Читать книгу Blackfire: The Girl with the Diamond Key - James Daniel Eckblad - Страница 5

Childheart sprang to his feet, coughing, choking on smoke that had engulfed him and was filling his lungs and stinging his eyes. The smoke was so dense that it blotted out the light from the sky, rendering Childheart incapable of seeing anything whatsoever, including most urgently any place providing a way of escape. And he knew he couldn’t last long; so any way out of the smoke, of necessity, would have to be nearby.

Childheart’s thoughts turned to the river—toward which he was already dashing, heading in the direction of its sound. Within seconds, the unicorn, galloping with utter abandon, tumbled harshly into the surf, his left hind leg striking a submerged rock as he plunged beneath the roiling waves, and was pulled by fierce currents swiftly downstream to the east.

Childheart knew that struggling against the currents would only waste oxygen. Moreover, he saw no light penetrating the water from above, and so concluded that surfacing for air at this point, despite his dire need, would simply deliver him to the same smoke he sprang into the water to escape. He wondered: would there be the lights of Fire Eyes to save him this time?

But Childheart had only just begun to search for lights as he continued to tumble and spin about in the undertows, fearful of some fatal collision with another submerged boulder, when with a jolt he felt himself lifted by a surge and launched out of the water. He landed hard against the ground, in a depression-like trough that was nearly ten feet beneath the smoke that continued to blanket the ground. And there was also some dim light, just barely seeping through the smoke, but enough for Childheart to see—to see the trough below and the smoke above, and so, with happy relief, to see the smokeless space where he lay.

The unicorn lay where he landed, breathing in air that was friendly to his lungs, and gathering his wits. Right away, Childheart sensed, in the darkness both ahead and behind, that the trough continued on some sort of course. Accordingly, he drew in several more breaths and then stood, his head just inches beneath the hovering layer of smoke, and at once began to step cautiously in the direction he was already facing, which seemed to be away from the river.

As he walked with probing tentativeness along the bottom of the depression, which was about six feet across, Childheart noticed: first, that he was working his way up hill, if ever so slightly; and, second, that there were deep wheel ruts in the hard-packed earth, suggesting a lengthy history of cart transport. How recently the carts had traveled along the route, however, Childheart could not determine. But it wasn’t as if Childheart had any inclination to allow wariness to dictate his movements. Proceeding on the present course, albeit with caution because of the darkness that veiled from sight whatever was twenty feet in front of him, was his only reasonable option, regardless of what lay ahead.

It wasn’t long before the smoke began to thin and Childheart was able to see well enough up the path to be able to trot, if not to gallop, if he so chose. But he still had no idea what existed just outside the trough—including anything that might be unfriendly—and reminded himself that any pace other than a slow walk would surely alert anything nearby to his presence.

On he walked up the path, gaining strength as he continued. Out of immediate danger, and aware of nothing imminent, Childheart now had the slight luxury of considering a pause on his journey to ponder his friends’ whereabouts. But Childheart continued walking up the path, “pausing” only in his mind.

He had every reason to believe that Kahner yet lived, if only still ensconced inside the industrial cavern or otherwise alive in the grip of capture. He was optimistic that Starnee and Thorn were still alive, there being no evidence that they were forcibly removed from Taralina’s compound during his brief absence while exploring the castle’s interior. He was optimistic, albeit less so, that Elli and Beatríz were still alive, since Kahner and he had not discovered them anywhere inside the tomb—or along the tunnel leading away from the Queen’s bier—and there being no evidence of any injury to the girls or of their deaths.

Childheart was not at all optimistic that the two boys were still alive, his last sighting of Alex and Jamie being the enemy closing in on them in fierce battle on the field between the two castles. And yet, he fleetingly reflected, as the smoke was fast dissipating before him, there seemed to him to be an inexorability to the story that their collective lives were unfolding that left him vaguely hopeful—as if the story itself was somehow in control, and the only determinative question was how the story would choose to end itself. But it was only a sense, and perhaps only wishful thinking, and not something that he at all could understand—and, therefore, not something he at all could believe. Still, even the merest sense of a controlling story was welcome, if only because it necessarily suggested a storyteller and an imagination, as well as a story with some direction, if not teleology, and because this sense, by being a sense, was (happily) unassailable by reason and logic.

What was logical, however, and therefore also unassailable by logic and reason, was that, if there was an imagination unfolding the story he was in, then ineluctably there was, as well, a storyteller who was good—or at least not evil; maybe entirely inscrutable, but certainly not evil. Perhaps not good either, if that were possible, but certainly not evil. And that was enough for now. It had to be; there wasn’t anything else. Just this sense . . .

So lost in his thoughts was he that Childheart was startled, both by the complete absence of the smoke and by the disclosure of the twilit, cloud-wrapped sky that had been an unwavering companion since first emerging from The Mountains, seemingly so long ago. More startling still was that the trough seemed to have become a ravine. The path-turned-to-ravine was thirty feet wide, and its sides were each two hundred feet of sheer rock towering toward a thin slice of sky above—the only light, drifting down against the gloom of the gorge.

Childheart stopped to listen, feeling vibrations in his hooves. There was a din of activity going on—deep in the ground beneath his feet; and he wondered if it wasn’t the sounds from the cavern he had fled—where Kahner might still be—and which he promised Kahner he would return to, within hours, if at all possible. He wondered, in that regard, how many hours, if not days, it had actually been since he had abandoned his companion.

Childheart, still stationary, searched up the path and along the canyon walls with his eyes, and then pivoted, to continue the same search behind him, looking for any other opening into or between the canyon walls besides the one he was following. But seeing nothing, he resumed his walk, maintaining the same quiet pace, constantly looking above, as well as ahead.

The pathway forming the bottom of the canyon continued to ascend, but more sharply now, and the height of the canyon’s walls was diminishing. Again Childheart stopped. No longer did he feel any vibrations or hear any sounds, save the whistle of a breeze cutting across the top of the gorge, now no more than fifty feet above his head. But he stopped just the same because there was a pale light in the distance, as if from the end of a tube, far up the path. He began to walk again, probingly, traveling for another fifteen minutes or so. Then, in the near distance, he saw that the sides of the canyon abruptly disappeared, and that he was about to enter a tunnel roughly the size of the initial trough the rapids had launched him into.

For another half hour Childheart walked through the tunnel, amazed at just how far away the light was at the other end, if, in fact, it was an end the light was signaling, and the light simply a light. Within another half hour, however, the light grew markedly larger and brighter, hurting Childheart’s eyes and reminding him of those moments just before Kahner and he had exited the bowels of The Mountains the first time, just to the north of Sleeping Guard River. Even more cautiously now Childheart stepped, a single footfall at a time, toward what just fifty yards ahead was almost certainly the tunnel’s end, and daylight.

The unicorn’s heart lightened as his eyes grew accustomed to the bright light. There, just ahead, just beyond the tunnel’s wide end, the grasses of a green meadow, with flowers of various sorts, and large, leafy trees in the distance, were beginning to come into focus. With exulting thoughts and feelings, Childheart stepped cautiously but fully into the light and halted.

Childheart blinked several times, fluttering his eyelids, as if striving, in his disbelief, to simply wipe away hallucinations. But the blinking only gathered clarity to his sight, and the unicorn was now beginning to believe that what he saw was actually there. The meadow of tall grasses immediately in front him spread far and wide, all the way to thick groves of giant trees on the opposite side of the vast fields. Oaks, poplars, chestnuts, and elms stretched all along the lower edge of the horizon. Scattered throughout the fields were towering clumps of wild flowers: daisies and daffodils; black-eyed Susan’s; and Queen Anne’s lace. The continuous forest of trees stretched one hundred eighty degrees along the meadow’s distant edge, beginning at the mountainside to his left and ending well into the distance to the right, likely many miles from end to end. Above and ahead the sky was a bright blue—as blue as any sky he could recall there ever existing above the Forest of Lament, even in the days of joy.

Above and behind him, and out of sight beyond the mountain tops, but evidenced by the light that illuminated everything in front, was the sun, long absent from the recent history of nearly all of Bairnmoor north of The Mountains spanning several hundred years or more. But here it was—at last—wherever here was! Stunned to the point of near numbness, Childheart lay down in the grass—softer than any grass on which he had lain for centuries—and ceased all thought, feeling that sort of entitlement following long and hard labor, as well as gratitude at sacrifice’s end, that enabled him to simply live in the moment of what had been gifted to him, leaving for a later moment—temptingly, a much later moment—the consideration of what to do next.

Gazing out into the fields, his head resting on his front legs, Childheart noticed for the first time what was barely visible above the woods on the other side of the vast meadow. Camouflaged in the trees, as if sprouting from the forest canopy itself, was an expansive castle compound, its high walls with towering turrets stretching wide along the upper edge of the horizon. Behind the walls, the castle proper—a multitude of levels and sizes of structures—soared majestically into the air like a skyline of geometrically-shaped mountaintops.

The three exterior walls of the sprawling compound visible above the trees were each a mile long and connected together at wide angles, suggesting the existence of numerous such outside walls and a castle grounds far larger than the one the Queen had occupied at the time of her death. Childheart gave a start, instantly raising his head and looking all about, unconcerned that unseen observers might spot him. For at that moment it occurred to him: was this not a place of beauty? Was the sun not shining? Were these not trees, green with life? Were there not flowers blooming? Was the grass not lush and the air balmy? And was he not far outside his own forest, well beyond The Mountains, and far removed from the place of battle?

And was not even the desolateness of The Northern Reaches, he continued thinking, now many miles behind him? What was this place, he wondered, if not a place where goodness ruled, and so a place where the Good must already have prevailed, quite apart from his own assistance? Must the Queen not already have been released, and occupying this part of Bairnmoor? And would not Elli—and so also Beatríz—be here, and alive and well, having been the necessary instruments of the Queen’s restoration?

Was this not evidence of the restoration of life, and so also a manifestation of the restoration of the Queen’s Kingdom of love and childnessness that the poem had prophesied would come to pass? Was this not, as Butterfly had promised and assured him would be the case, the revealing of the Good to him—the Good revealed to him, made possible by both his leaving and his waiting, one entailed in the other? Indeed, Childheart thought, there was even a substantialness to the grasses not felt before in Bairnmoor, or at least not felt for a very long time, and a perception he had of the living things all about him that suggested the kind of life that would finally endure, without end!

Childheart awoke from his reverie—and perhaps some sleep—to see that the low, tree-obscured sun was casting lengthening shadows, and was soon to set in what he deduced to be the western sky far to his right, behind the hills. Eager to see the Queen, to see his friends, and to be a part of the celebration of life with all of the Queen’s subjects, Childheart sprang up and bolted across the meadow on his way to the forest, and to the castle above and beyond.

As Childheart was slowing to enter the woods, he was suddenly puzzled by the absence of creature life anywhere about. He stopped at the edge of the meadow beneath the spreading boughs of a giant chestnut tree, and cast his eyes all about in search of any sort of life apart from the plants. Then he froze where he stood, shivering, but not from the evening air turning cold. Childheart reached his head toward the ground, hesitated, and then bit off the top of a tuft of grass, almost immediately spitting it out. He then reached for a chestnut leaf above him, needing to stand on his hind legs to secure one in his mouth. With uncharacteristic effort Childheart pulled at the leaf until it snapped from the branch; this, too, he blew from his mouth.

Both the grass and leaf had been fashioned from treated skins of some sort, or from materials produced by dark arts, and he suspected that the trunks of the trees were no less artificial. He raised a front leg and brought it down hard against the trunk of the chestnut tree, causing it to clang and reverberate like a tin drum. He glanced rapidly up toward the setting sun, and noticed, just before it dipped fully behind the hills, that it appeared to be more like the light of sun-like fire than of the sun itself, and that it seemed to be shining behind a glass that magnified its light and heat.

The sky was no longer blue, but only because its color, unchanged, was simply obscured by the evening dusk. Stars began to appear, but Childheart knew for certain, without knowing precisely why or how, that, like all the other manifestations of this “natural world,” they, too, were not real. The only thing that was real, he was now convinced, was the castle, and simultaneous with that realization, Childheart darted back into the meadow and galloped at full tilt away from the castle and back toward the tunnel opening he had emerged from only hours earlier. The “sun” was soon gone, with not even the pale light of a lingering sunset to guide his way, and the emerging stars being only back-lighted holes in a fabricated canopy painted blue, he could no longer see the tunnel opening, and so had no idea to which side of the passageway he was deviating. Once at the face of the mountain he would not know which way to go, left or right, to locate the escape route.

Not even a quarter of the way back into the meadow, however, something far more distressing caught Childheart’s attention. Closing in on him fast from both left and right, but not yet even visible, Childheart heard the thunder of what had to be hundreds of enemy troops, including the strident howling of Wolfmen, the screeching of Thrashers, the battle horns of Rumblards, and the thin yelps from lipless Unpersons.

Understanding that an ambush was underway, Childheart pulled up hard, pivoted in a whirl, and sped back toward the trees. He knew it was entirely possible that he was rushing headlong from the teeth of danger and into its mouth, but Childheart also knew he had no chance of reaching the mountain tunnel before being overtaken—and at least the woods would provide some potential for evasion. Hope was now a dashed dream; only a yearning for what remained of his life to mean something, to matter in some way, for the meaning of others, for the mattering of others—if any others remained—drove him toward the trees.

With the enemy within seconds of falling on him, Childheart reached the woods; on hearing sounds coming from just inside the grove of trees, however, he dug in his hooves and, still in a gallop, spun to his left, darting between the enemy forces to that side of their pursuit and the trees to his right. Along the outside edge of the forest he sped, hoping to gain enough distance to once more dive unseen into the trees and there hide until the enemy had passed by him. Perhaps then he could make another dash for the mountain and locate the tunnel before the hostile forces had again located him.

But soon Childheart learned the futility of that hope. Out from the trees just ahead another regiment of the enemy rushed to meet him. Childheart halted violently and sprang back into the trees. Immediately he was assaulted by enemy forces armed with weapons of sharpened steel. With abandon Childheart jumped and wheeled and pounced and turned, thrusting his horn and brandishing his legs. One after another of the Wolfmen and Unpersons, as well as soul-less men of the far north of Bairnmoor, fell before him. Knives and hatchets and spears felt ineffectual to Childheart, and his energy reserves seemed endless, his strength without limits. The nearly-entire absence of light was to Childheart’s advantage, and the enemy forces never expected—or experienced—so daunting a challenge from a single creature.

At last, his fine coat streaked with blood and sweat, Childheart breached the encirclement and bolted further into the trees and the darkness, leaving those attacking him floundering and stumbling, tripping one over another. And then, minutes later, just when Childheart was about to stop momentarily at the opposite edge of the forest to listen for the enemy behind him, Childheart felt a heavy net dropping onto him from above, the force of its weighted fall sending Childheart to his knees. All was instantly quiet, except for the lame struggles of the unicorn’s head and feet. Soon Childheart felt no longer any energy or any strength, and all was now entirely quiet.

Into this quietness hard as steel Childheart heard the soft stepping of numerous feet, and then a single voice—a familiar voice—not close, but distinct, and unmistakable.

“Bring him to me!” ordered the voice that Childheart thought he recognized, “but, first, tend to his wounds, bathe him, and give him food and drink.” Childheart cried out, attempting to gain the voice’s attention. But it was a weak cry, not heard by the one addressed—or, at least not to be acknowledged by him.

The net, not unlike the one employed by the captors belonging to Ashani (before they became friends) was tightened loosely, only to prevent Childheart’s escape. But escape was now the furthest thing from the unicorn’s mind, and soon, utterly bereft of energy and strength, Childheart—though resistant to the urge to do so—fell asleep.