Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [191]
“Well, if there’s truly dweomer at work here, then we can invent our own way to take omens, and it’ll be good enough. If there isn’t dweomer at work, well, then, we’re doomed,” Laughing, he drew his silver dagger and held it up, “May the gods look down and decide!”
Remembering a chance remark of Jill’s, he made sure that he was moving deosil, then spun round and round like a child playing a game. When, after a few dizzy-making turns, he saw out of the corner of his eye the high peak flashing toward him, he let the dagger fly. It arched up, winking in the sun, and fell pointing straight at the leftward of the two low and broken peaks.
“Done, then!” Enj called out. “Well see what the gods have in store for us.”
It took them all day to work their way up the leftward slope. The morning, or so Enj said, they spent learning how to climb, inching from crack to crack, from patch of scrub wood to fissure. Much to Enj’s relief they did find decent water, tinged with sulfur and warm, but drinkable, in the occasional pool or cranny. On the lower slope they could make steady if slow progress; by noon they could look back at the plain below and see the trees as tiny marks on barren ground. They rested crammed into a more or less horizontal fissure where trees as gnarled as gnomes were breaking black rock apart, and moss and lichen lay thick, a green if slimy carpet.
After a scant meal they started again. The upper slope rose so smoothly that it seemed they climbed for hours yet traveled not a mile. Up and ever up they went, bent double against the angle, eyes fixed on the next barren streak of black rock, the next patch or pocket of thin soil, slippery with dead grass. All round them the wind gusted this way or that, tainted with brimstone and ancient ash. At last, just when Rhodry’s legs seemed to be melting into water, he glanced up to see a horizon of sorts hanging above him— the blackish line of the rock face against blue sky where it lipped over to flatten. When Rhodry hauled himself over, he found another slope ahead, but this one slanted down,broken here and there with flattish spots where a scrawny tree or two lifted its bare branches.
“Almost there,” Enj panted. “Hang on.”
They rested for a few moments, blowing for breath, pushing back sweaty hair from their foreheads, then settled their packs and moved on. As the slope became a proper cliff top, Rhodry got a glimpse of what lay ahead, a huge rise of distant cliffs, as flat and circling as Lin Serr’s wall, with the snowy peak beyond catching full sun, but it wasn’t till they reached the edge that he could see the entire view.
“Ye gods,” he whispered. “Ye gods.”
In front of him the ridge they’d been following dropped away for hundreds of yards to a vast valley floor, unrolling on and on to the distant rise of precipice that had once been the inside of a mountain. These cliffs formed a semicircle, just as if they were the rim of an enormous drinking bowl made of clay, but one ruined on the wheel by a slip of the potter’s thumb, that is, the depression where they’d crawled over. Rhodry shook his head, trying to imagine what had made this crater. Over the lip of cold rock on which he now stood fire and liquid rock had once run like wine spilling from the deformed bowl, and the rock had bubbled, too, just like boiling water. He found it hard to believe, yet he knew that Enj’s father had taught the truth of the matter. The bottom of the bowl now formed the living valley, covered with grass in places and dotted with trees that flamed red and gold, as if in homage to their home’s fiery birth. Autumn came early, he supposed, at this height.
“The God’s Soup Bowl,” Enj said, grinning.
“It is! Avain was right, after all.”
“Good name for it, truly. Lacks a certain poetry, mayhap.”
“Whatever we call it, it’s huge.”
“A fair two mile across at least, I’d say.” Enj held up a thumb at arm’s length to help himself gauge. “Hard to tell. And those cliffs there at the other lip must stand a good mile above the floor. That be a wretched piece of luck.”
“Why?