They arrived at the first of Wirrin’s two candidates three days later in the mid-afternoon. The going had been slower than the siblings would have liked, and Wirrin had to keep reminding them that this was part of the ranges that she’d explored very little, and she didn’t know where the safe routes were.
Wirrin was quite enjoying herself, despite the complaining. She was adding more details to her map, and seeing formations she’d never seen before. Though this first mountain wasn’t all too interesting. Even slopes of blue-white snow led to a round peak below the clouds.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Hest grouched as they plodded their slow way up the slope. ‘Maybe it’s the next one.’
‘It could be under the snow,’ Alina said. ‘If no one’s been here in five hundred years, we have no idea how deep it might be at the peak.’
‘Remember,’ Leran said. ‘It’s supposed to be in the peak. If there’s a cave, it could be packed full of snow.’
Apparently for emphasis, Wirrin’s testing pole sank almost its full depth in front of her. It was just a branch she’d cut from a tree a little over a week ago, about two-and-a-half metres long. But as they were making their way further from Wirrin’s area of comfort, it had come in handy quite often.
They paused while Wirrin searched around for a stable way to continue the ascent as Hest grumbled and his siblings looked around. It didn’t take long and they were going again before he could work up to properly complaining again.
It was lucky that they’d started about half way up the smooth mountain, or Wirrin was sure Hest would be inconsolable with travel time. As it was, it took another two days of slow meandering to get to near the peak.
Wirrin’s testing pole caused two, minor, avalanches on the way up, revealing only more, smooth slope. Wirrin dubbed the mountain ‘Tellinvosh’ on her map and stopped keeping track of most of their progress on it.
They didn’t climb all the way to the peak, in the end. Once Alina decided they were high enough, she asked Wirrin to take them around in a spiral, so that they could test the mountaintop for caves or structures or anything.
At least Hest didn’t complain any more, as it took two full days of crawling, picking, hammering and two more snow-slides to spiral their way around the peak of Tellinvosh. Wirrin wondered idly about how much melt this mountain must experience to have been worn so featureless, and found nothing more than deep snow with her testing pole.
Hest was back to complaining as they crept their slow way back down. ‘I said there was nothing here,’ he kept insisting.
Everyone ignored him.
The four of them were lucky that Wirrin had caught that snow sheep when she had, or their food would have completely run out before they got low enough for hunting to be a possibility again. As it was, they were all cranky and slow from missing dinner.
It was late morning when Wirrin spotted the herd of hocsouben, goat-antelopes, and managed to hit one with an arrow. They weren’t high on a slope, so it took another hour of trudging through the snow before the injured animal collapsed.
They stopped before noon so that Wirrin could start butchering the hocsouben. She was fairly sure it was late enough in the year that bears would be hibernating, she didn’t want to deal with that hassle even if Leran had brought a sword.
It was mid-afternoon when they finished lunch and struck off again. They were only going another hour or so before Wirrin insisted they set up camp when she found a nice flat spot for it.
So they lounged by a spluttering fire and ate more than any of them had in the journey up to this point and didn’t really talk about anything other than how glad they were to find something tasty to eat. Wirrin had run out of spices days ago, though at least she still had a fair amount of salt.
The hocsouben lasted the two days it took to reach the second of Wirrin’s likely candidates. Immediately, Wirrin liked this mountain a lot more than Tellinvosh. She was quite sure this was their destination, though she didn’t bother mentioning that to the siblings.
A wide ledge, covered in snow, ran around and around the mountain, making for a very likely, easy, if slow way up. Tough brush and small trees, still holding onto some of their leaves, protruded from the snow almost all the way up the mountain and it was crawling with more hocsouben, mountain goats, and mountain sheep, getting in their nibbles before they presumably headed northeast soon.
The only trouble, and it wasn’t significant, was that they were starting much lower on this mountain than they had on the last. It would probably be more than a week to follow that wide ledge all the way to where it stopped a few hundred metres below the peak.
After five weeks out in the snow, even Hest had enough sense not to predict failure. The siblings didn’t even mind when Wirrin made them stop most of the day after shooting a mountain sheep.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
Despite what looked from down here like an easy, abundant climb, Wirrin stopped to cook most of the meat before they slept the night and started up the winding ledge.
If, as she suspected, the ledge had been carved into the mountain deliberately, it had been done more than five hundred years ago and there was no telling how stable it still was under all that snow.
First indications were good, though. They kept to the edge, out of the deepest snow, and the stone didn’t so much as crack under their weight other than a few times that they got too close to the edge. If water had damaged this path, it ought to have been worst at the bottom, Wirrin was fairly sure.
It only occurred to her two days later, when, with a resounding crack, the stone slid under her feet and the whole side of the mountain seemed to shake free, that she didn’t only need to worry about erosion.
They rushed back the way they had come as tons and tons of snow rumbled and crashed down ahead of them. Wirrin and Hest had been in the lead. Wirrin had to grab the young man to stop him being pushed off the ledge as the snow buffeted them.
It was near deafening, like hail during a lightning storm. The rumbling and crashing and the hail of splinters that pelted them as they ran back down the mountain.
But whoever had built the path had clearly thought things through. And after a couple of minutes of scrambling and pulling Hest and then Leran and then Alina away from the precipice, Wirrin managed to drag them all out of the hail of ice and snow, back into peaceful air.
She still pushed them further down the mountain, of course, as the avalanche pulled snow from all around it. But when it cleared, there had been very little chain reaction down the winding road.
Worn stone blocks now protruded from the snow, tall triangles apparently cut right out of the stone of the mountain’s side. It was these breaks that had kept the avalanche mostly localised to about a five-hundred metre stretch of the road.
As she surveyed the cracked and broken road, the odd spikes of stone that protruded more and more the further up the mountain’s face, the missing breaks in places, Wirrin remembered the other factor she needed to worry about.
Wirrin liked to think that she knew more than most people about the events of the Gods’ War. She’d never met anyone who knew where the final battles had taken place. But her growing suspicion about the siblings’ quest were all but confirmed by the state of this mountain.
Not only did she need to worry about five hundred years of erosion, digging through this road up the mountain. She needed to worry about whatever had happened during some magical battle here more than five hundred years ago, and what damage this whole structure may have sustained.
The siblings started ahead, up the cleared part of the road in front of them. Wirrin was about to call to them to stop and let her keep leading the way when they stopped on their own, surrounding one of those thin, triangular posts.
Wirrin shook her head to try to clear the ringing in her ears, it didn’t help. Slower, she followed the trio up to the stone. They were certainly in the right place.
Despite the centuries of erosion, the stylised shape of a mountain was still basically clear, smoothed out as it was. And at the top of it was an oval carving that must have been very deep to have survived all this time.
Though the iris had worn away, it was clearly a carving of an eye.
All four of them, little cuts in their faces from the avalanche, stared at the post for several moments before anyone said anything.
‘Just because it looks clear doesn’t mean it’s safe,’ Wirrin said. ‘It was the stone that cracked, not the ice.’
The siblings looked at her, all visibly deflating. But they’d been at this together for long enough to listen to Wirrin when she said something wasn’t safe.
‘We can go a little faster, though, surely?’ Alina asked.
Wirrin looked out at the road ahead of them, wide and sturdy. But those tough plants that had been peaking from the snow had sunken their roots into solid stone. If anything, the problem was clearer now that the snow was gone.
‘I doubt it,’ Wirrin said. ‘Did you know they had to pull out all the pavers in the square in Ettovica, after the battle? The Growth mages had cracked them all to pieces with those plants they grow.’
For a few moments, they all stared at the path. Alina nodded. ‘Lead the way, I suppose,’ she said.
Wirrin didn’t even try to increase their pace. Even on stretches of the ledge that looked unbroken and solid, the stone cracked and rumbled under their feet. Wirrin poked and prodded at everything, staying close to the side of the mountain where meltwater had dug a furrow.
The siblings didn’t object to the slow pace. Hest didn’t even grumble. Maybe he had taken Wirrin’s words to heart, all those weeks ago, and he didn’t want to die before he reached whatever they were going to find in a cave near the peak.
Or maybe they were distracted by the remains of carvings on the wall to their left, as they walked. Though it was heavily eroded, some detailed mural had once been carved into this mountain. Some pieces looked like people, some looked like more mountains, some like more eyes.
Though it was hard to tell, the mural didn’t seem to be repeating. Wirrin supposed it must once have told a story. But all she could have any confidence in was that it had been a story involving people and mountains. That sounded about right.
The crack that had started the avalanche spread all the way up the wall and into the next level of the ledge above. But sticking close to the wall, where there was the most material below them, seemed to be working well enough and, despite more cracking, the ledge held as they hopped across the small gap.
As the four of them slowly passed around to the eastern face of the mountain, the snow built up again. Wirrin brought them back toward the edge of the path and, this time, insisted they tie themselves together.
She waded through deeper snow, keeping a bit more distance from the precipice. Her old, oiled leathers kept her dry enough, but her legs were stiff and freezing by the time she called a stop for the day.
‘Can’t we go a bit further?’ Alina asked.
Wirrin pulled her shovel from her pack and shook her head. ‘We don’t want to try climbing at night,’ she said. ‘The predominant wind has been coming from behind us the last couple of days, so the best place to stop is here, where the wind is blocked by the mountain.’
The siblings didn’t protest much further, especially once Wirrin had cleared a space and set a fire. The trio went to look at some of the carvings Wirrin had dug up while she cooked dinner. Soon it was too dark to make out anything other than the fire.