The acid of this dreadful night bit deep. Something fundamental to the life of Gormenghast had been affected and weakened.
At a time when a devil was loose and the whole energy of the place was concentrated upon his capture it was stupefying to find that the castle had been stabbed to the heart by the perfidy of its brightest symbol, the heir himself to the sacred masonry, the seventy-seventh earl.
This child of fate was climbing through the gloom; stumbling among the roots of trees, forcing his way through undergrowth, pressing fanatically onwards.
How he would find her when the sun rose over the mazes of the forest and played across the trackless expanses of Gormenghast Mountain, he had no idea. He simply believed that the power that drew him could not fail to show itself.
But a time came when he was so benighted that further progress was impossible. He was sufficiently far from the castle, sufficiently lost, to evade immediate capture. He knew that search parties were even now being organized and that the vanguard of those levies was probably already on its way. He knew also that the sending forth of a single searcher redounded in Steerpike's favour. This would not be forgiven him.
Whether his absence would be associated with the sudden appearance of the 'Thing,' he could not tell. Perhaps the coincidence was all too apparent. What he did know was that the sin to cap all sins would be for any member of the castle, let alone its rightful sovereign, to have the remotest association with an Outer Dweller - for the earl of Gormenghast to go in search of a daughter of that squalid cantonment and a bastard child at that. He knew from his mother downwards to the most obscure of her menials the conception of any such happening would be equally revolting. It would be worse than shameless treachery. It would be at the same time a 'defilement' of the blood line.
He knew all this. But he could do nothing. He could only pretend, if ever he were caught, that the impending storm had affected his brain. But he could not alter anything. Something more fundamental than tradition had him in its grip. If he was caught he was caught. If they imprisoned him, or held him up for public contumely then that was what he deserved. If he was disinherited he had only himself to blame. He had slapped a god across its age-old face. It was so... it was so... but as the night-heat swaddled him in a near-sleep his thoughts were not of his mother's mortification, of the castle's peril, of his treachery or of his sister's anxiety, but of a thing of fierce and shameless insolence - of a rebel like himself who gloried in it: of a rebel like a lyric in green flight.
SIXTY-SIX
He awoke to the first crash of thunder. There was a shadowy light in the dark air that could only have come from some remote and cloud-choked sunrise. And as the thunder spoke the first of the great rain came.
The danger of it was at once apparent. This was no ordinary downpour.
Even the first streaks from the sky were things that lashed and kicked the dust out of the ground with a vicious deliberation.
The air was like the air in an oven. Titus had leapt to his feet as though he had been prodded with a stick. The sky seethed and rumbled. The clouds yawned like hippopotami; deep holes or funnels, opening and closing, mouthlike, now here, now there.
He began to run again, climbing all the while through a kind of half-light.
The forms of trees and rocks suddenly looming over him, forced him to turn to left and right in a sudden and jerky way, for it was not until he was upon them that they made themselves known.
His immediate object was to strike the fringe of the close-set trees of Gormenghast forest, for only beneath their boughs could he hope to shield himself from the rain. It hissed in the loose foliage about him which was no kind of shelter, even for this first flurry of the storm.
For all its initial violence there was yet no sense of hurry about the rain. It gave the impression of an endless reserve of sky-wide energy.
And as he stumbled on through the rain that spilled itself from the canopies of leaf above, a streak of lightning, like an outrider, lit up the terrain so that for a moment the world was made of nothing but wet steel.
And in that moment his eyes fled over the glittering landscape; and before the enormous gloom had settled again he had seen a pair of solitary pines on a hill of boulders, and he at once recognized the place, for one of the pines had been broken by the wind and was caught in the upper arms of its brother.
He had never climbed these pines nor stood in their shade nor heard the rustle of their needles; but they were more than familiar to him, for years ago he had stared at them every time he had emerged from the long tunnel- the tunnel that led from the Hollow Halls to within a mile of Mr Flay's cave.
When he saw the pines in the lightning-flash his heart leapt. But the darkness came down again and it was at once apparent how difficult it would be not only to arrive at the pines but to strike off from them, with confidence, towards the tunnel mouth. To arrive at the pines would yet not be to come to any place where he had stood before. In the moment that he had recognized those trees he had also realized that the rest of the dazzling panorama was unknown to him. He had taken some strange path in the darkness.
But though it might well be difficult, even with the increasing light, to know exactly in which direction to move, when at last he should come to the pines (for it would of course be impossible to see the caveward mouth of the tunnel) yet it was useless to dwell upon the difficulties, and Titus, altering his direction, struck out across the wilderness of coarse grasses that were already under water. The churned 'lake' reached upwards to his ankles. It spouted all about him. What had been fierce streaks of rain were now no longer streaks. Nor even ropes. Each one was like pump-water or a tap turned to its full. And yet there was still the dreadful closeness in the air; although the tepid water, hammering him and streaming over his body mitigated the heat.
Beyond the soaking grasslands, and the alder copses, beyond the stony and grassless foothills where the big ponds were forming; beyond the old silver-mines and the gravel quarries; beyond all these in a district of harsher country than he had so far encountered, he came at last to a group of giant rocks.
By now the light had to some extent percolated through the clouds of black water and when he climbed upon the back of the largest of the rocks he was able to see the two pines, not away to his right, as he suspected they would be, but immediately ahead of him.
But there was no need for him to approach them further. He could not have found a better look-out station than the rock on which he stood. Nor was there any need for him to strain his eyes to find features in the landscape by which he could determine the position of the tunnel's mouth. For there to the east, not a mile away, was that high line of trees that overhung the shelving masses of green-gravel, which, overgrown with every kind of vegetable life, descended step-like, to where among the valley rocks the small stream chattered, the stream which Flay had dammed, and which ran within a stone's throw of what had been the exile's cave.
