Trade talks took up the last few weeks of winter: Elana and Rennin locked in an assortment of offices with various combinations of the Prince of the White Steppes, the archons of Ghol Vidar, and a laundry list of local commercial interests. Although I had no standing to negotiate for my people, I was invited to a handful of those meetings. Derrek was not.
I worried that Derrek’s absence left us vulnerable to misunderstandings too subtle for our limited understanding of the language, even with the help of the translation spell, but I knew that there was little we could do for it, now. Rennin remained cold to him. Elana affected an air of being otherwise busy – and, to be fair, she was. He spent as much of his time as he could with his mothers, and at the temple. Those hours he did stay with us under the roof of Vol Mak Khan, he spent with me, trading his knowledge of divination for what I could teach of magical and material artifice.
Then word came that our provisions were ready and the roads were clear. The archons would hold a feast in our honor, and we would depart the following day. In the days leading up to that feast, Derrek and I presented our host and the archons with the magic boxes we had been crafting to that purpose, and asked that the one we had made for the prince be delivered to him, as well. The farewell feast was glorious, and I will tell the tale of it to my grandchildren, but it was all so carefully orchestrated so that nothing of lasting interest or import happened, save that Derrek and his mothers were invited to spite the Prince of the White Steppes, who conspicuously declined his own invitation.
We set forth southward in new travelling clothes, gifts not from the archons or the prince, but from Vol Mak Khan. The road descended from the great mountain city, winding through rugged, rocky foothills until once more we wound between the rolling hillocks of the White Steppe. Then the ground began to drop, and massive stones began to shove themselves up out of the dry, grassy steppes, the terrain grew rougher with each passing day.
We travelled with an honor guard consisting of three pairs of Jor twins and their cyclops companions, led by Inladat, the prince’s xian g`ul. Only a single aurochs-drawn wagon was needed to carry us, our yurts, and the other supplies for our final journey across the White Steppes. Our honor guard was not rude, or standoffish, but neither were they friendly, and I quickly found myself missing Darjaran and his jocular entourage.
We passed through two more cities – the rhu xian trade city of Kanadat and the Jor freehold of Hrodna – where we were greeted with hospitality much reduced from what we had grown accustomed to. Derrek’s banishment seemed to have stained us all.
Eight freezing cold and windy but blessedly dry days after we departed Ghol Vidar, in the early hours of our second day out from Hrodna, we came within view of the Great Ice Wall. From this side, at that distance, it looked like the world simply ended in a clear line where the ground dropped off and beyond which there was only sky. The feeling it evoked was deeply unsettling, and none of us were surprised when the road veered sharply west and east, a crossroads marked by a great stone pillar bearing the names of the nearest cities north and west and east of us, and warning against travelling to the Great Ice Wall.
Crossing that line, which marked the practical if not the official end of the sao`ashan Holy Empire, we left the paved road behind, and with it our aurochs-drawn wagon and most of our honor guard. Inladat took the lead and a single trio of Jor-twins-and-their-cyclops took up the rear. On foot, we began to veer slightly east, following the shape of the land. From the road it had all looked like a flat plain. As we traveled ever southward, though, the rolling hills of the White Steppe broke apart ever more quickly into badlands that reminded us of the Lightning Plains.
“This path will drop into a steep-walled pass,” Inladat told us as the ground began to turn downward. “At the end of that pass lays the Great Ice Wall. There are other passes, far from here, but this is the route by which the Dragon Bard descended, a century ago, and your ancestors, in the ancient past.”
Vol Mak Khan had confirmed for us that we would be walking the road that the llamenan and rrotran had taken out of the Empire. That knowledge had been tumbling through my mind for weeks, unable to find a context into which to settle. Three thousand years was an almost incomprehensible amount of time: half again the age of the djuunan species; a hundred times the age to which most elves might expect to live; two hundred, maybe three hundred generations of elves, depending on how one counted. A long time, even, to the near-immortal sao`ashan and their giant servants. There would be – could be – no trace of that ancient exodus. And yet, my eyes and my heart scanned the path in search of one, all the same.
On our second day off the paved road, the path turned steeply downward, following a stream of running snow through a narrow gorge that it had clearly cut in the stone cliff-face over the last four or five thousand years. The way grew difficult, polished slick by the seasonal floods and littered with fallen rocks that we could barely see because the high sides of the gorge left the path in deep shadow. Merely walking was a struggle. Though the stream was still slow and narrow, not yet running deep and fast with the coming of true spring, it proved nearly impossible to stay dry.
At last, though, we emerged on the far side of the slot canyon. The cliffs to either side gave way and a wide shelf of stone opened up before us before dropping off abruptly. Nothing I had ever seen before prepared me for the vista that opened up before us. Only the great canyon of the Holy Lands came close. The dropoff was not as steep as that, I could see if I looked carefully, but the distance to the ground below was so vast that it looked nearly perfectly vertical. Below, the tall and rugged mountain range that had loomed over the tall trees of my childhood home looked like sharp rocks pointing up from ant hills. The mountain streams that we had been assured were the headwaters of the mighty River Venn, accumulating from half-frozen lakes fed by a hundred thousand icy runnels like the one at our feet, were like barely visible pen-strokes on a map.
“Sweet Father Es,” I whispered in my native tongue. I could hear my companions muttering their own awestruck oaths.
“This wasn’t the path you used before,” Rennin said to Derrek, his voice strained and simultaneously hopeful.
“No,” Derrek said. “I came to the Compact from the Western Reaches, not the White Steppes. That descent is longer, but not nearly so steep. As long as this will take us, that would be two, three times as long. And it would be only a little less dangerous before putting us out in Handar instead of Mashandosaar.”
It was relatively early in the afternoon. There were a few hours of daylight left, but none of us wanted to face that descent before morning. Inladat set our guard to building a fire and making camp. Elana and Rennin soon joined them, but Derrek and I could not seem to pry ourselves away from the vista that spread out below us.
Mountains stretched out to our left and to our right, as far as the eye could see. As we looked longer, though, we could see a shallow valley almost directly below us, half-obscured by mist before disappearing into the shadows as it deepened. Beyond that, we could see what we knew must be the mountains of the dwarven holds and, beyond that, deep green shadows that must be Tanirinaal. Could we see as far as Georg or the plains of Namora? Or were those color shifts just the distance playing tricks on our eyes?
I knew that we should take off our packs and help set up camp, but I was too awestruck and homesick. I could not even bring myself to speak, let alone ask, but I guessed that Derrek felt the same.
“Behold the works and wonders of the gods,” said Inladat, coming up behind us.
I could only nod. Minute by minute, the shadows were lengthening. The year was yet young, and night was falling quickly. We should really be setting up our tents.
“It really does look like a lovely world to live in,” he went on. “And a traitor like you shouldn’t live to enjoy her banishment.”
I turned just in time to see Inladat’s foot land squarely in the middle of Derrek’s pack.
I cried out and grabbed for Derrek’s cloak. I caught him and held tight, but it was a futile gesture. Worse than futile. We were too close to the edge. Inladat’s leg was almost as long as I was tall, and apparently stronger than my entire body. I succeeded only in clinging to Derrek as I was thrown off the edge of the world with him.
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