Free Warautumn by Tom Deitz Page B

down to water—or liquid, anyway.”
    Rann raised a brow.
    “No, think, Rann,” Avall went on quickly. “We know the gems need blood in order to activate. I’m not sure how or whythey do, but they do. We also know that they display some of the characteristics of the Wells. Blood is liquid; so—obviously—is water. The water in the Wells has to come from somewhere, and it’s not unreasonable to suppose that all water is connected at some level deep underground. So even if I haven’t been here, maybe the gems—augmented by the Well water, or something—could tell where there was a watery place that fit my notion of what I wanted. I’m sorry, Rann, I know it sounds crazy.”
    “It sounds like you think the gems are sentient.”
    Avall’s face went absolutely serious. “I believe that more than ever. But even if they’re not, they seem to be—mostly—benevolent.”
    “Mostly.”
    Avall sighed, thrust himself away from his tree, and started down the trail again, talking over his shoulder. “In any case we have more imminent problems—the main one being that we really can’t stay here. I’m not sure how big this place is, but seven young men could exhaust its resources rather quickly, I’m afraid. We’ll need to burn a lot of wood if we’re to stay warm this winter, for one thing. And we haven’t seen any sign of animals large enough to keep us really well fed; which means that Myx is probably right in that regard, too: The place is too small to support a population of, say, deer. I assume there are fish in the lake, but we’ll get tired of fish soon enough, and
really
tired of smoked fish if that’s all we have to eat this winter. And we’ll run out of sugar, bread, salt, and cauf long before that. We have to find some kind of tuber or such like—I’m hoping Lyk can help there, as I’ve never been much good with plants or farming.”
    “Or we could get off this place—which would at least expand our options.”
    Avall nodded again. “We’ll have to. We’ve already seen that there are more caves in the cliffs opposite ours, and the landscape looks pretty ragged there—so I think we can reach the top fairly easily. The trick is going to be getting there.”
    “I assume you’ve ruled out swimming?”
    “Well, we all
can
swim except Kylin, and even he can manage if someone helps him—when he’s conscious, which he isn’t. But it looks to be almost two shots from here to there, which is a fair distance, especially if we want to take anything else across. We could use logs as floats, of course, but unless we can jump there by gem power, it seems to me we’re looking at building rafts. Which brings us back to Kylin. Obviously we can’t leave him here, but, unless he comes around in some manageable way, some kind of raft appears to be our only choice.”
    “You’re forgetting something,” Rann said through a grin.
    “What?”
    “Riff. He’s a shipwright by clan. We tend to forget that, because we’ve always known him as a soldier and as Myx’s bondmate. But he’s Ioray by birth, which is incredible luck, if you ask me. If it even is luck. I—”
    He broke off. Straight ahead rose a screen of laurel twice as high as their heads and maybe two spans deep, splitting the trail neatly. “Left,” Avall decided. “It looks like the growth is thinner that way.”
    “Slope’s not as steep, either.”
    “Lead the way.”
    Rann did. And while the land was rockier thereabouts, the undergrowth was commensurately less dense. So it was that before long they found themselves following the bottom of a defile where rocks rose higher than their heads—until they ended in the merest scrap of stony beach. It was no more than a span wide, and stretched south but not north, with boulders taking over again in the latter direction. Even so, it was enough to provide the clearest view yet of the strange place in which they were now marooned.
    “Beautiful,” Rann said, sinking down on a convenient