THE LIGHTED PATH
When Karigan’s boots touched the ground on the
Blackveil side of the wall, she felt as though she faced another
wall, but this one of shifting mists that wafted between her
companions, graying some of them out while exposing the others.
Tree limbs reached out of the vapor, crooked, amorphous,
adrift.
She was also met
with a wall of silence. Her companions did not speak. The Eletians
stood so still they could have been ancient statues of lost
Argenthyne. Lynx bowed his head and covered his ears as if the
quiet hurt them. The others peered into the forest, trying to see
beyond the mist, their hands on the hilts of their
swords.
“They smell of
fear.” Graelalea had come silently to stand beside
Karigan.
“What about me?”
Karigan asked. “Do I smell of fear, too?”
Graelalea did not
respond, but Karigan could guess. As for the Eletians, their
features remained stoic. Did they feel fear being in Blackveil?
Despair? Outrage at what had become of their ancient
land?
When Karigan glanced
once more at Graelalea, she was startled to find a pair of tears
gliding down the Eletian’s cheeks. Karigan watched them plummet to
the forest floor and splatter among the choked weeds and
muck.
Sorrow, Karigan thought. That
is what they feel.
Graelalea strode
over to Lynx. She lifted his hands away from his ears and spoke
quietly to him.
“I hear everything
and nothing,” he responded. “As though the world
howls.”
Graelalea said
something more and Lynx nodded.
“I shall try it.” He
closed his eyes for several moments and his expression and posture
relaxed. When his eyes flickered open, he said, “Yes, that worked.
It’s barely a murmur now.”
“We must begin,”
Graelalea announced, and that was all it took for the company of
twelve to fall in line. Grant abdicated the role of leader without,
notably, a word of complaint, and Graelalea strode to the head of
the line as if there’d never been any question.
They set off,
keeping the wall beside them as they headed east. There was a road
Karigan remembered—more from Alton’s reports than her own
experiences—that they must be traveling toward, an old Eletian road
that intersected with the wall. They walked on in silence, Karigan
in the middle of the line behind Yates and ahead of Ard. Yates
glanced back at her with a grin, but it didn’t look quite so jaunty
now.
Karigan shifted the
unfamiliar weight of her pack on her shoulders and grimaced at the
stiffness of her infantry boots. She really should have tried to
break them in more before now. She hoped they did not break
her in first. Otherwise the walking
cane the Weapons had given her would be needed for more than the
occasional support. At the moment it remained strapped to her
pack.
Thinking about her
personal discomforts helped divert her from worrying about the
greater threat of the forest, but not entirely. Sometimes she
thought she caught the jostle of a branch that had nothing to do
with wind, for there wasn’t even a breeze. She heard the occasional
scurry-scurry in the underbrush. In any
other forest she’d have dismissed it as squirrels. Here? She hated
to guess.
She felt the
watchfulness of the forest, as if it had stopped everything to
observe them. It was not the regard of a single unifying presence
like Mornhavon, but on some level the forest was aware. It did not attack them, but reared up over
them like a giant wave, hovering, waiting, inevitable. She wondered
if the Eletians gave it pause, if their presence set it back. If it
decided otherwise, what would happen if it stopped watching and
came crashing down on them as all waves must?
They walked on, the
mist revealing little about the time of day, but making tendrils of
hair cling to Karigan’s face and leaving her clammy and chilled.
She focused on the rise and fall of Yates’ feet ahead. Ard’s raspy
breaths followed behind.
Karigan had no sense
of how much time had passed when they halted. All she knew was that
her shoulders ached and one of her heels was being rubbed raw by
the boots. The damp air was acrid on her tongue.
They clustered
around Graelalea. “We begin on what is called in the common tongue
Avenue of Light.”
Karigan glanced
around but at first espied nothing that resembled a road, for the
area around them was thick with undergrowth. However, when she
looked harder, she discerned where the growth was a little less
thick, the lines too regular to be natural. Her foot wobbled on a
loose stone which was, on closer scrutiny, a sea-rounded cobble,
one among many, the paving stones of a road.
“Not much light here
no matter what it’s called,” Ard muttered.
No one
disagreed.
“If we were to
continue on this course along the wall,” Graelalea said, “we would
come to the Tower of the Heavens. But we shall take the
road.”
It was a pity,
Karigan thought, they couldn’t have all just entered the forest
through the tower, but the soldiers and Ard, being neither Green
Riders nor Eletians, would not have been able to pass through the
walls.
They paused where
they stood for several minutes while Yates made notations in a
journal and Grant and Porter produced devices to take measurements
of the road and its juxtaposition to the wall. When they finished,
the company turned away from the wall and followed Graelalea down
the road deeper into the forest. Karigan felt her last chance to
run to safety slipping away.
It did not take long
before Karigan decided to make use of her bonewood cane. She had no
wish to twist an ankle on a loose cobblestone rolling underfoot.
That they were slippery with slimy moss did not help. The stones
clicked and clacked as the company made its way, and there were
outbursts of swearing when someone tripped or slid. Rotting logs
that had fallen across the road complicated matters, and they had
to jump over gullies where the roadbed had been washed away. None
of the Eletians made a sound.
In fact, Telagioth’s
sudden, silent presence beside Karigan took her aback. He said
nothing but gazed hard at the bonewood. She stared back at him, at
his cerulean eyes and effortless strides, but he did not speak. She
could not contain herself.
“What is it?” she
asked.
“Your walking
stick,” he replied. “It has an unusual quality about
it.”
“Would you care to
take a closer look?” Karigan thrust it toward him in what she
thought was an unthreatening manner but he skittered
away.
“No, no,” he said,
raising his hands. “I am sure it will serve you well.”
Karigan thought it a
curious reaction. Maybe there was something to the Weapons’
assertion about the bonewood after all, but she was hoping she
would not have to be fending off Eletians in addition to whatever
endangered her in the forest.
Despite Telagioth’s
caution, he still walked with her, so she asked, “What do the
Eletians call the road? If Avenue of Light is its name in the
common tongue, what is its Eletian name?”
“Celes As’riel. Avenue of Light is not a perfect
translation. A better translation might be Star-lighted Path. Or
just the Lighted Path.”
“Celes As’riel,”
Karigan echoed. She liked how it rolled off her tongue, but it had
sounded more musical coming from Telagioth.
“This road was made
broader than any other in Argenthyne to accommodate travelers from
the north, and perhaps that is why it is called ‘avenue’ in the
common.”
“I like the Eletian
name better.”
Telagioth smiled. He
then spoke entirely in fluid Eletian, ending in a flourish with,
“Vien a lumeni Celes
As’riel!”
At his words light
ignited along the edge of the road from behind tangled vegetation.
Swords rang from sheaths and Grant and Porter charged toward it
with shouts.
Roused by the
commotion, Karigan extended her cane to staff length and took a
defensive stance. Yates and Ard bared their swords. The Eletians
simply looked on in amusement, especially when Grant’s sword rang
against what sounded like stone.
“Damn! I notched my
blade!” He came back hacking away at vegetation.
The rest of them
crowded to the side of the road and peered through brush only to
come face-to-face with a statue. Carved of stone, one of her arms
had broken off and weathering had scrubbed away much of her
features, but her graceful lines remained beneath snaking vines and
clinging black moss. She held in her remaining hand a large,
cracked orb fogged by age and dirt through which light
glowed.
“What is that
thing?” Grant demanded.
“It is what you
would call in your city a lamppost,” Graelalea replied. “We call it
lumeni.”
“But ... but how did
it light up?”
“Telagioth used the
words of lighting. Such a command may have lit the lumeni for quite
a distance, alerting, I fear, any and all to our
presence.”
Telagioth bowed his
head. “Forgive me. I did not know after all this time the lumeni
would light.”
“No need to ask
forgiveness,” Graelalea replied. “The action was, perhaps,
imprudent, but it is a joy to know Eletians have not been forgotten
in this land. And why shouldn’t Eletians walk proudly in their own
realm instead of in secrecy?”
“Because the current
residents are hungry,” Lynx said, hand to his forehead. “And now
they know exactly where we are.”