She knelt to set her palm against the earth. As she rested there for the space of seven breaths, she let her mind empty, as Eldest Uncle had taught her. Dirt lay gritty against her skin. When she let her awareness empty far enough, she actually felt the pulse of the land through her hand, thin and fragile, worn to a thread. But it was still there. The land was still, barely, alive.
With a finger, she traced the Rose of Healing into the dirt, brushing aside dried-up needles and desiccated splinters of pine bark so that the outline made a bold mark on the path. Heat rose from that outline, and she stood quickly to step over it and into the sunlight.
At first her voice sounded hesitant and weak, a frail reed against the ocean of silence that lay over the land.
“By this ladder the mage ascends: First to the Rose, whose touch is healing.” She took two more steps before bending to trace the next sigil into the dirt. “Then to the Sword, which grants us strength.”
Three steps she forged forward now, and either perhaps the heat had increased or maybe only the strong hammer of the sun was making her light-headed, because some strange disturbance had altered the air around her so that the air resisted her passage as porridge might, poured down from the sky.
She crouched, and drew. “Third comes the Cup of Boundless Waters.”
When she straightened, the flowers flowing out from either side of the trail had taken on a shimmering, unearthly cast, as though they bloomed with something other than material substance. Poppies flared with impossible scarlet richness. Lilacs lay a tender violet blush over swaying green stalks, shading into the complicated aftertones seen at sunset, although the sun still rode high above her.
She pressed forward four steps as a hazy glamour rose off the path like mist. Through this soft fog she reached, searching for the ground at her feet. It was hard now to see the path beneath her, but the dirt felt the same. Into the cool soil she traced the next pattern.
“Fourth lies the blacksmith’s Ring of Fire.”
Fog billowed up along the path, swirling around her knees as she took five steps forward. Ahead, through the hazy shimmer that now lay over the meadow, she saw the river. A figure stood on the far bank, caught in a moment of indecision among the rocks at the ford. Even from this distance, Liath recognized the stocky body and distinctive face of one of the Ashioi, but the woman was dressed so strangely, in human clothing, with human gear. She looked utterly out of place and yet entirely familiar as she gazed at the scene unfolding before her.
The fragrance of roses surrounded Liath, so dense it made her woozy.
Was it dizziness? Or was that Ashioi woman actually wearing Liath’s other tunic, the one she had folded away into the saddlebags thrown over Resuelto’s back just before she and Sanglant and the baby had tried to make their escape from Verna?
It was too late to stop now. She couldn’t pause to find out the answer. She had to go on.
She knelt, and drew. Rising, she spoke as she walked. “The Throne of Virtue follows fifth.”
The field of flowers expanded around her as though the clearing had breached the bounds holding it to the earth and had begun to spread up actually into the sky. Cornflowers burned with a pale blue-fire luminescence, blazing lanterns, each one like a shard of the burning stone cracked and shattered and strewn among the other flowers. Through this dizzying terrain she took six steps. It was both hard to keep to the path and yet somehow impossible to step off of it.
“Wisdom’s Scepter marks the sixth.”
She was almost to the river. Ahead, the flower trail melded and became one with the river itself, but the river no longer resembled an earthly river, bound by its rock bed. Like the River of Heaven, it streamed up into the sky, a deep current pouring upward, all blue and silver. Vaguely, beyond it, or below it, she saw the shadows of those things that still stood on the land: a pale figure more shade than substance, algae-covered rocks whose chaotic patterns nevertheless seemed to conceal unspoken secrets, withered trees so dark that they seemed lifeless.
She must not pause to look back. Her feet touched the water, yet it was not water that swirled around her calves as she took seven steps forward. She waded into a streaming river of aether that flowed upward to its natural home. When she thrust her hand into its depths, the currents pooled around her, swift and hot.
She traced the outlines of the final sigil, the crown of stars. Where her hand drew, the blue-silver effluence surged away with sparks of gold fire.
“At the highest rung seek the Crown of Stars, the song of power revealed.”
She climbed the River of Light.
The path opened before her, the great river spoken of by so many of the ancient writers. Was it the seam that bound together the two hemispheres of the celestial sphere, as Theophrastus wrote? Or was the theory of Posidonos the correct one, that by its journey through the heavens it brought heat to the cold reaches of the universe?
