Chapter Twenty-Four The Death of Sorush #3
And at that moment every flame went out, except that one. A few last scraps of fire flew away on the wind, scattering sparks, but otherwise—total darkness.
He had to think: Don’t drop the glass. In his astonishment he might have let go, and it would have smashed on the rocks at his feet, but he held it securely.
The others were all struck silent. They stood or sat still, looking upwards at the vast bulk of the mountain against the lowering sky. Not a speck of light or flame anywhere on it; a great hand seemed to have swept across and put them all out at once.
No one spoke. Malcolm looked again for the little patch where he’d seen the forge—looked with the naked eye, unsuccessfully, and then with the glass.
“What is happening?” asked the woman, Leila Pervani.
“Can you see it?” said Gulya.
“Yes, I can,” he said, and gave the glass back to Lyra. “Well, Gulya. We have to climb up to it, but I can see where it is.”
“Is it a long way?” said Lyra.
“Yes, and hard. But you’re not coming.”
“Yes, I bloody am.”
He ran his hands over his head, trying to clear the rain out of his eyes. “Well, to tell the truth, I shall need some help. Not with the fighting—Gulya has to do that herself—but with the preparation. Handing me various things when I call for them.”
“I can do that!”
“Maybe better with me,” said Ionides. “Only perhaps. Maybe not, in fact.”
“Thank you, but no.”
“Stay here and guard my rucksack,” said Lyra.
“This Miss Silver or Queen Tatiana?”
“What do you think?”
He nodded cheerfully.
Malcolm turned to him and said, “When Lyra and I and the gryphon—the little one—come down the mountain, things will have changed. Somewhere in the sky there are witches, under the command of Tuuli Latvala. Remember that name, and watch out for them. They will help us, but I don’t know how at the moment. ”
“Otherwise we stay here?”
“You stay here till we come down.”
Leila Pervani was looking at him. In the newly fallen dark he could hardly see her, but he had a vivid sense of her expression as he remembered it: fearless, appraising, wary. Ionides stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Yusif the boatman sat nearby, stroking his seabird daemon.
Malcolm took out the little bag containing the things he needed in order to deal with the sorcerer, and set his rucksack down next to Lyra’s and called to Gulya. Prince Keshvād remained where he was, couchant, still, silent. He looked Malcolm straight in the eye, and nodded slowly, once.
“When the fires were blazing, I could see a path. We’ll aim for that and try to stay on it,” Malcolm said, and set off.
Gulya flew a little, stalked a little, flew again. Asta ran ahead a short way, stopped to look back, moved further on. Malcolm walked steadily: there was a long climb ahead of them.
—
In the middle airs above the flank of the mountain and below the thickest clouds, Tuuli Latvala and her companions sped to and fro, south to north and back again, weaving a complex pattern that was invisible even to themselves; the weft was their trajectories, and the warp was their knowledge of the behavior of clouds.
This was a curious storm, no doubt about it, but they had seen others like it, and they had its measure.
What they had to do was impose an intention on the mass of clouds directly alongside the mountain and over the sea.
Everything had an intention, in the thought-world of the witches, but most things didn’t know it, or had intentions that were feeble or contradictory.
This storm had been summoned and formed by someone whose knowledge and skycraft were almost as full as theirs, but who seemed to have a limited mastery of self-contradiction.
Tuuli Latvala was able to express this state of things in words, if she needed to, but her companions didn’t need words to understand it.
They darted back and forth, tightening a thought here, lengthening a thread of influence there, tying together three currents in one greater one, and little by little persuading the clouds to part along a line parallel to the slope of the mountainside.
The flames that had engulfed the mountain so suddenly, and then vanished without warning, had perturbed the witches briefly, but they continued their work unnoticed by the people below; and before very long the vast, unwieldy clumsiness of moisture-saturated air found itself wanting to move this way, or that way, and to leave a gulf in the center of the mass, as if that had been its intention from the beginning.
Tuuli Latvala turned away from the work between the cloud base and the sea and soared up into the chasm that had been opening above them.
The quality of the light up here was quite different from the inky blue-black darkness clinging to the mountain and the rocky shore, because the higher she flew, the thinner were the clouds above her.
There was a silveriness that suffused the air, and with it one of the most joyous sensations for a witch, the promise of moonlight on her skin.
Satisfied with their progress, the witch looked back at the mountain.
It was completely dark; no moonlight yet came that far through the clouds.
Tuuli Latvala flew down to the water’s edge, where the waves smashed themselves against the rocks and shook the jetty and moved the wrecked fishing boat this way and that as it lay half-submerged.
She looked at the rocks where Ionides and the others were waiting, and greeted them briefly before flying up again.
Lyra didn’t ask why they had to defeat the sorcerer, though she badly wanted to know.
She was content to stumble up the mountain path peering through the dark at Malcolm picking his way faultlessly after Gulya over the rough stones, and feeling all around her a warning heat from the rock itself, as if it could burst into flames again at any second.
Malcolm said nothing; they needed all their breath for the climb and what would follow it.
They helped each other when they stumbled, steadied each other when the ascent grew steeper, and climbed more slowly when they needed both hands to move safely.
He went ahead and took care to go no faster or slower than she could, always moving forward, always into the darkness, always a little higher with each step.
The rocks underfoot and under their hands were hotter and hotter the higher they climbed.
The rain that still fell turned into steam, so they seemed to be climbing among clouds, and Lyra began to fear that they’d lose their way; but the little gryphon Gulya seemed to be sure of the path, and her lion claws were unaffected by the heat from below.
Asta found it harder to manage, and eventually sprang up with relief to Malcolm’s shoulder.
“What’s going to happen when we get there?” Lyra managed to say.
“Gulya is going to kill the sorcerer. He put a spell on her, so she never grew.”
“And if she doesn’t kill him?”
“She’ll have to. And she will.”
They fell silent, occasionally whispering a warning about a loose rock or a crevice beside the path.
Not long after that, the rain stopped.
While it was falling, difficult though it made their progress, it had at least kept them cool against the heat of the rocks.
Now, although the air was saturated with moisture and steam still rose around them as they struggled upwards, there was nothing to moderate the ferocity of the heat underfoot.
Malcolm was wearing strong boots, but Lyra wasn’t. She said nothing, but he could see how painful it was for her, and called to Gulya.
“Where is the forge?” he said.
“Really very close. You can hear the machinery from here. One more effort, and then I shall kill him.”
“You will only kill him if you do exactly as I say.”
“I will, of course I will.”
“But will you remember?”
“You had no fears about my memory before.”
“I know what happens in the middle of a fight. We should have taken time to practice, to train. Me as well as you.”
“I shall kill him, never fear.”
“As you say,” said Malcolm, and then listened. “I can hear it.”
He stood still, motioning to Lyra to do the same, and they listened.
The sounds came from below their feet as well as from ahead on the path—hammering, grinding, thudding, smashing sounds, deep in the heart of the mountain, making the rocks shudder all around them, shaking the moisture loose from their surfaces.
“What is it?” said Lyra.
“The forge of Sorush,” said Malcolm. “He’s mining for precious metals and minerals. Harvesting rubies that grow there. Refining the ores. He loves gold as much as the gryphons do.”
“But he loves it for its power,” said Gulya. “We love it for what it is in itself.”
“I think I see,” said Lyra. “Is he alone? Does he have any helpers?”
“The koruskati, and other beings we don’t know about. Malcolm knows how to defeat him. And we shall do it, and I shall kill him, and then you will see my true aspect, at last.”
Something was happening above them. Tuuli Latvala and her witch-companions had gathered in much of the cloud rack above, and the light that filtered through what was left had a different tone altogether from the black steamy hideous night that had enveloped Lyra and the others as they climbed.
The sky was not quite clear above them yet, but it was clearing.
“Let’s go on,” said Malcolm. “He’ll see this soon himself, and be alarmed.”
With burning feet they stumbled further on. And soon they came to a buttress in the mountain that obstructed the path. They would have to walk around it with great care, because a fall of several hundred feet lay below.
They stopped behind the buttress and Malcolm beckoned Lyra close, slipping the string of his small bag off his shoulder.
“This is what you have to do,” he said quietly. “In here there’s a flask of water, a bag of dust, a small pair of bellows, and a stone. Put your hand in there now and learn the feel of them.”