“Do you follow me now?”
“Yes, m’lord!” The other man gulped. “Quite well!” And then he was gone, having suddenly decided that something on the other side of the bar needed his attention right away.
“I’m so glad,” Corvis called after him. With a satisfied nod, he strode back through the front door, moving around to the stables to bid Rascal farewell.
HIS LUNGS BURNED from the icy air within his chest. Even with a thick cloth wrapped about his nose and mouth, and another tied over his eyes to blot out the worst of the light reflecting from the endless white, his face felt as if it would soon fall off the front of his skull. It was an all-consuming task to keep placing one foot in front of the other. His only signs of progress were the crunching of ice and snow beneath his boots, and the endless trail of footprints he and his guide left snaking along the mountainside.
With the butt-end of Sunder, Corvis tapped Sah-di on the shoulder. The Terrirpa stopped and turned about. Corvis was certain he’d said something, but his voice was lost in the howling of the winds.
Apparently seeing his employer’s confusion, Sah-di practically shouted in his ear, “You wish something of me, good Master?”
“I just …” Corvis coughed twice, attempting to regain some feeling in his numbed throat, and tried again. This time his voice, though rough as coal, was intelligible. “I just wanted to know if this really is the easiest route,” he shouted.
“To all intents and purposes, good Master.”
Corvis pursed his cracking lips. “What do you mean, ‘to all intents and purposes’?”
“You tell me you seek the way up Mount Molleya. This is the way we should go. But there are other ways, if the Master prefers. Ways of a more shallow incline than this.”
“Then why the godsforsaken thrice-damned hell are we taking this one?”
“Because the other routes, most patient Master, would add considerable time to our journey.”
“Translate ‘considerable’ for me.”
“Oh, at least a week in each direction.”
Corvis fought the urge to whimper. “This would probably be our best route, then.”
“As the wise Master suggests.”
And so it went, for several millennia-long days. The hours blurred together, smearing into a single, bleary tunnel of bright white below, bright blue above, hideous cold, winds threatening to hurl him over the edge of the precarious trail, and exhaustion so all-encompassing that even his teeth and his hair were tired. And thus, it was with no small amount of dumbfounded astonishment that he happened to glance up past the shoulders of his guide one afternoon to discover several thin plumes of smoke wafting into the air beyond the next ridge.
“One of the villages of my people, good Master,” Sah-di yelled back to him. “From that point on, the slope grows steeper, I’m afraid. But it may provide us a place to stop and rest up beforehand.”
“May? I don’t care for the ambiguity there, Sah-di.”
The Terrirpa shrugged. “It shames me, forgiving Master, that I cannot give you a certain answer. But I do not know this village. Though I have passed by, I have never before felt the need to stop. I know not what clan they claim, so I cannot know for certain if they will be well disposed toward me.”
Corvis followed his strange companion toward the edge of the ridge, then down into a small hollow—a valley in the very side of the mountain itself—in which sat a circle of crude huts.
A log palisade, scarcely more than a thick fence, blocked the path before them, and the mountains themselves guarded the village from most other angles of approach. Two men, clad in thick furs and with the same unusual cast to their features as Sah-di, flanked a swinging gate bolted into the logs. One stepped forth as Corvis and his guide approached, a hand on the hilt of his mace, while the other sentinel wrapped his own grip around a pull-rope that would, no doubt, set alarm bells tolling at the slightest tug.
The foremost sentry spoke, but whatever he said was completely lost on Corvis. His language was somehow beautiful and repulsive at once, lyrical yet harsh to the unaccustomed ear.
“Please, my good friend,” Sah-di implored him, hands clasped together at waist level. “In the language of the north. It would not do to insult our guest by speaking as though he were not here.”
“I don’t know you,” the guard grumbled in a gruff voice, “or your friend. What have you done to earn my courtesy?” But he said it in the language of Imphallion, albeit heavily accented.
“Courtesy, good friend, is something to be given without question,” Sah-di chided him. “Not a prize to be won.”
It was not a debate the sentinel was inclined to continue. “Who are you,” he demanded sharply, “and what do you want?”
“My name is Sah-di, of the Pa-ram. The gentle lord behind me has been gracious enough to allow this humble traveler to guide him through the peaks. We seek merely to beg shelter for the night, and perhaps a morsel or two of food. Tell me, good friend, what clan claims this village?”
The soldier—whose shoulders, Corvis noted, visibly slumped at the name “Pa-ram”—muttered, “Sho-rin.”
The clans of the Terrirpa, Sah-di explained to his employer over a hot dinner that night, were bound via a veritable webwork of boons, favors, and influence. Every clan had several other clans required, often by debts many generations old, to submit to their authority. They, in turn, had others to which they must answer. It was not unheard of, in fact, for one clan to hold supremacy over a second, which held supremacy over a third, which held supremacy over the first. It was a confusing, muddled system, one that an outsider could never hope to fully understand.
But the practical upshot of it all, Sah-di told him—and the only aspect concerning them—was that the clan Pa-ram currently held a multigenerational debt over the Sho-rin. “In essence, good Master, for the duration of our stay we are as kings in this tiny village.” He grinned. “I find my territorial borders perhaps a bit confining, but I suppose it is a place to begin.”
Corvis, who’d briefly dominated half of Imphallion, found himself underwhelmed.
But at least they had a warm room for the night, in the home of one of the villagers. The man and his family had been volunteered, as their house’s location near the far gate would allow the travelers the earliest possible start the next morning. That he owned one of the largest houses, and that his wife was one of the town’s best cooks—both details Sah-di pried from the sullen sentries—were simply fringe benefits.
Their supper, consisting of roast mountain goat and steamed vegetables (grown gods alone knew where) smothered in various sauces, was surprisingly good. Terrirpa culture being what it was, the two visitors sat and discoursed on various unimportant topics with the gentleman who owned the house, while the man’s wife and daughter prepared and served the meal.
Over the course of dinner, Corvis noticed his guide’s eyes settling more and more frequently, with a certain ungentle gleam, on the girl: a young thing barely scratching the border between adolescence and adulthood. She was, Corvis estimated, not much older than Mellorin herself. That particular thought, once unleashed, ballooned outward to fill his brain until he could think of nothing else. Sah-di continued to leer, and Corvis grew angrier by the minute.
Finally, though, the meal was concluded with nothing untoward, and the day’s exhaustion swooped down on Corvis like a striking raptor. He barely had sufficient energy to excuse himself from the table and bid his host a polite good night before he collapsed unconscious onto the thick pad he’d been provided.
He slept soundly and undisturbed, dreaming over and over again of home, of the laughter of children, of Tyannon’s gentle eyes.
Chapter Thirteen
“I don’t think I pronounced that right,” Corvis admitted.
“Ah, no. Had you actually been casting the spell, I think there’s a very good chance you’d have just melted something off. If you were lucky, it would’ve been your face.”
Grunting,
Corvis leaned back against the wall and allowed himself to slide slowly to the floor until he sat limply, limbs splayed out like a jellyfish washed up on the beach. Dark circles marred the flesh under his eyes, and both his forehead and bare chest were soaked with sweat.
Seilloah, of course, looked perfectly composed, not a single hair out of place or a wrinkle on her dress. But then, Seilloah always looked perfectly composed.
“This isn’t going to work, Seilloah,” he muttered finally.
“Of course it is. You just need a few minutes to rest.”
“No, I—”
“We’ll start with a different incantation,” she insisted, sorting through the pile of scraps and cracked leather bindings that covered the room’s only table. “Something a little less complex, maybe.”
“Seilloah, there aren’t any that are less complex.”
“Oh, nonsense. That incantation was Second Circle. And you’ve already mastered so much of the First.”
Corvis glared, fingers tapping on the wooden floor.
The witch sighed and gracefully lowered herself to sit across from him.
“You can’t give up, Corvis. You said it yourself when we met: You can’t make this work with force of arms alone. You need magic—and modesty compels me to admit that I’m probably not enough on my own.”
“Right. And if I had a few decades to study, we might make this work. But I don’t, and we can’t.”
“So what do you … Corvis, no.”
“Why not? You and I both know they exist, Seilloah. I read about them before I even met you.”
“Corvis, the power those icons grant isn’t your own. The discipline required to control—”
“Do you really think I have a problem with discipline, Seilloah? I can handle it, and you know it.”
Seilloah took a deep, steadying breath. “Corvis, where do you think the power of those icons comes from? Why do you think that every tale you’ve read of them ends badly?”
Ignoring the twinge of exhausted muscles, Corvis leaned away from the wall. “So tell me. What’s inside them?”
“Demons, Corvis. The icons you’re talking about contain bound demons.”
Long moments of silence. Then, “Oh.”
“That changes things, doesn’t it?” Seilloah suggested.
“No, it actually doesn’t.” Corvis licked his lips, dried and chapped from the constant exertion of his failed spellcasting. “Where do I start looking?”
THE AGONIZING CLIMB took another five days, an eternity of cold and ice that made damnation to the thickest flames of hell seem pleasant. All his life, it seemed, became an endless repetition of footsteps breaking the icy snow, struggling to move just one more stride.
On the fourth day beyond the village, the air grew noticeably thin. Sah-di adapted without difficulty, but Corvis found himself gasping at the exertion of merely lifting a foot from the snow. He was forced to stop at regular and rapidly increasing intervals, to rest and catch what he could of his breath. His chest burned, his skull pounded behind his eyes, and he grew light-headed. By the dawn of the fifth day, Corvis drifted in and out of coherence constantly—he spent half his waking moments in the misty befuddlement of a waking dream, the other half in the living nightmare of the Terrakas Mountains. At one point he regained his senses just after telling an amused Sah-di, very emphatically, “I already moved the furniture, so you cook the dog while I purple.”
The peak of the mountain had drawn slowly nearer, but so had the white wall looming before them, a cresting tidal wave of ice and stone. “This is the final stretch, good Master,” Sah-di assured him. “But I fear the remainder of our journey must be made with rope and spikes. I would not insult you or question your capabilities for all the gold in Daltheos’s earth, good Master, but I worry you may not be up to completing this journey.”
Corvis nodded breathlessly, leaning against an outcropping of snowy rock. “I’m too old for this sort of thing, Sah-di,” he gasped.
The Terrirpa’s lips tightened. “You are not an old man yet, good Master. It would be a shame if you never have the opportunity to become one.”
Somehow, Corvis couldn’t help but think that Sah-di’s reluctance to continue was less concern for his employer’s well-being than it was an excuse not to have to make the arduous climb himself.
He allowed himself another moment of rest, hoping against hope and reason that this wheezing breath would somehow prove more productive than the last. He muttered to himself, casting every strengthening spell he knew, rudimentary as they were. It was enough to get him moving again. Whether it would be enough to keep him moving was another question entirely.
“No,” he said then, standing up straight. “I have to finish this.”
Sah-di frowned. “Good Master, I think perhaps that—”
“This isn’t open to discussion, Sah-di. I hired you. I’m paying you. That makes me the boss.”
“And it would be poor business sense, not to mention dishonorable, for me to allow my employer to perish. You’ve come farther already than most men would ever dare or dream, good Master. It is no failing of yours that you cannot make the top.”
Corvis, despite his exhaustion, actually smiled. “Is that what you think this is, Sah-di? Some personal fixation? You think I’m here for the glory of conquering the great Mount Molleya?”
The Terrirpa shrugged. “I have seen men do it before, good Master. I have even guided some of them. In truth, I cannot think of any other reason for such an arduous journey. There is nothing at the top worth climbing to.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, friend,” Corvis told him. “There is a cave, near the very peak. And hidden within is something quite valuable to me. That’s what I’m after.”
Sah-di blinked. “Good Master, you have been led astray. There are no caves in the heights of Mount Molleya.”
“There’s one, Sah-di. It’s just damn well hidden.”
“But—”
“Look, it’s very simple, Sah-di. I’m going on. If you plan to head back now, go. But you won’t get the second half of your fee, and you’ll be coming back to town having lost your employer. That won’t be good for your reputation as a guide, will it?
“And just think. On the off-chance I’m not an idiot and actually know what I’m talking about, you’ll have helped me achieve something I desperately need. I’m very free with my rewards when I get what I want, Sah-di.”
The guide chewed the inside of his cheek in contemplation, finally nodding. “Whatever you may be, good Master, I think you are not an idiot. Moreover, however lowly I may be as compared with so august a personage as yourself, I am a man of my word. I will not turn back now, if you will not.”
Or he wants to get his hands on whatever’s so valuable. But that’s just fine with me. I want him to get his hands on it …
What Corvis said, however, was “I’m glad to hear it, Sah-di. I’m as rested as I’ll ever be. Let’s get started.”
The remainder of that hellish day, their ascent up the wind-blasted, ice-encrusted rock, became little more than a blur in Corvis’s memory. The entire day metamorphosed into an endless labor of fear and pain. Had he been asked even a day later, he could never have described an individual moment of the climb. He recalled nothing of the rough and abrasive rope; the bruised and blackened fingers as they sought, numb with cold, for a ledge wide enough to grip; the hammering on the pitons that echoed back louder than when they’d begun; his nails, torn and bleeding even beneath his heavy gloves, the blood pooling and sticking to the tips of his fingers. It was, in the truest sense of the word, a timeless experience; it took forever, it took no time at all. After an eternity of sheer hell, in the blink of an eye they were there.
By the time the slope leveled out, just a few hundred feet shy of the peak, there was no rational thought left to Corvis; he was an automaton, moving by rote. Sah-di was forced to drag him to the slight shelter provided by an outcropping of stone, and Corvis only watched emptily as the Terr
irpa hustled about, setting up something a little less crude. He’d barely erected the small tent when Corvis crawled inside and collapsed into oblivion.
SAH-DI WATCHED HIM, idly rubbing his hands on his own arms, and knelt down to start a small fire, well shielded from the winds by a bulwark of rock and snow. He considered abandoning this madman in the night and returning home, but just as quickly dismissed the idea as a poor one. If he’d planned to go back, the place to have done so was at the base of the cliff, not here at the top. The worst of the ascent was over, and he wasn’t sure he possessed the strength to tackle the cliff again without sleep and food.
And this one called Cerris, assuming he wasn’t weaving tapestries out of moonbeams and spiderwebs, might provide substantial reward for those efforts. Carefully, Sah-di rose to his feet. The only sounds coming from the alcove were the crackling of the cheerful little fire and the faint crunch of the native’s boots breaking snow, and both were well obscured by the screaming winds. His eyes gleaming with something more than reflected firelight, Sah-di went in search of Cerris’s supposed cave.
CORVIS AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING to find the guide standing over him, his expression far less simpering than it once was. “You’ve dragged us up here for nothing, you madman!” Sah-di snarled, his usual obsequiousness apparently having been lost in the snow at some point the previous evening.
Corvis peered at him, bleary-eyed. The night of sleep, secure in the tent and warmed by the fire, had done him great good. Though just a few steps shy of frostbite, and so sore that he wasn’t certain he’d ever move again, he was again fully aware.
Not that his guide’s ranting was helping matters. “Sah-di, I don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about.”