By the afternoon Gherrit was stumbling along, hot, tired and very thirsty. The shelf had given way to rocks, then to a series of small headlands spaced between shingle beaches. Gherrit did not dare approach the planted hillsides and had been forced to work his way around, hopping from one slippery, spray-drenched boulder to the next. The shingle dragged at his feet, the spray itched, his improvised bandoleer dragged him off balance. Sthirothh had bounced along with him, now at his side, now behind, rarely ahead. The creature was nimble and sure-footed both on rocks and the shifting shingle, head and long beak dipping and rising with each stride in a somewhat ludicrous fashion. Gherrit was careful not to laugh. It seemed unaffected by spray and Gherrit never saw it eat. It did not pluck the few berries in reach, nor strike at the small crabs that scuttled across the rocks, nor dart for fish in the pools.
The Sucker kept him from hunger, but thirst was another matter. Gherrit vaguely recalled that a person could live weeks without food, but only three days without water. His few drinks had been like the first – taking what moisture he could from thin seepages. When night came he was desperately thirsty, but there was naught to do but curl up on the least damp patch of sand he could find, as far from any plant as possible. When dawn came he trudged on, seeking water above all. The few tiny streamlets he crossed were all salty where accessible, the fresh water hidden under bushes, and Gherrit was not about to challenge even the meekest shrub. The slurp of waves was a torment. By late afternoon his tongue was thick, his mouth dry. There was no help for it - he would have to ask another question. He put some thought into how to ask.
“Sthirothh, can you guide me to a source of clean fresh water, one that I can drink in safety, within an hour’s walk?”
The strange creature let its head be dragged about by its long beak as if the latter were one of the pointers used in navigation. The beak wavered between directions, then settled on one line.
“I can,” it said shortly.
“Please do so,” said Gherrit, and they set off, picking their way along the narrow strand. That gave way to a rock shelf still wet at low tide, and that to rocks below a steep slope. They worked their slippery way around the finger of land, Gherrit sometimes falling on the flat seaweed that draped every rock. It was with a wet and bruised bottom that he rounded the tip to halt in dismay. The slope had steepened to a cliff, the rocks narrowed to a ledge, the ledge ended in a drop above dark water. He stood there, one hand on the sheer face, looking across to another small headland fringed with weed-covered rocks. The cove was shadowed, the entrance narrow, the water barely moving with each wave that slopped in from the gulf. Sheltered and calm but not inviting. If the land was hostile, what might lurk in the depths of this pool? Where was the promised drink?
“Wh …” he began and checked himself. Instead he turned to Sthirothh and kept his intonation even, carefully phrasing a statement – definitely not a question.
“You said you would lead me to water I can drink.”
Sthirothh pushed past him to leap up at the cliff, touching discolourations in the rock here, here, and then at three more places lower. A spot blackened to a void, expanded, and Gherrit was looking through a broad arch into a passage sloping upwards. From within came the sound of water tinkling into a basin. Gherrit restrained himself from lunging into the dark, fumbled out the glowstone case from beneath his salt-encrusted shirt and flipped back the lid. The pale light shone on bare walls and a smooth grey floor reaching deep into the hillside. The tinkling was near but not visible.
Gherrit took a step forwards, another, letting the beam play about. The air was still and smelt only of stone, dust-free. A few more steps and an alcove came into view, the noise of water louder, bouncing off the walls, and the light showed the faintest hint of mist. Two more steps and the source was apparent, a simple stone basin catching a flow from an aperture, filling to spill over into a drain below. The passage went on. Gherrit could not keep back any longer; he strode over and plunged his head beneath the stream, gulping down mouthfuls of clear cold water. It was bliss.
When his thirst was sated Gherrit stripped off his shirt and rinsed it of salt then, after a pause, did the same to the rest of his clothes. He used his shirt to wash his body and rinsed the cotton drawers and light trousers that were all else he had. His grandfather had remarked that salt water was hard on the privates and Gherrit now knew this for indisputable fact. Sthirothh watched incuriously with unblinking eyes. He wrung his clothes out and pulled them on despite the chill they brought, slung the belt back over his shoulder, took it off to fill the flask and considered. If he kept on down the coast he would come to Brahnak land eventually, but first have to swim across the little harbour, and then others after that. How many days? He did not know. Sthirothh would know, but that would be two questions, and knowing would not make the journey shorter. This passage might cut through to the next stretch of passable shore, so he would explore. So his thoughts ran. Gherrit picked up the laden belt again and set off, his light wavering ahead of him.
There was no breeze in the passage and the warmth of the day outside soon faded away. The damp clothes clinging to him drew the heat from his body, and Gherrit clumsily windmilled his arms in an effort to keep warm. Despite this discomfort, he grew fascinated as he went deeper. The walls grew ever more elaborately decorated, first with faint scratchings like random scribbles, then with lines that never quite made discernible patterns, then colours in the stone that swirled, formed and re-formed, holding the eye. Once Gherrit was drawn so deep that he stumbled. His hand came into contact with Sthirothh and the fascination fell away at once, the chill of his damp clothes and the peril of his situation returning in a rush.
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“What is this place?” he murmured.
“An old ether-delving,” Sthirothh told him, and Gherrit realised that he had spent the second of his three questions. What was an ether-delving? Something to do with the ether, and therefore with some form of magic, no doubt. Beyond that Gherrit was lost in a sea of ignorance. Of course he knew what the ether was – without its animating force the world would not exist – but an ether-delving? This tunnel was surely a delving, but how did that relate? Was there a Power specific to this place?
He sifted through his memories of instruction as a novice. There were Powers of place or kind, as Selm of the Waters, mightiest of all, or Vurei of tilled fields, spirits of grove and spring and the little sentiences that might make a dandelion patch home. In Wilds (and this was surely a Wild!) there were spirit-domains, of wood and earth and water (he had been warned about earth-spirits, about their malice and addiction to carnal pursuits). Stone did not harbour spirits, or so he had been taught, although it did spawn demons. His brain suddenly connected things – did not eat or drink, appeared from nowhere, unique name … Sthirothh was a demon, although apparently not of the nastier kind. Perhaps; that beak would be as good as a sword. Gherrit shook his head in frustration – there was too much he did not know, and this blind guessing would only lead his mind in circles, yet he dare not ask.
He had paced on as he thought, oblivious to the patterns that lured from every wall. Now he came to his first junction. A large tourmaline crystal embedded in the ceiling shone a purple light on a choice of three ways. An impossibly narrow passage opened to the left, a stair spiralled up through a hole and a third broader way bent off to the right. Gherrit chose the broad way; he had no desire to edge sideways through the rock and the stair looked decidedly unsafe. There was neither central pillar nor handrail, and the steps shimmered.
The corridor he chose was lit by glowing signs incised into the arched roof, the colours shifting as he walked. Gherrit went on a way, bathed now in pale yellow, now in lurid orange, now in an affronting shade of blue. He grew uneasy and wondered if he should turn back; a glance down at Sthirothh’s unperturbed form reassured him, then a glance back alarmed, for the passage vanished in coiling mists of a virulent green. The last colour was a low violet, and then he came into a round chamber where crackling black rods gave an intermittent light. There were no openings, and the stone was covered with sets of rods and dots, each bounded within a square. Gherrit walked around once, then again.
“There are patterns here,” he mused aloud. “This one here,” he flicked a finger at one square “is very like an exercise from my advanced figures class.” Sthirothh said nothing.
Gherrit took a swig of water and reflected, glancing sideways at the figures from time to time. They did not grab at his brain as the other patterns had, or at least he did not think they did. Would he know? He shook his head – this was an unprofitable line of thought. What would happen if he touched, say, this puzzle here in the way that solved the equation? The possibilities were endless, and doubtless included some very unpleasant outcomes. He could try to go back of course, but that would just bring other challenges. At least here was one puzzle he was confident he could solve. Finally, he was tired of being in terror of death, at the mercy of whatever horrible thing came his way. Gherrit gave way to the impulse, leaned forward and drew two deliberate lines and three dots with his forefinger. He was, abruptly, somewhere else.
* * * *
Somewhere else was indubitably a crypt. Not the outcome Gherrit had been hoping for. He was sitting on cold stone and his small light shone on a square tablet inset into the wall. Two lines of some script, a skull in low relief and three stylized dusk-lilies, near-universal symbols of death. There was no question in Gherrit’s mind that this was a grave and, as he turned his head, not a lone one. He was in some foreign sepulchre. On another thought he shone the light around lower. Sthirothh was nowhere to be seen. He was alone.
Gherrit laid down and cried. He was a clerk and a messenger, all alone in a crypt, after two days of fraught adventure, leaping from near death to thirst and hunger and weary trudging, a demon at his side ready to sink its beak into his flesh at a careless word. Worse, he could see no end to this perilous path, nor even any way out of this space sunk deep beneath a hostile land where the air muffled even the harsh breaths of despair. What could he do but sob?
When he ran out of tears he was sitting damply, exhausted, bleary-eyed and not at all happier. Yet still breathing, so there was nothing to do but go on. He pushed himself to his feet and walked slowly along the wall. There were rows above rows of tablets disappearing into the dark above, each with its inscription, skull and dusk-lilies. After thirty monotonous paces, each step sucked up into the silence, there was a corner. Gherrit pivoted on one foot and paced on, two, four, five paces and an opening fell away to his left. He remembered his grandfather’s stories of the tombs of Hirre, vast underground mazes where the ghosts of the Hirrese dead re-enacted their lives, changing the narrative until they reached some moment of satisfaction and faded away. How far would this crypt extend?
The opening was an arch into another hall, this one thankfully with bare walls. Gherrit had been taught that ghosts were almost always unable to harm, but ‘almost’ was not ‘never’, and he doubted the teachers had ever entered a delving. Further away from those unknown dead was better. He lifted the light from his chest and shone it about, trying to get a better grasp of this space. The walls were plain dark stone; the floor was more interesting - a light grey flecked with red ran in a band around a centre of pale yellow and white swirls. Gherrit followed one curl with a beam of light to an inscription. Another grave? He edged cautiously closer. Narrow lines of dark green stone inset in the floor spelled out ‘Fremin Dtaie tel Jhaugusis’. The script was that shared by most languages this side of the Green Sea, the form of the name that of a middle-class Haghar family. He had seen the like on many an invoice. Fremin was usually a woman’s name, although sometimes taken by men in memory of an aunt or grandmother. If it called a demon then the Haghar lands would be over-run with the creatures.
Gherrit knelt to look more closely. There was no marking other than the words. Was it a memorial? He swept the light about. There was no other marking within the scope of the beam, just this lone three lines. He slid a finger across the surface and felt no seam. Should he record the name, against some day when he might inquire as to the person? He had nothing to write on, or with, which brought to mind the chest of documents under his bunk on the Seeking Forgiveness on the Waters. By now he would have been missed. The ship would report to his absence (and that of the Mage Saore) to the authorities in Brahnker, and word would find its way back to Daruz Alman and, eventually, to Messer Pranik. What then? Gherrit smiled wryly to himself in the quiet dark. Losing his job was not the worst of his problems right now.
“ Fremin Dtaie tel Jhaugusis,” he murmured, and repeated it two more times to fix it in memory. He leaned forward to touch the name in farewell and a pair of hands shot out of the stone to grasp him by the throat.