Fire - Kristin Cashore [3]
Suddenly the slope under Larch’s back gave way and they were falling through darkness. An avalanche, Larch thought numbly, every nerve in his body still focused on protecting the child under his coat. His shoulder hit against something sharp and Larch felt tearing flesh, and wetness, warmth. Strange, to be plunging downward like this. The drop was heady, dizzying, as if it were vertical, a free fall; and just before he slipped into unconsciousness Larch wondered if they were falling through the mountain to the floor of the earth.
LARCH JACKKNIFED A WAKE, frantic with one thought: Immiker. The boy’s body wasn’t touching his, and the straps hung from his chest, empty. Larch felt around with his hands, whimpering. It was dark. The surface on which he lay was hard and slick, like slimey ice. He shifted to extend his reach and screamed suddenly, incoherently, at the pain that ripped through his shoulder and head. Nausea surged in his throat. He fought it down and lay still again, weeping helplessly, and moaning the boy’s name.
‘All right, Father,’ Immiker’s voice said, very close beside him. ‘Stop crying and get up.’
Larch’s weeping turned to sobs of relief.
‘Get up, Father. I’ve explored. There’s a tunnel and we must go.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘I’m cold and hungry. Get up.’
Larch tried to lift his head, and cried out, almost blacked out. ‘It’s no use. The pain is too great.’
‘The pain is not so great that you can’t get up,’ Immiker said, and when Larch tried again he found that the boy was right. It was excruciating, and he vomited once or twice, but it was not so bad that he couldn’t prop himself on his knees and his uninjured arm, and crawl across the icy surface behind his son.
‘Where—’ he gasped, and then abandoned his question. It was too much work.
‘We fell through a crack in the mountain,’ Immiker said. ‘We slid. There’s a tunnel.’
Larch didn’t understand, and forward progress took so much concentration that he stopped trying to. The way was slippery and downhill. The place they went toward was slightly darker than the place they came from. His son’s small form scuttled down the slope ahead of him.
‘There’s a drop,’ Immiker said, but comprehension came so slowly to Larch that before he understood, he fell, tumbling knees over neck off a short ledge. He landed on his injured shoulder and momentarily lost consciousness. He woke to a cold breeze and a musty smell that hurt his head. He was in a narrow space, crammed between close walls. He tried to ask whether his fall had injured the boy, but only managed a moan.
‘Which way?’ Immiker’s voice asked.
Larch didn’t know what he meant, and moaned again.
Immiker’s voice was tired, and impatient. ‘I’ve told you, it’s a tunnel. I’ve felt along the wall in both directions. Choose which way, Father. Take me out of this place.’
The ways were identically dim, identically musty, but Larch needed to choose, if it was what the boy thought best. He shifted himself carefully. His head hurt less when he faced the breeze than when he turned his back to it. This decided him. They would walk toward the source of the breeze.
And that is why, after four days of bleeding, stumbling and starving, after four days of Immiker reminding him repeatedly that he was well enough to keep walking, Larch and Immiker stepped out of the tunnel not into the light of the Monsean foothills, but into that of a strange land on the other side of the Monsean peaks. An eastern land neither of them had heard of except for foolish tales told over Monsean dinners - tales of rainbow-coloured monsters and underground labyrinths.
LARCH WONDERED SOMETIMES if the blow to his head on the day he’d fallen through the mountain had caused some hurt to his brain. The more time he spent in this new land, the more he struggled against a fog hovering on the edge of his