straightened to his feet. “It’s a badge,” he said. “The shape of a Mercenary badge cut into the grass.”