I flushed, awkward and embarrassed. He, predictably, smiled to himself as at a secret joke. I returned to the window, though I could feel his eyes on me continually as the miles passed.
We stopped for lunch three hours later and I was out of that coach before you could say Mobile Tomb. After a morning two feet from the prince of darkness, even Renthrette’s steely gaze seemed welcoming. Another misreading. She met my smile with a look that could turn milk to cheese at fifty paces and returned her attention to her horse, who she probably deemed a more worthy companion.
I had wandered cheerlessly off into the underbrush to relieve myself and was returning to the road up a shallow embankment when, glancing up, I saw that the sky, which had been bright and clear only moments before, was now darkening with huge purple storm clouds. They were moving at great speed, steadily obliterating the blue beyond, though I could feel no wind to speak of. There was a rumble of thunder and, almost immediately, there came a pattering of rain.
I scrambled up the slope to the road just as a distant lightning flash set Renthrette’s filly snorting and stamping. She dismounted hurriedly and whispered to it. As she did so, I glanced at the coach horses which, by contrast, were curiously still and unaffected, even as the thunder bellowed loud overhead. Orgos and Mithos slid down from the driver’s plate, hunching over to keep the rain from their faces, and, for a moment, the four of us were together in the road, caught quite off guard by the sudden storm. We exchanged bewildered and irritable glances and then I heard, from inside the carriage, the faintest laughter.
The ambassador, who was watching us through the coach window, clearly found the idea of great adventurers caught out by a cloudburst extremely amusing. His eyes fell on mine. “The pragmatist gets drenched!” he exclaimed with strange rapture. “How easily the unlikely takes you off guard, Mr. Hawthorne!”
There was something oddly knowing about his manner and, recalling my dream, I felt a shiver course through my spine. He continued to laugh, staring at me, and then, with a great sigh as if he’d finally got what he wanted, he turned his face up to the sky. “See, William,” he said. “Reality dawns.”
I followed his gaze and found that the clouds were now a charcoal gray marbled with wisps of violet and pea-soup green, thick and impenetrable. Light had fallen to a fraction of what it had been moments before, and the clouds seemed to be swirling like some heavenly maelstrom. Then, with a deafening roar and a crack like the splitting of a great tree, there was a flash of lightning that burned the world away, searing everything white and throwing me onto the ground.
I don’t know how long I lay there. It could have been seconds, but it felt like more. I thought I might have been blinded by the flash, but when I opened my eyes I found that they, and the rest of me, were quite unharmed. I was face down in the dirt and everything was still.
The dirt was dry.
Dirt?
I rolled over quickly and found Orgos already on his knees beside me. Mithos was a few feet away, and Renthrette, who was still holding her horse’s bridle, was standing a little to his right. They were all gazing about them in silence. There was no rain, no coach, no ambassador, no road.
“Where the hell are we?” I gasped.
Mithos gazed around the grassy vale in which we stood, his eyes lingering on the steep snowcapped mountains which hemmed us in on all sides.
“I have no idea,” he said.
SCENE IV Bird Watching
“What do you mean, you have no idea?” I spluttered. “We are a few miles north of Stavis, right? Where we were a few minutes ago. I mean, we have to be.”
“No,” whispered Mithos, still gazing about him as if he were in a trance, “we’re not. I’ve never seen these mountains before.”
“I’ve never even heard of mountains close to Stavis,” added Orgos in the same awed tone. “Outside Thrusia, the nearest range is Aeloria in the northwest.”
“Home of the Diamond Empire,” said Mithos. “And if we’re there, we’ll know soon enough. There’ll be fortifications, patrols. . ”
“But Aeloria is three or four hundred miles from Stavis,” added Renthrette, breaking silence for the first time. Her surliness had melted in the face of this new and thoroughly astounding development.
“More,” said Orgos.
“So where in the name of all that’s rational are we?” I demanded irritably. They were the adventurers after all. They were supposed to know these things.
“Like I said,” Mithos replied, turning to me at last. “I have no idea.”
“Well could you think a little harder, please?” I shouted. “I mean, we were only doing, what, six or seven miles an hour? And we had been on the Vetch road for about four hours. The Black Horse is twelve miles from Stavis, so that puts us. . What? What the hell’s the matter with you lot, eh? What are you staring at?”
Mithos took a deep breath and sighed. Then he took a step toward me and said, “I don’t know the land north of Stavis as well as I might, but there are no mountains in that region.”
“Yes there bloody are!” I yelled back at him. “Look around you! Use your bloody eyes, for God’s sake! Mountains! Everywhere. Of course there are bloody mountains north of Stavis. You think they grew overnight like some kind of apocalyptic mushroom? You think maybe no one spotted them before?”
“Have you ever seen mountains on maps of this area?” he responded, cool and hard.
“So they got left off. They aren’t especially interesting mountains. The mapmakers must have just figured they’d stick to the key stuff like towns and rivers. Maybe they had to write ‘Vetch’ in big curly letters and there was no room for the bloody mountains. Maybe-”
“We aren’t on the Vetch road anymore, Will,” he said with a touch of irritation. “Use
And suddenly my brain gave up and it just wasn’t worth arguing. He was right. There had to be an explanation, but he was right. We weren’t where we were supposed to be.
“This has something to do with the ambassador,” I muttered.
“Quite possibly,” said Mithos, himself again.
“If I ever see that bloke again. .” I began, but couldn’t think of anything that seemed suitable. “I’ll bet he drugged us and then drove us somewhere, dumped us and waited for us to come round. . ”
“Hundreds, maybe thousands of miles?” said Renthrette skeptically, but too confused herself to give the remark the withering disdain she would have mustered in other circumstances.
“If I’ve been unconscious,” said Orgos, “it hasn’t been for long. My beard hasn’t grown.”
“Maybe he shaved you,” I tried, lamely. Everyone ignored me and turned their eyes back to the mountains. A cold wind rippled the meadow in which we stood and, for the first time, I felt the chill of winter. Something was very badly wrong. It had been early autumn when we set out.
“So where to now?” Renthrette mused aloud.
“Shelter,” said Mithos, “and any signs of people we can track to civilization.”
“Which way?” said Orgos.
No one replied for a second, and then, with a half-shrug and no word of explanation, Mithos began walking across the valley. We followed, eventually, Renthrette remounting her horse, Orgos catching up with Mithos and striding silently along with him. I brought up the rear, in a stunned silence.
If the sun was going down, then we must be heading north. Presuming, of course, that the sun still set in the west. For all I knew, round here the sun might rise in the south, hang around for a bit and then go back the way it came. Maybe it didn’t go down at all, and would turn into the moon, or a side of beef. .
This was getting me nowhere, except perhaps on a fast horse to mental collapse. With that in mind, I chose
