The Night of the Swarm by Robert V. S. Redick

Author:Robert V. S. Redick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345508874
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2012-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

They passed a night of great unease, and Hercól roused them all before sunrise. “Now more than ever, take care with the metal on your persons, lest it be seen or heard,” he said. “Remember the council at Thehel Bledd: we could doom our quest just by being seen, if one of Macadra’s servants flees the mountains and sounds the alarm.”

The selk had been out already, and chosen their path up the ridge. It was a rough, cold climb under frigid stars; and a very long one, as they struggled up one sharp rise after another, winding among sheer falls of rock. Pazel thought of Bolutu, struggling with the weight of the Nilstone on his back. He had asked no one else to carry it since Uláramyth.

After nearly three hours they broke suddenly onto a jagged ridgetop. It was not the very summit of the ridge but rather a broad, irregular shoulder that curved away toward the chasm, studded with boulders and small shrubs and rounded, ice-glazed drifts of snow. By now the sun was beginning to glow behind the eastern mountains. Thaulinin made them all crouch low. “I can hear the wind in the canyon,” he hissed. “We are very close.”

Like a band of thieves they crept across that flattened ridge. Pazel could see what looked like a gap ahead, and soon he too heard the change in the wind, as though it were moaning through a narrowly cracked door. Pazel tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He could hear his every footfall on the icy ground.

The wind rose, and so did the light. And suddenly before them lay the aqueduct. It was an astonishing relic: a stone chute some twelve feet wide and half as deep, built right into the ancient rock. The chute was pitched gradually downhill, and when he looked to his right Pazel saw that where the ridge fell away the chute emerged from the ground and was held aloft by columns, so that the angle of descent never changed. Straight as an arrow it raced away across the mountainside, until at last, very far away to the east, it made a sharp turn and set off northward.

Pazel was awed. Two hundred miles. How many years, how many decades, did the Mountain Kings’ people give to the building of the waterway? Even now there was a little ice-fringed water flowing along the bottom of the chute.

Thaulinin beckoned them all to drop back, and then led them west, parallel to the aqueduct but on lower ground. It was a sheltered area, crowded with boulders and small, dense firs. After a few minutes they found themselves on a narrow trail.

Hercól flung out his arm, stopping the party in its tracks. The aqueduct loomed before them, suspended on its stone arches. But that was not what concerned Hercól. There was a clearing before the structure where no trees grew, and beside the clearing was an abyss. It was the chasm, of course: perhaps two hundred feet wide, and far too deep for them to dream of seeing the bottom from where they stood.

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