Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [140]
“We’re not. I don’t know why, but we’re not.”
The answer lay not a half mile beyond. They scrambled down the hill on the north face, made a little turn between two slopes, and came out facing west to see ahead and some hundred yards down into a long valley, bisected by a deep river, flowing north to south. To the south, their left, grassland scattered with oak trees lay between steep hills all brushy and forested. To the north rose a high wall of cliff,blocking a view of hills beyond—they could just see peaks, black with trees, over the rise of sheer rock.
“Oh, ye gods!” Garin whispered. “Haen Marn.”
Rhodry laughed, one of his berserk peals as wild as a thunderclap.
“This is it?” Otho snapped. “I don’t see a cursed thing but trees, neither dun nor hovel, naught. Wait! Those trees! Oaks don’t grow this high up.”
“Worms and slimes!” Mic sputtered. “What’s wrong with this view? Is it my eyes?”
As long as they looked down into the valley, “this view” made perfect sense, but when Rhodry looked round, he couldn’t see how the crest where he stood, on the east slope above the valley, connected up to the cliffs at the valley’s north end. They saw no dweomer-induced cloud or magical blackness swimming in the air; it was simply impossible to look at the place where the geographies must have sorted themselves out. The crest trotted right along, and the cliffs picked up—except they couldn’t have, but they did. The valley lay self-contained in one landscape; they all stood in another. The other dwarves were fuming, looking down, looking up again, staring all round them, but Garin merely sighed.
“Haen Marn,” he said again, as if that explained everything. He pointed north, where the river flowed out through a crack in the cliff face. “That’s the entrance. Haen Marn itself lies beyond the cliffs.”
“And what do we do, swim?” Otho snapped. “It’s a cold dark day for that.”
Garin ignored him. Automatically Rhodry looked at the sky. The sun was already sinking off to the west, turning the scudding clouds deceptively bright.
“Well, at least we won’t camp wet,” Rhodry said. “Better get on down, lads. Night’s falling.”
Otho snorted profoundly. Settling their packs, they headed downhill, picking their way through the underbrush and boulders to come out into a valley brimming with shadows. When Garin turned north and began marching purposefully toward the cliff, the rest trailed after, looking up and around them. While the valley itself matched the view they were remembering from the crest, some other thing fit wrong, so subtlely skewed that none of them could specify it. Off to the north, above the rise of cliff, Rhodry could still see the white peaks, about where they should have been and as high, too.
“It’s the wind!” Rhodry said abruptly. “It was quiet up above, but it’s blowing here. Should be the other way round.”
“Just so,” Otho snarled. “It’s eerie and dweomer-soaked and uncanny, and I hate it.”
Mic nodded; there was not much more to add, truly.
Eventually they caught up with Garin, who was rootling about between a trio of enormous gray boulders that lay at the foot of the cliff. Just as they reached him he grinned in triumph and pulled free a silver horn, all nicked and tarnished, at the end of a long chain.
“There,” he said. “I’ll call, and let’s hope someone answers.”
“Before we grow much older,” Otho muttered.
“Don’t get your hopes up about that.”
Even though the horn looked as if someone had been kicking it back and forth on the rocky ground, when Garin blew, the sound rang piercingly sweet, three long notes that brought tears to Rhodry’s eyes, although he could never say why, not then nor later. When he glanced at the dwarves, he caught Mic wiping his eyes on the back of his hand, and even Otho seemed moved. Garin blew the three notes three times, then returned the horn to its hiding place in a hollow among the rocks.
“Now we wait. Naught else for it.”
In the event they waited till the next afternoon. Some hundred yards from the river they found a sheltered spot among