Chapter 212: The Wide Canyon

Logan did not ask.

He walked behind his mother until the waking ended and watched the old man’s back. Rishin walked with Vina’s hand in his and his sleeve pulled down over his forearm, and he did not look round once.

’Not now,’ Logan thought. ’He said not now. He did not say never.’

That would have to be enough.

The wide canyon went on and on.

It ran downhill in long, slow bends, with the stream from the spring running beside them the whole way. The walls rose sheer and red on either side. The strip of roof between them glowed like a coal.

The units went first, as before. Logan had stopped flinching every time Terry scraped a wall. He had not stopped counting the scratches.

They found the first dead Shardcat late in that waking. It lay on its side against the left wall with its glass plates dull and cracked. A blade had opened its throat.

"Not one of ours," said Garen. He crouched beside it. "This is old. Somebody else came through here with a blade."

"Corran’s son," said Vina.

Garen looked up at her. "Maybe."

"It is," said Vina. She walked on, completely certain.

They slept against the canyon wall, in a ring of units, with Link keeping watch beside the stream.

Helen healed the last of the scratch on her forearm before she lay down, the one Daniel’s cut had given her. She did it with a small, tired gesture. Then she lay down between her husband and her daughter and was asleep at once.

Logan watched her sleep.

There was a thin white line on her palm where Vina’s cut had been. There was another on her forefinger, from his pin. Mending Spring had closed both of them, but it had not taken them away entirely.

’She is going to look like Corran,’ he thought. ’If this goes on long enough.’

[ Time remaining: 331 days ]

Edda braided Vina’s hair the next waking.

Logan missed how it started. He looked round while the units were going ahead, and there was Vina sitting on a rock with Edda behind her, and Edda’s fingers were moving quickly through the girl’s tangled hair.

"It has been coming undone since the Silver," Vina told him. She sat straight and did not move her head. "Edda says dwarves braid tight so it stays in a fight."

"It does," said Edda. She pulled a strand firm. "My grandmother did mine every morning until I was twelve. She said a loose braid is a handle for your enemy."

Bram was sitting a little way off with his hammer across his knees. He watched his daughter’s hands, and his face had gone soft.

Vina’s two braids were so tight when Edda finished that her eyebrows went up a little. She touched them all the way down, carefully.

"Thank you," she said.

"Thank you," said Edda, a little gruffly. "For calling for him. On the rings. I never said it where you could hear."

Vina turned round on the rock and looked at her.

"I heard you anyway," she said.

The canyon changed after that.

Other canyons joined it. They came in narrow and dark from the left and the right. Each time one met the wide canyon, the floor dropped a little further and the walls grew a little higher.

The stream grew too. Other streams came in with the other canyons, and by the middle of the waking it was a river running fast over red glass gravel.

There were more dead cats. There were marks on the walls, long pale gouges where claws had raked the glass. There were places where the gravel had been churned up as if heavy bodies had fought there.

Then Halden stopped at the front of the column and held up his gauntlet.

Logan went forward.

It was a shield.

It lay at the foot of the wall where the river curved. It was round and wooden, with a rim of iron, and it had been clawed almost in half.

Somebody had cut letters into the inside of it with the point of a knife. They were uneven, as though they had been cut in a hurry, or in the dark.

TAVIN. SON OF CORRAN. IF YOU FIND THIS, TELL HIM I WENT ON.

Logan read it twice.

Vina had come up beside him. She read it too, moving her lips. Then she looked up at Rishin.

"He went on," she said. "Grandpa. He went on."

Rishin looked down at the shield. He was slow to speak. Then he put out his hand and touched the cut letters with two fingers, lightly.

"Yes," he said. "Bring it, little one. Somebody will want it."

Garen had crouched beside her. He laid his hand across the claw marks on the front of the shield, with his fingers spread.

They did not fit. Each gouge was a full hand’s width from the next.

"The cats we killed had claws a finger apart," he said. He looked at Isolde. "Whatever did this was a great deal bigger."

Vina picked up the broken shield and carried it in both arms, though it was nearly as big as she was. Link took it from her after a dozen steps. She let him.

They slept once more beside the river, where two more canyons came in together.

Logan lay awake listening to the water. It was louder now, and it had a new sound under it, low and steady. It took him a long time to place it.

’A fall,’ he thought. ’Somewhere ahead, all of this water is going over an edge.’

Alice was awake too. He could tell by her breathing.

"The Seam," she said.

"I think so."

She turned over and put her forehead against his shoulder. "Promise me you will let the units go first."

He did not answer at once. She lifted her head and looked at him.

"I promise," he said.

She searched his face. Then she settled again, and she did not believe him, and she held on to his arm until they woke.

[ Time remaining: 330 days ]

They reached the Seam halfway through the next waking.

The canyons ran together one last time. The walls fell back on both sides, and the floor opened out into a wide bowl of red gravel.

The river ran across the bowl. In the middle of it, the floor ended.

It was a crack. It ran across the whole width of the bowl from wall to wall, and it was so wide that Logan could not have thrown a stone across it.

The river poured over its lip in a long sheet of white and fell away out of sight.

From the depths of it came the low roar he had heard through the sleep.

Its sides were red glass, sheer and glittering. Ledges ran down them, narrow and broken, and the edges of every ledge caught the ember light like knives.

"Boss."

Sonic’s voice fell from above the crack. He was hovering over the middle of it on Stormheart, looking straight down.

"Boss, there is a man down there."

Logan went to the lip on his knees and looked over.

The crack went down a long way. Twenty paces below the lip, maybe more, a ledge jutted out from the far wall. It was narrow and short, no wider than a doorstep.

A man was lying on it.

He lay on his side with his back to the wall. His clothes were in rags, and he had a broken sword clutched against his chest. He was thin, and he was covered in cuts, old and new.

On the wall above him and below him and on either side, as still as the glass itself, lay the Shardcats. There were dozens of them.

As Logan watched, the man lifted his head and looked up. He saw the faces at the lip of the crack. His mouth opened.

"Help," he said. His voice was a cracked thread, and it barely carried over the water. "Please. Is there somebody there?"

Every glass plate on the walls of the crack shifted at once.