Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 03] - Owlknight (34 page)

“T
ake slow, deep breaths,” Keisha told her sister, who was struggling to get enough air. She wasn't feeling all that well herself, but it was Shandi and Wintersky who had been hit the worst by what their guide assured them was not a sickness, but due to “only the height of the mountain.” This was mountain sickness, the illness of which Keisha had heard such unsettling tales. Safe to say, no one was making light of it.

Shandi leaned on Karles' shoulder, visibly taking calm from her Companion's presence. She was
dizzy,
felt as if she were choking, and nauseated; all symptoms, so their guide said blithely, of what he called “mountain fever.” He insisted that coming down off the mountain would cure them, and since Keisha had not been able to find any signs of disease using her Healing Gifts, she was forced to take his word and the word of all the tales that she had heard for it.

Of all of them, Keisha seemed to have suffered the least. Steelmind, Hywel, and Darian were very short of breath and had killing headaches; Wintersky had both problems and was looking a bit green. Shandi had all of these and shook with cold; they'd bundled her up, but she still shivered, besides being sick and half blind with headache. The nonhumans all showed discomfort in some way, to a varying degree, except for Kelvren, who seemed invulnerable to it all.

Keisha only suffered from the headache, which was bad enough.
I suppose I should be happy with that,
she thought, and tried to will more air into her lungs.

“We must get over the pass,” their guide insisted. “It will only get worse if we stay here.”

“Worse?” Shandi moaned. “This can get
worse?
I can't see how—”

“It will,” the Gray Wolf warrior said firmly. “Fever-dreams, or unconsciousness. We must get over. It will be better then.”

“All right,” Shandi managed to gasp, and climbed into her saddle. “Let's go, while I can still ride.”

With her head feeling exactly like someone had tied a wire around it and was tightening it more with every passing breath, Keisha got into her dyheli's saddle and waited for the rest to mount. How was the guide managing to be so healthy?

I suppose he must be used to being this high,
she decided.
It hardly seems fair, though.
They had been traveling through these mountains for three days now, but it was only today that they had started to feel so sick.

It was a pity they were all so miserable, because the scenery was spectacular; this last of the passes was actually above the clouds, though still below the snow line. It was about as cold in the shade as a late fall day in Errold's Grove, the full sun was intense and quite hot, and the little white puffs of cloud floating just below them looked like heaps of newly shorn fleeces.

Below and behind them lay one of many valleys, green and tree-filled; farther back, more mountains, growing blue with distance. Ahead of them lay the notch between two mountains marking the pass; mountains that in turn towered so far above the pass that it made Keisha dizzy to think about it.

This, so the guide assured them, was the final obstacle they needed to cross. Below this lay what the guide called “the Great Pass.”

I can't imagine how Snow Fox got this far, laden with sick people!
she thought. They must have been truly desperate to undertake the journey.

But then she remembered the children of Ghost Cat, so ill with Wasting Sickness they could hardly even feed themselves, and she knew that no parent could see that and not try everything to make it better. With the exception of the now-extinct Blood Bear, these people cherished their children no less than the parents of Valdemar.

She held on to the saddle-grip, enduring the jarring of her head with each step her
dyheli
took. She knew it was worse for everyone else—most of all for Shandi, who was as white as Karles' coat. Karles himself looked positively pale, even for a white “horse.”

The trail they followed was a slender track threading its way between enormous rocks tumbled from the higher slopes and clumps of brush. At this height, colors had been leached from everything by the intense light of the sun; the bushes and grasses were gray-green, the trunks of the tiny trees gray-brown, the rocks around them pale gray. Here and there were spring flowers—pale blue, pale pink, and white. Only the sky held an intense color, a blue so deep and pure that Keisha longed to be able to dip fabric in it and capture it forever. The only other place she had ever seen a blue that beautiful was when she had looked into Karles' eyes, just before he had Chosen Shandi.

They plodded upward, and the top never seemed to get any nearer—then suddenly they were there, at the top of the pass, looking down ...

... and down ... and down ...

Hywel whistled his astonishment; Darian shook his head in disbelief, and Keisha gasped. Even Shandi forgot her misery for a moment and stared.

“The Great Pass,” their guide said simply. “And here I must leave you. The track down is plain, see? You no longer need my help.”

He pointed to a much clearer track than the one they had used to climb up here, one that zigzagged down the steep slope (more of a cliff than a slope) from where they now stood.

The Great Pass; that was far from being any kind of a descriptive name for it. Keisha had pictured a mountain pass like any other—perhaps deeper, certainly longer, since it was supposed to go straight through all the way to Raven territory.

What she saw, however, beggared imagination.

It was as if someone had taken a giant knife and carved through the mountains to form a passage. The bottom was as level and flat as a good paved road, and it disappeared in either direction into the mists of distance. Right now the sun was high above them, so the bottom was in full light; she caught a glint of water down there, shining between the branches of trees made so small by distance that she could scarcely make them out.

“Gods of my fathers,” Darian murmured. “Who could possibly have possessed the kind of magic needed to make such a thing?”

Only then did Keisha realize that it was magic, and not nature, that had created this place.

“Huh,” Shandi said, rousing herself out of her misery. “I guess you don't know your history very well. The northern mage that Herald Vanyel fought, that's who—and I guess Vanyel must have had even more than he did, since Vanyel stopped him.” She peered off into the south and east, following the gash with her eyes. “It'll come out just north of the Forest of Sorrows—or it would, if Vanyel hadn't blocked it. I had no notion this thing still existed.”

Nor had anyone else, except the northern tribes, who clearly knew very well it existed,
and
provided easy access to the south. Only luck and Vanyel's Curse had kept them from taking it all the way into Valdemar in the past—and now, save for that final blockage, the north stood open to invasion.

Now it was more imperative than ever to find out what sort of state the rest of the northern tribes were in. They had joined together once to invade Valdemar, and only Vanyel had stopped them. What if they should band together again? They wouldn't need a great mage this time, only a strong leader and a good strategist—all the work of creating an easy path to the south had been done for them.

She was the first to break out of the trance of fascination that the Great Pass exerted on them, and ask her
dyheli
to start down the trail before them. Darian quickly shook off his own bemusement and followed her. One by one, the others did the same, as their guide remained on the top of the pass behind them, watching them solemnly as they began their journey downward.

It took them all day to make their way to the bottom, and once there, the great age of the place was self-evident. Far from being the barren cut it must have been for years after it had been made, a hundred thousand different plants and animals had taken advantage of the shelter it provided to move in and flourish. A stream ran right down the middle, fed by the runoff of the mountains above it, and where there is water, there will always be life. Leafed trees and evergreen trees had taken root here, and a variety of plants flourished along the banks of the stream. There was game in plenty, too, which was just as well, since the mountains cut off the sunlight and night would come very quickly here. There wasn't a lot of time left to set themselves up for the night.

So they didn't hesitate when they reached the bottom ; they made camp immediately. They still had some provisions in the form of dried meat pounded together with dried berries, provided by their hosts of Gray Wolf. That would do for now; in the morning they could hunt.

“How are your heads, all of you?” Keisha asked the others as they quickly gathered deadfall for a fire.

She got variations on “Fine, now,” from all of them, and Shandi in particular looked much more like her old self. Evidently their guide had been right; there was something about going up very high that made people sick—

Unless
they're used to it? That must be it; Keisha didn't want to contemplate what it would be like to try and become accustomed to the heights. How long would the sickness last?

Perhaps it would be possible to become accustomed gradually, without the symptoms.

But
I
don't care to be the one to find out, she decided, and went back to gathering very dry twigs to serve as kindling.

Steelmind found a real windfall, in that he found a tangle of wood piled up against a rock, dry and ready to burn. But that very find raised the possibility of another danger. Flash floods were always a possibility in the mountains, and they were in a particularly hazardous and vulnerable place. A cloud-burst could cause a flood leagues away—a flood that would sweep everything before it all the way down the Pass, and they would have no warning.

“Weather-Watching,” Darian said to Steelmind, as they all came to that realization after a short discussion. “Have you ever done it?”

“Not often, but I can do it,” the older man replied, unsheathing a hand ax, adjusting its weighting slide, then stooping to chop up the battered brush and limbs. Hywel and Wintersky helped him, as Keisha, Shandi, and Darian gathered up the armfuls of wood. Darian limbered up and hacked skillfully at some branches with his heavy brush-knife, while Kelvren helped in his own way by standing on long branches or small trees and snapping through them with his beak, even if they were as thick as a man's upper arm. It was getting dark fast, and even though the tops of the mountains above them still gleamed golden with sunlight, it was twilight on the floor of the Pass.

“Wintersky and I can watch, too,” Darian said with satisfaction. “Good; there won't be a night watch when we won't have a Weather-Watcher too; during the day we can take turns. Kel will know more than any of us during the day; he'll be up
in
the weather we're watching.”

:It is likely that we
and
Hashi will
also
be
able
to hear
a
flood before it
reaches us
—
well
in time for us
all
to
climb to escape,:
Neta said diffidently.
:So we will have twin defenses.:

But Keisha wondered how well she was going to be able to sleep with the specter of a flood sweeping down out of nowhere hanging over her head every night. “Maybe we'd be better off trying to find caves above the waterline each night?” she suggested, dropping her armload of wood beside the fire and going back for another.

“We would—if we can find any,” Darian replied. He didn't have to add anything; she'd seen the condition of the walls on the way down herself. There didn't seem to be much in the way of caves. “If I have to, I can use magic to enlarge a cave or fissure that is already there, depending upon the conditions at the time. I could maybe make us a shelter, before there were any rains, but that would put out an easily readable magical signature. It's best if we just make a camp as usual, though, because I'd rather not advertise to whatever may be out there.”

They could camp on the trail itself, but that carried its own risks, and how many more trails would they find as they made their way up the Pass?

She resolved not to think any more about it. They would be vigilant, and improvise. There had been too many surprises on this journey already to try to anticipate all the possibilities and plan for them. Meanwhile, she could gather wood and water, and do what she could to make certain that none of them would suffer any long-term effects from their mountain sickness.

 

Steady marching brought them to the end of the Pass in three days, and they had pressed themselves to do so in that short a time. The terrain, at least, provided nothing to impede them; it must have been an easy trip for that long-ago army that Vanyel defeated.

The tall mountains around them never grew lower, but the valleys between grew broader—and wetter. More of their time was spent crossing valley floors, some of them thickly greened valleys that were filled with plants that were entirely new to Steelmind. Here they did find furtive signs of people, but never saw any. Kuari reported that the tribes he saw were all small, no more than twenty or thirty people altogether, and they kept away from the travelers and their strange beasts and stranger allies.

More streams joined with theirs, and they started to see fish more abundantly. With that, Wintersky began throwing his line in every time they camped, and they enjoyed the results of his labor.

The end of the third day brought them to the end of the Pass; it opened out into one of those broad valleys, heavily forested, green, and wreathed with mist. All that day Keisha had noticed the clouds becoming thicker overhead, and the air growing more humid, although there was no sign that it was about to rain.