Owlknight v(dt-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Now it was more imperative than ever to find out what sort of state the rest of the northern tribes were in. They had joined together once to invade Valdemar, and only Vanyel had stopped them. What if they should band together again? They wouldn’t need a great mage this time, only a strong leader and a good strategist - all the work of creating an easy path to the south had been done for them.

  She was the first to break out of the trance of fascination that the Great Pass exerted on them, and ask her dyheli to start down the trail before them. Darian quickly shook off his own bemusement and followed her. One by one, the others did the same, as their guide remained on the top of the pass behind them, watching them solemnly as they began their journey downward.

  It took them all day to make their way to the bottom, and once there, the great age of the place was self-evident. Far from being the barren cut it must have been for years after it had been made, a hundred thousand different plants and animals had taken advantage of the shelter it provided to move in and flourish. A stream ran right down the middle, fed by the runoff of the mountains above it, and where there is water, there will always be life. Leafed trees and evergreen trees had taken root here, and a variety of plants flourished along the banks of the stream. There was game in plenty, too, which was just as well, since the mountains cut off the sunlight and night would come very quickly here. There wasn’t a lot of time left to set themselves up for the night.

  So they didn’t hesitate when they reached the bottom; they made camp immediately. They still had some provisions in the form of dried meat pounded together with dried berries, provided by their hosts of Gray Wolf. That would do for now; in the morning they could hunt.

  “How are your heads, all of you?” Keisha asked the others as they quickly gathered deadfall for a fire.

  She got variations on “Fine, now,” from all of them, and Shandi in particular looked much more like her old self. Evidently their guide had been right; there was something about going up very high that made people sick -

  Unless they’re used to it? That must be it; Keisha didn’t want to contemplate what it would be like to try and become accustomed to the heights. How long would the sickness last?

  How long would I be willing to bear it before I gave up? That’s the real question.

  Perhaps it would be possible to become accustomed gradually, without the symptoms.

  But I don’t care to be the one to find out, she decided, and went back to gathering very dry twigs to serve as kindling.

  Steelmind found a real windfall, in that he found a tangle of wood piled up against a rock, dry and ready to burn. But that very find raised the possibility of another danger. Flash floods were always a possibility in the mountains, and they were in a particularly hazardous and vulnerable place. A cloudburst could cause a flood leagues away - a flood that would sweep everything before it all the way down the Pass, and they would have no warning.

  “Weather-Watching,” Darian said to Steelmind, as they all came to that realization after a short discussion. “Have you ever done it?”

  “Not often, but I can do it,” the older man replied, unsheathing a hand ax, adjusting its weighting slide, then stooping to chop up the battered brush and limbs. Hywel and Wintersky helped him, as Keisha, Shandi, and Darian gathered up the armfuls of wood. Darian limbered up and hacked skillfully at some branches with his heavy brush-knife, while Kelvren helped in his own way by standing on long branches or small trees and snapping through them with his beak, even if they were as thick as a man’s upper arm. It was getting dark fast, and even though the tops of the mountains above them still gleamed golden with sunlight, it was twilight on the floor of the Pass.

  “Wintersky and I can watch, too,” Darian said with satisfaction. “Good; there won’t be a night watch when we won’t have a Weather-Watcher too; during the day we can take turns. Kel will know more than any of us during the day; he’ll be up in the weather we’re watching.”

  :It is likely that we and Hashi will also be able to hear a flood before it reaches us - well in time for us all to climb to escape,: Neta said diffidently. :So we will have twin defenses.:

  But Keisha wondered how well she was going to be able to sleep with the specter of a flood sweeping down out of nowhere hanging over her head every night. “Maybe we’d be better off trying to find caves above the waterline each night?” she suggested, dropping her armload of wood beside the fire and going back for another.

  “We would - if we can find any,” Darian replied. He didn’t have to add anything; she’d seen the condition of the walls on the way down herself. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of caves. “If I have to, I can use magic to enlarge a cave or fissure that is already there, depending upon the conditions at the time. I could maybe make us a shelter, before there were any rains, but that would put out an easily readable magical signature. It’s best if we just make a camp as usual, though, because I’d rather not advertise to whatever may be out there.”

  They could camp on the trail itself, but that carried its own risks, and how many more trails would they find as they made their way up the Pass?

  She resolved not to think any more about it. They would be vigilant, and improvise. There had been too many surprises on this journey already to try to anticipate all the possibilities and plan for them. Meanwhile, she could gather wood and water, and do what she could to make certain that none of them would suffer any long-term effects from their mountain sickness.

  Steady marching brought them to the end of the Pass in three days, and they had pressed themselves to do so in that short a time. The terrain, at least, provided nothing to impede them; it must have been an easy trip for that long-ago army that Vanyel defeated.

  The tall mountains around them never grew lower, but the valleys between grew broader - and wetter. More of their time was spent crossing valley floors, some of them thickly greened valleys that were filled with plants that were entirely new to Steelmind. Here they did find furtive signs of people, but never saw any. Kuari reported that the tribes he saw were all small, no more than twenty or thirty people altogether, and they kept away from the travelers and their strange beasts and stranger allies.

  More streams joined with theirs, and they started to see fish more abundantly. With that, Wintersky began throwing his line in every time they camped, and they enjoyed the results of his labor.

  The end of the third day brought them to the end of the Pass; it opened out into one of those broad valleys, heavily forested, green, and wreathed with mist. All that day Keisha had noticed the clouds becoming thicker overhead, and the air growing more humid, although there was no sign that it was about to rain.

  “Hurrrr,” Kel said, as he landed beside them. “Thisss isss like the Haighlei Forrressstssss, except that it isss not ssso hot.” He looked about with interest. “The trrreessss arrre asss big, and it isss damp therrre, like thisss.”

  Moss and lichen grew thickly underfoot and on the trunks of the trees; and moss hung from the boughs high overhead. All of the trees were varieties of conifer or evergreen, and some were awe inspiring in their size, even to someone who was used to a Vale and the huge trees that grew there. These giants towered above their heads, so high that their tops were lost to sight among the branches of lesser trees.

  Those trunks were like great, smooth columns, without any branches for such distances that Keisha couldn’t see how they could possibly be climbed. This was how they differed from the Vale trees, which branched out no more than two or three stories above the ground; these trees went on forever without branching out. It was unlikely that anyone would be using these trees to house an ekele any time soon, unless they built from the ground up!

  But the raptors and Kel all loved the new surroundings, and cheerfully went out on scouting forays while the rest moved away from the mouth of the Pass and found a secure site to set up camp.

  They all returned at sunset, Kuari last of all, and as they ate fish caught by Wintersky and grilled over the
fire, each Hawkbrother related what his bird was telling him.

  And in the end, even Kel looked troubled by what they had not seen.

  “Wherrre arrre the people?” Kel said finally. “We have flown herrre and therrre - and therrre isss no sssign of people.”

  “No sign that anyone has traveled the Pass recently either,” Darian pointed out, frowning. “There were tiny tribes in the other valleys - shouldn’t there be some sign of people here? Could another sickness have come through here and wiped everyone out?”

  “If it had - why wouldn’t Snow Fox have brought it with them?” Keisha asked. “They only had Wasting Sickness and a few other things we already knew how to clear up.”

  Hywel poked at the fire with a stick. “People do things differently, up here,” he said at last. “It could be that they are off fishing.”

  “Fishing?” Wintersky said incredulously. “Fishing? What is that supposed to mean?”

  Hywel looked uncomfortable. “I have heard - heard - that on the other side of that mountain there is a great expanse of water so far that you cannot see the other side, and it tastes of salt. This is where the peoples round about here get salt with which to trade. And I have heard that in the spring, there are torrents of fish coming up the streams. People gather at the rivers and catch these fish for as long as they come, and it is said that the fish are so thick in the rivers that one can walk from bank to bank upon their backs and keep dry feet. It is said that they can thus dry and smoke enough of these fish to serve them the rest of the year.”

  “That sounds like some sort of fable to me,” Wintersky said skeptically.

  Hywel shrugged. “It is only what I have heard. Also, I have tasted of this fish. Traders brought some back with them as provisions. It is good, very rich, and the meat of it is red, not white.”

  “Huh.” Wintersky still looked skeptical.

  “White Grrryphon liesss bessside sssuch a sssalty waterrr,” Kel observed, tilting his head to the side. “We call it an ‘ocean’ or ‘sssea.’ Could thisss be the sssame sssea?”

  “I don’t know why not,” Steelmind replied. “There is no reason why the coastline here could not be much farther to the east than it is where the Haighlei lands lie. It could be a larger lake than we can even imagine. But that doesn’t address the question of where the people are.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but we’ve only looked close to the mouth of the Pass,” Darian said. “Now, if I were living up here, and I knew that this place existed and might be used by war parties or even armies, I certainly wouldn’t want to live near it.”

  Nods all around the campfire showed that Darian had come up with a reasonable explanation - for now.

  But Keisha had the shivery feeling that this was not the real explanation.

  After half-a-day’s travel, they had finally come upon signs of people - but the signs weren’t good.

  “I don’t like this,” Darian said, staring at the remains of the village. This place had been more like the permanent village that Ghost Cat had built in Valdemar, before it had been deserted.

  Deserted? Maybe. Maybe not. However the village had become untenanted, it had been too long ago to tell if the people had left, died, or been taken away. All that was left were the moss-covered remains of the log houses, the carved poles, the other artifacts of life. The roofs had fallen in - but that could have happened in a single season; Darian had seen how the kind of roof the Ghost Cat folks built needed constant attention. As wet as it was here, moss would have started to grow inside immediately. Grass was knee-tall, but there were no possessions, nor the remains of any.

  “Hywel?” Darian said, turning to their only expert. Hywel looked just as troubled, and just as puzzled. “I do not know,” he said, looking around at the rumbled houses, the fallen poles. “There are no bodies, and no belongings. Perhaps they - ”

  Then he shook his head. “No, I do not think they walked away, and it would be foolish to say so. I do not know what happened here.”

  Darian scratched his head. “Do you see any signs of attack?” he asked reluctantly. “What would we be looking for?”

  “There would be no signs,” Hywel told him. “If the tribe was under attack, the men would go out to meet the enemy, and the women and children would remain here. And if the men did not come back - ” He paused. “Well, until Blood Bear began taking other tribes’ women, the women and children of the defeated would have been left in peace to rebuild their tribe as best they could.”

  “But now - we don’t know.” He considered for a moment. “If they were attacked by Blood Bear, wouldn’t the victors come here and carry everything off? They certainly tried to do that at Errold’s Grove.”

  “What if illness killed most of the people here?” Keisha asked. “Would the survivors just pack up and walk away?”

  “They might.” Hywel brightened a bit at that. “It is tradition that girls go to other tribes to wed, and warriors take wives from other tribes, so there are alliances created all the time. It could happen that they would pack what they had and go, if there were too few hunters to feed the people, or too few people to make a tribe.”

  But this settlement had been huge, larger than the Ghost Cat village was now. Could sickness have wiped out that many people?

  The ruins held no answers for them now, it had been too long since - whatever it was - had happened.

  “We move on,” he decided. “We’re nearly to Snow Fox territory anyway. We know that they’re all right. Maybe they can tell us what happened here.”

  He didn’t have to add that they would have to be wary. They already knew what to do. With Neta taking point, the birds spread out to either side, and Kel watched their backtrail. Hashi ranged out in a fan shape in front, filling in wherever another scout wasn’t. The one advantage they had was the forest itself; it was damp enough that scent lingered, giving Hashi plenty of information. The scant undergrowth and lack of low branches kept a relatively clear line-of-sight for them down on the ground, and a clear flight path for the birds.

  But the forest was not continuous; there were huge meadows to cross, with acres and acres of waist-high grasses. They were beautiful, but dangerous; crossing them meant coming out of cover.

  They had another one of those meadows ahead of them. This time, though, Darian was fairly certain that they would be safe, for a herd of deer grazed there, and Neta’s probe of their minds showed that they felt perfectly comfortable here, which meant they hadn’t been hunted recently. Darian was tempted to ask Kel to take one down for them, but decided against the idea. It was too early in the day to stop, and they would have to stop in order to take care of that much meat.

  So they were the ones who spooked the herd into flight when they came out from under the shadows of the trees.

  As the deer disappeared, the party moved warily out into the sunshine. Only now could they see the mountains towering on all sides of them; mountains with snow capping their peaks, rising through the thin clouds. It was Darian’s turn on Weather-Watch, and he sensed that there were storms moving in from the west. There would be rain tonight. Again.

  He didn’t know what the natives called this land, but he had a few choice selections. When they’d packed for this trip, he hadn’t counted on facing rain practically every night. They’d been improvising with limited success; rain shelters made from boughs and rain sheets didn’t keep the precipitation out all night long, and by dawn everyone was damp.

  He used magic to dry them out, driving the water from clothing and hair. He had no choice, even though this simple act might signal their presence to an enemy; they could not afford to get sick, or pick up something that would rot feet or infect skin. Keisha had to preserve her own strength for things that could not be prevented.

  Carefully, with all the birds in the air, they crossed the meadow. Steelmind gathered plants as they walked, stooping over now and again to snatch something that his peculiar Gift told him was useful. Already he had a dozen different herbs that he
wanted to try cultivating - someday. For now, he was content to add flavor and variety to their meals.

  This time he walked practically bent over, pulling up bulbs that looked exactly like wild onions, brushing them off, and stashing them in the bag at his waist.

  Darian knew that Hakan, Steelmind’s buzzard, was keeping a sharp eye out for trouble; Hakan circled highest above the clearing and had the widest view. Hakan’s type was not the same as the scavenger vultures; it was closer by far to the hawk families. Buzzards had fully feathered heads, mild tempers, and sleepy dispositions. They never exerted themselves if they didn’t have to - but that mild and sleepy outward demeanor concealed a determined nature. Hakan would fly through fire to protect Steelmind.

  Wintersky’s little sharpshin hawk Kreeak by contrast was a bundle of nerves. Never able to stay still unless he was asleep, Kreeak was making a circuit of the meadow, while Kuari stayed in the trees at the point where they would reenter the forest. Kel was above with Hakan, in position to attack if he was needed.