Owlknight

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Is it true, then, that Ghost Cat has found the cure for the Wasting Sickness?” he asked sharply - and anxiously.

  Hywel started to answer, thought better of it, and looked to Darian. Darian motioned to Keisha to come up to the front of the group, and replaced Hywel himself.

  “Warrior of Gray Wolf, I am Dar’ian k’Valdemar adopted of Ghost Cat, and it is among my people that Ghost Cat found their answer to the Wasting Sickness,” he said. “What is it that you would know?”

  The eyes of the Northerners widened to hear him claim kinship with Ghost Cat, and to see Hywel nod to confirm his claim.

  “You have a cure?” the warrior asked sharply, showing no sign of surprise that Darian knew his tongue.

  Darian nodded to Keisha, who answered the warrior with no sign of fear.

  Star-Eyed, I’m proud of her! She acts as if she did this all the time!

  “We have a cure only for the early stage of the sickness,” she said gravely. “Once the fever has fled the body, little more can be done - but we have the means of that cure with us, and will share it gladly.”

  The warrior sighed; a mixture of relief and disappointment. “And are you, then, a Wisewoman?” he asked Keisha, with the aloof interest most Northerners gave to the female Healers - it was beneath their dignity to give females any notice outside of the home, but at the same time, the status of Wisewoman was nearly equivalent to that of Shaman.

  “I am,” she acknowledged. “And the holy dyheli have decreed that I am to impart what cures we have to your Shaman and Wisewoman, if they are able to master those cures.”

  The warrior nodded, then turned back to Darian, relieved that he no longer had to pay direct attention to Keisha. “I am Chulka, the chief hunter of Gray Wolf,” he told Darian. “You will be very welcome among our people, with such gifts to impart.”

  The rest of the journey was made in silence, as the warriors of Gray Wolf spread out into the forest around them, leaving only one walking beside Hywel as his guide. The two young men - for the one that had been left was, if not Hywel’s age, certainly very near to it - spoke with animation to each other. Darian didn’t bother to try and listen, since it seemed to be mostly a mixture of boasts and hunting stories.

  Darian knew that they were near the Gray Wolf camp when the warriors began appearing again, most carrying game, to close in around the strangers as a precaution against overreaction by their own folk. By the time they reached the encampment, there were curious children running alongside them, and women peering at them from the shelter of their bark-covered houses.

  This was a temporary camp, not the kind of permanent village that Ghost Cat had established in Valdemar. Gray Wolf did very little in the way of husbandry, and as a consequence moved as they depleted the resources around their camp. In winter, they moved to a place where there were many caves that they used for storage and for living space during the cold months.

  What they had here were movable shelters, made of flexible willow branches and covered with slabs of bark and pine boughs, intended to keep out rain, give a certain amount of privacy, and not much more than that. There were cook fires in front of each of these homes, with pots half-buried in the ashes, much like at Ghost Cat. The one striking difference between Gray Wolf and Ghost Cat was the presence of enormous dogs everywhere - huge, easy-tempered dogs who paid no attention whatsoever to the newcomers, even Hashi, who was about their size. Darian made a mental note to ask about the dogs later.

  As was the case at Ghost Cat, the homes of the most important people in the encampment were nearest the center, so the Chief, the Shaman, and the Wisewoman had plenty of time to assemble to greet the visitors.

  Their guide stepped back so that the chief hunter could make his introduction; Hywel introduced everyone, including the dyheli and kyree.

  And Kel, of course.

  Kel came to the fore of the group and bowed to the three leaders of the tribe. “Have no fearrr of me,” he said, with a serious and sober inflection in his voice. “And do not fearrr forrr the game herrre-aboutsss. I ssshall hunt upon the oppossssite sssside of the rrrriverrrr.”

  “That is good to hear,” the Chief replied, just as seriously. “But it is best of all to hear that our allies of Ghost Cat have prospered in their new home. So, friends of our friends, before there is any talk of trade - will you share salt with us?”

  A bowl of salt was duly brought forward, and everyone tasted it ceremoniously, even Hashi and the dyheli. That ceremony was all it took to break down the last barriers; the Wisewoman and the Shaman immediately took Keisha aside to interrogate her; Shandi went with them, and Darian, Hywel, Steelmind, and Wintersky found themselves seated at the Men’s Fire, taking turns describing the journey they had taken and the condition of the land they had traveled through.

  “Truly - the rumors we have heard are not rumors at all, then, but truth,” the Chief said with unvarnished satisfaction. “Blood Bear is no more - having brought the Wasting Sickness upon us, they have finally sickened of it themselves. Had there been even a single war party, you would not have traveled past Magpie unmolested.”

  The warrior with the wolf-mask headpiece spat. “All the better, say I,” he growled.

  The others nodded.

  “What rumors did you hear?” Darian asked, grimly curious to hear the details of the downfall of his oldest enemies, the people who had nearly destroyed Errold’s Grove and who had succeeded in killing his first teacher.

  “After their war band failed to return, they set to breeding sons on the orders of their new Shaman,” said the Chief, his expression grim. “Girl-babies they exposed, that their women waste no time upon them. They sent out parties to capture more women to breed more sons. Then the Wasting Sickness at last struck them, and their new Shaman had not the cure for it.”

  “I heard that at the last, they had taken to sacrificing any who were stricken,” offered the chief hunter. “The warriors took to eating the flesh of those warriors who had fallen, to take on their extra strength after their death. And that the women began to run back to their own people.”

  “And so - they are no more.” There was no doubt as to the satisfaction in the Chief’s voice, a satisfaction that Darian shared completely.

  But he did not permit himself to indulge in it; an old Shin’a’in saying was that it was one thing to take pleasure in the defeat of an enemy, but gloating over it for very long made you no better than he.

  “So,” he said, allowing himself a single smile. “Let us talk of more pleasant things. Permit me, Chief, to show you the colors that we have brought. . . .”

  And let me never have to think of Blood Bear again.

  Fourteen

  “Make slow, deep breaths,” Keisha told her sister, who was struggling to get enough air. She wasn’t feeling all that well herself, but it was Shandi and Wintersky who had been hit the worst by what their guide assured them was not a sickness, but due to “only the height of the mountain.” This was mountain sickness, the illness of which Keisha had heard such unsettling tales. Safe to say, no one was making light of it.

  Shandi leaned on Karles’ shoulder, visibly taking calm from her Companion’s presence. She was dizzy, felt as if she were choking, and nauseated; all symptoms, so their guide said blithely, of what he called “mountain fever.” He insisted that coming down off the mountain would cure them, and since Keisha had not been able to find any signs of disease using her Healing Gifts, she was forced to take his word and the word of all the tales that she had heard for it.

  Of all of them, Keisha seemed to have suffered the least. Steelmind, Hywel, and Darian were very short of breath and had killing headaches; Wintersky had both problems and was looking a bit green. Shandi had all of these and shook with cold; they’d bundled her up, but she still shivered, besides being sick and half blind with headache. The nonhumans all showed discomfort in some way, to a varying degree, except for Kelvren, who seemed invulnerable to it all.

  Keisha only suffered from
the headache, which was bad enough. I suppose I should be happy with that, she thought, and tried to will more air into her lungs.

  “We must get over the pass,” their guide insisted. “It will only get worse if we stay here.”

  “Worse?” Shandi moaned. “This can get worse? I can’t see how - ”

  “It will,” the Gray Wolf warrior said firmly. “Fever-dreams, or unconsciousness. We must get over. It will be better then.”

  “All right,” Shandi managed to gasp, and climbed into her saddle. “Let’s go, while I can still ride.”

  With her head feeling exactly like someone had tied a wire around it and was tightening it more with every passing breath, Keisha got into her dyheli’s saddle and waited for the rest to mount. How was the guide managing to be so healthy?

  I suppose he must be used to being this high, she decided. It hardly seems fair, though. They had been traveling through these mountains for three days now, but it was only today that they had started to feel so sick.

  It was a pity they were all so miserable, because the scenery was spectacular; this last of the passes was actually above the clouds, though still below the snow line. It was about as cold in the shade as a late fall day in Errold’s Grove, the full sun was intense and quite hot, and the little white puffs of cloud floating just below them looked like heaps of newly shorn fleeces.

  Below and behind them lay one of many valleys, green and tree-filled; farther back, more mountains, growing blue with distance. Ahead of them lay the notch between two mountains marking the pass; mountains that in turn towered so far above the pass that it made Keisha dizzy to think about it.

  This, so the guide assured them, was the final obstacle they needed to cross. Below this lay what the guide called “the Great Pass.”

  I can’t imagine how Snow Fox got this far, laden with sick people! she thought. They must have been truly desperate to undertake the journey.

  But then she remembered the children of Ghost Cat, so ill with Wasting Sickness they could hardly even feed themselves, and she knew that no parent could see that and not try everything to make it better. With the exception of the now-extinct Blood Bear, these people cherished their children no less than the parents of Valdemar.

  She held on to the saddle-grip, enduring the jarring of her head with each step her dyheli took. She knew it was worse for everyone else - most of all for Shandi, who was as white as Karles’ coat. Karles himself looked positively pale, even for a white “horse.”

  The trail they followed was a slender track threading its way between enormous rocks tumbled from the higher slopes and clumps of brush. At this height, colors had been leached from everything by the intense light of the sun; the bushes and grasses were gray-green, the trunks of the tiny trees gray-brown, the rocks around them pale gray. Here and there were spring flowers - pale blue, pale pink, and white. Only the sky held an intense color, a blue so deep and pure that Keisha longed to be able to dip fabric in it and capture it forever. The only other place she had ever seen a blue that beautiful was when she had looked into Karles’ eyes, just before he had Chosen Shandi.

  They plodded upward, and the top never seemed to get any nearer - then suddenly they were there, at the top of the pass, looking down . . .

  . . . and down . . . and down ....

  Hywel whistled his astonishment; Darian shook his head in disbelief, and Keisha gasped. Even Shandi forgot her misery for a moment and stared.

  Havens - it must be a league or more to the bottom! And it goes on forever!

  “The Great Pass,” their guide said simply. “And here I must leave you. The track down is plain, see? You no longer need my help.”

  He pointed to a much clearer track than the one they had used to climb up here, one that zigzagged down the steep slope (more of a cliff than a slope) from where they now stood.

  The Great Pass; that was far from being any kind of a descriptive name for it. Keisha had pictured a mountain pass like any other - perhaps deeper, certainly longer, since it was supposed to go straight through all the way to Raven territory.

  What she saw, however, beggared imagination.

  It was as if someone had taken a giant knife and carved through the mountains to form a passage. The bottom was as level and flat as a good paved road, and it disappeared in either direction into the mists of distance. Right now the sun was high above them, so the bottom was in full light; she caught a glint of water down there, shining between the branches of trees made so small by distance that she could scarcely make them out.

  “Gods of my fathers,” Darian murmured. “Who could possibly have possessed the kind of magic needed to make such a thing?”

  Only then did Keisha realize that it was magic, and not nature, that had created this place.

  “Huh,” Shandi said, rousing herself out of her misery. “I guess you don’t know your history very well. The northern mage that Herald Vanyel fought, that’s who - and I guess Vanyel must have had even more than he did, since Vanyel stopped him.” She peered off into the south and east, following the gash with her eyes. “It’ll come out just north of the Forest of Sorrows - or it would, if Vanyel hadn’t blocked it. I had no notion this thing still existed.”

  Nor had anyone else, except the northern tribes, who clearly knew very well it existed, and provided easy access to the south. Only luck and Vanyel’s Curse had kept them from taking it all the way into Valdemar in the past - and now, save for that final blockage, the north stood open to invasion.

  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.