The journey from the shelf down to the plateau took half a day. The path switched back and forth, spanning the entire face of the mountain. It seemed entirely too long to me, until I considered that walking down it was one thing; climbing it would be another. By stretching it out, whoever created this path lessened the slope and thus the amount of effort it took to ascend it in any given minute. It also probably made it less likely for snow or water from snowmelt to rush down the path and erode it to uselessness.
Once we descended enough to put the entire mountain behind us, cutting off the chill breeze blowing out of the High Reaches, the air warmed significantly. While walking downhill wasn’t hard, it was still a minor exertion, and the breeze blowing along the mountain faces was welcomingly cool rather than bitingly cold. The sun shone in our eyes most of the day, but its warming rays felt good on muscles that were still tired and sore from the journey. Whatever grew down on the plains wafted its scent on the breeze, so odd, spicy odors mingled with the scent of ice, water, and damp stone to create a truly interesting scent.
As I walked, I stared down at the plain below us and felt a sudden touch of wonder. For a moment, I reveled in the fact that I was walking on the surface of a totally different world, one that no human from Earth had ever seen. Granted, this wasn’t the first new world I’d visited, but the last three had all had enough similarities with Earth that a lot of the time, it was more like I was visiting some strange part of our planet with weird creatures than that I was on a whole different world. Here, though, everything felt alien, from the “people” surrounding me to the featureless and oddly colored plain to the smells carried on the wind. Nothing really reminded me of home, and I felt a momentary disorientation as I fundamentally understood that this wasn’t “Earth in a costume.”
It was ironic when I thought about it. Back on Earth, people spent their entire lives dreaming about other worlds. Scientists argued over what they might look like, and how life might evolve on them. Artists painted pictures and wrote stories of alien landscapes and civilizations. People swore that they’d been abducted or seen aliens, or that they’d traveled to other worlds in their dreams. All of those people would probably kill to see what I was seeing. Me, though? I never thought about that sort of thing. I just didn’t care, and if someone had given me a spot on a rocket to another planet, I’d have declined without even thinking about it. A human was finally walking the earth of another world, and he didn’t give a shit about the grandeur and wonder of it all.
“It’s very likely that there were human Inquisitors before you, John,” Sara reminded me.
“Don’t rain on my parade with your facts and logic, Sara,” I said teasingly. “Just let me have this moment.”
“Okay, fine,” she laughed back. “Everyone make way for John Gilliam, the first human to walk the surface of another world!”
“Much better,” I replied, ignoring her sarcasm. “Although a little fanfare might be nice, too.”
The path dumped the three of us directly onto the plain, ending abruptly enough that I wondered if the hills I’d been expecting were somehow sheared away, magically leveled. As we stepped off the path onto the plain, an odd sensation seeped into me. I felt a sense of contentment and comfort, like the feeling I got being in a secure and sheltered location, knowing I could relax for a bit and let down my guard. It wasn’t anything overwhelming, but it was an alien enough sensation that instead of comforting me, it actually tripped my mental alarms.
“Sara, any idea what that is?” I asked nervously.
“It seems to be part of the local spiritual field,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s not affecting your mind; it’s touching your spirit. It’s as if someone set up a big standing spell designed to make anyone here more relaxed.”
“Something like what the hunt spirit was doing?” I asked.
“Similar, yes, but both far more powerful and far less potent. It’s strong enough that it seems to spread out to cover all that I can see of the plain, but it isn’t very concentrated. You should be able to ignore it with a little effort.”
It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the change. The others had halted, and Aeld took a deep, cleansing breath, while Bregg lost some of the tension in his muscles.
“Ah, the Peace of the Haelendi,” the shaman said with a smile at me. “Do you feel it, Freyd?”
“I think so,” I replied. “It covers the entire Haelendi, then?”
“Yes. In fact, it’s part of what makes this the Haelendi.” He gestured toward the plain. “From the edge of the High Reaches, south to the Kimurrin range, and stretching from ocean to ocean east to west, the Haelendi is our refuge and haven. Here, the valskabs exist in harmony with the spirits—as much as possible—and work together to make a place that is safe for all.”
“What about the war with the Oikithikiim?” I asked dubiously. “I think that would put a big damper on your harmony, wouldn’t it?”
“Sadly, yes,” he sighed. “It’s true that we’re called to defend ourselves and our homes from the four-legged ones far too often, Freyd. And the worst part of it is, there’s no reason for it.”
“No reason? What do you mean?”
“Their assaults against us are pointless. No Oikithikiim can step foot on the Haelendi and live, and none of our people can enter Alemella, at least not without dire consequences. That’s part of the Great Bargain.”
“Then, why do you attack them? Why did you even bother attacking them up on the Northern Ocean?”
“Because while some put their faith in the Bargain,” Bregg growled, “most of the rashi aren’t willing to take that chance. What if the four-legs found some way to enter our refuge safely? They’re bloodthirsty and savage, but they aren’t stupid, and their profane arts can be both subtle and powerful.”
“So, what is this bargain?”
“It’s a secret of the valskab, Freyd,” Aeld said firmly. “Perhaps the rashi will care to discuss it with you, but it’s not our place to speak more of it. Suffice it to say that the Great Bargain created the Peace of the Haelendi. I won’t say more about it.”
“We’ll stop here,” Bregg told us, pointing to the nearby river. “We’ll wait for sunset, then head out.”
“Why are we waiting for sunset?” I asked dubiously. “There’s hours left in the day.”
“We’ll travel at night for at least the next week,” Bregg replied shortly. “That’ll give us time to adapt.”
“Adapt?”
“You’ll see.”
We settled in near the water, laying out furs and settling down. Aeld and Bregg sat in silence, while I took the moment to look around a bit. The ground around us was rocky and uneven, covered with rubble that had probably fallen from the peaks behind us. Someone had cleared the rocks from space we rested in, most likely to serve as a base camp. They’d also created a track that paralleled the river, heading slightly southwest. It wasn’t much of a road, really just a path, only maybe ten feet wide, rutted and pitted from water and ice and covered with a fine layer of gravel that would probably make footing slightly treacherous. I looked back at the peaks and realized that it probably didn’t need to be any wider; no one was bringing a wagon or cart into the High Reaches, after all. The path likely needed to accommodate hunting parties, maybe miners—the Menskies had copper weapons, so I assumed they had copper mines somewhere—and nothing more.
I examined the rockfall near us a little more closely. The tumbled stones were dark and smooth, looking heavily weathered, and little grew here except patches of the pale green moss. As I looked closer, though, I wasn’t sure if my first assumption was right. The rocks didn’t really look like they’d come from the mountains. The stone up there was striated in shades of grey and speckled with flecks of quartz. The rubble was dark gray, almost black, and fairly homogenous. The stones did look inordinately smooth, but they were twisted and folded into odd, almost wormlike shapes. Tiny holes dotted the rock’s surface, looking almost like pores in the stone.
“It’s igneous rock, John,” Sara confirmed my suspicions. “It looks like the aftermath of a lava flow. I think that at one point, there was a volcano nearby that dumped lava all along this area.”
“Does that matter?” I asked curiously.
“Maybe. None of the mountains we just crossed showed any signs of vulcanism, so it makes me wonder where the lava came from. And like you were thinking, if the High Reaches were created by uplifting, the way most mountains are, the area around them should be hilly and uneven. The flatness around here and the presence of lava suggests that the High Reaches could have formed more cataclysmically.”
The rough ground around us looked far too barren to support life, but I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. The river that flowed nearby appeared to be the main source of water for all sorts of creatures. Myriad tracks spread out through the rocks and clearing, leading to and from the water. Most of the prints looked to come from relatively small creatures, maybe the size of mice or even squirrels, but a few larger, heavier tracks showed that there were predators around, no doubt feeding on the smaller creatures. I started to watch a little more carefully, but fortunately, the most I saw of any kind of animal life were brief flashes of movement or color darting through the dark stones.
As the day passed and the sun hovered before us, I realized something: being in the High Reaches had apparently seriously skewed my concept of cold. My body had come into being there, and it had quickly adapted to heavy amounts of physical labor in bitter cold. I’d gotten used to breathing the dry, frigid air; I’d grown accustomed to the wind screaming through the peaks to batter us with icy claws. I hadn’t enjoyed it or anything, but I’d adapted.
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Being in the Haelendi almost felt like stepping out of a freezer and into a sauna. Oh, it wasn’t that warm, but it felt that way. The air lay heavy and humid on me, laden with moisture that the winds and cold of the High Reaches would have sucked dry. The breeze that curled along the face of the mountains behind us gently ruffled my fur but didn’t penetrate to my skin. The sun stayed in front of us and beat down on me, warming my fur and heating up my body. It felt like sitting around wearing a warm, damp blanket, and part of me wanted to head back to the mountains just to cool off—or maybe take a dip in the river. Not that mountain climbing was actually likely to help, but I longed for a blast of nice, cold air to chill my fur a bit.
That was when I discovered something interesting about this body: I didn’t sweat! With the relatively warm air, the humidity, and the sun hammering me, I’d expected my fur to be drenched, but it stayed perfectly dry. After a little bit of thought, I realized that made sense: the wind didn’t seem to be making it to my skin, so any sweat there wouldn’t be evaporating and cooling anyway. Perspiration would just sit on me, making me clammy and miserable without cooling me in the slightest. Still, my body had to have some method of ridding itself of extra heat—didn’t it? I glanced around at the equally miserable-looking Aeld and Bregg and wondered if maybe it didn’t, and we’d all have to pour water on ourselves or roll in mud to cool off.
“It does, John,” Sara assured me silently. “In fact, that’s the reason you feel warm right now. Your body’s transferring heat to your outer skin layers, warming the air beneath your fur, and that wind is carrying most of that away. Your skin’s warm, but your core isn’t, and that’s what really matters.”
“Is it always this warm?” I asked at last.
“It’s not warm now, Hemskal,” Bregg growled. I opened my mouth to argue, but Aeld spoke before I could.
“It really isn’t, Freyd,” he told me soothingly. “It just feels that way because you’re adapted to the High Reaches. Your coat has thickened, the underlayer has grown in, and your body’s set itself to conserve heat, not dissipate it. It happens to all of us when we’re in the mountains for more than a couple weeks.”
“Then, you must all have been up there for a while before we met. You looked just like you do now, after all.”
“We spent time in the High Reaches adapting before we set out,” the shaman corrected. “That’s one of the purposes of that camp we just left—and the dozens of others like it spread along the face of the High Reaches. The wind up there is cold enough to trigger your ice adaptation.”
“So, are we going to be miserable for the next few weeks, then?” If that was the case, I really was tempted to head back into the mountains.
“No, the warm adaptation happens much faster,” Aeld laughed. “You’ll simply shed your heavier, denser fur, and your skin will adapt to cooling rather than insulation.”
“Until then, though, we travel at night,” the big hunter repeated. “We’ll camp near the river, so if we get too hot during the day, you can dunk yourself in it to cool off.” He paused and glared at me suspiciously. “How have you never gone through a warm adaptation before?”
“This is my first time stepping foot on the Haelendi,” I replied honestly. “I’ve spent my whole life in the High Reaches.” That was sort of true; I’d spent my whole life in this world up there, at least.
“How did you survive the Dark Season, then?”
“The same way anyone survives the cold and snow: I stayed out of it. There are caves and tunnels in those mountains, and a smart hunter spends the warm season stocking up on furs and food to last through the cold.” I glanced over at the river a little longingly. “I think I might actually take a dip in the water, now that you mention it. It’s a little uncomfortable out here.”
The hunter looked dissatisfied, but I ignored him as I walked over to the river and sat on a large rock at the edge. I hesitated for a moment; I didn’t really want to get my fur all wet, as I had no idea how long it would take to dry, but I was seriously baking in the sun. After a few seconds, I slipped just my feet into the water, sighing as the chill of it washed over me. It was a nice feeling, a welcoming one, and I suddenly realized that being in the High Reaches had seriously changed my idea of what was cold and what was comfortable.
“This body kind of sucks, Sara,” I complained pointlessly as I swished my toes around a bit.
“Not for this world,” she laughed. “It’s almost perfectly designed for here, in fact.”
“Except that I can’t dunk myself in the river, or I’ll be damp and smell like wet dog for days.”
“Actually, you could probably submerse yourself completely and be dry in a couple hours in this breeze. That water that your feet are in? It’s not actually reaching your skin.”
“Wait, what? I can feel it, Sara…”
“You feel cold and pressure, and your brain interprets that as being wet, but you really aren’t. There’s a thick layer of waterproof fur that keeps water confined to the outermost layers of your coat. That’s why you got snowed on and rained on constantly but never felt chilled by it. The liquid never touched your skin.”
She suddenly appeared beside me, and this time, she looked kind of like me in this body, except her fur was strawberry blonde, she was smaller and more petite, and of course, she wasn’t actually there.
“You see, John, thanks to the relatively rapid pace of evolution on this world, a Menskallin’s body is almost tailor-made for this kind of cold. If you had your Puraschim body, you’d be suffering severe frostbite in your feet right now—and they’d probably have to be amputated.”
“This water isn’t that cold,” I argued. “I wouldn’t want to spend thirty minutes in here or anything, but I’d be fine taking a quick dip, even in my Earth body.”
“No, you probably wouldn’t,” she contradicted. “Remember how I told you that your temperature scales from Earth were basically meaningless because things like the freezing temperature of water can vary from world to world?” She gestured at the glittering water. “Well, this is one of those worlds. Back on Puraschim, this river would be a solid block of ice, John.”
I froze, my feet still submerged in the liquid. “What? It doesn’t feel that cold!”
“Because of the body you’re in. It is, though. Using your idea of a Celsius scale, where 0 is water’s freezing point and 100 is its boiling point, on Puraschim, this water would be about thirteen degrees below zero.”
“How is it not freezing, then? Water is just…water, right? H-two-O.”
“What you call physics and chemistry vary from world to world. You’ve already seen a couple worlds where gunpowder doesn’t work, as you might recall. That’s because a world’s inherent and magical energy fields can interfere with how forces and elements interact. Go to a really low-tech world, and you can’t even smelt metals out of ore or fashion them into anything; they lose what you’d think of as metallic properties.
“Here,” she continued, “water contains some inherent energy that keeps it from solidifying as quickly as it normally would—which is useful, because the temperature in this world is much lower than it was on any other you’ve visited so far. At least, the temperatures you’ve experienced so far. And your body has numerous features designed to withstand those temperatures.”
“Like fur,” I sighed, shaking my shaggy arm.
“Not just fur, but multiple layers of fur, including that waterproof one I mentioned. Your skin has an insulating layer of liquid with proteins in it that keep it from freezing—the same proteins that are in your blood, lymph, and cells. Your muscles and nerves are both designed to work at lower temperatures without interruption, and your core temperature could drop to what would be a fatal level in your previous bodies while only feeling like a chill to you.”
“That’s a lot of features,” I admitted.
“Yes, but then, I’d expect something like that, considering this world’s BR. And with a rating like that, I’d also expect your body to have features allowing it to shift to relatively warm temperatures, like the ones you’re in right now—which would probably be very close to zero Celsius on Puraschim but feels warm to you.”
With all that being said, I suppose I was happy enough with this body after all.
I didn’t actually take a dip in the river, but Bregg did after I moved away from it. I knew that he wanted to question me more, but he didn’t. I could only guess that Aeld had instructed him not to; either that, or he figured he wasn’t going to get any straight answers anyway, so it didn’t matter. The three of us waited another few hours for the sun to descend, then began to break camp as the air cooled to a more tolerable temperature.
I wasn’t really looking forward to the trip. The path I assumed we were taking was certainly better than the one we’d followed in the High Reaches, but it wasn’t exactly a good one. With the ruts and holes in it, we still risked turning an ankle or tripping and falling in the darkness. Aeld’s staff would help, but it would also serve as a beacon for anything that might be out hunting. The next week promised to be filled with minor injuries, stumbles, and probably random attacks from hungry predators. At least, so I thought until the sun dropped below the horizon, and a new radiance slowly grew to light the night.
It started as a dim, bluish haze that hung in the air, so faint I couldn’t be sure it was even there. As the sky darkened, though, the glow grew brighter, forming itself into streaks of luminescence that rose like misty fingers from the ground. By the time true darkness fell, hazy columns of azure light rose into the sky, starting maybe thirty feet above the ground and stretching higher than our mountain perch had been, spreading out like Christmas trees as they ascended. Only a dozen or so of the lights glowed in my vision, but they shed a soft radiance across the land beneath them that washed out colors and left everything in dim shades of blue or black. The pillars shifted and writhed slowly in the sky, almost as if they were flickers of a very slow-moving flame or dancers moving to a song only they could hear.
“Any idea what that is, Sara?” I asked silently.
“It’s a disturbance in the spiritual field, John,” she explained. “I’m not sure of the source, but it seems to be some kind of interference pattern.”
“Back on Earth, we had Northern Lights that I think were caused by solar radiation. Could this be something like that?”
“Judging from your thoughts, not unless the Haelendi is the magnetic pole of this world—which is technically possible, I suppose, although the magnetic pole is rarely so far from the center of the planet’s rotation. Even if it is, though, that sort of display should be much higher, where the radiation meets the atmosphere, not down here. It looks more like something that the Haelendi is generating itself.”
“The spirit lights are a welcome sight.” I didn’t turn as Aeld walked over and sat beside me; in the dark and quiet, I’d heard his approach, and after Bregg’s questioning, I was being a lot more alert.
“What makes them?” I asked not turning away from the display but curious if he actually knew.
“No one knows. Their brightness and colors vary every night, and there seems to be no pattern to either. The stories say that they were here when we reached the Haelendi, and they’ll be here long after we’re all gone from this world.” He smiled. “They’re particularly bright tonight, though. It’ll make a good night for traveling.”
“Why didn’t we see them from the shelf up there?”
“They’re only visible on the Haelendi.” He pointed back the way we’d come. “Step back onto the path upward, and they’ll vanish, and the Haelendi will be dark once more for you. Return to the plain, and they’ll appear. No one knows why.”
“That’s interesting,” Sara mused. “I wonder…” She fell silent, and I gave a mental shrug. I knew her well enough to know that her silence meant she was pondering something deeply, and asking her about it would just mean she’d need longer to reach a conclusion.
“They—they’re beautiful,” Kadonsel whispered in my thoughts.
“You can see those?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes. No. I can’t explain it. I can see them, but not the way I once saw things.” She sighed. “So many things look different now, in fact.”
Curious, I activated See Spirits, wondering if the lights looked different that way, and had to suppress a gasp of surprise. What had been simple blue pillars of light in my normal vision looked like swirling, undulating spirals to my spiritual sight. Waves of light poured out from them irregularly, burning in various shades of silver and descending to wash over the land. Pulses of various colors flashed from them, beaconing in different directions like the lamp from a lighthouse. In my spirit sense, the lights looked almost alive.
I shut down the sense, and the dark, blue-lit world rose about me once more. Bregg was already off, heading down the dimly lit path. I took a deep breath and set off behind him. The spirit lights really were beautiful, but I couldn’t take the time to admire them. I was here for a purpose, and it wasn’t to gawk at mysterious lights in the sky. I had a feeling that whatever I was here to do was going to be a whole, lot uglier.