The Deepcombers

Chapter Fifteen

Lon woke a few hours before dawn and discovered he couldn't sleep anymore. It was quiet.  He stared down at the river's misty shrouds and then raised his gaze to the snow capped mountains. The only thing bigger than these granite spires was the midnight sky, speckled with stars as deep as the eye could wander.

Why was he awake? Was it the stone tablet that'd disturbed his slumber? Should he take it off to rest? Or maybe he just didn't need as much sleep anymore? He summoned the strength to rise with the heavy weight around his neck. He didn't feel tired at all. The young lad stared down at the others asleep on the rocks. Someone should stay awake anyway he thought, to act as a lookout. The leader should have set a watch. 

Scolding himself, the lad circled around his slumbering companions until he found a goat path that scaled the hill behind the piles. He followed the trail up through the crumbling cliff towards tall trees on the rocky ridge. Lon spied a gnarly hemlock with an inviting bough. He liked to sit in conifers because he loved their smell and he felt invisible when encased in their envelopes. From this perch he could see just how the river snaked through the land and how it began in the misty marsh below. Maybe they should cross that water obstacle here where it was the least adverse? He knew they needed to get to the other side of that morass for the Port of Ligne was in the northeast corner of the island.

In this quiet time Lon thought about the sudden shift in his life and his journey to this point. What would they do when they reached the Port of Ligne? Clyde made it clear he wouldn't join them. Where would he go? And what would they do without him? They had no money, no contacts, and no way of securing passage. Each of them was a known fugitive from Crolean Justice. Maybe I should just keep walking?  Why get all these innocents killed? What if I simply carried on alone? No. That wasn't the deepcombers' way. The company's camaraderie was everything! The bonds of friendship sustained them and after-all that's what the stories were really about. But was this the same thing? Yes! He was in Oub, or very close. He was on the Forbidden Isle. And he had a party of specialists, just like in the sheets. He had a healer who was a learned scholar, a veteran swordsman and a lizard with excellent night vision. It was like what he'd dreamed about, and what he'd played at in Dundae. It almost resembled his boyhood adventures in every way. Almost every way.  Because in those naive fantasies he was a Varget speaker with an arsenal of commands including ice bolts and fireballs and every other wicked thing he'd ever read about in the sheets (and some he'd made up on his own.) That was the difference; he might have friends that looked the part, but he was a weakling and certainly not a true deepcomber. He had no Varget. Is that why he wore the heavy stone block around his neck? Was he just punishing himself?

Lon peered down on his companions still asleep at the bottom of the hill.

At the top of the rise was another mountain terrace, about thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long. The middle had been cleared of trees and was paved with nickle slag. The young lad heard a queer sound, and saw a strange sight. He heard a metal gate creak and could see an ominous-looking apple orchard occupied the far end of the shelf. Gentle mists whispered about the trees and the metallic soil at his feet glowed sinister in the moonlit.  The grove was surrounded by a shoulder-high stone fence in which there was a rusty metal gate wide enough for a wagon. The aperture was unlatched and it creaked on its hinges. With spine tingling certainty Lon realized there was no wind; the iron-barred gate groaned back and forth under its own power.

The aged trees had dark leaves and shiny black fruit. Lon knew at once  it was a Midnight Orchard. This place produced night apples and they were forbidden. Myths said the seeds were given to feigorin by one the lessor deities banished by Kluth. The evil trees were reported to have black leaves just as these did. The fruit could only be harvested at midnight, Lon remembered, and when the moon was directly overhead or else it'd spoil at dawn. He looked up and saw the moon was low in the sky. It was almost morning.