by L J Chappell
And then suddenly they were there. Pole fifty-three.
He was ready to stop, to simply sit in the snow at the base of the pole and sleep, but Thawn patted him on the shoulder with her thick snowy gloves. ‘There,’ she told him. ‘Isn’t that a wonderful sight?’
Just twenty or thirty feet ahead of them he could make out a dark shape in the snow. As he stumbled up to it, he saw that it was a simple tarpaulin, fixed securely and held in place by rocks. Bane moved one of the rocks and lifted the near edge: one by one, the party ducked inside.
The tarpaulin was raised slightly, no more than knee-high above the level of the snow, but inside had been hollowed out: the excavated snow had been used to raise the sides, and the tarpaulin formed a roof above them. It wasn’t high enough to stand upright, but there was enough space to sit comfortably and there would be just about enough space for all of them to lie down.
Against one side was a line of backpacks and a couple of short wooden spades.
‘I’ll get the lamps going,’ Garran said.
Inside the shelter was surprisingly quiet: it hadn’t been obvious how loud the wind was until they were now suddenly out of it. Outside, they could hear it whistling around them, buffeting the snow and the tarpaulin.
‘What is this place? It’s like a miracle.’
‘A miracle?’ Bane laughed. ‘It’s hardly that. It took a lot of effort to dig out.’
‘You made this place?’
‘Yes. We dug it, secured it, and left all this stuff here so we could travel light. That was on the way over.’
‘You’ve already crossed the mountains?’ he asked, and then realised: ‘Those tracks we’ve been following are yours?’
‘Of course they are.’
‘Who else would come this way?’ Slorn asked him. ‘The mountains are impassable, remember.’
None of them removed any of their damp things until Garran had positioned a small circle of three oil lamps in the centre of the shelter. They rigged up a frame above the lamps, and would rotate the dampest clothes. In the bags there were towels, and some dry clothes. There were no replacement boots, but there were a few blankets which they could wrap around their feet while their boots dried.
There was food as well: slightly stale bread, more baked biscuits, and the ingredients for a watery vegetable soup heated over the lamps. They only had three lightweight bowls, but they took turns sharing them.
‘What happens tomorrow? We’re still much lower than those mountains.’
‘Yes, but we don’t have to go over the mountains,’ Slorn laughed. ‘We’ll be travelling between them, through the passes, and the first pass lies just ahead of us. After that, there’s an easier stretch, followed by the second pass. That’ll be the trickier bit, and we want to be doing it during daylight hours.’
‘Do we have somewhere to sleep tomorrow night as well?’
‘There’s a proper shelter, stonebuilt with a fire and a roof, but it’s on the far side of the second pass. That’s not nearly as far as we came today, but the going will be much slower: we have no ponies, and we’ll be carrying some of this stuff as well. But the first step in tomorrow’s journey is to get as much sleep as we can tonight.’
They would leave the lamps burning through the night: Garran topped them up from a bottle, but still turned them down low to make the oil last. And then they lay, crushed against each other on the hard-packed snow floor, and pulled the blankets over them.
The others complained that it was freezing, but it felt far warmer than the prison cell. And although their meal had been pitiful and the others had grumbled, there had been plenty of it, it had been warm and it had been better than he had eaten for days.
‘I’ll wait up with you,’ he heard Magda tell Slorn. ‘Or we can take shifts, as long as I have the first one. Otherwise you’re likely to let me sleep.’
‘I’m worried about him,’ Bane commented. ‘It’s been dark for ages.’
‘I’m more worried that he might have been detained,’ Slorn admitted. ‘The local militias may lock him up simply because he’s a stranger. It’s the kind of thing people do when they’re twitchy.’
‘He can take care of himself,’ Bane assured him. ‘He has a level head.’
‘I hope so. But perhaps one of us should have gone instead.’
‘It had to be Ethryk. He found the dealer, agreed the price. It would have been suspicious if anyone else had taken them back. You know that.’
‘And he’ll be able to move much faster than us,’ Garran added. ‘Remember, we were slowed down quite a bit by your wizard.’
After that, they stopped talking and everyone slept.
Some hours later, Ethryk joined them. There was a sudden chill as he lifted the tarpaulin and let himself in.
‘Thank the Gods,’ Kiergard Slorn greeted him. ‘I was beginning to worry about you.’
‘As was I,’ Ethryk said. ‘That is a hellish poor journey in the dark.’
‘I’ll turn up the lamps, and you can dry your clothes here. There’s some soup and bread: you can tell us what you found out while it heats up.’
‘There is some uproar and confusion in Lanvik. They must have discovered the escape soon after you left, as the Guard has been out since the early hours. They’re searching the town and the harbour, and they’ve closed most of the roads. They’re not being very friendly to strangers. But no-one’s thought to look this way yet.’
‘Any problems?’
‘No. They searched me, twice, but I wasn’t carrying anything. And I needed a pass to get in and out, but that wasn’t too difficult. I just played dumb.’
‘Do they know anything?’
‘No-one knows anything. When they haven’t found him after a couple of days, I think they’ll probably decide it was magecraft.’
2
Each morning that he awoke in the prison had been worse than the previous one: he had been stiffer, hungrier and thirstier, and had felt more pain and discomfort than the day before. So when he woke up in the snow shelter, largely refreshed and with tolerably warm feet and hands, he couldn’t help smiling.
He had been rescued, he had eaten warm food, he had drunk fresh water and he was with people who didn’t want to kill him. Even better, they had a plan to get him somewhere safe, away from this place. Over the past day his situation had immeasurably improved to the point where he even felt a little cheerful about it.
‘Stop smiling, wizard,’ Thawn grumbled at him. ‘We are cold and wet and miserable and sore and badly fed. This is the third night from the last four that we have slept among these cursed mountains. And every one of these things is entirely your fault.’
The mage pulled on his boots, which were still a little damp in the sole and at the toes, and went outside.
It was still dark, but he was more awake and more alert than he had been the previous evening. It was obvious to him now that their shelter had been built recently – it was surrounded by a wide area of compressed snow, beaten down by their boots as they had dug it out. He could see the route they had come yesterday, snaking up one side of the valley: the same trail, narrower and slightly more obscured by blown snow, led up away from them, eastwards, further and further up into the mountains. That would be the path that Slorn and his band had taken two days earlier, and the route they would be following today.
It was too cold to simply stand immobile outside, so he went back in – Garran and Thawn were warming up both the remains of the soup and the bread, which had frozen and become hard again through the night.
‘How long will the journey take us?’ he asked, as they sat and shared food and water.
It was Kiergard Slorn who answered: ‘It took us two days to get there, and I think it should also take us two days to get back. We have to move at your pace and you are still weak – stronger than yesterday, but still weak – so we’ll be travelling slower than I’d like. But on our westward journey we had to carry more and made quite slow progress then as well.’
‘On the descent after the second pass, on the east side, there is a cabin,’ Bane added. ‘A proper building, in stone and wood, with a proper fire.’ Slorn had mentioned the cabin yesterday, and it was sounding better and better. ‘That is where we slept three nights ago and that is where we will spend tonight as well, unless the weather is against us.’
Garran laughed. ‘If the weather is against us, then we have more to worry about than reaching the cabin. If there is heavy snow or strong winds or if it simply becomes too cold then we will probably all die.’
‘Don’t frighten him,’ Ethryk said. ‘This clear weather should hold for another day or two.’
‘Ethryk has a feel for these things,’ Thawn said. ‘He’s usually right.’
‘Come on,’ Kiergard Slorn interrupted. ‘We need to go. We’ll leave what we can, but we should take whatever’s left of the food as well as the spades, the climbing equipment and the lamps.’ Everyone else groaned, and he added: ‘We have to be prepared, in case Ethryk’s wrong about the weather or in case the route is blocked and we can’t reach the cabin today.’
‘What about the wizard?’ Thawn asked.
‘The rest of us will share out his provisions,’ Magda said. ‘If he has to carry a pack, he’ll slow us down.’
No-one said “He’ll slow us down anyway, even if he’s not carrying a pack”, but he guessed they were all thinking it.
After they had finished dividing up the various supplies among them, one pack remained untouched in the corner: the mage opened the flap and found it full of small brightly coloured flags, each about the size of his hand, fixed to lengths of very thin rope. It seemed that they were simply going to leave them here.
‘What about these?’ he asked. ‘What are they for?’
‘They were for marking our route,’ Ethryk told him: ‘if the snow became too deep to see it.’
‘We didn’t know about the poles,’ Magda explained. ‘They run the full length of the trail between the passes, and some distance on either side. But our flags would have served the same purpose.’
The sun still hadn’t risen when they set out twenty minutes later, into the bitter cold before dawn: as they climbed, the day gradually became brighter and warmer. Despite the effort of yesterday, the mage was far better at keeping pace with the others today. Proper food, exercising his muscles and his body, liquids to drink and a good night’s sleep had all helped partially restore his strength. There was almost a spring in his step.
A couple of hours later, when they reached the highest point of the first pass and finally started downhill, he didn’t even feel he needed to rest when Slorn had asked.
‘What’s ahead?’ he asked, as they pressed on.
‘We have some hours of travelling downhill, which should not be difficult as long as we are alert. After that, there is a flatter stretch which may be more difficult – we had problems there when we crossed the first time, but hopefully this time it will be easier. The mountains are steep on both sides, and the wind swirls around and blows the snow into deep, deep drifts: it is impossible to tell where the ice will hold your weight and where you will simply sink down. And then we climb to the second pass. Hopefully we will achieve that before dark.’
‘And then down to the cabin?’
‘Yes. Even after night has fallen, the downhill stretch should be easier. Much of the path on that side has very little snow or ice lying on it, so it is easier to follow and more difficult to lose the way.’
‘Is that why you thought you could make it?’ he asked. ‘Because it’s not so bad on that side?’
‘It didn’t look as bad as people said.’
Bane laughed. ‘It looked just as impassable from Tremark as it did from Urthgard.’
‘We talked to people in the villages and towns on that side, and all the locals knew tales and legends of people who’d crossed in winter. Those stories were all set in the distant past, but there were so many of them that I assumed that there must be some truth behind them.’ He considered for a moment, and added: ‘Also, the weather has been warm and clear for some days, and was forecast to continue that way. That meant there would be no fresh snow falling, so we knew that if we made it across then we would be able to make it back again.’
‘And …,’ Garran interrupted, ‘Kiergard Slorn believes that words such as “impassable” are a challenge. So he talked the rest of us into coming with him. He only told us about you when we were in sight of Lanvik.’
‘And if you hadn’t made it across?’
‘Then we’d have turned back and retraced our steps to Tremark, and you would still be rotting in that prison. Unless they’d executed you by now.’
‘Then I’m very glad you tried. I just wish that I was worth the effort: that I remembered more.’
‘I’m sure there’s a good chance that your memory will return. And even if it does not, I have high hopes that you will remember some of your magecraft.’
‘What if I don’t?’
‘Then I hope you’ll learn other useful skills. If you turn out to bring nothing of value to our little group, then I’m going to look pretty foolish.’
‘What exactly is your group? Who are you, and what do you do?’
‘We,’ Kiergard Slorn announced grandly, ‘are a Company of thieves, of brigands and bandits; a Company of mercenaries.’
‘Which?’ Those all seemed like different things.
‘Whichever is paying most,’ Slorn smiled.
‘He means whichever is paying,’ Garran said. ‘We’ve had problems with that, sometimes.’
‘You think I should stay with you?’
‘Well, I would expect you to stay with us for a while at least. I think it would make sense if you did.’
‘Because I don’t remember who I am?’
‘Partly, yes. You don’t remember who you are or where you belong or who your friends are, or your enemies. So you have nowhere else to go that you know about. Plus we have already arranged passage far away from this place and from your captors in Lanvik: it would be foolish of you not to take advantage of that. And, finally, I would have thought that you should be harbouring a tiny trace of obligation and gratitude towards us, your gallant rescuers. But …’
‘But …?’ he prompted.
‘But it is entirely your decision.’
‘We should also make it clear that, if you leave before you’ve somehow paid us back for this effort, then we’ll hunt you down and kill you,’ Magda told him, with a sudden cold edge in her voice. The others laughed, and she smiled.
A little later, at a rare patch of open ground, they paused for a few minutes to take off the packs and stretch; to rest and quickly eat something. He looked round at his new companions. He had already decided that he liked them: not simply because they had rescued him, but also because of the way they worked so well as a group. They were like a small family: friendly, honest and open as well as competent and effective together.
The only one he had doubts about was Kiergard Slorn: behind his casual talk there was a sharp intelligence, and something ruthless. He was friendly enough, but not a friend: pleasant enough but with a guarded wariness and suspicion. He seemed to be a little less cautious with Bane and Magda, but the mage could see a little distance between him and the others as well. Perhaps that was because he was the leader – he did seem, clearly, to be the leader of the little band.
Perhaps he should have been more cautious of these people: from his rescue, he knew they were killers – perhaps not casual killers, but efficient and dispassionate and unlikely to hesitate because of ethical concerns. And they described themselves as thieves and mercenaries. But he was happy to have found friends, and these people were good friends to have. He felt relaxed around them. Still, he wished he knew who he was, wished he remembered something. They had told him about Urthgard and Lanvik, and that he had been accused of killing Lord Skollet: but none of these names sounded at all familiar.
Perhaps his memories would com
e back when he was somewhere safe and warm, clean and out of danger: somewhere that he could relax.
Through the day, they followed the snaking line of poles between the two passes. As Slorn had explained, there were deep drifts of snow which could have badly impeded their progress, but the combination of the wooden poles and the lingering traces of their earlier tracks made the going surprisingly straightforward. The actual walking was miserable and cold and wet but since they could walk at a steady pace without continually stopping, they made good time and were only a little short of the second pass when the sun set behind the mountains.
An hour later, they were clambering unsteadily downhill and soon passed the last of the poles. He had hoped for an impressive view as they topped the second pass, a panorama of Tremark stretching out below them, but the twist of the valleys and trails meant that the only views were of more cliffs and slopes, a confusing mix of black rock and white snow.
It was three hours after the second pass, almost four hours after the sun had set, that they finally rounded a spur and Kiergard Slorn pointed ahead: ‘There – that’s the place.’
As they trudged down the mountainside from the second pass, the cabin had gradually become grander and grander in his mind: better equipped and larger with every pace. He was almost expecting lights in the windows and people drinking at tables outside in the snow, with the sound of singing and music spilling into the night. The reality was a low, squat building of grey blocks with a pair of simple shuttered holes in the wall for windows and a misshapen wooden door held in place by a wooden beam. It looked more like a shack for animals than for people, and inside was equally barren and unwelcoming. There were piles of old hay for beds, the same as in his prison cell.
But there was a fireplace, and a stack of timber round the back. Once they had barred the shutters and stopped up the holes in the door with pieces of cloth, and broken some logs loose from the ice and set them burning in the stone fireplace, the single room soon heated up and the warmth made the place seem almost homely.