darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,74
of hiking with only short breaks for snacks and shivering, the storm slacked off and we finally began to warm up a bit.
That process picked up considerably when we hit the place where the Demon’s Brew fed into the Evindine. The Demon’s Brew ran hot, coming as it did from steaming sulfurous springs in the Demon’s Mouth, a long wide valley full of mud pots and fumaroles that ran north-south here, following the line of the mountains. There were a number of similar places on the western side of Hurn’s Spine.
Some of the more accessible ones had become the sites of great baths, claiming all sorts of health benefits to be had from soaking in them, but not the Demon’s Mouth. The valley was both hard to reach and carried an ill reputation thanks to the choking fumes that sometimes rolled out of the various smoking fissures and rifts that cleft the ground.
If that weren’t enough to keep people away, there was also the fact that they had a much better location for a health bath some miles farther down the mountains at Yellow Springs. The Demon’s Brew was too hot to bathe in of itself, but a deep pool not too far below the confluence of the two small rivers provided us with a chance to get really warm and clean for the first time since we had left Jax’s castle in Dalridia.
I didn’t even bother to strip off my clothes—it wasn’t as though they could get any wetter—just dropped my pack and dove in once we’d established that the water there wouldn’t boil the flesh off our bones. At first, the heat burned along my skin like dilute acid. After a few minutes, though, the worst of my cold faded and the waters began to soothe and relax.
Despite the sulfur stink and the metallic tang to the water, that deep pool felt like the best thing that had happened to me in ages. A pure animal pleasure that required neither thought nor effort. I didn’t even mind when the cold rain picked up again. It was actually kind of pleasant to soak there with only my head above the surface, watching the icy drops strike the water and send up little fountains at the impact.
There is something about hot water when you are bone cold that beats even the finest of dry heat. My aches faded slowly from the outside inward: skin, muscle, and finally bone and joint. Below me I could feel Triss gliding around on the bottom of the pool with the other Shades, enjoying the water in his own utterly alien way. It was a brief interval of peace in a life that hadn’t seen many. Which, of course, meant that it couldn’t last.
Not long after I finally felt well and truly relaxed, Siri slid over from where she’d been lounging in the shallows and talking quietly with Jax. “Any thoughts on what comes next?”
“You mean besides soaking until I dissolve completely away? And then sleeping the sun from east to west? Nope. Not a one.”
She canted her head to the side and gave me a very skeptical look.
“All right, all right. We’re going to have to move on, and do it sooner than exhaustion would like. You obviously have some ideas on that front. So why don’t we start there.”
As if he had sensed the change in conversational mode, Kelos appeared then, surfacing silently, like one of the enormous marine crocodiles that hunted the salty marshes of the Ruvan Delta in the Sylvani Empire. I nodded at him and quietly spoke Faran’s name. Siri hadn’t been on Kelos watch, so I figured my apprentice must be. She slid out of shadows behind Kelos moments later, followed, somewhat to my surprise, by Kumi.
“Do you want Jax to join us?” I asked Siri.
She smiled and shook her head. “No, we’ve already had a little chat, and she likes my thinking well enough. It’s the pool here that gave me the idea.”
“Which is?” asked Kelos.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the trail shallows out a lot another day or so down that way.” Siri pointed along the line of the river.
“It does,” said Kelos. “There’s one more really nasty bit right after the Evindine goes over a long falls, but once we’re past that, it’s easy going.”
“Which means that we’ll start running into whatever the Son of Heaven has cooked up for us somewhere in there,” said Siri. Kelos nodded, and she continued. “We don’t know how