Visions Read Free Page A

breathing was now a wheeze, and there was a dull ache low in his back. Face against his chest, Tel could hear a rattling sound from deep inside him.
    “My love,” she said, squeezing him tightly, “you keep me young, but I’m getting cold out here. Can we go in now? I told the children I’d find you for them, and now it’s my sworn duty to bring you back.”
    “If you insist,” wheezed Anka.
    “I do.” Tel stood up, then inched her way back along the ledge, fearful as always of the long fall to the rocks below. Anka followed closely behind, his breath escaping in gasps, head spinning by the time he knelt to squeeze through the narrow entrance to the tunnel leading below.
    “The trail grows narrower each year,” she said.
    “The trail is the same. Perhaps your feet are growing larger.”
    “From chasing you,” she said, holding out a hand to guide him through the entrance.
    The tunnel sloped severely for several yards so that they crouched in a duck-walk position until the rock was reasonably level and the ceiling high enough for standing. The walls and ceiling were lined with crusts of tiny quartz crystals, clear and white, but streaked with the yellow of citrine and purple of amethyst. The floor was worn smooth by countless footsteps of those who climbed upwards to see the sun or the moon, smell the sweet scent of pine, hear a bird, or stick a tongue out in falling rain, for except for the great vent carrying hot air, smoke and body odors directly to the top of the cliffs, this was one of only two entrances to the caverns.
    They spiraled downwards on a gentle slope, squinting ahead in dim light of torches placed in the walls several meters apart, acrid fumes of burning sap stinging their eyes and nostrils. The noise was faint, at first, growing steadily louder until they could hear individual voices, especially those of the children playing some kind of hiding game. Odors of cooked food and sweaty bodies wafted through the tunnel, along with faint, sweet smoke of hard wood fires. Anka scowled as senses once again saturated, and then ahead of them a shadow raced along the walls, squealing. A pubescent girl, naked and long-legged with blonde hair tumbling in a tangled mass down her shoulders, came around a corner and nearly ran into them. She stopped short, seeing Anka and Tel, her generous mouth spreading into a smile that showed delicate, even white teeth.
    “They’re back!” she shrieked, startling both Anka and Tel, and then she raced back down the tunnel.
    “They’re back! They’re back! She found him!”
    Anka put a hand over his pounding heart. “Spirit of the world, my heart might explode. Catch me.”
    Tel laughed. “Dear Baela, always running. Her spirit is our youth, my heart.”
    “She looks like a water lizard, and runs like one.”
    Tel frowned. “She, and the children like her are the true immortality of the Tenanken, my heart. Not us.”
    “I know, I know, but appearances must count for something. She should cover herself, Tel. She is not a child anymore.”
    The tunnel ended at last, and they stepped out onto a flat shelf overlooking the great bowl of the main cavern thirty meters below them, a vaulted ceiling rising sixty meters above their heads to a single fumarole going up hundreds more to the outside world. The cavern was round, over a hundred meters across, a series of concentric shelves dropping down into the bowl until at the bottom there was a large, flat area worn smooth by community meetings and ceremonies. The spiral of shelves began where they stood, and ahead of them raced Baela, spreading the word that Anka had returned.
    Children of all ages cascaded down from rocky shelves, spilling into the bottom of the great cavern where the eldest Keeper of The Memories would take them once again into the past. Most were clothed in shirts and pants brought to them by Pegre, but all had cast aside the heavy footwear for the moment, and were bare-footed before him. The only