Free Warautumn by Tom Deitz Page A

afternoon session.
    “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Rann asked, as he and Avall paused at their shelter’s northern edge. The roof came down tothe floor there, like the corner of a pair of lips, but the floor extended farther out than the ceiling, to form a kind of ledge. Runoff from rain had made a channel beyond, going down. Riff, Lykkon, and Bingg were already a dozen strides along it, scanning the undergrowth for some place to turn right and begin their trek upslope. There was growth aplenty, for vegetation covered every surface that was not too steep to support it, while the view above was masked by limbs, save at one point where they could see exactly enough to determine that their shelter was set three-fourths of the way down a massive escarpment of porous gray stone.
    “They fed me enough to get by; they clothed me—until yesterday,” Avall retorted. “The Eight know I’ve had enough rest, and, however I may look, I’m not fragile, and certainly not broken—no thanks to Zeff in the case of the latter. I’ve got a bit of a headache, granted, but that could be the result of anything from gem residue to sleeping without a pillow last night. In any case, I’ll be much better when I know more precisely what our situation is.” And with that, Avall led the way down the trail.
    Actually, it wasn’t a trail in the sense that anything living had made it. Mostly their route consisted simply of a fairly steep slope leading off to the right, following a depression between two low ridges, so that water kept it swept free of debris. Avall wondered how often it rained here. Or snowed. The sky had been clear so far, but half a day was no indication.
    They could see little of the lake or the ring of cliffs beyond, courtesy of the intervening trees, but Rann was watching the landscape keenly. They heard birdcalls and the murmur of the wind among branches, but no other sounds save the occasional rustle of small animals—probably squirrels. What bare rock showed was still gray and porous. “I’ll wager this was once a fire mountain,” Rann mused. “I’d say it exploded ages ago, and the top came down in the middle. There’s one like that up past North Gorge, though I’ve never seen it.”
    Avall shuddered. “Do you think this one will?”
    Rann shrugged. “Not so soon that we wouldn’t have warning. It looks pretty benign around here.”
    Avall indicated a nearby stand of evergreens. “Plenty of wood for whatever we need wood for.”
    Rann nodded again. “More wood than we’ve got appropriate tools to work, I’d say. Something tells me we’re going to have dull swords before this is over.”
    “You sound like you think we’ll be here for a while.”
    “We may be—unless you can get the gem working, which I frankly doubt, given that it’s in pieces.”
    “I intend to try.”
    “I know you do,” Rann growled. “But we have to be realistic. If this is an island—”
    “It is.”
    Rann stopped again, and this time he sank down on a knee-high, moss-covered rock that protruded from a froth of bracken to the left of the trail. They’d covered almost two shots by then, and looked to be roughly halfway to their goal, though the lake was only visible as an occasional flash of blue ahead or to the left. “But how do you
know
that, Avall?” he asked wearily. “I truly don’t understand your talk of having seen it before.”
    Avall flopped up against a tree, and began stripping leaves from a waist-level twig. “I saw it in a Well once,” he—almost—snapped. “As I’ve already told you. Beyond that”—he shook his head—“all I can think of is what
you’ve
already suggested: that the gems give you what you want—if you want it badly enough. And I wanted a place away from everything.”
    Rann gestured expansively. “But here? How? Not that it isn’t beautiful.”
    Avall let got the twig. “I had a lot of time to think about that while I was imprisoned, actually. And I think it comes