the pink glow faded from even the highest peaks. Then Mark saw what he'd seen only a time or two before in all his life: sullen, glowing red spots near the summits, what folk called Vulcan's fires. Those fires as he saw them now were still so far away as to be part of another world.
When it was fully dark, Mark burrowed into a thicket, and contrived for himself a kind of nest to sleep in. For a moment that evening, just as he was dozing off, he thought that he heard his father's voice, calling to him, with some urgent message…
Throughout the next day, Mark continued as before to work his way upstream. The way grew steeper, the going slower, the land rockier and rougher, the country wilder, trees scarce and people even more so. On that day, though he peered more boldly than before out of the riverside thickets, Mark only once saw distant workers in a field, and no one else except a single fisherman. He was able to spot the fisherman in time to detour round him without letting the man suspect that anyone else was near.
That afternoon, two full days since he'd fled his home, Mark saw certain landmarks — a distant temple of Bacchus, an isolated tabletop butte — that assured him he was now quite near the village in which his father had been born. Some few of his father's kinfolk still lived there, and it was necessary now for Mark to think about those relatives. The angry riders of the Duke might well have reached them already, might have established a watch over every house in all the land where they thought the fugitive would be likely to turn for help. And now, for the first time, one clear idea about his destination did come to Mark: safety for him could lie only outside the Duke's territory, in that strange outer world he'd never visited.
But there was something else, besides distance and dangers, that still lay between him and that possibility of safety. He had, he discovered now, a sense of terrible obligation, connected of course with the sword. The obligation was unclear to him as yet, but it was certain.
Mark held to his course along the river, and did not approach his father's old village closely enough to see what might be going on there. On what he could see of the nearby roads, there were no swift riders, no signs of military search, and his repeated scanning of the sky discovered no flying beasts that might be looking for him. But Mark kept mainly to the concealing thickets, and traveled quickly on.
When the last sunset glow had died on the third evening of his flight, he raised his eyes again to the mountains ahead of him. Again he saw, more plainly now than ever before, the tiny, fitful sparks of Vulcan's fires.
On this third night the air of the high country grew chill enough to keep Mark from sleeping soundly. He wrapped himself in the sword's covering, but built no fire, for fear of guiding his still hypothetical pursuers to him. The next morning, wet from a light drizzle, he climbed wearily on. The country round him grew ever wilder, more alien to what he knew. He continued to follow the river as it carved its way across a high plain, then up among a series of broken foothills. Mark's head felt light now, and his stomach painfully empty. On top of each shoulder he had a sore red spot, worn by the cord from which the sword was slung.
Near midday, with timberline visible at what appeared to be only a small distance above him, Mark came upon a small shrine to some god he did not recognize. He robbed it of its simple offerings, dried berries and stale bread. As he ate he tried to compose a prayer to the anonymous god of the shrine, explaining what he'd done, pleading his necessity. He might not have bothered with the prayer were he not getting so close to the gods' high abode. Even here, so close, he was not entirely sure that the gods had either the time or the inclination to notice what happened at small shrines, or to hear small prayers.
Maybe tomorrow he'd be high enough on the mountain to get some direct divine attention. At any previous time in Mark's life, such a prospect would have frightened him. But, as it was, the shock that had driven him from his home still insulated him against the theoretical terrors that might appear tomorrow.
Not far above the shrine, the Aldan had its origin in the confluence of two brooks, both of which flowed more or less out of the north. At their junction Mark tried his luck at fishing, and found his luck was bad. He grubbed around for edible roots, and came up with nothing that he could eat. He searched for some fresher berries than the shrine had provided, and found a few that birds had spared. If any human dwelling had been in sight he would have tried his skill at burglary or begging to get food. But there was no such habitation to be seen on any of the vast hills under the enormous sky, and Mark was not going to turn aside now to look for one.
He spent the fourth night of his journey, sleeping little, amid a tumble of huge rocks at timberline. Tonight the lights of Vulcan's forge-fires appeared to Mark to be almost overhead, startlingly near and at the same time dishearteningly far above him. Near midnight some large animal came prowling near, staying not far beyond the glow of a small fire that Mark had built in a sheltering crevice. When he heard the hungry snuffling of the beast he unwrapped Townsaver and gripped the hilt of the weapon in both hands. No sound came from the blade, and the air around it remained clear and quiet. Mark could feel no hint of magical protection in its steel, yet in the circumstances the simple weight and razor sharpness of it were a considerable comfort.
In the morning there were no animals of any kind in sight, nor could Mark even find a significant track. The air at dawn was bitter cold but almost windless. During the night Mark had wrapped himself again in the sword's cloth, but now he swathed the weapon again and tied it for carrying. Then he climbed, heading up between foothills, following a dry ravine, moving now on knees that quivered from his need for food. Once he was moving, he was no longer quite sure just how he'd spent the night just past, whether he'd slept at all or not. It seemed to him quite possible that he'd been walking without a pause since yesterday.
Shortly he came upon a small spring that gave him good water to drink. He took this discovery as a good omen, drank deeply, and pressed on.
All streams were behind him now, as far as he could tell. He kept following what looked like an ill-defined trail up through the ravine. Often he wasn't sure that he was really following a trail at all. By now he was unarguably on the slopes of the mountain itself, but so far the climbing was not nearly as difficult as he had feared that it might be. There were no sheer cliffs or treacherous rockslides that could not be avoided. Even so, the going soon became murderously hard because of sheer physical exhaustion.
Mark considered ways to lighten the load that he was carrying. But it consisted of only a few things, none of which he felt willing yet to leave behind. The idea that he might be able to discard the sword, somehow, along the way had itself already been discarded. The sword was connected with his goal, and it would go with him to the end. At one point, with his head spinning, he did decide to divest himself of bow and quiver. But he changed his mind and went back for them before he'd gone ten steps.
The climb became a blur of weariness and hunger. At some timeless bright hour near the middle of the day Mark was jarred back to full awareness of his surroundings by the realization that he'd run into a new feature of the mountain. Just ahead was the bottom of a cliff face, very nearly vertical, a surface that he was never going to be able to climb… gradually he understood that there was no need for him to try.
He was standing on a high, irregular shelf of black rock, with the wind howling around him. But the day was still clear, and the afternoon sun on his back was comfortingly warm. The sun had warmed the black rocks here considerably, even if the deeper shadows still held patches of snow, and there was a chill in the wind that played endlessly in the fantastic chimneys of the cliff. Mark stood still for a time, still holding the sword and bearing his other burdens, slowly getting his breath back after the long climb. In some of the chimneys he could hear a roaring that was deeper than the wind, a noise that he thought was coming up from somewhere far below.
Mark was wondering which of the chimneys might hold fire, when his attention was caught by a place he saw at the rear of the rocky shelf, just at the angle where the clifface went leaping up again. There were signs of old occupancy back there. Mark's eye was caught by scattered, head-sized lumps of some black and gnarled substance. The lumps were of an unfamiliar, off-round shape. He went to one and prodded it with the soft toe of his hunter's boot. The object was hard, and very massive for its size. Mark slowly understood that the lumps were metal or ore that had been melted and then reformed into rough blobs.
He stood now in the very rear of a shallow half-cave in the face of the rising cliff, in a place where the sun struck now and the wind was baffled. Here there were old, cold ashes, from what must have been a very large wood fire. The ashes looked too old, Mark thought, to have any connection with the fires he'd seen up here during the last few evenings. Anyway, he d assumed, from the stories he'd heard, that what people called the lights of Vulcan's forge were something to do with earthfire, volcanic, whether or not it was the god in person who raised and tended them. Yet plainly someone had once built a large blaze, deliberately, here in this broad depression in the rock floor against the cliff. The stain of its smoke still marked the natural chumney above. The tone of the old soot was a different darkness from that of the rock itself.
In front of the abandoned fireplace Mark slumped to his knees, then let himself sink back into a sitting
