Our morale waned after the ogre encounter. None of us, except possibly Rennin, had actually wanted to fight. The diplomats’ tongues spell had worked too slowly, and the language barrier had made it all but inevitable – though, given my own speculation, perhaps I should have anticipated that they would respond to the giant’s tongue with hostility. That they had responded so suggested continued conflicts with the Holy Empire, particularly the giants of the White Steppes, and the possibility that we had very deliberately not been warned about those hostilities. Hadn’t Elena noted that the path down the Great Ice Wall looked too well maintained? It seemed the Holy Empire was in closer contact with the mortal world than I had known.
Khanaarre, particularly, seemed deeply affected. She had refused to look at any of us the rest of the day, barely speaking even as I’d bandaged her hand. That night in the tent, she’d tucked her knees up between us. At the same time, she had reached out and pulled my face close to hers so that our foreheads were almost touching.
It took us two more days to make it up out of the ogre’s valley. They were silent, sullen days. The rock and the mud, alone, were brutal and disheartening. The guilt and frustration we felt about the ogres we’d killed, and our fear of another such encounter – with a perhaps less one-sided outcome – hung over our heads like dark clouds.
The view from the top of that ridge went a long way to restoring our spirits. The great valley of the Venn’s headwaters spread out before us, at last: a shallow descent leading to a wide plain spiderwebbed with narrow but widening traces of icemelt that were even now growing into creeks, all feeding into a great glacial lake. A little to the east, but mostly due south, rose a plateau steaming with geothermal springs. We camped there, on the ridge, hoping that we were far enough out of the ogres’ hunting grounds, and that enough time had passed, that we were safe from reprisal.
In the morning, we began our long descent toward the Compact. The ground on this side of the ridge was rockier and less muddy. It still took the better part of three days to make our slow, diagonal descent, but the going was much easier.
Finally, we reached the shores of the glacial, snow-fed lake. The mid-day sun shone off of it like a mirror, rippling as it moved southward, gaining speed. On the far side lay the lush geothermal plateau, venting steam from numerous hot springs.
“That,” I said to Elana as we picked a site to make camp along the shore, “is where I would have you build me my tower.”
The prince stopped what she was doing to look across the lake. Rennin and Khanaarre did the same. You couldn’t see it from here, but the nearest springs were vivid rainbow colors from the exotic minerals in the earth. Further on, the springs were clean and clear – still rich with minerals, but safe, even healthful, to mortals.
“It’s beautiful,” Khanaarre said. “And the very edge of the world, just as you said.”
Elena and Rennin nodded in awestruck agreement.
The prince and her knight pitched our two tents while Khanaarre and I knelt at the edge of the waters and built an impromptu, temporary altar at which to purify ourselves. The miasma of death that clung to us after the battle with the ogres was nothing compared to what we had suffered violating the Tomb of Xadaer, but we still didn’t want to carry it further than we had to, and certainly not to civilized lands. We stripped, and splashed ourselves with bitterly, painfully cold water from the lake, fumigated ourselves with holy incense, and chanted prayers to Torh and his children. When we had done and dressed, we called our companions over and purified them, as well.
Purifications complete, Khanaarre and I joined our companions in setting camp. Elana and I went about foraging firewood while Khanaarre and Rennin fished for dinner.
“You said you never went back to the Holy Empire before now,” Elana said that evening, as we all went about cleaning up after dinner. “How did you even know this is here?”
I stopped what I was doing and looked back across the lake. The sun had begun to lower itself behind the mountains, and the lake and steam and mist reflected the colors of sunset back like a warped mirror.
“I didn’t ever make it back home,” I said, “but I did try once. After I left … the Usurper. After I spent some time with the elves. Before I went to the Wolfwood. I tried. This was as far as I made it before I realized that there was no way I’d survive the journey to the Great Ice Wall alone.”
Had that been eight years ago, now? Nine? Strange how it felt more distant than the rebellion, itself.
“I had come up on the other side of the River Venn,” I told them. “And I found nymphs, children and grandchildren of Venthiir, bathing in the hot springs. They showed me which ones were safe, and which ones were too hot, or infused with poisonous minerals, or home to dangerous animals. They told me how much further it was to the Wall, and they might have outfitted me for a longer journey if I’d asked, but …”
I paused, trying to decide how to frame the end to a story I hadn’t quite set out to tell. I had been afraid that, if I did make it back home, I might not come back to fulfil my promises to Aemillian. Obviously, I couldn’t tell the prince that. Finally, I shrugged, and gestured toward the lake, and toward the mountains, themselves.
“I didn’t think I could make it. I had started later in the season than I should have, and the journey had already been harder than I’d anticipated. I returned to the Compact and went to make my study of the Children of Enhyl, instead.”
I stared up at the mountains, toward the Great Ice Wall that we could no longer see.
“If I had made it back to the Holy Empire, then,” I said, almost unable to stop myself. “I might never have settled in Georg. I would never have met Sara, or you all.”
And if the dragons who guarded the Eastern Veil were to be believed, that might have been better for the world.
Khanaarre rested a companionable hand on my shoulder. She had never been exiled, but her master had, and she was an expatriot, for now. She knew what it was to miss a home you might never see again.
Elana and Rennin shifted uncomfortably. If I had not settled in Georg, they would never have found me, let alone recruited me to their cause. Whatever their suspicions regarding my true motives – and I knew they had suspicions, I had always known they had suspicions, they were not fools – they knew that they needed me, and that need outweighed any sympathy they might have expressed.
The next morning, we broke camp at a leisurely pace, taking in the beauty of the valley as best we could.
“Is there an altar here,” Elana asked, “or a temple where we should make sacrifice to Venthiir before we continue?”
Venthiir was not one of the gods of the Triumvirate Mysteries into which Elana was initiated, but he was one of the Five around whom the Vencari imperial cult revolved. I should have anticipated the question.
“Just the one Khanaarre and I built for our purifictions,” I said. “If there’s a proper shrine or temple here, somewhere, the nymphs I met disdained to show me. If we live to see my tower built, we will rectify that.”
Elana nodded.
“Yes,” she said simply.
I suspected that if she took the throne, there would be a great deal of temple-building in Vencar in the coming years. That would be a mark in her favor, when I finally made my decision.
Returning to the small altar Khanaarre and I had built, I pulled a bottle of wine from my wizard’s chest and left it there at the edge of the lake, beside a burning stick of incense. Venthiir was the great divine patron of wizards, after all, not just the god of the river along which the majority of Vencari trade moved.
As we backed away from the offerings, an uncanny nymph emerged from the waters to claim them. Her hair and eyes were as dark as night, and both glittering with stars, and her hair waved in the breeze as if she had not just emerged from underwater. Her naked skin was pale as ice, except for her lips and nipples and fingers and toes, which darkened to black. She smiled at us, an unsettling shark-toothed grin. We bowed low, and when we straightened she was already half returned to the water.
===
We walked along the lake shore for most of a day, grateful for the relatively level terrain, before the mountains began to close in, funneling us and the water toward the gorge where the lake became a waterfall and the River Venn officially began. That gorge opened up into a canyon, and we were able to follow the rim until we found a goat-trail down into the valley. We took turns in the lead. Khanaarre and Rennin found the best paths, of course, but by this point in our adventure we were all competent trailblazers.
With every day that passed, and every mile we moved south, game and vegetation became more plentiful – both facts for which we were extremely grateful. We were less grateful for the spring thunderstorms that blew in without warning. Some were merely bitterly cold. Others threatened to wash us off the face of the mountain. Some were only minutes long. Others robbed us of entire days of travel.
There were stretches where we walked alongside the river, camping within earshot of rushing waters – a sound which grew ever louder as spring progressed, as well. There were other stretches where the river would cut into the rock, leaving us at the top of a canyon, or waterfall over a cliff, forcing us to find a path down. But find a path we did, winding ever further downland and southward toward the Compact and the waiting rebellion.
And then we crossed into dwarven territory.
The first sign of dwarven civilization was massive, almost impossible to miss. If we had been on the east side of the river, we could not have avoided it. At the top of a waterfall lay the city of Sump, which was responsible for maintaining the elaborate system of waterwheels and aqueducts that supplied a third of the clean water for all the cities on Mount Asarin, as well as some sort of motive energy that I did not at all understand. We could see some of those wheels – massive artifices of wood and steel – protruding from the eastern face of the cliff.
Like Vencar and Georg and Tanirinaal, the people of the Compact called the whole nation after the name of its greatest city: Mashandosaar. The dwarves, themselves, called the broader territory Hakhanta Rrotranata, Our People’s Mountains.
“The dwarves came together as a single political unit for the sake of certain treaties with the Compact,” I explained as we traveled, “but the great cities are bound to each other by language and networks of kinship, more than politics – like the Free Cities of the River Naam.”
“Yes,” said Elana. “And they seem to understand the nations of the Compact as something like overly-insular clans. When we planned our mission to Tanirinaal, we had originally intended to continue up the Venn to Mashandosaar and petition the Lord of the city to speak on our behalf to the other dwarven lords. But, where Queen Rrallashyl was kind enough to hear us out and deny us in person, Lord Uveg refused to see us. We heard later that he went on to throw the Usurper’s embassy out of his halls until he and his advisors are satisfied that our feud is settled.”
“I remember hearing about that,” I said. “The selling price of Georgi steel almost doubled that season. It made things hard for buyers across the Compact, before prices stabilized, but Georgi smiths and miners made as much of it as they could.”
“I’m glad that fiasco benefited someone,” grumbled Rennin. “We’re still not certain the Usurper didn’t know that we were gathering support in the Compact before then, but he certainly knew after.”
Sump was easy to avoid. It was on the other side of the river. The next city we came across was more only slightly more difficult. Humans, elves, and even dwarves talk like the dwarven nation is wholly subterranean. In truth, only a handful of their cities are entirely underground, and none of the truly great ones. Even from the distance of the far side of the great River Venn, we could see the long, winding walls that enclosed Sump’s crown of fields and pastures, punctuated by great towers that served as air vents and guard posts, and the massive structures that served double duty, and the towers and balconies that grew from the cliff-face like vast alien fungi. Similar, if smaller, structures rose up on our side of the river almost immediately. We skirted around the fields, as much to avoid disturbing the potato crop and the famously aggressive dwarven goats as to avoid attention. But we could not avoid the dwarves in their own territory forever, even if we had wanted to.
We had our inevitable first encounter on our second day in Mashandosaar territory. Five burly dwarves – none quite as tall as Elana, but each half again to twice as wide – met us on the road in the afternoon. These particular dwarves had ruddy and tanned skin, and long curling hair and beards that they wore in simple loose braids held by copper ornaments. Three went on foot, two rode their infamous goats, all five wore blackened armor with green-trimmed black livery and carried a short-hafted and heavy-headed polearm, with a spearpoint, axeblade, and hammer head.
“Halt in the name of Clan Ehrlig,” they demanded in their native tongue. Further south, there would have been every chance that these guards spoke elven, or even the common language of the Compact. This far north, it was fortunate that I had already picked up a great deal of the dwarven tongue, and that they were there to guard against incursions from ogre bands or rival dwarven clans, not handfuls of (mostly) human adventurers, clearly lost in the mountains. They let us pass with only cursory questions. The next guards we encountered, near sunset the next day, even invited us to stay the night in their guard tower. The beds were so small that I had to sleep on the floor, but it was still far warmer and more comfortable than our tents.
We were four days into Hakhanta Rrotranata when we finally came to Nagaan. The River Venn had been a great river from its headwaters, the glacial lake we had camped beside so far to the north. It had grown wider and deeper with nearly every mile we travelled, fed by both seasonal snowmelt and perennial streams. By the time it had thrown itself down the mountain in the waterfall that drove the engines of Sump, it was so powerful that crossing the waters, themselves, was a problem.
Nagaan, the southernmost of the three great dwarven bridge cities, was a large part of the solution to that problem. Legend had it that the city had begun as a toll bridge, built when the dwarves first began expanding west from Mount Asarin, into the easternmost reaches of the Alsan mountains. In the subsequent millennia, it had grown from one long and rickety rope bridge to three pairs of enclosed stone walkways, each stacked atop the one before, wide enough for two horsedrawn carriages to walk side by side, marvels of magic and engineering and architectural splendor, with a city-sized fortification on each side, guiding trade safely up from the woods and the river into the mountains and vise versa.
The trade season had only just begun, but the roads – even the surface road we traveled – were already thick with peddlers and merchants whose wares could be carried on one’s own back, or strapped to one or two massive and hardy dwarven goats. Like the uurnigath of the Wolfwood, a few of the dwarves we saw were as tall as the guards we’d met in the high mountains – one or two were even as tall as Rennin – and a few were as small as barely three feet tall; all were broader and more massive in proportions than any people we had yet seen, even the mighty Jor. Their complexions were more like humans or the Children of Enhyl, ranging from pale and ruddy to warm dark browns, their hair and eyes like obsidian or dark agates, without any of the red hair or complexions, or the deepest cool black skin found among elves or the humans of the deeper deserts. The overwhelming majority, of course, were of the masculine genders: proud and stoic, whether bearded or clean-shaven, dressed in sturdy but elaborate trousers and boots and coats, with wide belts dripping with pockets and pouches, and cylindrical hats, all elaborately tooled and embroidered. But we saw maidens and matriarchs, as well, distinguished by their veils and capes and as visibly withered and unwell as elven men. Every dwarven woman we saw was surrounded by protective entourages of brothers or husbands, and many were drawn in carts or carried on palanquins.
Our party raised the eyebrows of the gate guard and toll takers, but we were not the only humans or the only elf in the crowd, or even the only party openly armed and armored, just the most ragged and filthy by several orders of magnitude, and we were admitted without trouble when Elana produced the requisite coin (hidden in Khanaarre’s wizard’s chest until that very morning) for our toll.
Just inside of the gate was a great open-air market catering to dwarven travelers in search of exotic elven finished goods. Every third or fourth booth boasted a kitchen of some sort, and the market was thick with the smells of roasting meats, fruits, vegetables, and mushrooms, and wild combinations of elven and dwarven seasonings. Elven merchants – almost exclusively women, mostly mothers and daughters – shouted in thickly accented dwarven, advertising the quality and uniqueness of their wares.
“According to a friend of mine from So’renner,” I told my companions as we worked our way through the market, searching for one of the staircases that would provide access to the city proper, “a master-smith who did his journeyman’s time here, the elven merchants fake their bad accents, a tactic to make the dwarves think they might be able to get a better deal from a poor speaker of the language – but most of these women are second or third or even fourth generation traders, and were raised speaking dwarven alongside their mother tongue.”
My companions rolled their eyes, but they also laughed.
We found an access building and descended into the dwarven city. The stairs were packed so tight that we were all claustrophobic, but when we reached the gallery below, the press immediately vanished as merchants and travelers rushed in every direction to their destinations. The ceiling was high above us, a vast dome divided into great hexagonal vaults, each supported by tall columns decorated with elaborate geometric designs that emitted soft blue light and filled the gallery with a sense of peace and seemed to absorb the din that should have accompanied the hundreds of people in an enclosed hard-walled space.
At the base of the stairs was a guidestone: a three-sided monolith, each side emblazoned with a simplified map of the city and directions in each of the three languages likely to be spoken by a traveler. A thousand years ago, Alric had told me, the guidestones had only had two sides, but that trade with Georg and Vencar had grown heavy enough that the Lords of Nagaan had eventually deemed it worth the effort and expense of replacing them all with three-sided stones, adding the language of the Compact to the traditional elven and dwarven. With the guidestones’ aid, we made our way down to one of the human markets, where we secured ourselves lodgings at the first hotel we found that boasted its own bath house.
“Does your language spell ever stop?” Rennin asked, rubbing his temples as we dropped our gear in the room and stripped off our excess layers.
I shook my head – both an answer, and a futile attempt to clear the buzzing echo of accumulating dwarven words from my ears.
“No,” I said. “You will spend the rest of your lives learning every mortal language you hear.”
Elana laughed.
“That is both incredibly useful and incredibly annoying,” she said. “It’s too bad it doesn’t confer literacy.”
I laughed, too.
“I have said the same, myself,” I admitted. “If we have a few days to rest, here, we should spend an evening or two in a dwarven tavern, so the spell can gather enough so that it won’t ring in our ears so loud.”
“I would like a few days of sitting,” Rennin admitted, “to say nothing of some dwarven ale. But … do we have time? And is it safe?”
Elana and I exchanged a long look. I could guess her questions easily enough.
“I do not know if the Usurper can teleport assassins this far from the capitol or not,” I said, “but sending soldiers a day’s ride across your border into a former colony to capture a band of fugitives and sending soldiers across three kingdoms into a major trade city that does not fully recognize your government are very different degrees of overreach. I doubt he will do the latter. And I think that a few days of rest, listening to rumors and asking discreet questions, while we take the time to plan our next steps more carefully, will be very much to our advantage.”
Elana considered, looking first to Rennin, then to Khanaarre, who both nodded. After a moment, she nodded, too.
“Yes,” she said. “A few days of rest and discreet reconnaissance are very much to our advantage.”
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