Three days travel along a road in a wide open gap between the mountains of the otherwise unbroken Serhin Range: that was Tirrtian Pass. There were other minor gaps and notches in the mountains that travellers could cross over, but Tirrtian Pass was broad enough to build a city in and easy enough to verge on flatlands. At its broadest point, it could take a day to walk from one side of the pass to the other!
Still, the land visibly humped up towards mountains to either side of the caravan. The horizon here was thrown to the sky by rocky upwellings from the earth. The far side peaks seemed fewer yet even more impressive than the larger count of near-side peaks.
These mountains - the Serhin Range - were a grand barrier between the hard climates of north-central Kelkaith and the cold-but-maritime climates of south-central Kelkaith. This was the point where the great world maps transitioned between drawing the world in green and drawing them in white.
There were no cities built up in Tirrtian just yet, though Denziu wondered if someday there would be a great city thriving from trade. There were plenty of merchantgons passing through who might need services.
Not that they would, it seemed. They had plenty of food; Lorma had even thrown out some perishables for spoilage. The group’s twice-blessed wagons had given them no trouble along the way. Denziu suspected that was abnormal for a Tekagoli caravan, because there'd been a grumble from Mosdrao that morning that the group was usually behind schedule by this point.
Denziu thought of Serafustin taking zir luck charm. Was zie still a Tekagoli merchantgon? Had zie ever been one? If Praoziu was leaning on all the other land gods to protect Denziu’s Fate, were any of them really Tekagoli merchantgons this time? Maybe their perfect schedule arose from Praoziu’s interference.
Denziu had little choice but to think silently during the ascent. These were some of the most unpleasant days in the route. Denziu was not lashed to a great weight, but the others drew wagons with wood piled high on them… and they got rained on as they climbed the pass.
When they took a break to pass around bread, they ate it damp.
They ate a lot of bread those three days walking in the hills under the mountains that filled the horizon to each side of Tirrtian Pass. The loaves of bread that Choave had bought in Velrilari came back, and there were still green onion rolls. Bread could be eaten with only the briefest of stops, and they needed the energy for hauling uphill.
They also had dried meat and steak and kidney pasties, at least. They had eggs in the morning and the evening as well, a great supply of ten dozen having been bought at Akima. There was no shortage of food.
Lorma ate from a private stockpile on her own wagon, Denziu noticed, when the others were breaking out the meats. Everyone else loved the steak and kidney pasties so much that Denziu decided to waive them on so someone else could have a second one. Zie asked Lorma for vegetarian options instead.
So it was that they had asparagus and rhubarb salad that first evening, and with Denziu's encouragement there arose enough interest that the ingredients were exhausted by the caravanners. They had grilled artichokes on the second evening, and again Denziu's participation drew more and more of the caravanners into grilling artichokes until Lorma ran out of them. They had cherry tomatoes, beets, and a reconstituted dry soup the third evening, this being the last thing stocked in Lorma's private stockpile, and with a great big grin she chastised Denziu for encouraging the whole caravan to stick their snouts in.
It wasn’t as good as eating meat and the vegetable dinners left Denziu feeling bloated, but it was fun to make Lorma smile.
As for the terrain... Denziu's ability to sightsee was ruined by the weather. They were travelling north under a front that was still pushing into the relative highlands of the pass and it looked like the weather was Fated to do its best at raining them out. It was cold. Denziu loved the outdoors even less for being rained on all day. Zir wind shield helped a little in scattering raindrops, but an awful lot of rain still went straight through it, including every especially fat droplet of water.
The next day? More rain. Hiking uphill all day was loathsome work even to Denziu, whose wagon was not a burden. The others did not talk save occasionally to curse. Even Ekis was silent to avoid antagonising the others. Only when they stopped to rest did moods recover.
Stolen novel; please report.
They were passed that day by a wagon train loaded down with lighter goods. Choave’s blessing had kept them faster than other caravans all the way through the route, but that second day in the pass someone passed them instead. Sacks of some kind heaped high on every wagon underneath the covered tops, and Denziu thought they might be food merchantgons carrying the most ubiquitous import north.
Dragons are hard to harm with the weather, but they are not always happy about it. The vashael were more afflicted than the vrash, for the vrash were all attired, and it is a trait innate to the vrash that they enchant their clothing to shed the filth and damp. So the vrash kept something dry to their scales, and the vashael by contrast had only their friendly wind to guard them from the inclement weather.
To have the friendly wind wick away the water was to be chilled by it, and it was an unpleasant decision to be made moment to moment. Denziu longed for sunshine to radiate across zir scales. Zie thought that zie might buy in Sybanisk an outfit of warm, waterproof clothing enchanted to imitate the vrash innate ability.
If zie did that, it would be embarrassing to wear. There were vashael who could stand in the snow like swaivshon, wearing only a pair of goggles to guard against the snowblindness that could set in for so much of the year in northern Kelkaith. Long practice of living day-to-day without clothing had convinced Denziu to imagine zie would do that, and zie had not packed a single outfit on the outbound journey. To fantasise about wearing attire was to imagine giving something up.
Denziu imagined that zie would.
That day, cursing the cold rain in Tirrtian Pass, Denziu very much imagined that zie would give up on being a nudist in Kelkaith.
Two days climbing a pass in the rain convinced zir that they were still Tekagoli merchantgons.
The rain broke on the third day. The skies cleared over them.
Denziu looked out across the grassy hills of Tirrtian Pass and felt guilty for still not caring much about the beautiful wilderness. The endless fields rolled by beyond the wagon, grassy but for the occasional conifer. Even the view ahead down over Kelkaith did not move zir. Zie could see as much or better on the wing.
The wind waved the grass and did not touch Denziu, who was shielded under an innate vashael wind shield. It would have been a chilling wind anyways. All the winds from here on out would be chilling winds. The friendly wind of the vashael was credited with making them more tolerant of the cold north.
Their third day in Tirrtian Pass took them steadily downhill. Instead of grunting with the effort of pulling the metals, they instead were slowed by stiffly resisting the inclination of the wagons to roll downhill. The weight of the wagon pressed on them.
The muscles required to hold back a wagon were less exercised than those required to pull it, slowing the others and drawing the occasional groan out of them. They didn’t get nearly as far as usual that day.
Denziu had an easy day, walking at the pace that everyone else kept with zir floating wagon behind zir.
Sybanisk! They could see it ahead of them every time the caravan paused for a rest. It dominated the forward northern horizon past the mountains of the Serhin Range. These views snatched north over toothsome green onion rolls were Denziu's first glimpse of the far north.
It was white on maps, but it wasn’t snowy in this season. It was from here a great grassy plains, grown thick with the summer. The grasslands looked hardier than they were verdant, with the purples and browns of aridity-tolerant plants thrusted up from occasionally patchy grasses. Yet green there still was, and Denziu suspected (as only a soil-seller could) that the hump of the landscape in Tirrtian Pass wasn't brutally elevated enough to wring the clouds dry reliably.
Even without the rain, it was a long, slow day of walking with the caravan. Denziu was afraid to even make conversation with Ekis for fear of upsetting the others, while Oghai’s encouraging chatter filled the relative silence.
Zie thought about things that were hard to discuss with the others. It was the safe thing to think about. No temptation to speak and remind the others that Denziu was having an easy day. Ekis, Denziu imagined, must be doing the same thing alongside zir, for the usually talkative and energetic izerah was quiet.
Zie thought again about encountering Taioma in Inaildoro. The midnight feast, the cookies for the caravan the next day, and Taioma's disappointed claim that night that she'd hoped to summon a cake. What kind of cake would that have been?
But oh, Taioma's decayed appearance! Stabilised rot, a well-preserved zombie of a dragon. What was so bad about Fate under the land gods that necromancers died to change it? What a bizarre and revolting decision. What was so bad about being lesser divinities that they rejected the greater divinity of the land gods? What was Taioma’s story, if a zombie could reject the land gods far enough to die of it, and then go back to being a geomancer?
'Lesser divinity'... The books of Querent-Querent were steadfast in using the phrase to refer to ordinary dragons. Denziu wondered what kind of 'god' zie was. Nobody had ever built a shrine to Denziu, zie thought... and then thought better of it, for likely zir mother Praoziu had done it. Serafustin had said that Denziu had been 'written into a corner' by Praoziu's prayers. Praoziu must be tying herself into a knot with worry, Denziu thought with a sinking stomach.
These thoughts and many others filled Denziu's ever-active mind in a long, slow day of walking at a less ambitious pace, while the caravanners went downhill into Sybanisk.