Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,47
nice path. All these pretty rocks lining it. So will we be hauling ourselves up a mountain?”
“No, when they say rim, they really mean rim.” And he went on to point out that the national park named Gooseneck was even more spectacularly abrupt. One moment you’re driving along flat ground, with a small fence ahead. You walk up to that low fence, look out over an abrupt drop straight down thousands of feet to the San Juan River winding below.
They followed a clump of tourists, Godiva grinning, camera in hand, as they passed the signs for the Grand Canyon rim.
Then suddenly they were there.
She halted, and drew in a long slow breath as she gazed wide-eyed out over the layers and layers of wild geological action over millions of years. The vista was vast, the rocky formations exalting in their forms. The river looked like a ribbon far below.
“Wow,” Godiva breathed. “Wow.”
“That limestone layer?” he murmured, bending toward her, though the other people around them were too busy with cameras to glance their way. “That was formed at the bottom of the sea. I was told that that limestone got up there, nine thousand feet above sea level, during a war between krakens and dragons epochs ago.”
“Okay,” she muttered. “I would have scoffed a week ago, but now nothing will surprise me. Krakens? Of course there are krakens.” She smiled up at him from under the brim of her sun hat. “Wouldn’t you love to go flying out over that mega-canyon?”
He bent down again and whispered, “I did.”
She grinned in delight. “Of course you did. And?”
“It was just as astounding as you can imagine. The air currents so strong I soared for miles without having to do much more than bank.”
“I wish I could fly,” she sighed. “Always wanted—hey. Where are those people going?”
“There are all kinds of tours and walks. Some are for rock climbers, others less strenuous, but even so, it’s really hot at the bottom of the canyon.”
She seemed completely oblivious to the sun beating down directly onto the dark brim of her hat. Rigo’s basilisk stirred within him, heightening his awareness of a shift in the winds flowing over the canyon.
“I don’t want to go all the way down,” she said. “Just a little ways, so I can see some of those sediment layers up close. Especially those ones at an angle. Imagine what kind of forces tipped them like that!” She bustled toward one of the pathways, moving like the hummingbird he remembered.
He cast another doubtful look upward. The sky was bright blue, but the basilisk smelled thunder on the wind.
Rigo looked toward Godiva, halfway down the path already. She halted behind a clump of people gathered at a point where several trails led off.
“ . . . and we’re seeing a possible storm on the doppler,” a park ranger was saying as Rigo caught up. She pointed to a bulletin board. “So we’re cancelling the one o’clock trail rides . . .”
Rigo turned to ask Godiva what she wanted to do, but she wasn’t beside him. He turned, in time to see her vanish around an outcropping glittering with mica.
He caught up. “They’re issuing storm warnings,” he said. “We have an hour’s walk back to the car.”
“Eh.” She waved her phone upward. “It’s blue sky overhead! They just have to be extra cautious. And I don’t want to go far. I only want to get an unimpeded shot of the river way down there. I think I’m going to have to add a road trip into my next book, just so I can fit this in. It’s too spectacular to waste.”
And off she went, the cane tapping. He noticed she didn’t lean on it all that heavily, but mostly seemed to use it as extra support for her footing, yet she still moved quickly.
Rigo followed, loving the sight of her complete absorption in the gorgeous scenery. Two, three, then five times she stopped, looked around, then muttered, “No, just a bit farther . . . There. Right over there, that has to be it.”
She stood at the lip of a cliff, and began a slow panning of the entire canyon—but halted halfway, exclaiming, “Where did the light go? It’s noon!”
She glanced up at the same moment Rigo did, to discover a weather front spreading with deceptive slowness from the south. “That is a weird cloud,” she said. “It looks kind of like an amoeba.”
“It’s a storm cell,” Rigo said as a gust of hot