Of Truth and Beasts

Chapter 19

A few nights later, Chane was out foraging on his own. He took relief in being off by himself for a while.

In his mortal days, he had needed a share of solitude. That penchant had increased since the night he rose from death. Though he cherished Wynn’s company, the last two moons in close quarters with others had begun to take its toll.

He still had some acquired life in one bottle, so he was not concerned for himself, but he strode the pass’s western slope, looking for firewood or anything edible for his companions.

They had made good time in the last few nights, and mountains loomed close ahead. But even in darkness, the landscape was bleak, a rocky terrain spare of trees.

He wandered into an open area at the base of a shorn slope where no trees grew among the scattered, loose stones. Only the sharp angles of embedded boulders showed in the dark. He headed toward the straggly trees at the far side, for no game would linger here.

Chane’s boot toe caught on something.

Stumbling forward before righting himself, he looked down at a square edge protruding from hardened ground. He found himself standing on a flat area, and an exposed patch of smooth stone showed where his boot had scuffed away the dirt. He bent over, studying it.

It was smooth—too smooth—and level versus the surrounding slope of dirt. Crouching, he began brushing away more dirt, and soon exposed an edge.

Though the stone was pitted with wear and age, the small patch appeared to be cut square. He began using his old shortened sword to break more of the hard earth. When he had cleared five paces’ worth, he stopped to examine what he had exposed. The entire edge of stone ran straight and square for the whole distance. It might have once been the foundation of a small but heavy building set into the gradual slope. He stood up, scanning the ground around him, and let hunger rise a little to sharpen his night sight.

Those other shallow, angular protrusions were not embedded boulders. He could see the outlines for what they were—the bones of long-forgotten buildings at various points up the shallow slope.

Had there been a settlement here long ago? That was strange for the middle of nowhere.

Chane walked back along the edge he had exposed. He noticed a fallen tree, weather grayed, lower down the slope. Hacking off pieces, he gathered what he could before turning back the way he had come. But he paused, glancing back once at those ruins’ remains, and remembered what Ore-Locks had claimed at the shattered pylon.

Something is out there, along our path.

Chane was tempted not to mention this place at all.

Before dawn, they had found a decent spot to camp between two ridges up the pass’s western slope. A tiny, if somewhat clouded, stream trickled down a rock crevice to replenish their water casks. Walking into camp, Chane found a fire burning with the remains of last night’s wood. Wynn was bent over a pot at the fireside.

“I’m telling you, they are edible,” she said emphatically. “As long as they are thoroughly cooked with enough water.”

Ore-Locks frowned, almost to the point of disgust, showing more emotion than usual. Lying nearby, Shade grumbled, her head on her paws.

“What is edible?” Chane asked, dropping the wood beside the fire.

Wynn looked up, and he noted her dust-laced hair. She wore it loose tonight, and instead of wispy and light brown, it looked flat and dull in the firelight.

“Oats,” she answered.

Both surprised and dubious, Chane leaned over the pot. “The stone-rolled ones ... for the horses?”

“It’s the most abundant foodstuff we have left. Domin Tilswith and I were forced to live on them several times. They are perfectly edible if cooked down enough ... but a pity we have no honey.”

Shade made a little retching noise and squirmed around to face the other way.

Chane regretted the lost hare from a few nights back, more so when he studied the cream-colored goop Wynn was cooking. Fortunately, he would not have to eat it.

“Did you find anything else?” she asked.

“Nothing to eat,” he returned. “Only ... only a place.”

Wynn stopped stirring. Ore-Locks was still slightly aghast, watching the pot. He blinked and looked up.

“A what?” he asked.

The look in Wynn’s eyes made Chane clench his jaw, wishing he had said nothing at all. But it was too late.

Wynn held her crystal over the half-buried stone remains. Excitement—even hope—slowly built within her.

“Well?” she asked Ore-Locks.

He’d done some digging and unearthed a forearm’s height of a stone wall’s base. He was crouched, examining it.

“This was cut by my people,” he confirmed. “Humans do not fit stone like this without mortar, but ...”

“But what?”

“I see proof of only three dwellings. My people do not live in small villages in the middle of nowhere.”

“So what was this doing out here?” she asked.

Wynn twisted in her squat and spotted Chane a few paces off with his arms crossed. For some reason, he’d been resentful about bringing them here. Shade sniffed the ground all around but didn’t seem any happier than Chane. Wynn ignored them both.

Ever since finding the broken pylon and Ore-Locks’s mention of a ground-level entrance into the mountains, her thoughts hadn’t stopped churning.

“What do you think it was?” she asked Ore-Locks.

She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice. When she saw her own hesitant hope mirrored in his face, it made her falter for an instant.

“Perhaps a way station for overland travelers,” he said slowly. “My people have constructed a few such north of Dhredze Seatt, along the coast toward the Northlanders’ territory. But those were built on a well-traveled route and—”

“Then Vreuvillä was right!” Wynn cut in excitedly. “Dwarves once used this pass to interact with the Lhoin’na ancestors. But we are nowhere near the range’s southern side and the seatt itself. Where were the dwarves coming from, going to, that they’d require a layover here?”

No one spoke, but Chane’s expression grew darker. What was wrong with him?

Wynn scurried over to join Ore-Locks. “Are you certain your ancestors might be capable of building a passage all the way through the range?”

“If you sages believe much was lost in your Forgotten History, then there is no telling.... But I wonder what knowledge and skills my people may have once—”

“No!” Chane nearly snarled.

Wynn stiffened in surprise as Shade’s head swung toward him.

“Even if you find such a thing,” Chane went on, “we are not wandering down some tunnel beneath mountain after mountain, with little food, nothing to hunt, and only hope of fresh water. If we travel for days and nights and reach only a cave-in, do we walk back out, only to find ourselves worse off than before?”

Chane crossed his arms tighter.

“Pohkavost!” he hissed, anger making him slip into his own language.

Wynn didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t wrong in calling it “lunacy.” Everything he’d said was valid, but he was not in charge here.

To make matters worse, Shade normally growled if Chane took that kind of hostile tone. She hadn’t, and instead she got up and sat right in front of Chane, glaring at Wynn.

Ore-Locks remained crouched in silence. Wynn didn’t need to glance back to know he was waiting for her to end this rebellion.

She was tired, hungry, filthy, and had no wish to fight with the two companions she trusted—and she certainly had no wish to side with Ore-Locks.

It suddenly occurred to her that while Chane and Shade had both remained at her side, aiding her, the more she gained hope in her purpose, the more reticent they’d become. Did they want her to fail, to abandon this desperate task and just go home—to be the dutiful little sage, finally obeying her superiors?

“If we found a passageway on this side,” she said calmly, “we would not even have to search for the seatt. It would lead us right there.”

Chane took a step forward, his mouth opening to argue, but she stood up in the same moment.

“We have to try,” she told him. “We have to at least look. It’s better than facing another moon or more wandering in the mountains, trying to find the remnants of a lost seatt on the edge of leagues and leagues of desert.”

The words building in Chane never left his parted lips. Maybe now he would finally accept that no matter what, she would still follow her own path.

Shade rumbled at her softly and began walking over. Wynn wasn’t about to tolerate a heated argument of chopped memory-words, either.

“No,” she said, holding out her hand. “We’re doing a search. Maybe I’m wrong and there is no passage, but these ruins, this place, existed for a reason.”

She turned away, facing south, though it was too dark to see the foothills of the pass’s end, let alone the mountains. Then she looked down at Ore-Locks still crouched at the base of the exposed wall’s remains.

It felt wrong to hurt those close to her by turning to him, but whatever his motivations, he was the only one willing to help. If she could find a passage built by the ancient dwarves that led directly into the seatt, half this battle would be won.

“Well?” was all she said to him.

Ore-Locks simply nodded.

Ghassan il’Sänke was no closer to finding a way inside the seatt. He had given up counting days or nights. He searched the lower reaches of the headless mountain until exhaustion took him, and he simply dropped where he was to sleep. When the rising sun, or a sharp wind, or the night’s chill woke him, he searched again.

A small voice in his mind began to taunt him. Could he be wrong? Was it not possible that this mountain had eroded on its own?

Perhaps there had once been a high lake up there, and it had simply dried out and filled in. Who was he to claim otherwise? A natural disaster, such as a volcanic eruption ages past, could have collapsed the top once it had cooled. Even that would have fit the legend of the mountain’s head returning as fire. And again, nature would have taken care of the rest over centuries.

But Ghassan denied his self-doubts.

What natural disaster could collapse an entire mountain from the inside? A volcano would have blown the top outward, leaving sharp, pocked stones, if not hardened paths of cooled lava, in the aftermath. Many small ravines would have formed following the erosion of softer material. But it was not so.

The seatt was in there, beneath the headless mountain. He had only to find his way in before Wynn reached it. But he was no scout or guide, wise to these barren wilds. He needed to start relying on his strengths.

He was a metaologer.

Movement caught his eye where he lay exhausted on a gravel slope. At first he did not bother to look. It would be another tiny dust twister kicked up by wind curling through the peaks. When it came again, he heard gravel tumbling overhead.

Ghassan rolled his head, raising a shielding hand, and looked upslope.

It was only a barrel-chested lizard skittering away as a few specks of gravel tumbled down. The creature’s scales were mottled brown and gray. Perhaps it had been there all along, blending with the landscape. He lowered his hand, too tired to even hunt it down for food.

But his mind came fully awake.

How or why had this ugly little creature come all the way out—up—here? But for protruding boulders and loose stones, there was little cover in this area, and yet he had not noticed the creature before. In its rush, it had sent gravel down slope. It would have done so whether it had climbed down or up to get to his level.

Ghassan rolled onto his hands and knees.

The lizard froze on a boulder beyond the gravel slide’s edge; it had noticed him.

His thoughts galvanized as he blinked slowly. In that sliver of darkness behind his eyelids, he raised the lizard’s image in his mind. Over this he drew the shapes, lines, and marks of blazing symbols stroked from deep memory. A chant passed through his thoughts more quickly than it could have passed between his lips.

He felt the lizard’s tension, poised in the baser response of fight or flight. He wanted the latter as he opened his eyes and still kept the little beast’s presence fixed in his mind. When he hissed at it, feeling the flight response seize it, he fed its instinctual fear with his will.

The lizard bolted.

Ghassan scrambled upslope after it, slipping and sliding on loosened gravel. The lizard must have someplace that it holed up; it was too far from the lower reaches to have merely wandered all the way up here.

The lizard was faster, or he was slower, than expected. By the time he reached the boulder, it was gone from sight, but he still felt its presence in his mind. He followed that blindly.

An immense rock protrusion jutted outward just around the slope’s bend. Years of erosion had built up above it, creating a dangerous outcrop of loose material. He did his best not to make the slope’s material slide as he worked his way toward the outcrop.

The closer he came, the more the presence felt as if it came from below. He did not care for traversing underneath that much amassed loose gravel and earth. Angling down toward the overhang, he inched along with many upward glances.

A flash of brown-gray darted in under the outcrop, and Ghassan froze. He could still feel it in there.

He carefully stepped farther down as he sidled around below the outcrop, watching those tons of dirt and rock atop it for any sign of shifting. Then he saw the hole and dropped on his knees in despair.

The lizard had simply run inside its den, a slit beneath the great stone, barely large enough to reach into. It was certainly no entrance into the mountain. But he had learned one thing.

Ghassan did not need to search alone.

He released the connection to its limited instincts, as it did not have the necessary mental function that he would need. A mammal of some kind would be better. He carefully hauled himself up, sidled along the slope, out of the outcrop’s path, and then turned downward. Once panicked into running, the lizard may not have dived for a true entrance. But other forms of wildlife existed here.

Some might use other hiding holes here to take cover against high winds, cold, rain, and sleet. And perhaps one of their refuges was not naturally formed, something large enough for a dwarf, or him, to enter.

Chuillyon stood in the remains of what appeared to be some sort of small dwarven settlement too small to even have been a village. Apparently, Wynn and her companions had spent a good deal of time here shortly past dusk, and then had moved on toward the foothills into the range.

“What was it, do you suppose?” Hannâschi asked, crouching to finger the edge of a half-buried foundation stone by the light of her cold lamp crystal.

Her face looked too pale, her cheeks slightly sunken, and her gold-brown hair hung dull. Shâodh was faring only a little better.

Chuillyon cursed himself for being a fool, and not for the first time in recent nights. If he could find away to go back in time for one moon, he would have managed all of this differently. Upon leaving his homeland, he’d decided they were better off traveling light. He had requisitioned horses instead of a wagon to ensure greater mobility, should they need to bypass Wynn or shadow her more closely. They had brought water bottles, blankets, crunchy flatbread, dried fruit, and limited grain for the horses.

In his younger days, he and Cinder-Shard had traveled long distances with far less. They’d always managed to forage for themselves, and he had not foreseen why following one small, human journeyor would be any different. But it was different, and in his zeal to discover Wynn’s true goal, he had not calculated the possible outcomes carefully enough.

Although he had seen an ancient map showing the Slip-Tooth Pass, the distance had been difficult to gauge. They had traveled toward the mountains longer than expected, and though he had intellectually known they would enter some barren terrain, he had not fathomed quite how barren. The closer they came to the range, the less there was to forage for themselves or their horses.

He had handpicked Shâodh and Hannâschi long ago for their skills and quick wits. They were both journeyors, and so of course they had undertaken tasks of their own abroad. But Shâodh had gone with two other elven sages to help map sections of the great jungle to the east of their homeland, while Hannâschi had spent a year at the Chathburh annex aiding in an exchange of Elven and Numan texts—and to read and account the Numans’ newest metaology holdings for comparison.

Both had performed well and returned home with useful information, but neither had ever faced conditions like this. Sleeping on the ground in winter was beginning to take its toll, and though faithful Shâodh had believed Chuillyon knew a great deal about Wynn’s final goal, this was not exactly true.

If and when Wynn could find Bäalâle Seatt, Chuillyon knew nothing about what she sought there. Shâodh was growing more and more aware of this, and it did not sit well with the young journeyor. Worse, Chuillyon may have underestimated Wynn.

In spite of her surprising deeds at Dhredze Seatt, she was still only a small human. It never occurred to him that her physical constitution might outlast that of his own kind. The journey down the Slip-Tooth Pass had to be longer than she anticipated, and her supplies must be dwindling. Yet she showed no sign of giving up or turning back.

Chuillyon should have paid more attention to the fact that she’d trekked all over the eastern continent—even to one of the highest points in the world there. She was hardier and more tenacious than anticipated, and that admittance embarrassed him.

Shâodh crouched next to Hannâschi. “It is dwarven? You are certain?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Not a trace of mortar was used.”

His brows knitted. “So, they examined these remains and then headed straight south?”

Hannâschi merely nodded.

“Did you hear them say anything?”

“No, this area is too exposed. I could not get close enough, even by bending light and shadow.”

Through all of this, Chuillyon remained silent. Shâodh looked up at him, a slight touch of disgust in his usually stoic expression.

Shâodh’s demeanor was becoming an issue—not that Chuillyon entirely blamed him. The young one was loyal to the Order of Chârmun and to the guild. When given a clear mission, he would do anything to succeed. But they had no clear mission here except to tag along in secret without a known destination or ultimate purpose.

Only Chuillyon could feel the desperate importance of following Wynn, of finding out what she sought. That blind purpose had sunk into the core of his old bones. His fears of failing were not something he cared to verbalize for Shâodh. For now, he required assistance and obedience, and nothing less.

Hannâschi stood up. Back home, she often chided him for his methods. Out here, she never complained or tried to get him to explain their current purpose. But she was exhausted, and he knew it.

“On to the foothills?” she asked. “Once they are forced to go on foot, I might be able to get closer.”

Chuillyon nodded once, and Shâodh looked away.