They were two or three miles further on before Yaret finally looked back over her shoulder. By that time the donkeys were long out of sight. Parthenal had already been checking more surreptitiously, and had seen them disappear with a feeling of relief.
“Parthenal’s right; they will be fine,” said Rothir.
“Yes. I’m sure they will,” she said distantly. “I shall just have some explaining to do to my grandparents.”
“Well, your grandfather will also have some explaining to do to you, I believe.”
“Yes. You had better tell me where these cliffs are that we’re going to.”
“In another ten miles or so,” said Parthenal, “we will come to the chasm cut by the river Thore. The gorge is many miles long, and hundreds of feet deep. It’s quite a spectacular place.”
“I am sure.”
“You cannot help but admire it,” Parthenal went on, aiming to distract her from the vanished donkeys. “But there’s no bridge. The chasm is too wide. So we’ll continue along the cliffs on this western side until they drop down low enough for us to descend to the river. You won’t need to cross it with us. If you continue along this side, after another five miles or so you’ll see the Coban hills to the west.”
“Very well. I can work out the route from there. And you?”
“Meanwhile we shall ford the river and go east to Farwithiel,” said Rothir.
“And what if the stonemen are still after you?”
“If they haven’t caught up with us by the time we reach the Thore,” said Rothir, “they have little chance of doing so, and they will know it and most likely give up. East of the Thore is not a good place for them.”
She did not ask why not. She merely nodded.
“Without the donkeys you won’t be able to carry much gear,” said Rothir thoughtfully. “You’ll need a horse. Tiburé?” he called over. “I think that Yaret should be allowed to keep Poda when she leaves us.”
Tiburé paused, looked at Eled, and after a moment’s consideration nodded. “That seems fair payment for your service.”
“I don’t want payment,” Yaret said.
“Take it,” Rothir told her.
“Well… A horse would certainly make things easier. But what about Eled? Won’t he need Poda to ride home, once he is healed?”
“It looks as if that won’t be for a while. And they have horses in Farwithiel,” said Parthenal, watching Eled drooping yet again in front of Maeneb.
“But she’s a very fine horse. It’s too valuable a gift,” said Yaret reluctantly.
“Eled’s life was a valuable gift,” said Rothir. “It merely repays the debt.”
“There is no debt.”
“Do you want the horse or not?” demanded Parthenal impatiently.
After a moment’s silence, Yaret said, “Thank you.” Rothir looked over at Parthenal with his eyebrows raised. Parthenal shook his head. He was feeling rattled. Nothing was going as it should. He hated the constant stop-start of this journey. And it was so slow.
They trudged on, now climbing gradually but steadily. The sun began its long slide through the cool afternoon, yet its lengthening light conferred no warmth to the scene around them. The grass was yellow and the stocky trees dropped sharp needles on them as they rode.
This is a land prepared for winter, thought Parthenal, and he shivered.
At last Tiburé said, “Ah! Here is the Thore. I thought we’d never get here; but there is the path that leads to the cliffs. Maeneb? Is there anyone behind us?”
Maeneb looked back and listened briefly. Then she shook her head.
As they continued riding, a wide fissure in the ground became visible to their right, snaking towards them until their path lay parallel to it. This was the top of the famed cliffs above the Thore.
Parthenal dismounted and approached the edge of the ravine to take a look. Only once he came close could he hear the surging rumble of the waters, so far down were they.
He had been here on a few occasions and the sight and sound never failed to impress him. At the bottom of the gorge, the Thore looked small and thin, hardly more than a stream; but he knew that despite appearances it was a wide, strong river and that the drop down to it was even further than it seemed to be. The sides of the gorge were sheer red sandstone, perpendicular in many places; yet a surprising number of stunted trees or stubborn thorn bushes dotted the walls, clinging perilously to narrow perches.
“I have heard of this place,” said Yaret sadly, “but never imagined that it could be so…”
“Majestic?” he suggested.
“High.”
“It is certainly that. Are you afraid of heights?”
“Not normally,” she said, “but this is something beyond my experience.”
“We will not ride, but will walk the horses along this section of the path,” said Tiburé.
So only Maeneb and Eled remained mounted, with Rothir guiding their horse along the track while keeping as far as possible from the cliff-edge on their right.
At first that sheer edge was still several yards away. Before they had travelled very far, however, more rocks intruded to their left and pushed them closer to the brink. The rumbling of the river from below became more audible: a ceaseless, threatening thunder.
They moved carefully. Parthenal, leading the group, did not try to hurry on this path, although without a two-hundred foot drop by his side it would have felt easy enough. One slow mile they went, then a second, slower mile; every step a measured one, taking constant care, although the roar of the river gave him a strange sensation as if this place was not quite real. As if he could float away across the cliffs unharmed, aloft on unseen wings…
Don’t let yourself be hypnotised by it, he thought; and he paused to gaze down, sternly fixing in his mind the long sheer drop to the tumultuous water.
Then he looked up and across the chasm to the far side. A haze lay over it. Otherwise it appeared much the same as the land they had just walked through, with a patchwork of thin trees and bushes fading into mist.
That similarity, he knew, was deceptive. They might be permitted to find a path through to Farwithiel… and they might not.
But they still had to cross the river to get there. They were now above the chasm’s deepest point, and there was a long way yet to go. Not wishing to pause, Tiburé had taken over at the front of the group. Parthenal moved back from the river’s roar and was following the others when Maeneb cried out suddenly.
“Eled is slipping again!”
Quickly he pushed forward to assist her, holding up the slumping Eled. Meanwhile Rothir steered the horse to a less narrow section of the path, for this would be a dangerous spot for Eled to fall.
“Wake up,” Parthenal told the young man. “Hold on tight, Eled. Just a little further, and then you can rest.”
Ahead of them, the trail was crossed by a broad rock platform that overhung the gorge by a foot or two. It was the widest section of the path for some way; so here Rothir halted Maeneb’s horse. Carefully he and Parthenal together lifted Eled down and laid him on the stone slab to recover his strength.
Parthenal feared that it would take a while. Eled was barely conscious; his eyelids were fluttering.
“I should not have done it,” said Rothir quietly. “I should have taken my chances with him in the Coban hills. I should not have brought him all the way to the Gyr Tarn.”
“So now you would be stuck in some benighted Coban village, while we hunted high and low for both of you,” said Parthenal.
“There were other options.”
“Forget them. This is now,” said Parthenal. Kneeling down to pull the woollen blanket closer around Eled – he did not know where it had come from, presumably the pedlar – he saw how Eled tried to lift a hand to aid him, only to let it fall aside as if the effort were too great.
Parthenal felt a sudden lurch of his heart in case Eled should die here, on this hazardous blade of rock above the beating waters and so far from home. An unusual sense of fear and panic washed through him. From Eled’s drawn face, he thought the young man must feel the same anxiety.
“Take it easy, Eled,” he said, raising his voice over the rushing river of sound. “You’re just tired. Don’t worry; there’s no need for haste. You can rest here for a while.”
Even before he finished speaking he could smell it.
“What?” he said, at the same time as Rothir shouted harshly, “Darkburn.”
The stench of burning and decay enveloped them like sudden night. Parthenal sprang to his feet, drawing his sword with a swift ringing hiss, but his limbs had already become weak. He was ensnared by a swelling fear which was expanding swiftly into a storm-cloud of horror: a spreading flood of blind despair, which filled him with the certainty of imminent disaster – of fast-coming oblivion – of death. It almost overwhelmed him.
The darkburn was on the path ahead. He had not expected anything to come from that direction. It was rushing at them, tall and dense in its smoky indistinctness and moving on what might be ragged legs. He felt the heat pour from it as it whirled onto the stone platform. Behind it clumps of weed burst into flames. The very rock seemed to crackle with the heat.
Parthenal’s hand around his sword-hilt felt as feeble as Eled’s. His mind was a chaotic mass of fear and loathing and dreadful grief and anger. He did not know how to untangle the emotions nor how to deal with them. He was aware that somebody was wailing and hoped that it was not himself.
He saw Rothir lift his sword as if it weighed as much as a tombstone and swipe it at the darkburn, which spun away for a second. That reminded him of what he had to do although he did not know where to find the will or strength. He thought of the man he loved, and the will came: with the will, the weakness lessened enough for him to raise his sword and try to cleave the darkburn with it.
The darkburn charged, hurling itself between the two men in an onrush of unbearable heat. The horses panicked: Poda tried to flee, neighing wildly, and Parthenal was aware of Yaret attempting to control her so that the horse would not trample Eled in her fright.
He hacked at the darkburn and it seemed to pause although it did not break. This one was not to be so easily broken. Both he and Rothir struck again, in unison, and then had to leap back from its heat.
But caught between his sword and Rothir’s the darkburn seemed to flounder. Throwing itself forward in a hurtling rush, it missed them both. Before he could strike at it a third time, it spun to the edge of the precipice and went straight over. It fell in a long dark blur towards the churning waters far below.
In his weakness Parthenal did not dare to look over the edge after it in case he fell too. He collapsed to his knees on the warm rock and tried to regather his strength. But the rapid thinning of the cloud of horror told him that the darkburn must have truly gone.
“More,” called Rothir’s urgent voice, and he raised his head to see the stonemen running down the path towards them in the darkburn’s wake. Seven or eight. Before he was on his feet they had already charged the Riders.
Tiburé, wielding her sword against the first one, almost sliced the man’s arm off: Maeneb had her long knife out and was slashing at another. As usual the stonemen had little concept of self-defence – it was all attack, brutal and direct. Parthenal’s sword clashed heavily on an upraised axe as two stonemen leapt over to assail him. He had to fight against the feebleness that still made his limbs as lax as reeds.
They would not get Eled, he told himself furiously, he would not let them: and filled with wrath, he smote again and again until first one and then the other stoneman crumpled underneath his sword-blows, painted extravagantly in their own blood.
But two more ran forward to replace them. And behind them yet more stonemen were arriving, howling and yelling now that secrecy was no longer needed. Where had they all come from? Why hadn’t Maeneb detected them?
No time to think about that. Get ready for the next onslaught. The panicking horses helped him, unintentionally, by getting in the attackers’ way. One stoneman was kicked under the chin by a flying hoof and was hurled backwards into Rothir, who picked him up and threw him off the cliff. Another was knocked down and trampled by Tiburé’s horse: Tiburé made short work of him.
But on the stone slab, close to Eled, Poda neighed and reared up frantically while Yaret tried to pull her away from the injured rider. Hooves slipping on the rock, the horse fell over on her side. She landed heavily, close to the cliff-edge, neighing in distress.
Yaret was beneath her. She was trapped by one leg which was held fast under the weight of Poda’s body, right next to the precipice. Parthenal had to slash at a stoneman, sending him flying with a thump of his sword-hilt, before he could risk another glance Yaret’s way.
Her head was over the edge. She was trying to pull herself free: but the weight of the horse on her foot was immovable. Rothir hacked the head half off a stoneman and shouted something. Parthenal could not decipher the words over the harsh clatter of metal on stone and the pounding of the waters far below. When he tried to move over to help Yaret, two more stonemen ran forward to assail him.
He parried the blow of the first, ripping the sword from the man’s hand to spin high and glittering in the air before it disappeared over the cliff. But meanwhile the second stoneman leapt up onto Poda’s belly and swung his axe down fiercely, to where Yaret lay trapped and helpless.
The axe smacked into rock with a crunch. The stoneman jumped off Poda and kicked Yaret, hard.
Parthenal saw only the sudden flailing of her arms and legs as she was thrown over the precipice. Then she was gone. Time stopped. He stood with his mouth open, trying to take it in.
There was a roar next to him. Rothir charged like a madman; three seconds later the stoneman standing triumphantly by Poda had followed Yaret over the edge and down into the chasm with a sword-wound through his heart. Rothir was yelling incoherently as he laid about him. Two more of the enemy fell to his sword, while Parthenal, coming swiftly to his senses, finished off another. Maeneb cut the throat of a fourth.
He ran to Tiburé’s aid: there was blood on her face as she fought off the last of the stonemen. An instant later the man lurched forward and collapsed with Parthenal’s sword embedded in his back.
“Is that all of them?” said Tiburé, panting. She did not seem to realise what had happened.
Nor, fully, did Parthenal until Poda rolled over and finally struggled to her feet, her hooves skidding on a pool of blood, and they saw the booted foot that had remained trapped beneath her. Then sickness and horror lurched over him, as dreadfully as if the darkburn had just reappeared.
Rothir flung himself on his stomach at the cliff’s edge and looked over. Parthenal knelt there too to gaze down, although he had little hope.
There was no hidden ledge still holding Yaret. She was not clinging to any of the small gnarled shrubs that dotted the cliff face. No outreached hand stretched up for them to haul on. Her body was not even visible down below; the river might have already swept it away, along with the dead stonemen and the darkburn. He listened to its constant, busy noise which was itself a kind of silence.
At last Rothir sat up and wiped a hand across his face.
“I’m going down to look for her,” he said.
“Rothir. She’s dead,” said Parthenal.
“She might not be. I have to make sure.” Rothir was having difficulty speaking.
“She won’t have survived that fall,” said Tiburé. “Quite apart from her foot.”
“I don’t know,” said Maeneb with a kind of wail. “I don’t think she’s alive. I can’t hear anything. But I didn’t even hear the stonemen coming. I was listening in the wrong direction. And then Eled…” She made a despairing gesture.
Parthenal walked over numbly to check on Eled, who still lay motionless where they had laid him down. He was, miraculously, untouched by the fight. The stonemen had evidently not thought him worth attacking. Perhaps they had assumed him to be dead already, for he was only half conscious at best.
“I’m going down to look for her,” said Rothir again, his voice hoarse and almost unrecognisable. “I have to.”
“There’s no way down to the water,” said Tiburé, “not for another five miles. And then after fording the river you would have to backtrack downstream. The only path along the bottom is on the far side of the water. And we cannot move Eled yet. And even if we could move him now, it would be almost dark by the time we finished our descent to the ford.”
“I’ll go alone, now,” said Rothir.
“It would still be dark,” said Parthenal, “before you could reach this section of the Thore.”
Rothir, sitting by the cliff edge, put his head in his hands.
“I’ll try and get some food into Eled,” said Parthenal after a moment. “That might help. So might some more ethlon.”
“His mind is more awake than his body,” said Maeneb mournfully. “But it wanders.”
Rothir raised his head. “We told her she’d be safe! She was our responsibility. We told her she’d be safe!”
“We could not have foreseen it,” said Tiburé, although it was perfectly clear to Parthenal that they both could and should have foreseen the ambush. They had looked behind for their pursuers and not ahead. They had placed too much reliance on Maeneb when she had Eled on her mind.
Numbly he reached for the bag that was still strapped to Poda, to find some food for Eled. It was Yaret’s bag. She had been wearing her backpack when she fell: her most precious possessions had gone down with her. Such as they were.
Her foot still lay there on the rock. He did not know what to do about it. In the saddle-bag he saw a shirt and dropped it on the bloody foot to shroud it. Then he found oats and biscuit and made a mush of them with water to feed to Eled. All this time Rothir sat with his head in his hands.
“Something happened,” murmured the sick man, his eyelids fluttering.
“We were attacked. But the stonemen are all dead. You rest, and we’ll move again in a little while,” said Parthenal. He did not want to be the one who told Eled.
“We may as well all eat now,” said Tiburé. Almost as if nobody had just fallen over the cliff. But Tiburé was always practical. Tough as granite. She began to distribute the last of the bread – stale and hard – along with cheese and dried apple.
Everything felt like stone and sawdust in Parthenal’s mouth. Rothir looked at the food in his hand as if he did not know what to do with it. Then he began to eat, determinedly, the muscles of his throat and jaw working. He looked like a man in dreadful pain. Parthenal’s own grief and horror were focused on Rothir: he tried to spare some grief for Yaret too. He hoped it had been quick. Surely it must have been. A few seconds at most before she hit the bottom. Or drowned. That would have taken longer.
He wanted to stop imagining it. This is now, he thought, but I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was back then, before it happened. I wish it could be stopped. I didn’t know her. But there will be no forgetting this.
No-one spoke. They listened to the snarl and roaring of the waters down below. Tiburé gave Eled a few drops of ethlon, and he roused himself.
“Had we better move on? I’m ready now,” he said, lifting his head to look around. “Are we all here? Where’s Yaret?”
“Yaret went ahead,” said Tiburé. Nobody contradicted her. Rothir hoisted Eled to his feet and Parthenal helped to lift him on to Tiburé’s horse. They walked past the dead stonemen and slowly, carefully along the cliff with the waters echoing in their ears.
After a mile or two the sound grew louder; the sides of the gorge were becoming less high, or else the river had not cut a way so far down. Parthenal watched the water rushing closer: grey, fast and careless except where it swirled into great pools before dancing its way out again. Its song was an unremitting blur of noise. By the time they descended to the crossing place it was almost deafening.
Here the water was at its broadest and less than a yard deep. None the less they had to ride the horses across with care because of the swirling current and the rocks underfoot. A slip could mean being swept away through the deepening gorge for many miles, all the way down to the Darkburn...
That name now seemed to grip like an iron clamp on Parthenal’s chest. He saw the ragged darkburn falling with its burden of despair. And Yaret falling after it. He had the sense of a door closing, of some light shut out.
By the time they reached the far side of the swiftly-flowing Thore, twilight was cradling them. Its soft blue presence was no consolation.
“I need to go and look for her,” said Rothir again, dully.
“At first light tomorrow,” said Parthenal, “we will go together.”
Those must be splashes from the river crossing that marked Rothir’s face, for Rothir never wept. But as darkness covered them, Parthenal to his dismay found himself weeping a little, silently, for his friend.