Kelven's Riddle: The Mountain at the Middle of the World Page 18

  Florm stopped in a grove of trees on a small rise where a spring bubbled up from the ground and ran off toward the south. Aram dismounted and looked to the north. A tangle of thick, tall trees surrounded the base of the mountain, and spread out for at least a mile from it on all sides. Upon closer inspection, the mountain did indeed appear to be far too uniform and straight-sided to be natural formation. The woods surrounding it were so thick and dark that they looked impenetrable. The top of the mountain or pyramid rose dark and majestic above the forest. Aram looked curiously at Florm, but said nothing.

  “You are a brave man, Aram, master of wolves. Are you brave enough to enter there?”

  Aram looked into the gloom under the spreading trees. “What do you wish me to do there?”

  “I wish to give you something.” Florm answered. “It is there, inside the mountain of Joktan.”

  “What is this thing?”

  “It is an object known as the Call of Kelven.”

  Aram gazed at the distant pyramid and the dark jungle that surrounded it and waited in silence.

  “The Call is an ancient device of communication between horse and man. Long ago it was used by Ram to summon Boram, my grandfather. Later, it bound my father, Armon, in friendship to Joktan, perhaps the greatest king of old. I wish now to give it to you that it may bind us in the same ancient bonds of friendship. You may use it to summon me at any time.”

  Aram stared at him, stunned. “My lord,” he protested. “I am but a servant. I will gladly retrieve this thing for you, but I am not worthy to summon you ever, anytime.”

  Florm’s great dark eyes glowed in their luminous depths.

  “My young friend, you are anything but a servant. By the strength of your own will, you have shed the chains of Manon and gained your freedom. You learned to survive in the wild, and you have become a warrior who’s like I have never seen. You saved me and you have protected my people. You have exerted your own will, above that of the grim lord himself, over the company of wolves. You are anything but a mere servant. I’m beginning to think you may embody the answer to Kelven’s Riddle. That is why I wish you to possess the Call.”

  Aram did not know what the lord of horses meant by Kelven’s Riddle, and decided not to inquire. He looked at Florm. “Can we not communicate with our minds when it is necessary?”

  “Only over short distances,” Florm answered. “Mindspeak does not suffice beyond several yards between peoples of different kinds, and for only a few miles among those who are the same, as with horses. With the Call, you may summon me across a thousand miles. It is mine to give—I want you to have it.”

  Aram still doubted his worthiness to possess such a device or to use it in summoning as great a person as Florm, but he acquiesced with a slight nod. “What must I do?”

  “You must make your way through the forest to the great stair at the base of the mountain. It will not be easy. These woods are ancient and troubled. You must proceed with care. Then you must find the door, enter the square mountain, and make your way into its depths by many passages, none of which any horse has ever seen. Somewhere in the depth of the mountain, at the lowest level, you will find another door, beyond which is the Call.

  “The Call is kept by two Guardians, strange and dangerous creatures, who took it back there after Joktan fell ten thousand years ago. The Guardian on the left is named Ligurian, and the one on the right is Tiberion. You must say the right words or they will slay you. Say the right words and they will give you the Call.”

  “What are the words?”

  “You must say this; ‘I come in the name of Florm, lord of horses, son of Armon, son of Boram, for the Call that Kelven gave to men at the beginning of time.’ Then you must speak their names, Ligurian first, Tiberion second.”

  Aram ran this over in his mind, making certain that he had it. Then he looked at Florm. “I will return,” he said. He glanced up at the sky. The sun was rising toward midmorning as he turned away and entered the trees.

  Beneath the trees there was sunlight-swallowing gloom. Within steps he was plunged into near total darkness. Not a single ray of light found its way through the dense, convoluted canopy to illuminate the thickly rooted floor. He had not gone far into the jungle before it was necessary to stop and wait for his eyes to adjust to the sudden gloom. Even then, objects mired in the shadowy murk beneath the trees revealed themselves but reluctantly. The only thing that was clearly seen was that his journey to the pyramid, no more than a mile or two distant, would be arduous and difficult.

  There appeared to be nothing living in the dim world beneath the trees. No small animals moved in the undergrowth or scurried up and down the knotted trunks and no birds flitted overhead. It was a silent place, overwhelmed and choked into perfect stillness by ancient, gnarled wood.

  Aram found it necessary to detour constantly as he went forward, hacking through thick undergrowth with his sword, and avoiding enormous tree roots that heaved up from the ground like huge coils of rope. In places, the massive tree trunks grew so close together that he could not pass between them. Often, he strayed further to either side looking for passage than he progressed forward.

  Even after his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could not see very far in any direction before darkness swallowed things up, removing them beyond the limits of his sight. Slowly, carefully, he negotiated the dim forest, gauging his direction by sighting along several trees at a time and choosing a particularly odd trunk that he knew to be in line with the direction he needed to go. Even if he had to reach the chosen tree by a circuitous path, once he succeeded, he would line up more trees, before him and behind, and continue.

  He knew that without being able to see the sun or any landmarks above the close canopy of the trees, it was inevitable that he would go somewhat astray. A more serious problem was that, after a while, the twisted massive trunks of trees began to appear very similar to each other. Nonetheless, he trusted his instincts and his eyes, always studying the way before him and the path he’d come. Occasionally, there would be the whispered ghost of a ray of light from the sun. Always it appeared to come from behind him, to the south. Each time it seemed a confirmation that his sense of direction had not failed him, but he could not be certain.

  As he struggled forward through the gloom, time itself seemed to dissolve in the murk. It was difficult to know how long he’d been wandering the forest floor. More worrisome, he began to suspect that his wanderings were in fact aimless, maybe even circuitous, and that he was becoming hopelessly lost. Even the tumbled walls of ancient rock that he occasionally encountered, apparently the work of men, though it was hard to tell from their crumbled state, began to appear very like one another.

  Then, abruptly, after two or three—or perhaps four—hours he emerged from the trackless gloom of the jungle into an area of less dense growth where there were crumbled stone buildings and wide ruined avenues. Trees still grew thick and unchecked amidst the broken walls and towers and thrust up through the pavement but even so the going was much easier. He found one particularly broad avenue that went straight toward the pyramid and followed it. It was broad enough that there were gaps here and there in the thick canopy of the trees overhead. His heart lightened—he could see the sky.

  There had once been a great city here, but unlike his city, which was carved from living rock, this one had been constructed from the foundation of the ground upward and was composed of hewn stone. At regular intervals cross streets intersected with the broad avenue. It appeared as if the city was laid out perfectly along straight lines of tangent, and if it could be seen without the crush of vegetation, would cause the observer to marvel. But now it was overgrown with ancient trees and thick underbrush. Even the main avenue was punctuated here and there by massive trees that severed the roadway, forcing Aram to detour to the right or the left as he made his way forward.

  There were many large structures, in that they sometimes filled whole city blocks, but none of them was overly tall, none more than t
wo or three stories. With only the broad grasslands of the high plains surrounding it, there had been no reason to check the city’s lateral growth and build upward. It was a sprawling metropolis.

  Eventually, as the day waned toward afternoon, he came out into unhindered sunlight and the sudden end of the avenue’s use as an access route to the pyramid. It ended abruptly at the edge of a deep, straight-sided chasm, a thousand yards across and at least half that deep. It was clear from the ruined remains of broken stone that jutted a few yards into empty space that at one time a bridge had spanned the gorge, but had long since crumbled into the depths.

  Leaning over the edge and looking down, Aram could see, far below in the dimness of the abyss, the metallic glint of water. The sides of the chasm appeared to be almost perfectly perpendicular and there were obvious signs of quarrying. This chasm, then, was manmade. The stone for the construction of the city had come from here.

  Curiously, this quarry—if indeed that’s what it was—had been delved in such a way as to render it exactly symmetrical in both directions. It was as if the builders of the city had quarried their stone from a perfectly straight seam of subterranean rock, resulting in a massive ditch that severed the city in two. Perhaps, Aram thought, the quarry had once served a defensive purpose as well. But, if that were true, why not surround the city’s entirety instead of just its central portion?

  He glanced across the gorge, at the broken walls and towers rising above the jungle beyond. They seemed little or no different from those on the near side, in size or construction, but maybe that interior part of the city had been built at the first, the chasm surrounding it on all sides, and this outer portion had come later as the city grew.

  Leaning as far out as he dared from the remains of the bridge, Aram looked along the canyon in both directions. He could not see the end of it either way but that was mostly due to the lateness of the day and the persistent gloom created by the overreaching trees. There was something he could see that lifted his hopes, however. A few hundred yards to the right on his side of the chasm there were steps, cut into the stone, leading down into the depths. Looking across at the other side, he saw that there were corresponding steps descending the opposite wall.

  There was no other bridge that spanned the chasm in either direction for as far as he could see, and it was pointless to try and fight his way through the jungle in hopes of finding one. It appeared that if he was to cross, he would have to use the steps, and there was no telling how deep the water at the bottom of the quarry would be. Well, he thought, he could swim; he’d done it before when necessary. In any event, the only visible solution was to use the steps and hope they’d retained their integrity down through the centuries.

  Directly across from him the wide avenue went straight on toward the heart of the pyramid-shaped mountain, although it was as badly overgrown as on the near side. The jungle pressed in upon it from both sides. His journey toward the pyramid and the mysterious Call would get no easier.

  He made his way toward the steps along the side of the gorge, scrambling across broken masonry and through deep undergrowth until he came to the top of the stairway. The steps were narrow and steep and faded quickly into the gloom below. In the west, the sun was halfway down the sky, obliquely off to the southern side of the gorge and so had little impact on the depths.

  The steps, however, though weathered, were still in very good shape, having been expertly cut from the natural rock, but were overgrown with a thick layer of spongy, damp moss. As he descended, he went with vigilant care, so as not to slip and plunge to certain injury and likely death over the side. It grew increasingly darker as he went down and he kept his right hand upon the wall as a guide and tested each step before descending.

  The ribbon of water below him was dark as obsidian and still. No breath of wind troubled its surface. It appeared to him to be very deep, though there was no way to verify this. Along its edges where it touched the sides of the gorge, there was texture to the water, as if plants grew there. And there was something else. A pale strip of stone rose above the dark surface, cutting across it from one side of the gorge toward the other, and though it didn’t touch either shore, appeared to be a bridge.

  Down he went, into the gloom. Sunlight angled into the gorge from the southwest and touched the upper hundred feet or so of the wall opposite but what light the stones reflected weakened almost to nothing before it reached the depths. The moss on the steps thickened as he went down and they grew ever slicker.

  Finally he stood at the edge of the water. The steps continued on down into the murk a short way and a few steps beyond where they entered the water and three or four yards out from the side of the chasm the span of a bridge rose from the water and arched toward the other side.

  The ends of the bridge were under water for about ten feet from the walls on both sides of the quarry but the center rose clear of the water for the rest of its length. It was a gently arched bridge without railings, cut from the natural rock. The water beneath it was dark and its surface was splotched with patches of mossy growth. There was no telling as to its depth. Peering before him beyond the point where the steps entered the water, he could just make out the beginnings of the bridge in the murk.

  Gingerly, he stepped down into the water. It was startlingly cold. As he descended the last few steps to the point where the bridge turned and spanned the chasm, the water rose above his waist to his chest and he felt his vital organs tighten and contract upward as if they were trying to avoid the bitter chill. He turned to face the bridge and found that he was a bit offline, as if he’d gone below the point where the beginning of it arched away from the steps. Evidently, the stairway continued on downward into the deep water. At one time, then, this bridge had spanned the gorge through open air. The bottom of the gorge was somewhere still far below—the water had filled it up over the centuries.

  Easing back upward for one step and then two, he came into alignment with the arched span of the bridge that rose above the water. He put one foot gingerly forward and felt its broad span beneath his boot. Testing its integrity by putting weight on his forward foot, he found it to be solid. He moved his other foot forward. Then he was on the bridge.

  Moving carefully in the gloom, using his hands as outriggers in the icy liquid, he eased out over the unseen portion of the bridge and in a few steps came clear of the water. He continued to hold his hands out slightly for balance as he ascended toward the arched center of the bridge. The bridge was steep, steeper than it had appeared, and slick. His eyes were focused on watching the slippery, moss-covered stone as he progressed, but at the periphery of his vision he caught a glimpse of something moving in the depths.

  He stopped and set his feet, and then leaned over as far as he dared and peered down into the murky water. Far below, down in the deep, flashes of silver darted here and there. Fish. They were moving rapidly from his right to his left beneath the bridge. He straightened up and continued on, up the arched span, step by careful step, until he reached the apex and began to descend toward the other side. Below him the silver flashes increased in number and speed, always moving from right to left.

  It was even more difficult to descend the arch than it had been to climb up it. Always he was in danger of slipping on the slick moss and plunging into the icy lagoon. Fear of the water—of the dark, mysterious depth of it, began to rise in him. Unreasonable, and attached to nothing obvious other than the strange behavior of the silvered fish, it nonetheless filled him. His chest ached with tension and his breath came in short, labored gasps.

  The surface of the water beneath the bridge suddenly boiled as schools of fish scrambled madly from right to left, fleeing—something. Aram fought a stifling fear as he tried to negotiate the downward portion of the arch. Then, once again, he entered the water as he neared the far stairway. Careless now of the danger of slipping, he surged through the cold water toward the steps, heeding a desperate urge to get clear of the icy murk. His chest constricted further as
the water rose to his midsection and he struggled for each breath as he hurried toward the stair.

  Finally, he stepped clear and began climbing, just as there was another movement down in the water. This time the object was not a school of fish, but something massive, broad and dark, blacker even than the surrounding murk, rising slowly and deliberately out of the depths. In a sudden spasm of fear, he turned and sprinted up the stairs, heedless of the slippery moss and weathered condition of the steps, taking them two at a time, stopping only when he was well above the surface of the water.

  Then, breathing heavily from fear and exertion, he pivoted carefully on the mossy steps, digging the fingers of his right hand into a crevice in the stone for support, and looked down. The large dark something was falling back into the blackness of the deep, becoming one again with the underwater night. Aram turned away and moved on as quickly as he dared. Whatever the unknown thing was, if it came out of the water after him, he didn’t want to face it on the slippery surfaces of the stairway.

  He cleared the steps into full sunlight and turned to look down into the bottom of the gorge. The dark surface of the water was still once again, with not a ripple anywhere. He sat down on the top step and took several deep breaths while he waited for the pounding of his heart to cease. What, he wondered, dwelled in that deep, dark, icy pool? Whatever it was, it had sensed his presence on the bridge and had decided to investigate—or perhaps do something worse.

  Before continuing on up the avenue, he examined the position of the sun, having a clear view of it for the first time all day. It had slid almost halfway down the sky to the west. He knew he must hurry or he would have to spend the night in this place. And he was positively terrified about crossing the dark water at the bottom of the chasm after nightfall with its unknown entity lurking in the depths. It would require all his courage to do so once again while the light of day lasted, let alone in twilight. It would be impossible at night.