“Like the dust people?” Nicci asked.
Thistle nodded. “But not just people. Also spiders, centipedes—and lice, terrible monstrous lice.”
Nicci felt a twist inside of her. “I hate lice.”
“Lice drink life as well,” Bannon said. “No wonder the wizard likes them.”
“What killed your mother and father?” Nathan asked.
“Scorpions—big scorpions had infested the almond trees, and when my parents came to harvest the nuts, the scorpions fell upon them, stung them. When Uncle Marcus and two other villagers went to look for them days later, they found my parents’ bodies, their faces all swollen from the stings … but even though they were dead, the Lifedrinker made them into dust people too. My parents attacked Uncle Marcus.”
Her words tapered off, and Thistle didn’t need to continue the story of what the villagers must have done to get away. “After that, I stayed with my aunt and uncle. They said they would take care of me, that they would watch over me.” Her voice was bleak. “Now they’re gone. Verdun Springs is gone.” She swallowed hard. “My world is gone.”
“And you are with us, child,” said Nathan. “We’ll make the best of it.”
Bannon pushed ahead. “Yes, we will—if we ever get to Cliffwall.”
Looking up at Nicci for reassurance, the orphan girl nodded. “We’ll be there by tomorrow.”
* * *
The next morning Thistle led them along the floor of a canyon whose rocky bottom looked as if it had suffered flash floods during storms, but not for some time. The sky closed in as the canyon walls rose higher and drew together, looking sheer and impenetrable.
The wizard frowned, trying to gain his bearings as the shadows lengthened. “Are you certain this isn’t a dead end, child?”
“This is the way.” Thistle trotted ahead.
The canyon narrowed, and Nicci felt uneasy and vulnerable, realizing this would be a perfect place for an ambush.
“It closes up,” Bannon said. “Look ahead—it’s a dead end.”
“No,” the girl insisted. “Follow me.”
She led them up to where the rock walls formed the end of a box canyon, leaving only what looked like a narrow crack of two mismatched slickrock cliffs. Thistle turned to the travelers, then rotated sideways and shimmied into the crack.
She vanished.
Nicci stepped forward to see that the crack was a cleverly hidden passageway that led through a narrow elbow in the blind wall. After inching her way along through the claustrophobic passage, Nicci saw light ahead.
The girl squirmed out and stepped into a widening canyon. Nicci joined her, and Bannon and Nathan emerged behind them. Nicci caught her breath.
They all drank in the view of Cliffwall.
CHAPTER 40
Past the bottleneck of the closed-in stone passageway, the hidden network of canyons on the other side of the towering barricade wall was a whole world cut off from the rest of the landscape. Steep-walled finger canyons spread out like outstretched hands cutting through the high plateau. Nicci and her companions absorbed the view. This place was a hidden, locked-away network of secret, sheltered canyons.
The main canyon through the cracked plateau was broad and fertile, cut by the sinuous silver ribbon of a stream that collected drips from numerous overflowing springs. Sheep grazed on the lush green grasses, and fenced fields were bursting with tall stalks of wheat and corn. Vegetable gardens crowded with squash and beans had been laid out in confined ledge niches that pocked the cliffs. Orchards grew along the streamside, many of the trees in blossom. Wooden hutches held beehives that added a faint hum to the air. Hundreds of people worked the fields, tended the flocks, climbed the canyon walls on wooden ladders. It was a thriving, prosperous society.
All along the cliffs that enclosed the canyons, large overhangs and alcoves created natural sheltered caves in which buildings had been constructed, clay brick and adobe buildings. Some of the natural grottoes held only two or three dwellings, while larger overhangs held a veritable city of adobe towers connected with walkways.
The opposite side of the canyon held a singularly enormous cave grotto, a yawning alcove that held imposing stone buildings with blocky façades. The architecture had an air of ancient majesty. Nicci realized this must be the legendary wizards’ archive, only recently revealed.
Cliffwall was like a fortress in its huge, defensible alcove, stone-block structures five and ten stories high, massive square walls with defenses. A narrow, winding path chiseled into the cliff was augmented with knotted ropes and short ladders to grant access from the canyon floor to the yawning grotto above.
Once through the bottleneck into the canyon, Nathan tilted his head back and stared in awe, his mouth agape. “It reminds me of the Palace of the Prophets. Ah, I do miss the library there.”
Bannon displayed the same wide-eyed wonder Nicci had seen on his face when he was in the city of Tanimura. “Was the Palace of the Prophets really that big?” he asked.
Nathan chuckled. “Size is a relative thing, my boy. The cliffs and the overhang definitely make this look imposing, but the palace was at least ten times the size.”
“Ten times?” Bannon said. “Sweet Sea Mother, that can’t be possible!”
“No need for comparisons,” Nicci said. “Cliffwall is impressive enough, and it has the advantage of being intact. Perhaps we’ll find what we need to know about the Lifedrinker.”
In the bright daylight, some of the local people had spotted the visitors emerging through the hidden entrance to the canyon. Two boys working a vegetable plot halfway up a cliff whistled an alarm. The shrill sound echoed and ricocheted, amplified by the angled canyon walls. Others converged, responding to the alarm.
While Nicci might have preferred to reconnoiter the canyon structures to assess the Cliffwall defenses and any possible threat, Thistle shouted and waved at the people coming closer. “Hello! We are strangers from the outside. We need to look into your archive.”
More alarm whistles echoed from the alcove settlements, and in the towering fortress of the Cliffwall archive, dozens of people bustled to the windows and doors. Nicci couldn’t hold Thistle back as she boldly strode forward into the canyon, confident they would all be welcome here.
A group of Cliffwall dwellers hurried toward the four travelers. Thistle put her hands on the hips of her ragged dress and raised her voice. “We are here to defeat the Lifedrinker! I brought you a sorceress, a brave swordsman, and an old wizard.”
“I don’t appear that old,” Nathan said, salvaging his pride. “And I am a prophet as well as a wizard … although at present I am unable to use either of those faculties.” He tapped his head. “Still, the knowledge is here.”
“They are here to find out how to stop the Scar,” Thistle proclaimed.
Nathan looked up at the people drawing closer. “Hello! We understand you have an archive of knowledge? Ancient records that might prove useful in dealing with this terrible enemy that plagues the land?”
Nicci added in a harder voice, “Information that will give us the tools and weapons to defeat him? We need it.”
One middle-aged farmer wore a brown tunic flecked with grass ends and chaff from cutting wheat. “You would have to see Simon for that. He’s Cliffwall’s senior scholar-archivist.” He indicated the towering fortress alcove up the side of the cliff, where more than a dozen people were working their way in single file down the narrow pathway to come meet them.
“And Victoria. They need to see Victoria,” added a woman whose tight bun of pale hair was tied in a gray scarf. She had wide hips, stubby callused fingers, and biceps that were larger than Nathan’s and Bannon’s combined. “She’s the one who decides what knowledge the memmers preserve.”
The farmer brushed at the fragments of wheat, then placed a stalk between his teeth. “Now, now, it all depends on the type of information they need.”
“We haven’t seen strangers and outside scholars for years, not since the
Scar wiped out the valley,” said a red-faced shepherd who came puffing up, catching the end of the conversation.
“The scholars have needed new blood,” said the hefty woman. “No one here has found a way to stop the Lifedrinker. We need help.”