The Ring of Five Dragons, page 28
part #1 of The Pearl Series
The path on the north side was a bit wider, though steeper still, and more difficult to climb since moss and lichen were embedded in the moist ground. She was about to check her map, but found that she did not need to. Just as she knew the moss and lichen underfoot came from constant runoff, she knew what she would see within the next half kilometer. Again, she felt a wave of uncertainty, a loss of a sense of self. But, now, mingled with that was a glimmer of light, and of hope.
“Riane, unless I am completely mistaken, this is your territory,” she whispered. “I am going to rely on you to guide me.”
Hurrying on, she cocked an ear, heard the dim roar of falling water.
Heavenly Rushing, she heard in her mind.
The path pitched downward a little, and she began to run, her heart pounding fast with elation. Water ran off to either side, dribbling in small rivulets that darkened the rocks. Now the ground rose, winding through a graveyard of boulders that looked to be the result of an ancient rockslide. Scrambling over them, she heard the roaring increase. Then she was over the summit, looking down at a sight that took her breath away.
Heavenly Rushing, Müna’s sacred waterfall, rose up for hundreds of meters, towering into the purple sky. Curtains of water cascaded down, lifting veils of mist into the air, creating sparks of light and minirainbows that flashed in and out of existence as she ran, laughing, toward its base. It was an odd feeling, this shock of first sight underlain by a sense of familiarity. Just as odd, it seemed, was that she was getting used to the duality, even to enjoy it.
Annon had heard Giyan speak of Heavenly Rushing many times, for it held a particular place in the myths of the Kundalan. It was there that Müna directed the Five Sacred Dragons to dip their tails, for it was said that the pool of water at the bottom of Heavenly Rushing went down to the center of Kundala. Other myths told of Kundalan Queens—when there were Queens in the time before the Long Becoming—doing battle there, vying for territorial control of Kundala in defiance of the basic precepts of the Great Goddess. Deaf to Her voice, they continued decimating each other’s armies until Müna caused the cascading waters of Heavenly Rushing to become blood, sweeping away the warring Queens and their minions. “Bloodthirsty you are,” She had cried in Her wrath. “Blood you shall drink until you drown and are no more.
Thus were born the modern-day Kundalan, from the headwaters that fed Heavenly Rushing. Above those headwaters lay Riane’s destination, the Ice Caves.
It was the hour before noon, Riane having made excellent time. She was hot and sticky with the sweat and grime of hard travel. At the spume-hidden edge of the pool, she threw down her pack and bathed in the spray of the sacred waters. She threw her head back, stared up at the huge sheets of water, so brilliantly white they might have been cascades of fine, granulated sugar. Taking in the grandeur of the falls, she felt almost happy, in that special way one feels on coming home. She unlaced her boots, tied up her acolyte’s robes around her hips, and dangled her bare feet in the icy water. So close to the falls, she was completely immersed in the mist. The roaring was a physical sensation, vibrating through her like the heart of a machine. The icy sensation crawled up her legs, numbing their ache. She bowed her head and, without conscious thought, began to recite the devotions.
Up until now, they had seemed a meaningless jumble of phrases and stupid pieties. But here at the fountainhead of the Great Goddess she began to discern a thread. She slipped into the pool, walking out until she was waist deep. Again, that peculiar sensation of newness and familiarity. She was certain that Riane had bathed here many times. Her robes pooled around her like the wings of Müna’s butterfly, fluttering in the wavelets. As she continued her devotions she seemed able to stand apart, to hear the words and make sense of them as if she were observing herself. Odd for a V’ornn to have this thought, but she was certain this place was holy. Inexplicably, she began to cry, tears rolling freely down her cheeks. She felt filled up with the enchanted beauty of this spot, that seemed to have appeared from out of a dream.
She launched herself into the deep water. She turned over, floated on her back. The lowering mist was the most beautiful translucent white. Within its constantly changing heart colors were born and died like tiny flames. As the sunlight struck them, the billowing clouds of mist took on shapes, as if she were dreaming with her eyes open. She saw tantalizing snippets of Riane’s life before she had contracted duur fever: faces she did not recognize, hulking shapes like monsters, vast icescapes, blood flying and a thirfscreaming as death came.
The water grew even colder as she floated out toward the center of the pool. There, the water was almost black, and she could well believe that it was virtually bottomless. A small breeze stirred the mist, sending long tendrils down to scud across the turbulent water. She was still a good distance from the base of Heavenly Rushing, but she could feel its immense power. For some reason, it had a special meaning for her. She strained to bring into focus emotions, thoughts, experiences that remained hazy and unreadable in an alien memory that had lost its focus. “Why blood, who was screaming?” she cried, enraged again at the deaths of Annon’s family, of the injustice of it all.
High above her head, above the mist, on the cliff face where the falls spilled down, a snow-lynx that had come to drink from the headwaters skittered away as two large shapes loomed out of the forest of Marre pines. As they stood in the deep shadows at the lip of the cliff staring down, the huge gyreagle descended from the bowl of the sky. It alighted on the shoulder of one of the shapes, began fastidiously cleaning itself of the droplets of ice-hare blood.
Can she see us? thought the first creature.
Not through the mist, the other replied. But if I do this … An appendage moved out past the rim. It will seem as if a breeze has stirred the water vapor.
Many tangled threads come together here.
She is the fulcrum and the lever.
Will she find it? one thought.
She must, the other replied. If not…
What if she is not the One? If she is not the One, she will fail and we are lost.
She is the One. Müna has told us in so many ways—Her messengers, the gyreagle and the owl, marked them; they were both injured before they were brought together in the annealing fire and storm of the Nanthera.
That is what frightens me. The holy circle of the Nanthera was violated, if only for a moment. Even we do not know the ultimate consequences of that.
AH the more reason to believe in the Prophesy. It is this very imperfection, which binds two incomplete souls, that has forged the One.
The first creature peered down through the veils of billowing mist. Already she has powerful enemies.
The imperfection that created her also binds her to her enemies. There is no other possible path.
If they find her before she is ready, they will crush her like a marc-beetle. She must choose her allies carefully.
Indeed. One will love her, one will betray her, one will try to destroy her.
The gyreagle’s feathers rustled as she lifted her great wings, disturbed perhaps by the grave nature of the conversation.
The first creature resumed, I am filled with foreboding. It was prophesied that the Dar Sala-at’s coming would coincide with the possibility of Müna’s death. Müna. may die, and we cannot save her.
That is true enough. Only the Dar Sala-at holds that chance. The only chance.
The first creature shuddered. If the Great Goddess dies, we die, even us Immortals.
The second creature nodded. Yes. Kundalan, V’ornn, Us. It mil be Anamordor, the End of All Things.
Our enemies have begun recruiting allies—many against the few of us who are left.
We have the Dar Sala-at.
Perhaps we should provide…
No, no. We are forbidden to interfere.
Simply by being here we have interfered. Surely we can take one step further. The first creature extended both upper appendages, and it was as if a shadow passed across the sun. The gyreagle spread its wings, launching itself into the air. There. Thigpen will know about the Dar Sala-at as we now know.
The second creature followed the huge bird’s flight. Ah, no. If Thigpen is forewarned, who else will be alerted?
With the stirring of the mist came strange voices in Riane’s head. Not Riane’s voice, and not Annon’s, either. It was as if she sat at one end of a shell-like theater, listening to a conversation being held on the other side. The strange acoustics picked up the sounds—an eerie susurrus as of wind echoing through an old, abandoned house. These voices stirred up odd ideas and emotions inside her, so that she grew by turns elated and terrified, as if she were a baby who could not yet understand the language of her parents. She stopped her floating and, treading water, strained to make comprehensible what was not. In a moment, the mist darkened as if with the fall of night. When the brightness returned, the conversation had ceased.
Riane looked around as if ghosts or spirits or even daemons might be observing her, but past a few meters the billowing mist hid everything from view. Weighed down by her sopping robes, she climbed back onto shore. Her pack and boots were where she had left them; nothing had been disturbed. She walked away from the spray, into a patch of intense sunlight, stripped off her clothes. She had a small but nutritious lunch while her robes dried. As she ate, she strolled around the base of the immense waterfall. She drank in the beauty as before, but now she had another agenda. What language had the unknown being been speaking? It seemed vaguely familiar, but…
Old Tongue, the voice in her head said.
“How is it you know the Kundalan Old Tongue? Were you Ramahan from some other abbey?” Riane asked, but there was no reply.
By the time she returned to her robes, they were dry enough for her to put on. She tugged on her boots, shouldered her pack and set off toward the east side of the falls, where a kind of crude staircase had been hewn into the cliff face, presumably by the Ramahan, or perhaps it was Riane’s tribe, whoever they might be.
As she renewed her assault on the cliff face, she recalled the story Astar had told her of how The Pearl came to be lost. How, she wondered, could Ramahan turn on one another, murder their own, use the Kundalan’s most sacred object for their own ends? What kind of creatures were the Ramahan instructors turning out, what kind of society existed within the abbeys that could breed such evil?
Once upon a time, Astar had said, the abbeys of the Ramahan were impervious to evil. How had that changed, and why? At the center of all these questions stood Bartta, like a spider in her web. Everyone inside the abbey was afraid of her, even the other konara. Utmost Source taught that Ramahan did not amass power, they distributed it evenly among the Kundalan. And yet, it seemed clear that Bartta was doing just the opposite.
Riane clutched her head. These days when she thought about Bartta’s evil her head began to throb with intense pain.
Relax and breathe.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she rested her sweat-streaked forehead against the naked rock. This high up, she could feel the changes the altitude wrought in the weather. Though the sun still burned in the purple sky, the temperature had dropped considerably, and the biting wind had picked up. She shivered. It was High Summer. What would this trek be like in winter? Instantly, a memory surfaced of howling winds, white-out blizzards, temperatures that sucked the warmth out of flesh and bone.
She licked her lips, thirsty. But she did not have the leverage to reach behind her for her water bottle. She knew she had to distract herself so she could keep going, mechanically climbing until she reached the top. She resisted the urge to look down. Annon, like his father, had a kind of vertigo. But when she did look down she felt no vertigo at all. Instead, she had the unmistakable sensation that she belonged on this cliff face, that high altitudes were something exhilarating and energizing.
She continued her ascent with renewed confidence, grateful for Riane’s innate abilities. It was odd how things had changed so rapidly. She no longer felt invaded when Riane’s memories or abilities bubbled up. Her emotions were a bit more difficult to deal with, however. As she went, she turned her mind to the section of Utmost Source on the Spirit House.
Accessing the Spirit House is not to be undertaken lightly, for the risks when the two planes of existence intersect are legion. First and foremost, the planes are essentially incompatible. The corporeal and the noncorporeal may stand side by side; they may, in a few highly specific instances which will be enumerated later, exist one within the other. But under no circumstances are they interchangeable. If the noncorporeal should be allowed to cross into the corporeal without the proper safeguards and supervision, the resultant derangement would be terrible to witness, unimaginable to experience.
Riane had read in the first chapter of the book that there were three hundred ninety-seven known planes of existence; an infinite number lay unknown and unexplored. According to Scripture, these realms of reality overlay one another like an unimaginably immense multitiered sphere. Each one had what Astar had described as an orbit (though the Utmost Source text referred to it as an energy harmonic) so that at any given time they were nearer or farther from one another. Riane had tried to imagine an infinite number of layers- all moving in different rhythms peculiar to their own harmonics, but failed. In the time when Utmost Source was written the Ramahan’s chief purpose was apparently discovering and exploring new planes of existence, though now, it seemed, the priestesses were caught up in far more mundane matters. This ability to move between planes was called Thripping.
The second risk to Thripping involves energy flow—or behavior. Everything in the known and unknown universe conforms to principles of energy. These energy behaviors are not always known to us. They are surely not the same for the many different planes of existence, but they are unwaveringly consistent within their own set of principles. Therefore, it is essential for High Ramahan to be conversant with as many sets of principles of energy behavior as is practicable.
The book went on to enumerate the ways in which the energy behavior of the Spirit House differed from those of the Kundalan corporeal universe. This was the key to understanding how to access the energy from that ethereal place. No mention was made of qi. It dawned on Riane, as she chewed over the densely worded paragraphs, that the book was discussing Thripping without the use of the sacred needles—just as Astar had told her Mother used to do in the time before she was murdered by her own shima.
“There are always alternative paths,” Astar had said. Riane wondered now whether the Nanthera was one of those alternatives. Surely during the rite Annon had walked upon ground that was not firm. He had peered into the heart of the Abyss, had seen the five-headed daemon grinning at him…
Enough! Riane shivered. She was frightening herself. And yet her thoughts kept returning to the poisoned well for that horrible moment, when Annon spanned two worlds, two planes of existence, was affected by two separate energy flows. What had really happened to him there? What had happened to Riane—the Riane who had died from duur fever?
It does not matter. Go on.
What else could she do?
She commenced once more to climb, her fierce V’ornn determination meshing with the Kundalan expert knowledge of this cliff face, and this time she did not stop until she reached the top. Hauling herself over the lip of the cliff, she emerged onto the upper plateau not very far from where the creatures had hours before discussed her fate. Almost all the slopes above her were crusted in snow, which the wind whipped downward, lacing the thin air with showers of sparkles. She sat in the shade of a Marre pine while she drank and ate a little. At this elevation the air was noticeably thinner, her lungs had to work harder to get the same amount of oxygen into her system, and yet, as had happened when Konara Laudenum had made her enter the Cube of Tutelage, she found that she had no trouble breathing. Nor did the growing cold disturb her. She was beginning to feel a power long hidden, a sense of self-reliance returning that Annon had once had, that Riane, too, had had, before the terrible events that had overtaken them both. For it seemed clear to Riane that the girl she had once been had tragically lost her parents, just as Annon had lost his.
Soul mates.
She smiled to herself as she spread out her map on the soft bed of Marre pine needles and took a look at where she was. I’m almost to the Ice Caves, she thought even before she was fully oriented. She knew that she had only to negotiate the icefall at the northern end of the narrow plateau, and she would have reached her goal.
As it was growing late, she gathered her belongings and began the short trek to the base of the icefall. Within several hundred meters the stands of Marre pines disappeared, to be replaced for a time by low, twisted brush that by its pale grayish color looked more dead than alive. Finally, those too petered out, and all that remained was bleak tundra—bare rock and permanently frozen subsoil that supported grey-green lichen and not much more.
By a mountaineer’s standards the icefall wasn’t large, but from its base it looked intimidating enough. Annon had never encountered this kind of terrain. No matter. Without a moment’s hesitation, Riane unhooked the narrow-bladed ice ax from her pack and began her ascent. The part of her that was still Annon was astonished at the ease and facility with which this body transported itself over the jumbled, glossy surfaces. For once, the female’s lighter weight and less dense bones were a distinct advantage. Riane had no difficulty leaping over seemingly bottomless chasms, hauling herself up virtually vertical expanses via the hand-and boot-holds she hacked into the ice with the ax. Moreover, she instinctively knew the best and fastest path up. It felt good to be stretching her muscles, to be doing instead of thinking.
Inside of two hours, she had reached the Ice Caves. They were gargantuan holes in the upper face of the mountain. At the mouth she felt as dwarfed as if she were on a raft in the middle of the Sea of Blood. She walked inside. Her legs ached, but in a good way. She slid off her pack, stacked the contents just inside the mouth. The floor was almost unnaturally smooth and, owing to the immense size of the caves, even the tiniest sounds were magnified and iterated.
