'Those are the Needle Rocks,' said their guide, indicating dark shapes in the night which blanked out stars and constellations.
Somewhere a blowhole spluttered as a wave forced its way up its gullet. Paddling, Hearst strained to see their landing ground, which must be close now.
'Those rocks have claimed many ships,' said their guide, his own paddle helping drive their canoe forward even as he spoke. 'Storms make these waters dangerous.'
'It looks calm enough now,' said Blackwood.
'Yes,' said the guide. 'But storms do come in from the Ocean of Cambria. Open water reaches away east to Ashmolea. Storm waves league westward, building their strength.'
And Miphon thought:
– Yes. Yes indeed.
Remembering.
They came in under towering cliffs, where swells, leisured yet powerful, surged onto rocks. A narrow shingle beach afforded them a landing.
'A league's easting along these rocks takes you to the start of the Chameleon's Tongue,' said their guide. 'Nobody will have seen us land, not here in the cliff-shadow. Take care, and perhaps you'll reach Seagate without being seen.'
'Whose eyes should we fear?' said Miphon.
'Any ship cruising the Ocean of Cambria counts as danger,' said their guide. 'Worst are the Alvassar pirates, who sometimes raid this far north – but others can be as bad.'
'What others?'
'Whalers from the Ebrell Islands, who will meet you with a smile then ram a harpoon between your shoulder blades. And the sea traders from Asral, the Malud -they fancy a little knife-work now and then.'
'So much for the dangers from the sea,' said Miphon. 'What about the people living on the Chameleon's Tongue?'
'Nobody lives on this coast for fear of Alvassar slaving raids,' said their guide. 'Over the Lizard Crest Rises, which run the length of the Tongue, there's people living by the shores of the Sponge Sea.'
'What kind of people?' said Hearst.
'Who cares? It's a rugged coast, no good for travellers. I do hear tell that they're poor: I don't know if they'd kill you for your flesh and bones, but I do know this coast's safest.'
'Weil keep to it then,' said Hearst. 'Many thanks for your help.'
'Life is for life.' said their guide, dismissing his thanks. 'All speed!' 'And you,' said Miphon.
The canoe ventured out into the night. Miphon. Blackwood and Hearst began to pick their way over the rocks toward the Chameleon's Tongue. Once they got there, five hundred leagues of sandmarching would take them to the mountains near Hartzaven and Seagate: a twenty day journey, if they made good time.
While Southsearchers had handed them from village to village on their journey through the Stepping Stone Islands, it had been a blessed relief for Hearst to have all command responsibilities taken from his hands. He had failed so many times that he had come to doubt his own fitness for command.
Now he was reluctant to lead his party away from the shelter of the cliffs and onto the Chameleon's Tongue. He wished they could have stayed in some South-searcher village, to live out their lives in island isolation while the world contended with its troubles. Yet he carried a guilt-burden: therefore he committed himself to this quest. It was the least he could do.
The tide was half way out; from dark sand dunes, an expanse of beach over two hundred paces wide sloped gently to lines of small surf breaking under the stars; the distances were hidden in the night.
'Well,' said Hearst. 'Let's be on our way.'
Leading them onto the sands, he felt nervous, uneasy: the beach was too open, too wide. But time was important, and they could travel faster along open sands than through the dunes, scrub and rocklands of the hinterland.
Soon they fell into a steady rhythm, tramping over the firm seasand at a pace they could keep up right through the night; slowly the cliffs receded into the darkness behind them. But nothing soothed Hearst, not their steady progress, not the lull of the rhythms of the heart, not the low-mounting seafall of beaching swells. Still apprehensive, he kept glancing backwards, thinking how easy it would be for horsemen to ride them down on the beach.
Suddenly, from the darkness ahead, something huge rose from the sand with a seething, hissing cry. Points of white shone within its expanding darkness as it swept toward them.
Hearst screamed: 'Ahyak Rovac!'
His sword leapt to his hand. His body braced to receive his enemy: braced to meet his death.
The monster broke apart into separate flashes of white which wheeled away into the night, cold cries now clear and recognisable.
'It's only seabirds,' said Miphon mildly. 'Only gulls.'
Hearst stood there, shaking.
'Come on,' said Blackwood. 'Let's be moving.' i i
League after league slipped away beneath their boots, until gradually the sky began to lighten. It needed close j observation to tell that night was drawing to a close, but after so long in the darkness, they were sensitive to the ' slightest variation in the sky.
They had some darkness left still, but Hearst began to scan the shoreline for a place to stop. There was little variation in the dark line of dunes, but soon they crossed water: one of the streams, scarcely deeper than the thin slick of mirage, that seeped out from the dunes to run down the beach to the sea.
'Halt,' said Hearst. 'We stop here.'
They walked up the beach, treading in water all the way; the waterflow would wash away their footprints before sunrise. i
'They're ready,' said Miphon.
Hearst, opening his eyes, sat up to join the others at their meal, which was some triangular shellfish Miphon had recovered from sands near the low tide mark. The travellers had eaten several shellfish meals since they set out along the Chameleon's Tongue. It had been seven days now.
T think we're better than halfway to the Elbow,' said Hearst.
'We'd better get there soon,' said Blackwood. 'Before we die of sheer monotony. I'm dreaming sand, you know.'
'You're lucky,' said Hearst. 'I'm eating it.' And he spat out some grit which had infiltrated his meal.
'We could use the time,' said Miphon. i never did 498 finish my little lecture on free will. Where did we get to? Quantifying the stochastic and the deterministic, I believe.'
'Perhaps a certain wizard had better determine to leave his lectures to another time,' said Hearst. 'Or a certain wizard might find himself making a personal investigation of some possibly purely stochastic but definitely very cold and vigorous wave-forms.'
'Oh,' said Miphon.
But that was as close as they came to a quarrel. i"** Ten days down the Chameleon's Tongue, Hearst lay dreaming of a struggle on the battlements of Castle Vaunting. In his dream, Phyphor directed a blaze of fire at Collosnon invaders. Then there was a fading glow, like an afterimage, as red-hot Collosnon armour cooled rapidly in the night air.
A survivor, half-cooked, screamed.
The dream shifted to… a dragon's mouth, filled with fire… Looming Forest… Rovac, and then… Ep Pass… and… the Harvest Plains, where Farfalla…
'They're ready,' said Miphon.
Hearst let food distract him from his dreams. Without surprise, he found that today's shellfish tasted much like yesterday's. The grit, perhaps, was a trifle finer today.
Having eaten, he lay back and closed his eyes. Through closed eyelids, a blood-red sun. Endless, endless, the sounds of the surf: the thunder of breakers beaching themselves on nearby sands, the moaning surf-dirge of distant waves churning into foam.
Blood-red sun.
Farfalla… yes, Farfalla… a tent on the Harvest Plains… the sun hot through the skin of the tent… hot shadows, breathing whispers… taste of the sun… hot-skin shadows… red sun… Farfalla, yes, Farfalla had taught him much… including how to use a sword, how to fight with a precision which did not come naturally to him.
Farfalla had even taught him how to train when there was no opportunity to exercise his muscles. Now, lying in the sun in a place on the Tongue, hundreds of leagues from Selzirk, Hearst made use of that teaching.
Time and again, Hearst reviewed techniques. He imagined drawing his sword… at first slowly, getting every angle precisely right, then faster and faster, till his blade was a blur scarcely slower than thought. Time and again he imagined facing Elkor Alish, remembering exactly how Alish moved: fluid, fluent, supple as a cat, lithe as water, his blade attacking with perfect mastery of speed and timing.
Timing,' said Farfalla.
He remembered her voice, low, relaxed, persistent, working its way into his mind.
'The greatest mysteries lie in the simplest things,' said Farfalla. 'Timing and speed are the halves of one whole. What is that whole? Language lacks a word for it. That alone should tell you how much we have to learn. There are other mysteries Other mysteries. Yes…
But think of the training, think of…
Timing…
In the end he had said to her: 'This watching, breathing, listening, timing, it's all yery well, but sooner or later there has to be a moment when you're committed – when there's no reserve, and the only chance is to carry through the attack.'
And she had said: 'I haven't tried to teach you things you already know.'
Sunlight through his eyelids. Blood red. A sword slants through space and time. From moon-bright steel to banner-red blood. Again. Again…
Someone was snoring. Opening his eyes, Hearst saw Miphon had gone to sleep; Blackwood was nodding. He noted a flicker of movement: a lizard was daring the sunlight. It was darkish green, with bluish spots on top; patterns reminiscent of gills stippled its sides. It breathed in quick puffs though a toothless mouth; its neck swelled out with every inbreath. Slowly the lizard approached the empty shells left from the travellers' meal, where a few flies savoured shellfish remnants.
A quick tongue flicked out, snatching one of the flies for the lizard's maw. Speed and timing. Perfection. The lizard watched Hearst with beady eyes; he wondered if he would be fast enough to grab it.
He would welcome a change of diet.
Behind them lay three hundred leagues of open beaches, clean and white under the blue dome of the heavens; they had travelled all the way to the Elbow.
In any other geography, the Elbow would have been unremarkable, unless one cared to comment on the way the strata had tilted so they ran diagonally and in places almost vertically. The Elbow was simply a conical rise of rock, no more than a hundred and fifty paces high, upthrust from the sea and connected to the rest of the land by a low spine of rock over which a child could have scrambled.
This piece of rock had been dignified by its own name and marked on maps because it was a major landmark, interrupting the sweep of the sands of the Chameleon's Tongue, and marking the point where the coastline turned north.
The three travellers could see that the Elbow finished in a point deep in the water, but to follow the cliff-edge out to that point would have meant wading waist-deep in water.
'Let's climb to the top,' said Hearst.
So up they went, forcing a way through tough, scrawny vegetation, avoiding those parts that were armed with thorns and spines. From the top, they had an extensive view. To the west and north, the sands of the Chameleon's Tongue stretched away to the horizons. Inland, the ground rose to the heights of the Lizard Crest Rises. Out to sea lay the Teardrop Islands.
'That's where we're going,' said Hearst, pointing north.
It was much the same as the landscape they had already traversed; near the Elbow were small cliffs, some with veins of red ore running through them, but further north the cliffs declined and sand dunes ran alongside the beach again.
'We can get down to the point from here,' said Miphon. 'Those rocks might give us good fishing.'
They climbed down, taking care when easing past a sheer drop to the water. On reaching the point, they saw a huge sea-cave was eaten into the cliff.
The water here was deep, the bottom lost in sightless darkness. The tide was low, revealing orange and yellow growths on rocks usually covered by the sea; there was the smell of sun-dried algae. Peering into the water, Hearst saw a few very small fish, nibbling at rocks or hanging motionless in the water until they sculled away with a flicker of orange fins.
'We can use snails for bait,' said Miphon.
From the rocks, they gathered snails, some rounded and black, others living in conical white shells. They pried stones from between crevices and hammered the snails; the sea creatures writhed and twisted as their shells were broken. Blackwood pitied them, their comfortable lives shattered by hammer-stones, their bodies exposed to the harsh light of the sun – yet he still broke open the shells. He was a human being, a kind of creature that must eat to live.
To cut his bait down to size, Hearst bit into one of the white-shell snails. After a few moments, his mouth started to burn. He swilled it out with salt water and spat.
'Don't touch the white ones,' said Hearst. 'They burn your mouth.' 'All right,' said Miphon.
With hooks baited, they let down their lines. Blackwood and Miphon used thin lines and small hooks, trying for the little fish they could see, but Hearst, with stronger tackle, weighted his line for the depths. Blackwood got the first catch, a small fat fish with dark spots on the top and a pale underbelly.
'Did it give you a hard fight?' said Hearst.
'Oh, it was a memorable struggle,' said Blackwood. 'What kind of luck are you getting?'
'Just nibbles,' said Hearst.
He pulled his line up to have a look; steel glistened water-wet. His bait had been stolen.
'The hook's too large,' said Miphon.
'No,' said Hearst. 'The fish are too small.'
He baited his hook again, then pounded the rocks, hammering barnacles to a white scale-paste, which sifted down through the water. More small fish flickered into view, drawn by this manna. Nothing else. i felt something,' said Miphon, excited.
'Probably something purely stochastic,' said Hearst.
But, when Miphon drew up his line, his own bait was gone. Miphon packed it away.
'I'm going hunting,' he said.
'Alone?' said Hearst.
'The only other thing on the Tongue is our shadows.'
'I don't think it's safe,' said Hearst.
'I'll be the judge of that,' said Miphon.
He turned and clambered up the steep slope, and Hearst, weary with long leagues of marching, did not bother to call him back. The day was too hot and lazy for anyone to imagine danger on the stalk. Hearst concentrated on catching fish.
Three more snail-baits were taken in quick succes sion. Hearst gutted Blackwood's fish – there were five of them by now – slicing from vent to gills, drawing out heart-red organs and thick intestines packed with fragments of barnacles. He scaled them, lightweight fish armour spraying up where his knife skimmed the skin. Then he cut off the head and tails.
After baiting his hook with a bit of fish, Hearst threw a handful of guts, heads and tails into the water. They fell away into the depths, leaving threads of blood near the surface. Hearst threw in his line after them. He got no bites except the tiny infuriating nibbles of the little, thieving fish.
Late in the afternoon, Hearst pulled in his line and wound it up.
'We'll come back by night,' said Hearst. 'When the tide's in. The bigger fish might start feeding then.' 'Good,' said Blackwood.
And Blackwood gathered together handfuls of black snails and dumped them in a splash-fed pool above high water mark, where he would be able to lay his hands on them easily by moonlight. He threw a couple of hammer stones into the same pool. Then the two climbed to the top of the Elbow.
Miphon had garnered a brace of lizards, each as long as a man's forearm. They cooked the lizards and the little, little fish over a small, hot fire which gave no smoke to betray them to the watching world.
'We're going fishing tonight,' said Hearst.
'Are you?' said Miphon.
'There'll be bigger fish by night,' said Hearst. 'All fishermen know that.' iil take your word for it,' said Miphon. 'Myself, I'd rather sleep.'
Hearst and Blackwood got a little sleep themselves as the last of the daylight faded; they woke to the light of the moon's declining quarter. The moon rode battle-high, with streamers of black cloud sliding through the sky on a high airstream; down near the sea, the night was calm, but there was a low swell, and as Hearst and Blackwood climbed down to the point they could hear the swells breaking on the rocks, and the glutinous shifting of masses of water within the sea cave.
Hearst stood on the rocks and relieved himself, an arc of urine spattering into the sea, kicking phosphorescence to life in the water. Phosphorescent creatures gleamed on the rocks as each slow, lazy sea-surge rode home leisurely to end in an echoing thud in the depths of the sea cave.
The two men, shadows to each other in the night, broke open snails and baited their hooks.
T should have saved one of those little fish,' said Hearst. 'That's the best bait.'
'You can have the first one I catch,' said Blackwood.
Soon after, Blackwood handed Hearst a small fish. It quivered in his hand, struggled as the hook went home. Live bait. Hearst swung his line once, twice, three times, then cast it out into the darkness. It fell. The line snaked away as the small fish sprinted in panic. Hearst felt life sing along the line as his bait carried the hook into the depths.
Then the line went weightless. It swayed away sideways into the night. Pulling on the line, Hearst felt a leisurely power bearing his bait-fish away. He yanked on the line to drive the hook hard home. The answer was a sudden jerk that almost had him in the water. The line pulled taut. Cordage burnt through his hands. He swore. Then the line broke.
A larger swell rocked through the dark sea, splashed spray onto the rocks they were standing on, and boomed thunder inside the sea cave. Black clouds swallowed the moon. Something gleamed under water, big, white, far down, turning, gone – what was it? Another wave slammed home against the rocks.
'Come on,' said Hearst. 'Let's get back to the campsite.'
Later that night, waiting for sleep, he thanked his 505 fates for what had been, in its own way, a perfect day. He knew the dangers that lay ahead: the Dry Pit, the Marabin Erg, and, if they survived that, eventually a battle with the Swarms themselves. He knew the odds favoured his death: he doubted that he would live to see another spring. And so he savoured what was left to him, and found it sweet. As Saba Yavendar said:
My feet wear down the last of the road Through scarabshard cities, through shufflerock hills, Through grey timedwindled mountainscapes.
Insects feed at my sweat Till a cavemouth swallows me to its shelter.
My goatskin outglubs the last of its bub, And fills the cup to less than belly-centre:
Yet I drink, for I will not refuse the cup Simply because the wine lacks the brim.
There must have been a storm far out to sea, because for days big swells broke on the shores of the Tongue, each swell rising glass-green as it reached the shallows near the shore, then breaking to churning white spray with a boom of thunder.
As the three trekked north along the sands, the tideline now was littered with shells, and occasional clumps of black seaweed, some with thick clusters of fat pink barnacles clinging to them. Now and then they encountered signs of human life: charred timbers that had once been shaped with axe or adze, and had met fire before the sea brought them to this resting; a fishing float marked with a weather-rune; the cork-buoyed haft of a broken harpoon.
Halfway between the Elbow and the cliffs of Seagate, they found a beachside tree covered with blood-red blossoms. It was, said Miphon, a tree known to some of the peoples of the Ocean of Cambria as yanzyonz, meaning 'autumn fire'. The travellers rested in the shade of the tree; bees were at work in the blossoms.
'Honey,' said Blackwood, listening to the bees.
'That would be nice,' said Hearst.
'These things can be arranged,' said Miphon. 'If you don't mind waiting.'
'But,' said Hearst, 'you've lost your…'
'This doesn't need magic,' said Miphon. 'Watch.'
And he caught one of the nectar-seeking bees, tore pieces from its veined wings, then released it. The injured bee could fly hardly faster than walking pace. Miphon followed it, knowing it would lead him straight to the hive.
'I'm going to dig shellfish,' said Blackwood.
'Enjoy yourself,' said Hearst.
Left alone, he decided to gather some firewood. In his search, he discovered, not far from the shoreline, a low bank of old shells, long ago bleached white by the sun. Many were calcined, cracked by heat; there were banks of such shells all along the Chameleon's Tongue, where groups of people had camped for weeks at a time, feeding on shellfish, sometimes cooking them in bulk to take inland. The heap of discarded shells could have been there for years, decades or centuries.
Unbidden and unexpected, a memory surfaced. It was one of the memories of the wizard Phyphor, who, thousands of years before, had stood on the shores of the harbour of Hartzaven, at Seagate, watching a small sailing craft making for the shore.
Phyphor had said: is that them?'
And his companion, one Saba Yavendar, had said, yes, yes, that's them, that's the party come to negotiate for the Dareska Amath – Hearst remembered.
Remembered the Dareska Amath, as seen through Phyphor's eyes. A wild people, yes, much given to laughter and boasting, fond of improbable stories and outrageous dares, a tough and hardy seafaring folk, eager for the challenge of an audacious venture into the Deep South. Those were his ancestors, and… they were nothing like the people who now lived on Rovac.
The Dareska Amath had been quick to anger and quick to forget; the Rovac had developed the capacity for a sour, unrelenting hatred that nothing could appease. The Dareska Amath had possessed a sardonic sense of the ridiculous which tempered their excesses; the Rovac cultivated an overbearing arrogance and a fanatical sense of honour which destroyed their sense of proportion.
Standing there on the sands of the Tongue, Hearst thought of the way Elkor Alish had gone raging to war to revenge a wrong committed over four thousand years ago. The Dareska Amath would have laughed at such a loss of proportion – and at Alish, seeking to honour their memory by destroying the Confederation of Wizards.
Now the Swarms were sweeping north through Argan. That disaster must make Alish re-assess the situation, and see that their world was too fragile to sustain a never-ending feud that threatened the destruction of the strongest and the best. And if Alish would reconsider, then, possibly, Morgan Hearst and Elkor Alish might one day be able to meet again as friends.
The time came when the cliffs of Seagate appeared through the surfhaze: one more march would bring them to those cliffs. Another day would bring them to Hartzaven, where they hoped to be able to find a boat to take them to the northern shore.
Hearst decided to make the march to the cliffs by night, for if they were going to meet anyone on the Chameleon's Tongue, this last part of the journey was where it was most likely to happen.
They made their way by moonlight. The moon was cold and steel-bright in a clear sky. There was no cloud; every star was visible. The beach stretched away into the darkness; they walked on the wet sand, letting the waves' wash obliterate their footprints.
The ocean had calmed; the waves were less than knee-high, but broke with a series of sharp retorts, each like the crack of a whip. Breaking, each wave curled over, forming a tube in which phosphorescence was stirred to life, so it was as if a bolt of lightning shot along the inside of each tubing wave just before it collapsed into miniature thunder.
Where feet scuffed the wet sand, phosphorescence shone, a speck here, a speck there. Blackwood scooped up a handful of sand. In the centre shone the blue-green fire of one single phosphorescent creature. Its body was too small to see, but its light, in the darkness, held close to his face, was bright as one of the ardent stars of the heavens.
The Rovac warrior Morgan Hearst led them on, into the darkness.