‘Oh, that’s just fine, Talen,’ Kalten said sarcastically. ‘If we go any closer, the cliff will block off our view of the peaks.’
Talen rolled his eyes upward.
‘What?’ Kalten asked.
‘Just start walking toward the cliff, Kalten. Sparhawk can stand here and keep his eyes on the gap. He’ll tell you whether to go to the right or the left.’
‘Oh.’ Kalten looked around at the others. ‘Don’t make an issue of it,’ he told them. Then he started off toward the cliff.
‘Veer to the right,’ Sparhawk told him.
Kalten nodded and changed direction.
‘Too far. Back to the left a little.’
The blond Pandion continued toward the cliff, altering his direction in response to Sparhawk’s shouted commands. When he reached the cliff, he went along slapping his hands on the face of the rock. Then he drew his heavy dagger, stuck it into the ground, and started back.
‘Well?’ Sparhawk called when he had covered half the distance.
‘Ogerajin didn’t know what he was talking about,’ Kalten shouted.
Sparhawk swore.
‘Do you mean there’s no opening?’ Talen called.
‘Oh, the opening’s there all right,’ Kalten replied, ‘but it’s at least five feet to the left of where your crazy man said it would be.’
Chapter 26
‘Please don’t do that, Talen,’ Bevier said. ‘Either go all the way in or stay outside. It’s very disturbing to see the bottom half of you sticking out of solid rock that way.’
‘It’s not solid, Bevier.’ The boy stuck his hand into the rock and pulled it out again to demonstrate.
‘Well, it looks solid. Please Talen, in or out. Don’t hover in between.’
‘Can you feel anything at all when you poke your head through?’ Mirtai asked.
‘It’s a little cooler in there,’ Talen replied. ‘It’s a sort of cave or tunnel. There’s light at the far end.’
‘Can we get the horses through?’ Sparhawk asked.
Talen nodded. ‘It’s big enough for that – if we go through in single file. I guess Cyrgon wanted to keep down the chances of anybody accidentally discovering the opening.’
‘You’d better let me go first,’ Sparhawk said. ‘There might be guards at the other end.’
‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Kalten said, retrieving his dagger and drawing his sword.
“Tis a most clever illusion,’ Xanetia observed, touching the rock face on the left of the gate. ‘Seamless and indistinguishable from reality.’
‘It’s been good enough to hide Cyrga for ten thousand years, I guess,’ Talen said.
‘Let’s go in,’ Sparhawk said. I want to have a look at this place.’
There was difficulty with the horses, of course. No matter how reasonably one explains something to a horse, he will not willingly walk into a stone wall. Bevier solved the problem by wrapping cloth around their heads, and, with Sparhawk in the lead, the party led their mounts into the tunnel.
It was perhaps a hundred feet long, and since the opening at the far end was still in shade, the light from it was not blinding. ‘Hold my horse,’ Sparhawk muttered to Kalten. Then, his sword held low, he moved quietly toward the opening. When he reached it, he tensed himself and then stepped through quickly, whirling to fend off an attack from either side.
‘Anything?’ Kalten demanded in a hoarse whisper.
‘No. There’s nobody here.’
The rest of them cautiously led their horses out of the tunnel.
They had emerged into a tree-shaded swale carpeted with winter-dry grass and dotted with white stone markers. ‘The Glen of Heroes,’ Talen murmured.
‘What?’ Kalten asked.
‘That’s what Ogerajin called it. I guess it sounds nicer than “graveyard”. The Cyrgai seem to treat their own dead a little better than they do the slaves.’
Sparhawk looked across the extensive cemetery. He pointed to the western side where a slight rise marked the edge of the burial ground. ‘Let’s go,’ he told his friends. I want to see just exactly what we’re up against.’
They crossed the cemetery to the bottom of the rise, tied their horses to the trees growing there and carefully crept to the top.
The basin was significantly lower than the floor of the surrounding desert, and there was a fair-sized lake nestled in the center, dark and unreflective in the morning shadows. The lake was surrounded by winter-fallow fields, and a forest of dark trees stretched up the slopes of the basin. There was a sort of rigid tidiness about it all, as if nature itself had been coerced into straight lines and precise angles. Centuries of brutal labor had been devoted to hammering what might have been a place of beauty into a stern reflection of the mind of Cyrgon himself.
The hidden valley was perhaps five miles across, and on the far side stood the city that had remained concealed for ten eons. The surrounding mountains had provided the building materials, and the city wall and the buildings within were constructed of that same brownish-black volcanic basalt. The exterior walls were high and massive, and a steep, cone-like hill, its sides thickly covered with buildings, rose inside those walls. Surmounting that hill was yet another walled enclosure with black spires rising on one side and, in startling contrast to the rest of the city, white spires on the other.
‘It’s not particularly creative,’ Bevier observed critically. The architect doesn’t seem to have had much imagination.’
‘Imagination is not a trait encouraged amongst the Cyrgai, Sir Knight,’ Xanetia told him.
‘We could swing around the sides of the basin and get closer,’ Kalten suggested. ‘The trees would hide us. The ground around the lake doesn’t offer much concealment.’
‘We’ve got some time,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Let’s get away from the mouth of this tunnel. If it’s the only way in or out of the valley, there’s bound to be traffic going through here. I can see people working in those fields down there – slaves, most likely. There’ll be Cyrgai watching them, and there may be patrols as well. Let’s see if we can pick up some kind of routine before we blunder into anything.’
Berit and Khalad made a dry camp in another cluster of jumbled boulders two days west of the place where they had seen the strange soldiers. They watered their horses sparingly, built no fire, and ate cold rations. Khalad spoke very little, but sat instead staring moodily out at the desert.