Called to Darkness Read online

  "The Earthnavel's a real place? And you know where it is?"

  "Yes."

  "Then we know where Eovath went!" She was still convinced it was for a crazy reason, but what was the difference? "Tell me how to find it!"

  "No. But I'll take you to it."

  Anger flared up inside Kagur, and she took a long breath to cool it. "You just said the spirits want you to help me. Point me to the Earthnavel, and that will satisfy them."

  "No, it won't. They—and you—need more from me. Think about it: How does Eovath know about the Earthnavel and the depths underneath it? How, unless Rovagug—or something that presumes to speak for Rovagug—truly is guiding him?"

  "To the sun shining underground."

  "I don't understand how such a thing could be, either. But supposedly, the Darklands are full of wonders and horrors that make a mockery of what we think we understand about the world."

  "The Darklands."

  "The place where Eovath has evidently gone. The true underworld beneath the little caves we humans occasionally explore. Layer upon layer of tunnels and vaults twisting through the roots of the earth. I've never been there, but I once spoke to the son of a man who had. The lad shared his father's stories."

  "And secondhand tall tales make you an expert?"

  Holg scowled. "They make me as close as you're likely to find hereabouts. They make me canny enough to know the Darklands are a maze as big as our whole world. Alone, you could never pick up Eovath's trail, not if you searched for a thousand years. But with my prayers to aid you, you have a chance."

  Frowning, fingering the hilt of her father's sword, Kagur considered until Grumbler resumed nudging her with his trunk. Probably, the mammoth simply wanted attention, but it felt like he was urging her to accept Holg's offer.

  If so, he was a wise beast, for what other choice did she have?

  "This is how it's going to be," she said. "We'll hunt Eovath together. But if I decide you're slowing me down, you'll tell me what you know, and I'll go on alone."

  Chapter Six

  Into the Tusks

  Grumbler stopped of his own accord just before the place where the trail became narrower and steeper, snaking its way up an escarpment with icicles hanging from the ledges.

  Though mammoths were creatures of the plains, Grumbler had carried his riders safely through the foothills of the Tusks. But he was unlikely to do as well on the actual granite mountainsides looming before them, and he had the good sense to know it.

  Kagur knew it, too. "Lift!" she said, and she and Holg climbed off Grumbler's back.

  It was likely they'd never see the animal again. He'd linger here for a while, hoping for Kagur's return. He might even wander back from time to time. But like the nomadic hunters who tamed them, mammoths had to keep on the move or starve. That was especially true in winter, when they had to find their forage beneath the snow.

  Kagur stroked Grumbler's head, and he nuzzled her with his trunk. Her vision blurred, and she blinked the tears away.

  She told herself it was ridiculous, weak, to cry over a mammoth, even one she was fond of. But Grumbler was one of the last remnants of her life as a Blacklion, and the only one that was a living creature. She gave him a final pat, then turned away.

  "I'm sorry we have to leave him behind," said Holg, hobbling to restore flexibility to legs stiff from the ride. "He has a faithful heart."

  It shamed her that even a blind man could perceive her distress. "He'll be fine," she snapped. "Worry about yourself. Are you sure you can handle the mountain trails?"

  "I'll count on you to keep me from stepping off a cliff."

  Though he was presumably joking, Kagur could easily imagine him plunging to his death in just such a mishap. But in the hours that followed, he surprised her.

  He didn't have trouble keeping clear of the drops, nor did he need to stop and rest at annoyingly frequent intervals. When they came to an especially daunting slope or narrow icy ledge, he chanted a prayer and twirled his staff through mystic passes. The carved swirls in the wood gleamed like gold—sometimes his flesh did, too—and then he negotiated the treacherous stretches slowly but capably.

  Afterward, he sometimes appeared winded, as though drawing down power was taxing in and of itself. Still, Kagur had just about conceded he was acquitting himself adequately when they came to a fork in the trail.

  The branch to the left climbed steadily. The one on the right dipped down, then rose again. But both twisted around the mountain and out of sight, and Kagur could see no reason to choose one over the other.

  Apparently, neither could Holg. Panting a little, his wrinkled face ruddy, he squinted uncertainly back and forth.

  "Well?" Kagur asked.

  Holg shook his head. "I'm not sure. The spirits will have to advise us."

  "You claimed you knew the way!"

  "I do, give or take. I paid close attention to the wayfarer who told me how he stumbled on the place. But that's not as good as if I'd gone there myself."

  Kagur felt like he'd deceived her, although perhaps that wasn't strictly true. She took what she intended to be a calming breath, and the cold, thin air stung her lungs and made her cough.

  When the fit subsided, she asked, "Will the spirits tell you?"

  "Watch, and you'll see. This is the same sort of magic that will guide us underground."

  He stood and pondered for a moment, then removed two of the fetishes strung around his neck, an amber bead and the fang of a wolverine. He laid the former in the snow at the start of the trail on the left and the latter at the beginning of the one to the right.

  Then he clutched his staff with both hands, planted the butt on the ground, closed his cloudy eyes, and whispered. Kagur couldn't make out much of what he was saying, but she caught enough to notice that the lengthy incantation looped back on itself. The last line was the same as the first. If he wished, a shaman could thus recite it over and over without arriving at an endpoint.

  As it turned out, that was what Holg had in mind. As he muttered his way through for the seventh time, the eighth, and then the ninth, the westering sun dropped behind a peak, and twilight turned the white snow misty gray. Her jaw tight with impatience, Kagur wondered if the old man's magic had failed and he was just too stubborn to admit it.

  Then she heard a faint rustling sound at her feet. She recoiled a step, reached for her sword hilt, and then released it without drawing. The phenomenon that had produced the noise appeared harmless even if it was uncanny.

  Slithering like a snake, the wolverine fang fetish crawled down the trail on the right. Meanwhile, the amber bead and its knotted thong lay lifeless as before.

  "We see the sign," said Holg in a normal voice, startling her, and the tooth pendant stopped moving. He went to pick it up. "I told you the spirits would point the way."

  So he had. She only hoped she could trust them.

  She had no real reason to believe otherwise. Except that Holg was the only shaman she'd ever met who didn't worship the Lord in Iron or the Song of the Spheres and who didn't seem interested in nattering on endlessly about the glories of whatever it was he did venerate.

  That made her curious, and a trifle wary. She decided to see what she could pry out of him once they stopped for the night.

  With an outcropping shielding them from the wind, their meager campfire crackling between them, and wolves howling somewhere to the northeast, she asked, "Why do you serve these spirits of yours? What's wrong with Gorum?"

  Holg swallowed his mouthful of salty, leathery jerky. "Nothing. But these"—he gestured toward his cataracts—"generally grow in the eyes of the elderly. They came on me when I was very young. Perhaps you can imagine what that was like. All I wanted in the world was to be a hunter and warrior like my father. Suddenly, it was never going to happen. I was never really going to have a life at all."

  "Your parents must have sought a healer to cure you."

  "Of course, and he was a powerful one. He traveled with Lord V
arnug himself. But for some reason, his prayers didn't work, and afterward, I decided to slash my throat. At least that way, I wouldn't be a burden and an object of pity for all the long years stretching out in front of me.

  "Fortunately," the old man continued, "I was still getting up the nerve when the spirits started whispering to me. Well, not literally, but ‘whispering' suggests the way it feels. They promised that if I became their servant, they'd give me talents to make up for my murky sight. I'd grow up as capable as any man, and more able than many. Naturally, I took them up on it." He smiled a crooked smile. "It never even occurred to me until years later that perhaps they'd ruined my eyes themselves to bend me to their purpose."

  Kagur scowled. "Is that what happened?"

  "I still don't know. Nor do I really care. They kept their word. They gave me all I needed to live as a Kellid should."

  Picking a scrap of jerky from between her teeth with her thumbnail, Kagur mulled that over. She decided that in Holg's place, she would have cared about the answer. And had it been the wrong answer, she would have found a way to retaliate.

  "You never speak their names," she said. "Is it forbidden?"

  The old man chuckled. "No, I just don't know them."

  "How can that be?"

  "These particular spirits are ancient. Maybe so ancient they came into being before anything had a name, although some of my learned southern friends would say such a notion is blasphemous. Be that as it may, if they do they have names, they don't confide them to mortals. I suppose it ensures no witch or wizard will call them forth and try to order them around."

  The more Kagur heard, the stranger it all sounded. Holg had walked with the spirits for most of his long life without ever really coming to know them at all.

  "Anyway, they're friendly," she ventured at length.

  "Somewhat. They often don't care what happens to men and women. But when they do take an interest, they come down on the side of good-hearted folk like the Blacklion tribe, not evil giants and minions of Rovagug. Which is what you want to be reassured about, isn't it?"

  Feeling vaguely discomfited, she shrugged.

  "I understand," he said. "Every shaman learns there are two kinds of people: the many eager to imagine spirits and gods take a keen interest in every trivial thing they do, and the few who chafe at the thought of it. You're one of the chafers, so the secrets I have to tell you make you ill at ease."

  "I'm not ‘ill at ease.' I'm just out to do my duty to my tribe, which is to cut Eovath to pieces. It doesn't help me to listen to crazy prattle."

  "Well, there's one way to shut me up. You know most everything worth knowing about me. I know scarcely anything about you. Tell me something before we lie down to sleep."

  "What do you want to hear?"

  "Anything. Perhaps something about Grumbler, or that sword you prize enough to risk stealing it back from Ganef."

  Kagur was reluctant to oblige him. Since waking in the Fivespears camp, she no longer cared for talk except to accomplish some practical purpose.

  But for good or ill, Holg was her comrade now. He'd answered all her questions, and a blunt refusal to respond in kind would be rude. She tried to select an anecdote for the telling and so discovered something awful.

  Prior to the slaughter of the Blacklions, her life had yielded an abundance of pleasant memories. Her mother singing and playing cat's cradle with her. Riding a mammoth all by herself for the first time. Her first kiss, from a skinny boy of the Blueice tribe at a muster of the following. Winning the prize for swordplay at a similar gathering four years later.

  It had always made her happy, or at least happier, to recall such moments, but now the memories hurt like sharp stones grinding inside her. Eovath figured in so many of them. His betrayal had even murdered the past.

  He truly left me with nothing, she thought. Nothing but the need to end his life.

  To Holg, she said, "I'm too tired for stories. Maybe in the morning."

  To her relief, the blind man didn't press her to make good on that. As the sun rose, they simply gnawed more jerky, rolled up their sleeping furs, kicked snow over the embers and gray ash of their little fire, and then trekked on up the trail.

  Kagur kept an eye on the peaks and ridges, on the gnarled pines, boulders, and even snowdrifts that an ambusher could use for cover. She still only had Holg's word for it that Eovath had passed this way before them, and if the shaman was correct, her foster brother had had no reason to linger. But these silent, frozen heights were frost giant country beyond a doubt.

  Yet even so, no hulking marauders appeared to block the way. Unfortunately, when Kagur labored to the top of a grade and got a clear look at what lay beyond, she discovered the way had blocked itself.

  She knew how to spot a trail, even one buried in snow, and there was none to take her to the top of the scarp looming above her. Perhaps there had been once, but if so, an avalanche had swept it away. Suggesting such a collapse, dark scree dotted the white slopes below.

  Wheezing, Holg climbed up to stand beside her. He squinted at the cliff for a time and then asked, "What do your eyes see that mine can't?"

  "That your crawling fetish led us astray."

  He sighed. "I don't want to believe that, but it's possible. Sometimes, the spirits speak, and men misunderstand. If there's no way to make the climb, I suppose we'll have to double back and try the other path."

  How long would that take, and what if the other trail didn't go where they needed it to? Scowling, Kagur took another look at the cliff.

  Truly, it was mad to imagine anyone could scale that sheer expanse of rotten stone glazed with ice. Still, a climber could at least make a start here, and that bulge farther up would do for a step ...

  "Give me the rope," she said. Holg had brought a line because he'd known from the start they were headed into the mountains, and they'd already used it to belay themselves together on some of the more dangerous stretches of trail.

  Alas, the same precaution was unlikely to preserve anyone's life on the scarp. In fact, the opposite was true. If one climber fell, he or she would probably jerk the other loose from the cliff face.

  Kagur took off her shield, bow, quiver, pack, and baldric and hung the rope in their place. "When I make it to the top, I'll drop the line. Send the gear up and then climb up yourself."

  "Let me strengthen you before you start." Gloved hand manipulating the air like he was determining the shape of some invisible object, Holg murmured the beginning of a prayer. It was the same charm he used to facilitate his own climbing.

  Kagur felt an impulse to step back. Like many Kellids, she appreciated it when shamans closed cuts and cured sickness but was leery of other forms of magic, even those supposedly sent by Gorum.

  At the moment, though, she was likely to need all the help anyone, even a strange old man and his nameless familiars, could give her. She stayed put while he finished the prayer and gripped her forearm.

  Warmth shivered through her limbs. The sensation was exhilarating, and she smiled. Then she remembered who she was and everything she'd lost, and that instant of pleasure felt like disloyalty. Hoping Holg hadn't noticed, she twisted away from him and toward the bottom of the scarp.

  With the shaman's power quivering inside her muscles, it wasn't too difficult to clamber up a little way. After that, though, she had to inch and hoist herself along on a diagonal. A zigzag course was the only way to the top.

  Despite the cold, she sweated until it soaked the garments next to her skin. Her fingertips ached, and as often as not, the ridges and outcroppings beneath her groping feet felt narrow as the edges of blades.

  Worse, she moved with an unaccustomed lack of certainty that brought home to her that she was as much a creature of the tundra as any mammoth. She wondered if she was making mistakes any accomplished climber would know to avoid. If so, she might well pay for it with her a bone-shattering tumble to the ground.

  But maybe she wasn't entirely inept, for in time she came to
the flat, featureless spot that had looked like it would be the most dangerous of all to negotiate. The fingers of her left hand wedged in a shallow crack, the toes of her left foot barely planted on a convex bit of rock, she stretched out her right arm. Her right foot dangled.

  As she'd hoped, she was just able to touch the lump of stone on the other side of the flat space. She brushed the snow off it and found ice underneath.

  She told herself it didn't matter. She still had to try. She gripped as tightly as she could, and, with an awkward sideways hop, abandoned her other points of support.

  Despite her augmented strength, her right arm throbbed all the way down to the shoulder. Her body banged into the rock face, and her fingers started to slip.

  But there was a trace of a ridge under the handhold. She'd spotted it from base of the cliff.

  Or at least she'd imagined she had. As she scrabbled with her feet and couldn't find it, she wondered if she'd actually seen a shadow or a streak of discoloration.

  Then her left foot landed on something solid. That enabled her to find it with her right one, too.

  Her fingers were still slipping. But with her toes on a perch, albeit a narrow one, she dared to release her grip and heave herself to the right once more. She flailed out with both hands and caught a larger outcropping that—thank Gorum!—was both bumpy enough for easy clutching and free of ice.

  Once she had hold of it, her body didn't want to let go. Still, after a panting, shivering moment, she forced herself to look up, find the next set of holds, and clamber onward.

  The warm inner vibration of Holg's spell died away when she was just shy of the top. Fortunately, at that point, the hand- and footholds were substantial. Grunting, she dragged herself up into the notch between two peaks, then slumped on her belly in the snow.