She found the ancient track made by those who had dragged the granite block. With her [alpenstock] before her she slashed a way through the overgrowth, stamping shorn leaves and limbs underfoot, scattering crawling insects and hopping amphibians as macaws above turned their heads broadside to watch and monkeys screeched and pointed. Daraway followed behind saying nothing for Mym asked her nothing. What else was there to ask? The [armiger] had freed the orcs and driven them to dwarfdom. He had lured her folk out of the delving and down the valley and onto the span like stock to slaughter. She did not ask why. She did not ask how Daraway knew. Perhaps such things mattered, but she wouldn't waste breath on them. She needed it to get back to the delving before the [armiger] could finish what he had started.
The ground sloped up and the jungle went with it. She pushed until day's end and might have pushed on into the night but no moonslight or starlight reached the jungle's floor. It was as dark as the wyndings. She followed the sound of a dribbling stream and with her adze she hacked out a narrow flat place for them to sleep. Daraway threw her cloak over them and they listened to the constant drip of the canopy on the heavy fabric.
The following noon they surmounted the moraine of a long vanished glacier. There the raucous steam-breathing organism they called a jungle failed and the ground transformed from damp and black and wild with life to a tremendous pile of brown and gray powder. On the moraine's far side a lake spread itself amid masses of stone and scattered bristlecones with water so clear under that she saw straight to its bottom. The boulders left there by the now vanished glacier gathered and dipped their wide bodies into its edges like old dwarves at a communal bath. They had stories to tell if she would but stop and [ask]. She didn't stop.
The slope steepened above the lake into a long couloir filled with last year's snow. The sharp edge of the snowfield lay just above the reach of the rippling water. Thick clear drops rained off in the sun and spattered the surface. The snowfield appeared to rise in an unbroken track all the way to the top of the couloir. Its suncups rose and fell in miniature analogs to the ranges about and its whiteness was dulled by windblown dust. She stepped onto it. Daraway came up behind her with her cloak gathered around. Was it so cold already? She turned up the couloir and climbed on, kicking the toe of her boots into the snow and stepping upon them. Placing the spike of her [alpenstock] and weighting it to keep it planted. Its steel head chilled her hand to a tingling numbness.
Hours later it felt like they had climbed to the moons yet the way ahead seemed even taller than before. She looked at the highest point of the couloir. Someone had collapsed a mountaintop into the gap. Rocks too large to scramble and too sheer to climb choked the pass. But she couldn't turn them around.
She heard Daraway heaving and coughing behind her. The woman had stopped and leaned from her hips with a hand outstretched against the slope.
"Steady on," said Mym.
"Slow down or I swear to god I'll drop a boulder on your head."
"Ye can't do no such thing."
The bottom of Daraway's chin emerged from her hood. "Don't test me," she said. "I learned some things separating you from the block."
Mym looked up the slope and then looked back. "I've got te get back before the armiger does and there's no way of gettin there than gettin, so we better fuckin get."
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"Eloquently said."
"Ye need me te carry ye?"
Daraway took a step. Snow came off the sole of her boot and sped away down the couloir. "Not yet."
Mym looked up again at the problem ahead of them. She turned back to the woman. "He let em go just te clear us out of the delvin," she said.
Daraway's hood bobbed back and forth as she nodded. "I think he assumed the whole delving would turn out to stop them. That you'd annihilate each other."
"And when we didn't he sent for the rest of us. Beggin us all te come vengin across the sea."
Daraway took another step, then another. Mym watched her but her mind was elsewhere. Back at the delving.
"I'm glad just Khaz and me went."
"Me too."
Mym leaned over her [alpenstock] and worried her knee where it pained her. "Wish I knew where the keeper got te."
Daraway peered up at her. "How many dwarves does it take to hold the delving?"
"More than it's got. I need te get back there yesterday."
She turned and climbed on. She came at the blocked pass from the left but soon had them cliffed out. A boulder as big as the whaler overhung above, the top of some other mountain dropped into the gap of this one. Below it stretched a pitch of ice that fell away to jumbled rocks cleft by centuries of avalanche. With her adze she chopped a catwalk in the ice and they crawled along the base of the blockage. Sheets of ice released by her hacking tumbled downslope to strike the rocks with speed and force to split them into a thousand shards. At the slope's opposite side they could walk again. There a steep ramp of snow wound up and around the boulder. They climbed it and at its top they tramped up a short and shallow rise to the top of the pass. There she stopped and looked back.
She saw Daraway trudging the final steps with wind whipping locks of her hair out of her hood as if they were drafting lines made with a right angle. Beyond her the alpine lake now a sapphire reflecting the midday sun: a wild blueberry on the wide gray tongue of earth, the green spots of the bristlecones at its banks, the emerald blanket over all the land beyond, spreading down to the edge of the tremendous graphite slab that held no reflection whatsoever. The executioner's block was too distant to see.
She turned to look at the valley ahead. Twin to the white valley of her home with its high sided walls and dense conifer stands and a narrow bending river. Other peaks and passes sawed atop its far side, and in the gap made by a pass she saw the next ridge beyond, and the next, and finally the white mountain itself with the crevasse on its face now so wide it looked as though the mountain was cracking in two. Miles beyond and miles above the white mountain fumed a great front of black clouds laced with silver lightning belched by the black heart of the world.
Daraway came beside her and leaned against the wind as if she was still climbing the slope.
Mym pointed the spike of her [alpenstock] at the black heart. "That's where the armiger thinks te find it?"
Daraway nodded. "It is."
She started to tell her it was a lie. A myth. A story told to impress lads and lasses of the once celebrated glory of their dying race.
But in that moment she looked down and saw the parallel lines etched into the stony shoulder of the pass. Scars whose memory [told] of dwarves long ago dragging a granite block. She kicked snow from the ancient track. "Damned stone of the damned earth. Well. If the dwarfstone's there te be found then we need te be first te find it."
Daraway coughed and nodded. She wiped wind tears from her eyes and hid her singed fingertips inside her long sleeves. "I'm ready," she said.
"Follow me."
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> +1 [Belonging]: I knowed the armiger was a shitter the moment he put that orc lady up on a post. If I'd told em so things might've turned out different. I should've said somethin... (6/10)