Storm Rising

murmur of thanks.

Then he ate as quickly as he could shovel the stew in with the aid of a piece of tough, flat bread. The tea had an odd, astringent taste, but it was curiously soothing to his raw throat.

As soon as he had finished both tea and stew, the same Shin'a'in took bowl and cup away from him. The others were already curled in their bedrolls for sleep, and he followed their example. The Shin'a'in blew out the oil lamps on his way out of the tent, leaving them in darkness.

At some point before he went to sleep, Altra appeared, lying beside him and half over him, creating a swath of heat at his back. The Firecat purred quietly and said just one thing.

:Karal... I'm proud of you.:

With that added comfort—in more ways than the merely physical—he fell instantly asleep.

The Shin'a'in woke them before dawn, and they broke their fast with more stew, bread, and tea. Then they were in the saddle again, and pushing outward.

The second day was a repetition of the first, as was the third. Karal's eyes grew sore from the reflection of sun on snow, and from the red eyes that met his every time anyone—except the shaman and An'desha—turned to face him, the others must be suffering the same. The cold, dry air made his lips crack and chap, and his throat sore. After the second day, Lo'isha gave them each a little vial of aromatic oil to moisten their lips with, and advised them that they might want to anoint their whole faces. Karal took him up on the suggestion; Firesong resisted at first, but by midafternoon, with his cheeks flaming from wind-chapping, he had given in and done the same.

Karal lost track of time; he was either riding or sleeping—too much of the former, not enough of the latter. The landscape they traversed was always the same; not quite flat, but close enough for a young man from the mountains, rolling hill after snow-covered, rolling hill, with scarcely a tree or a bush in sight except where they marked the passage of watercourses or the location of a spring. The cold numbed all of him, and he never was really warm except the moment that they awoke him. Firesong looked miserable, Silverfox looked resigned, and only An'desha and Lo'isha seemed to thrive.

But then, this is—was—his home.

The gryphons rarely appeared, and when they did, they were fixated on the goal and could talk of nothing else. At last—after how many days he could not tell, that goal loomed up on the horizon.

It was singularly unprepossessing, for something they had chased across half a continent—an odd, melted stub of silvery-gray rock, poking up out of the top of yet another rolling hill.

Then, when it didn't get any closer, he realized that it must be much larger than he had thought.

Then he finally spotted the tiny dots of more Shin'a'in swarmed about the base, and the equally tiny dots of two gryphons circling it, and he understood how large it was.

There was a long pile of something dark against the snow at the foot of the Tower-rich, turned earth. It looked as if the Shin'a'in had been digging for something.

The closer they got, the more his skin crawled. The Tower simply didn't look melted, it had been melted. The great force that fueled the Cataclysm had made the rock of the Tower run like liquid wax. And they were about to play with forces worse and more hazardous than the one that had done this, weapons that the Mage of Silence, who had created this, thought were too dangerous to use!

What am I doing here? he thought, aghast.

It would not be the last time he had that thought.

They rested and slept for what remained of that day and all suicidal to the next night; it would be stupid, and perhaps suicidal to enter the Vault with their minds fogged with fatigue. But the moment the sun rose, so did they, and one of the Sword-Sworn led them to the opening the Shin'a'in had been working on since this expedition had been decided on.

The old door to the Tower lay somewhere beneath several hundred tons of melted, fused rock. The Shin'a'in had taken a more direct route to the Vault beneath the remains of the Tower. There must have been hundreds of them working on it to get it done in so short a period of time.

They had burrowed down in a long slanting tunnel into the side of the hill supporting the Tower, straight to the ancient Vault wall. That was only stone blocks mortared together, and the mortar, after so many centuries, was old and weak. Urtho had never bothered to put any sort of armoring or defensive measures on the wall of the Vault—after all, anyone who got this far would still have to dig a hole in the full sight of the guards, the army, the Kaled'a'in, the gryphons....