But as every secondary tone had darkened to the chromatic blindness in Gavin’s sole remaining eye, so every secondary voice in curiosity’s chorus had fallen quiet in his ears. The soloist rose before him. The answer to all things lay up there. And Karris’s salvation, too—if Gavin were strong enough.
He came out from the shade of two mighty overarching atasifusta trees and saw a great gate, open, flanked by two large statues. All the work of human hands stopped at the gate. Not an outbuilding lay beyond, only the trail and jungle. The statues were warriors in identical scale armor and the spears common to the Tyrean era. But their faces were curious to Gavin: one a typical Tyrean with a prominent nose and brow, perhaps woolier hair than was common in Tyrea now, but the other one had flatter features, dark hair straight as wheat, and small eyes with a monolid like no one Gavin had ever seen.
“Is this some race of the immortals? A people from beyond even the Angari?” Gavin asked. “Or is it some quirk of Tyrean art?”
Orholam shrugged. “Look over here.”
There were ceremonial baths by the road, fed by a lively stream.
They drank and washed and thought of little else for a time. A mosaic wall behind the stone baths depicted men and women feasting and then washing in its waters. There were among them men with such eyes as the statue had, and other races and peoples Gavin had never seen in the Seven Satrapies. Men covered with tattoos and tall women and men half-sized, like Blood Forest’s pygmies, though perhaps that was simply the ancient Tyrean art’s way of depicting children.
All the figures were dressed in simple robes, and looked somber as they washed.
Apparently the old Tyrean Empire had been more cosmopolitan than the Seven Satrapies, or some races of men had simply passed from the earth.
Gavin washed his body. Nothing like having salt water and sand between your butt cheeks as you started a hike that might take weeks.
No, not weeks. They didn’t have that long. Karris needed him to make it before Sun Day.
By the time Gavin was finished bathing, Orholam had washed himself, and had found water skins and clothing covered with odd pockets in airtight chests sealed with luxin. By their first good luck they’d had in a long time, the skins and clothing were actually functional. Four hundred years old and yet functional?
Then again, it was hardly the most astonishing magic here, so Gavin put it out of his mind.
That magic and their luck didn’t extend to finding any edible food, though. Even the food they found likewise sealed away from the damp was, after all this time, little more than dust.
The water and the salt fish would be enough for a week, though. Gavin hoped it would be enough.
It would have to be. He wasn’t going to take the time to fashion weapons, hunt animals, butcher and cure meat. He didn’t know if Karris had that much time. Sun Day was coming.
They ate the fish, drank, filled the water skins, and then started. Old Parian text adorned the ground just under the gate, a line reference of some sort?
Ah, a prayer. For the pilgrimage.
Orholam spoke under his breath—saying the prayer, Gavin guessed, but he wasn’t curious enough to find out if the old man recognized it, or knew Old Parian at all, for that matter. This whole trip had to be like a holy wet dream for the old kook.
The path was straight as an arrow’s flight through the jungle. Some sections had been displaced by roots and new growth, others washed out by mudslides. Elsewhere, entire trees had fallen over the path and melted into soil, from which had bloomed flowers. But the path was impossible to lose.
Gavin kept an eye out for animals, but saw nothing larger than mice.
They climbed the crater’s rim. The ridge here descended to a circular swamp before the queer black stone itself began. The straightness of the road had only aided its own erosion. Water from any rain cascaded fast down what had once been the road and had washed away all its stone.
There was nothing for it but to try to cross the swamp while the sun was still high.
It was muddy, mucky, brutal work, first sliding down the hill trying not to turn an ankle and then crossing the ooze, hoping not to plunge into some sinkhole or quicksand.
Orholam insisted on going first, in thanks for Gavin saving his life. Gavin followed in his footsteps. They didn’t speak.
Nor did they make it across the swamp before evening fell.
Gavin said, “Mosquitoes are proof that God hates us and wants us to be miserable.”
“I always thought of them as a strong hint to go inside and be with friends beside the fire, and be done with the day’s labors.”
“You’re kind of a look-on-the-bright-side guy, aren’t you?” Gavin asked. “I don’t really remember that about you, back on the oar.” He’d always been set apart, but then he’d been quietly pious, and though kind, he’d been morose.
“Life on the oar was its own life. Everything looks bright after that darkness.”
The road was ruined on the other side by erosion, and the climb was misery. It was almost dark when they reached the first white gate, beyond which began the tower path itself.
This was the first of eight such gates, Gavin thought, if there weren’t others on the other side of the tower. He’d been studying the black monstrosity all day. The tower was indeed a cylinder of equal thickness from foot to head, so the long path didn’t curl around the outside of the tower but rather was cut into the tower so pilgrims would have the black stone not only below them and to one side but also overhanging above them as well.
And what black stone it was.
With only one good eye, and the other only good for monochrome, Gavin had held on to a great deal of skepticism about what his initial impression of the black stone was. Surely it couldn’t be obsidian. Not an entire tower of it, glittering dangerously.
Obsidian was precious beyond words. If the whole tower was actually made of it, the pilgrims of old would have made off with all of it, and obsidian would no longer be as precious as it was.
But as they stood mere paces away from it now, it could be nothing else—unless there was some kind of hex here, fooling his eye.
Orholam appeared unfazed and was washing himself at a great stone basin off to one side before the gate, again fed with fresh running water off the tower side. Either the ancients had been quite a thirsty lot or they’d been obsessed with ritual cleanliness.
There was nothing ritual, though, about Gavin cleaning the muck from his legs and clothes. Again.
As the sun set, they finally confronted the gate itself, with its own statue of an immortal beyond it. The gate was fully as wide as the trail (though he thought he might be able to climb around the outside of it). The drop here was only thirty feet. The gate was starkly white against all the light-sucking black of the tower, its pearlescence shining in the sunset (probably pink, Gavin guessed). There were three mighty locks on it, side by side. Each labeled.
“My Old Parian vocabulary is limited,” Gavin said. “Any idea?”
Orholam said, “The locks are Confession, Contrition, and Satisfaction.”
“Not much good as locks, are they? The keys are still in them.”
“Perhaps you should be grateful that the guardians who had to abandon this place decided that their own desire to save a relic of the place holiest to them should be suborned to the possible needs of strangers living long after them to make this climb.”