Vhaasa was awake before the last team on watch, Oodo and Ghetti, began to wake the others. He had been lying on his side, watching the scarlet dawnfires roll in, the daystars chasing away their smaller nocturnal kin and draping light across the landscape. Sleep had not been easy between the events of the day and the need to keep pressure on his perforated nose. The persistent sounds of the others shifting in their bedrolls all night suggested the rest of the cohort was similarly effected.
Ghetti had cooked the rest of the iryx that he said probably wasn’t tainted by the jackals’ jaws. That made breakfast a treat, and Vhaasa was leaning on a pile of panniers eating his share while the rest of the cohort went about dressing, pissing, strapping on their kit. Mogrus rolled over abruptly, tumbling out of his blanket and hopping to his feet looking strange in his sleeveless cassock. Vhaasa chuckled a bit as he remembered last night’s round of jokes, picturing Oodo’s expression for the thousandth time.
The skyfires had given way to full daylight before the cohort was on the move again. Mogrus had to have Mallock call a halt several times in the first few leagues of their day’s trek. During these times everyone would shuffle their feet or lay down on the hardpan while Mogrus got out that inscrutable map and his counting beads and scratched away at the gritty soil. Sometimes it only took a few minutes. Once it seemed they were there half the day, but it had grown difficult to track the time. Vhaasa was sure the days and nights weren’t even anymore, not consistent, and seemed to remember Nith confirming at one point that something of the sort might be happening. Before he died.
Mallock was teaching Vhaasa to twist herbs with reed-gum paper on one of those halts when Ghetti spoke in his strangely articulate rumble,
“You wouldn’t mind if I interrupted your figures to offer an observation, would you, maven?”
“What is, Ghetti?” Mogrus asked.
“I don’t mean any disrespect to your Arts and auguries, Mogrus Un’Akuhl. It only seems to me that a clear eye may serve us all as well in such a case as this. I believe we have arrived.” Ghetti gestured south with his long crook, keeping respectful eye contact with Mogrus all the while.
The cohort all looked to where he pointed. The same quivering horizon ahead as had taunted them for the last month. But no. Right at the edge, just barely visible, a sliver of darkness lay across the land.
Neph’s Chasm, Vhaasa thought, right out there just a league or so off. It had been so long, and the Nephraath Barrens had swallowed the cohorts’ senses, leaving them numb to the possibility of change. The only variation to the bleak Barrens in that month’s time had been the shiftstorm, and they’d spent that coiled up in Nith’s uneasy ritual.
“So it does, Ghetti,” Mogrus made an awkward expression, “So it does. Help an old man up, then.”
Ghetti offered Mogrus a hand and the two old men walked over to where Captain Mallock and Bandrell stood staring at the dark ribbon on the horizon.
“Onward, eh?” Mogrus asked the Captain.
“Right,” Mallock said, blinking, “Onward, all!”
“Onward!” Bandrell shouted after him, the others offering him quizzical looks.
The cohort grabbed their kit as they moved on south. Something of the discipline Mallock had attempted to instill early in the journey had come back to them now, and they walked in a close formation. Mogrus walked with the captain at the head, Bandrell and Russk doing their duty as a rearguard. The drays had been fanned out to the sides by Ghetti’s crook and calls, nine or ten of them left, one carrying on its back the meat and hide of two others.
To Vhaasa’s mind it had never taken longer to walk a league, and the distance crossed had never before brought as many unwelcome changes. The sky gradually dimmed, the daystars fading from view as they made their way south. Before they’d crossed half a league it was too dark to make out the line of the chasm before them. The grey and yellow gravel of the Nephraath Barrens gave way to lead colored hardpan; the broken gouges between each plate a finger deep. Sudden gusts of wind came from random directions; chill and breathlessly hot by turns. The terrible gulf closed on them with each step, inexorable.
* * * * *