Darksong by Isobelle Carmody

Author:Isobelle Carmody
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742283890
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2009-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

20

My brother was an extraordinary man. There are few of his ilk and

seldom are the lives of such people merely happy. His desires nearly

destroyed him and his dreams burned him. In the moments of his sharpest

pain, he bade me play the a’luwtha to him and he wept, for so had

Shenavyre played to the Firstmade. I would have stopped but he

commanded me to go on for he said the beauty of the music healed him

even as it rent him …

THE ALYDA SCROLLS

They had been walking no more than ten minutes when the path began to slope up again. Ember was on the verge of announcing that she would go back and wait in the carriage when she saw through a gap in the trees that the path entered a tunnel a little way ahead. The thought of the coolness of the shade kept her silent. And indeed, as they entered the tunnel, which burrowed straight on into the mountain, all of them uttered cries of relief at the delicious chill of the air. There were no lights of course, and they had no torches or lanterns, but the glare of the day went a long way into the tunnel and, just as it was fading, Ember realised there was light coming from ahead. It looked like daylight but they hadn’t been walking nearly long enough to have passed right through the mountain. And it did not look like firelight, though she had begun to wonder if the fire falls were actually within the mountain.

By the time they had reached the other end of the tunnel, her teeth were chattering and she was glad to discover that it was daylight they had been seeing. For several blissful moments she revelled in the warmth of Kalinda just as she had earlier relished the cold of the mountain shade. For most of the walk, coping with the temperature extremes and curiosity had kept her from focusing too much on the pain simmering under her skin, but as they stood waiting for their eyes to adjust to the light, pain stabbed hard into Ember’s skull and she doubled up under the force of it. It passed as quickly as it had come, and fortunately she was behind the others so none of them had seen her clutching at her head, but the intensity of it had frightened her nearly to bonelessness.

She forced herself to look around and note that the tunnel had brought them through the edge of the mountain to a bowl-like valley at its centre. The tunnel opening was only several metres above the floor of the valley, which lay much higher than the plain outside the mountain. A path worn by feet ran from the tunnel down a gentle slope to a small forest.

‘Do you hear that?’ Hella asked.

Ember became aware of a deep thrumming noise. ‘Is it … some sort of landslide?’

Bleyd grinned at her in boyish excitement. ‘It is the sound of the falls but we can not see them from here.

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