There was a thin trickle of water in the base of the creek bed, but the torn-up grass on its banks thirty yards apart suggested that not so very long ago, it had been a torrent. Then it would have hummed with insects, but now it was silent, and I saw nothing but a pair of dassie watching me absently from the rocks. Nevertheless, I walked carefully, eyes down for hibernating snakes and the giant crab spiders that lived in these parts, picking my way between boulders strewn by the flood the river barely remembered. As the climb became steeper, the river divided like the fingers of a hand, each digit pointing a different route to the high ridge above. I considered it, caught sight of startled crows circling, but could not see what might have dislodged them. I checked the map, squinted into the sun, and chose the middle tributary.
Within ten minutes, I was using my hands occasionally, and within twenty, I was climbing, being careful not to dislodge the scree, which would crash into the valley below. It was hot work, and I cursed myself for bringing no more than my usual water flask, which was already half empty. Sweat ran in my eyes, making them sting, but I could not pause. Not yet.
I have never been so ill at ease climbing. I’m used to smooth brick and concrete, iron and stone, and I know their textures and their natures, what will yield to pressure, what will crack or splinter, how much weight they can bear, and where I might find places to hook fingers or toe caps. For the most part, the rule of these materials is regularity, and it is the breaks in that regularity—the chinks and nooks and crevices—that I know how to find and that keep me up. But cliffs are all irregularity, and while that means more handholds, more places where I can brace myself with knee or foot, the materials are unknown to me. I found that I had no idea what would crumble in my grasp, what might dislodge and fall beneath me, what might tear out as soon as I put weight on it.
I stopped, nestled in a crevice, and shrank into the shade, where I could breathe and slow my heart. Every joint and muscle seemed to ache. If I survived the day, I decided, I would lay my battered and exhausted body down and not move for a week. One way or another, it would all soon be over.
A breeze I had not noticed seemed to funnel up the cliff wall, and I turned into it so that it chilled the sweat that streamed down my face. As I did so, my eyes fell upon a darkness in the cliff above and to my right, no more than twenty yards as the crow flies.
An opening.
It wasn’t the source of the dried-up waterfall, which came from higher, but it had probably been screened by that cascade throughout the rainy season. Now it was dry, a curtain had been lifted, and what it showed was a cave—and a new one, at that. There were others in the cliffs, mere natural apses, little more than hollow pocks cut by wind and spray over time, but this was different. Its edges were hard and bright, and below, I could see shards of fractured stone the size of a one-horn. The waterfall had eroded the cliff till part of it had given way, but no one had seen the opening till the torrent dried up.
No one, that is, except an elderly and eccentric Mahweni herder, who had then come down the mountain with tales to tell and fortunes to make.
I flattened myself into my alcove still further. If they were keeping any kind of watch, they would be close by. I checked my satchel. I had a knife with a long blade, as well as assorted chisels and a hammer, but my revolver was still empty.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I shook the thought off, but before it had faded from my mind, I thought of the machine gunners I had cut down, and of Tanish, bleeding in the warehouse. It hadn’t been my enemies who shot him, not directly, but his blood was on their hands nonetheless. I tucked the pistol into my belt in the small of my back. Then, once more, and with a sense of looming finality, I did what I always did.
I began to climb.
CHAPTER
35
THERE WAS NO ONE in the cave mouth, but there was a coil of long rope, which had been fastened to a spike driven through a crack in the uneven floor.
They aren’t all climbers, then.
I had guessed as much, but it was as close to good news as I was likely to get, so I stored the thought away for future use and crept soundlessly inside. A jagged rock like a huge fractured canine, part of the cliff face itself that hadn’t come free when the surrounding stone collapsed, dominated the cave. I squeezed past it and found myself in an open area with a single narrow access point that burrowed back into the mountain. I peered cautiously in, but the passage turned, and no light came from around the corner.
I swallowed, touched the empty gun at my back, and inched my way into the dark.
I heard them before I saw them, grunting, gasping, and cursing. Flattening myself against the rock wall, I listened.
“It’s too big,” said a gruff, male voice in Feldish. “We’ll never shift it by ourselves. We should send back for the survey team, get a couple of the biggest of them up here. Topple it across the entrance, then pile rubble on it.”
“We’re trying to keep the place secret!” said another voice, a voice I knew, and my heart sank a little, though I was not surprised. “Are you mad, man? We can’t lead people to the very spot we don’t want them to find.”
“We have them do the work, and then we make sure they don’t leave,” said the gruff voice, darkly.
“That’s your solution to everything,” said the other. “And look where it’s gotten us. If you leave bodies behind, people come looking for them. Have you not even learned that much?”