Chapter 53: North of the Ash

They walked for nine days before the land stopped looking like a wound.

It happened slowly. The burned hills behind them gave way to scrub, and the scrub gave way to long grey grass that rolled under the wind like the back of some enormous sleeping animal. The air lost its taste of smoke. The clouds, which had hung over Veilrest like a lid, drew apart and let the sky through, hard and pale and very high. And somewhere in the second week, without anyone remarking on it, they stopped looking over their shoulders.

Fel still dreamed of the village. He dreamed of the steps of the Hall, and of Pim’s spoon lying in the ash, and he woke each time with his hand clenched so tightly around the hilt of the golden saber that his fingers ached. But the dreams came less often, and when they came, they no longer left him gasping. They left him cold and quiet and clear, which was worse, and also better.

Old Clatter carried them without complaint. He ate whatever the road offered, sang to himself in the evenings, and had developed a distinct fondness for Brannoch, who fed him honeyed oats from the palm of his enormous hand and never once flinched when the beetle’s mandibles clicked an inch from his fingers.

“He likes you,” said Thara, from the top of the saddle. She was lying flat on her back across the reed roof with a hatchet balanced on her nose. “It’s disgusting. Nobody likes you. You are made of rocks.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“I’m just saying. I’ve been feeding him dried plums for six years and he’s never once sung for me.”

“He sings for you.”

“He sings at me. It’s different.” The hatchet slid off her nose, and she caught it without looking. “He sings at me the way a lord sings at a servant who’s spilled the wine.”

“You did spill the wine,” said Veyra.

“That was one time!”

“It was a barrel.”

“It was a small barrel.”

Fel, who was sitting on the forward bench with the black sword across his knees, felt something loosen in his chest. He did not smile. But he listened, and was grateful, and thought that perhaps this was what Thara was for. She was a lantern with a loud voice. She walked into every silence and set it on fire, and in a company that carried what this one carried, someone had to.

The road climbed. They had left the High Road at the river fork on the third day, since the High Road ran east to Sorticia and the Ashen Hills lay due north, and for a while they had followed an old trade track that wound between low hills the color of pewter. Now even the track was fading. Some mornings it vanished entirely for an hour at a time, and Veyra would climb down and walk ahead, her bow in her hand and her long pale braid swinging, reading the ground like a page.

On the tenth morning she stopped.

She stood very still in the middle of the track, with one hand raised. Old Clatter halted at once, mid-stride, his front claw hovering. Behind her, in the saddle, everyone fell silent.

“What is it?” Fel whispered.

“Smell.” Her nostrils flared. “Wet dog. And something rotten under it.”

“Well, that’s not suspicious at all,” said Thara, sitting up. The hatchet appeared in her hand. “How many?”

“I cannot tell. The wind is wrong.” Veyra crouched and laid two fingers in the dust. “Paws. Many. They have been walking beside the road for some time. Perhaps since last night.”

“Following us?”

“Pacing us.” She straightened. “Cinderjackals. They hunt in packs, in the Ashen Hills, and they follow the smoke of fires. We lit three in four nights.”

Fel looked at the grass. It rippled in the wind, long and grey and perfectly innocent. “I don’t see anything.”

“You will not,” said Brannoch. He had risen. The great war-spear came off his back with a soft rasp of leather, and the round shield swung down onto his arm. “They are patient.”

“How dangerous are they?”

“Alone, a dog,” said Veyra. “Together, a problem. Do not let them reach the saddle. Do not let them flank the beetle. Brannoch, left. Thara, the roof. Fel…”

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine. But you are the only one of us who can stand in the open and not die at once, so stand in the open.” Her mouth twitched, very slightly. “Try not to be eaten.”

“That’s a recurring theme,” said Fel.

He climbed down the ladder. His boots hit the dust. He drew Falling Star in his right hand and the golden saber in his left, and the ring in his palm warmed against the hilt, a small, steady, familiar pulse, like a second heartbeat.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

For a long moment nothing happened.

Then the grass moved.

It was not the wind. The wind moved the grass in long soft waves, and this was a thin, quick, purposeful ripple, running parallel to the road on both sides, and it was running in a circle. Fel counted three lines of it, then five, then gave up. A low, bubbling snarl came out of the grey. Something white flashed, a flicker of teeth, and a pair of narrow yellow eyes rose over the top of the stems and fixed on him.

The jackal was the size of a pony. Its fur was the color of cold embers, black on top and glowing a dull red at the roots, as though a fire were banked inside it. Its lips were drawn back from a mouth full of slender, curved, needle-bright teeth. Smoke curled from its nostrils.

“Oh,” said Fel. “Those are bigger than I thought.”

“They always are,” said Thara cheerfully, and threw a knife.

It took the jackal in the throat, and the beast dropped without a sound. That was the signal. The whole field erupted. From the grass on both sides, a dozen, perhaps fifteen, black shapes came pouring toward the road, low and fast and silent, with their red-rooted fur streaming and their yellow eyes fixed on the beetle.

Fel did not think. He had learned that much on the long road from Tohei. When the moment came, thinking was a debt you paid later, with interest. He stepped forward and met the first one in the air.

The black sword went in under its jaw. The saber opened its flank. The animal screamed and fell across his boots, and he kicked it clear and turned just in time to catch the second on the flat of the blade, a hard, heavy, snapping weight that drove him back a step. Teeth clacked a hand’s breadth from his face. He could smell it: hot fur, rot, and old ash. He drove the saber up through its chest.

Behind him came the crack of Veyra’s bow, three times, so fast it was almost one sound. Three jackals dropped in mid-leap. To his left, Brannoch simply stood where he was, and the pack broke against him like a wave against a cliff. The war-spear swept out once, flat, and four animals went sprawling. The shield came down on a fifth with a noise like a dropped anvil. Brannoch’s expression did not change.

From the roof of the saddle, Thara’s hatchets flashed. She was laughing. She had a hatchet in each hand and she leaped from the roof to the top of Old Clatter’s head and from there to the ground and back again, a small, green-haired whirlwind. “Four!” she shouted. “Five! Brann, I’m beating you!”

“Mm.”

“Six!”

“Eight,” said Brannoch.

“You can’t count the ones you squashed!”

Old Clatter had joined the fight. He did not appear to have been asked. A jackal darted in beneath his belly, aiming for the soft joint at the base of one leg, and the beetle lowered his great horned head, almost delicately, and flung it twenty feet through the air. It hit the ground, rolled, and did not get up. Old Clatter hummed with satisfaction.

It was all over in less than a minute.

Fel stood in the middle of the road with his chest heaving and both swords dripping. There were nineteen bodies in the grass. The rest, a few stragglers, had broken and fled, and Veyra’s last arrows chased them into the hills. A thin smoke rose from the dead animals. The smell of burned hair hung in the air.

He looked down at himself. He was bleeding from a shallow scratch on his forearm. That was all.

“That was…” He stopped. “That was easy.”

“Yes,” said Veyra.

“Is that normal? After everything? I thought…”

“A month ago, it would not have been easy.” She slid an arrow into her quiver and looked at him, her violet eyes steady. “A month ago, you could not hold a sword in one hand, and you did not know where to put your feet. Now you do.” A pause. “You have changed, Fel.”

He did not know what to say to that. He looked at the black blade in his right hand. The ruby in its guard was dark and quiet, and no voice spoke from it, but a warmth ran up the hilt into his wrist, like a held breath, and he thought of a white room and a woman’s voice. Each time you call upon me.

Not yet, he thought. I do not need you yet.

The warmth faded.

“The tails are good eating,” said Brannoch.

Everyone turned to look at him.

“What? They are.” He crouched and began, with great gentleness, to skin the nearest jackal. “Smoked, with a little salt. Better than the oats.”

“I am not eating a dog,” said Thara.

“It is not a dog.”

“It looks like a dog!”

“It is a jackal.”

“That’s a kind of dog!”

Veyra put her face in her hand. Fel laughed, a short, startled bark, and heard it carry across the grey grass and come back, thin and strange, as if from very far away.

They ate the tails that night. Thara had three helpings and refused to admit it.

The sky changed on the twelfth day.

Fel noticed it first as a darkening along the northern horizon, a long low smear of purple and grey that he took for a storm. It did not move. It did not grow. It simply sat there, enormous and patient, and as they climbed through the afternoon it rose slowly out of the haze and took on edges, and shape, and weight.

“That,” said Veyra, “is the Ashen Range.”

Fel stared.

He had seen mountains. He had lived beneath the white cliffs of Veilrest for a month and been dwarfed by them every day. But those had been hills, he realized, compared with this. The range ran across the whole northern sky from the left edge of the world to the right, a wall of black and slate and snow, and in the middle, higher than all the rest, a single peak rose like a broken tooth. Its summit was lost in cloud. Its flanks were scarred with long streaks of rust and black, and from a crack near its crown, a thin ribbon of smoke rose straight up into the heavens and never wavered.

“Karzhul,” said Brannoch quietly.

“It is still burning?”

“No. It died a thousand years ago. The smoke is from the forge.” Veyra’s eyes did not leave the mountain. “The dwarves have a tunnel that runs from the old volcano’s throat to the lowest hall of their city. They have used the heat of the earth for ten thousand years, and the smoke you see is only what escapes.”

“That’s a thousand miles away.”

“It is closer to three hundred. But yes.” She almost smiled. “It is a very large mountain.”

“And there are two more?” He squinted. “I thought you said three peaks.”

“Two more. They stand beside the great one, one on each side, like attendants beside a throne. You cannot see them from here.” She turned from the horizon. “We will reach them in about three weeks, if nothing goes wrong.”

“Something will go wrong,” said Thara.

“Something always goes wrong,” said Veyra. “That is why we plan for three weeks and not two.”

Fel looked at the smoke, at the thin straight thread that rose from the mountain’s crown, and felt something old and hungry stir in the back of his mind. There, said Gideon’s voice, quiet and dry. There is where the answers are, boy. Go on.

He did not answer. But he gripped the sword a little tighter.

Behind him, in the saddle, the others had begun to argue about supper.