64. Treacherous Ground (Gadarien)¶
Gadarien almost wished they hadn’t found the cabin. It had been wonderfully restorative, but the brief interlude of comfort made their return to suffering all the more difficult. The easy hike through rolling hills was behind them. Ahead were only steep valleys, biting winds, and whatever awaited them in the ruins of Irkeset.
Despite their grueling pace, they were running out of time. The new moon was only two days away, and they still had to ascend the mountain. Gadarien’s lungs burned, each step hammering spikes of pain into his head. He drew strength from Vaye and Adranaya, just as they drew strength from him, none of them wanting to let the others down.
The valley ended abruptly in a wall of dirty white ice. It was only three or four times his height, but above it, a field of ice continued to rise at a steep angle, winding out of view. The Tine itself appeared sporadically high above, clawing shreds out of the clouds.
They camped at the foot of the glacier, huddled together around their tiny campfire, an island of warmth in a cold, dark sea. At dawn, they began their ascent, tied together at the waist. Gadarien considered himself an expert climber, but not when he couldn’t feel his hands. He had only trained on ice once, during a brief expedition to Dzhar many years ago, and it had hardly prepared him for this. Any exposed skin stuck to the ice on contact. Worse, the wall was studded with sharp black rocks that jarred his arm when his axe struck them. The only saving grace was that his exertions kept him warm.
Halfway up, he paused to look back over the valley, and his breath caught at the sight. It seemed the whole of Telua was spread out before him. The rising sun flashed off lakes and rivers, more intricate than the finest carvings. In the distance, the Falpassoa shined like a snail’s track. A thin haze of smoke floated in the air north of the river, where the waiting armies were encamped.
A warbling, fluting whistle jerked him back to the present. He tried to pinpoint the sound, but the echoes made it impossible. Another piercing call answered from the opposite side of the valley, motion flickering in the caves along the cliff face.
“We’ve got to move,” Vaye shouted from below.
“I know!” he called back. “And stop shouting!”
He made it to the top and was surprised to find it was a sort of lip, like the top of a wall, with a much shorter descent on the other side. The field of ice continued along the valley as far as he could see, but they only needed to cross one corner of it to reach the slope leading to the Tine. He clambered down the inner surface and sat, catching his breath. Vaye appeared a moment later, then Adranaya hooked a graceful leg over the edge. Gadarien sat up and peered at the adjacent valley walls.
“Do you think it was Grandchildren?” Adranaya asked quietly.
“Well, it wasn’t birds,” said Gadarien sourly.
“Grandchildren hate daylight,” said Vaye. “Maybe we can make it across the ice before dark.”
Adranaya frowned. “And after that?”
There was no point in debating. “Let’s go,” Gadarien said, pushing himself to his feet. He set off at speed, his confidence boosted by having made it up the wall.
Almost immediately, he stepped on a thin crust of snow concealing a crevasse. His stomach lurched with terror as he started to fall, but Vaye dove forward and grabbed a handful of his furs. Behind her, Adranaya dug her heels in and heaved on the rope, the Gyre allowing them both to react instantaneously. Vaye fell back, spinning Gadarien around and dragging him on top of her. As they fell, his chin collided with her eye socket, generating a burst of color and pain.
He rolled off her and spat blood onto the ice. They lay on their backs, waiting for their hearts to drop back down into their chests. Vaye and Adranaya had saved his life, in an inversion of what had happened while crossing the Eyewall. If it hadn’t been for the Gyre, though, they would all have fallen.
“If you wanted to be on top so bad, you could have just asked,” Vaye said, rubbing her bruised eye. His laugh turned into a weak cough.
“How about we look where we’re going from now on?” Adranaya said, massaging her wrist and peering into the hole in the ice. “We definitely don’t want to fall on that.”
The crevasse wasn’t actually that deep, but what lay at the bottom sent a fresh burst of fear through Gadarien’s blood. The icy crust had shattered onto a landscape of fireglass, twisted black shards and ridges as sharp as Vaye’s daggers. “The City of Broken Glass,” Vaye whispered. “It’s buried under all this ice. We must be walking on what used to be rooftops.”
Gadarien stepped back and gestured to Vaye. “After you.”
She grimaced and set off, cautiously tapping the crust with each step. It was maddening to move so slowly. The day was slipping away, and they still had a whole mountain to climb after they crossed the glacier. The wind whistled across its furrowed surface, sudden gusts threatening their balance almost as much as the ice itself. Or perhaps the weird howling sounds weren’t the wind at all. Whenever Gadarien glanced at the horizon to get his bearings, he caught glimpses of movement in the shadows—never anything direct, just flickering shapes at the edge of his vision.
The steep angle warped his perspective, the glaring whiteness dazzling his eyes. What had looked like a gravelly scree in the distance resolved into a jumble of boulders, the pebbles actually head-sized. Climbing that slope wouldn’t be easy, but anything would be better than this treacherous field of death-traps.
They almost made it before the attack came.
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