Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

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.