Winter's Edge

Chapter 70 - History

Ian

IT felt like we'd been walking the dust-ridden halls forever and gotten nowhere. We were following a pair of dice in the hands of a madman, and Abby didn't have much more time. She'd be dead by the end of the day.

In Harlan's rush to leave Summerlight and get to his daughter in time, he'd only been able to find three flashlights and only a few extra batteries. According to him, the hidden mountain city had a small thorium reactor supplying practically endless power, so they rarely found a use for flashlights or batteries. Our only option had been to use one flashlight at a time until the batteries were all gone.

And we were on our last set of batteries.

We jogged toward a T intersection and Brother Lawrence threw the dice. "Right," he said.

We passed him and turned right, but he snatched his dice and overtook us again in no time. Then the passage came to a sudden dead end.

"Oh, my." The monk scratched his bald head. "That's odd."

"Your dice led us to a dead end?" I said.

He rolled the dice. "Yes. But they say to go forward."

A little more of my hope was crushed. Even the dice were no longer sending us down reasonable paths. They wanted us to walk through walls now.

"I'll assign seven as the number for going forward," Brother Lawrence said. "All other numbers are for turning around." He rolled the dice again. Seven. Brother Lawrence frowned and tried several more times. Seven kept coming up in different combinations. His dice were creeping me out again.

"I don't get it," Harlan said.

Brother Lawrence looked up, listening to the voice in his head, I assumed. "Interesting."

"What's interesting?" I said.

No answer. The monk just moved up to the wall, inspecting its surface. "Ah, yes. Here it is." A crack lay beneath his hand. He dusted it off. "The Light would like us to go through the wall."

I frowned. "Huh?"

"I said the Light would like us to go through the wall."

"No, I heard you. The 'huh' was more like, 'are you crazy?'" It was all I could do to keep from blowing up at the monk.

"Hmmm." Harlan cocked his head at the wall. "You know, I never considered that this part of the city was sealed off from the Old City."

Maybe he was on to something. I turned to the monk. "Can you teleport us to the other side of that wall?"

"I can only teleport if I feel it well up inside of me, like a push to do so. I feel nothing of the sort right now." Brother Lawrence shook his head. "The Light must not want me to teleport for some reason. Maybe there's rock on the other side. I can't imagine what would happen if we teleported into rock."

I didn't understand the monk's power, but he'd made a valid point. "If the Light's the one who gives you your powers, can't He jump us right where we need to go so we don't end up in the rock? Heck, why can't He just jump us right into Winter's Edge?"

Brother Lawrence looked up and nodded. "He says, 'Life's not easy. Get used to it.'"

"What the— Are you serious?"

The monk shrugged, palms up.

I was stunned for a moment until I reminded myself that the voice in his head wasn't really God. But the way he'd found Summerlight so easily still had me wondering. Had he followed Elian or Harlan to Summerlight once before but forgotten, and the Light just his memory telling him the path via a spooky little voice in his head?