Can they see us yet? he wondered. With their magic tricks? What are they thinking?
“Is that you, Porto?” Endri asked, each word an effort.
“I’m here, lad.”
“I want to go home now. I’m cold.”
“I know. We all want to go home.” He could feel the younger man shivering, although the day was warmer than most had been since they crossed the Rimmersgard frontier. “We have one more thing to see to, that’s all. Then I’ll help you get back to Ansis Pelippé—back to Harborside.”
“Is it still summer?”
Porto was heartened. Endri hadn’t talked this much in days. He hoped it meant that the blackened place in his back was actually beginning to heal, but every time the wind changed direction he could smell the corruption of the young man’s wound. “Yes. Still summer.”
Endri was silent for a while. “They’ll be having the race, the harbor race,” he said at last. “My uncle . . . won it once. He had the biggest arms I’ve ever seen. Like a wrestler. He drowned.”
“How could he win the race if he drowned?” Porto leaned forward, hoping to see a smile, but the gape-mouthed emptiness of Endri’s face was like that of a dead man. And God save me, I’ve seen too many dead men, Porto thought. I want to see people I know again. I want to see my Sida, alive and smiling and far, far away from this cursed, freezing place. Thank the Holy Ransomer for Count Streáwe, who kept Perdruin out of the worst of this dreadful war.
“Uncle didn’t . . . drown then. That was another time.” Endri sighed, but it turned into a cough that Porto could feel rattling the frail chest through both their armor. “It was all another time,” he said when he had his breath back, so softly that Porto had to lean forward again to hear him.
Endri did not say any more and soon his head sagged in sleep as the horse continued to pick its way over the bumpy track that had once been a road as large and as magnificent as the Avenue of Triumph leading to the Sancellan Mahistrevis palace in Nabban. Porto did not know enough about the Norns to guess how long the road had lain like this, all but unused, nor had he heard of a time when the white-skinned northern fairies did anything but lurk in their snowy wastes and plot vengeance against mankind. For a moment the depth of what he did not know, the incomprehensible vastness of history, almost made him dizzy. He looked to the other riders nearby, some Rimmersmen, some southerners like himself, and wondered if the rest thought like he did. By their faces, whatever thoughts they had were just as grim.
Isgrimnur had already grown weary of staring at the mountain, but it had become hard to look at anything else. The great dark cone of Stormspike seemed to swell and spread as they approached until it covered most of the horizon and threatened to pierce the low sky with its sharp peak. Wispy clouds of steam drifted up from crevices in the mountain’s flank, then twined upward until the winds of the upper heights snatched them away, leaving only a few faint wisps to wreathe Stormspike’s head.
Despite the white wisps at its brow, the mountain was not enfeebled; it towered over the smaller peaks nearby like a great thane among his kneeling housecarls. The stripes of snow trailing down from the mountain’s white cap only made its black stone immensity loom larger, as though Nature had sought to restrain it and failed. Yet Isgrimnur and a few thousand mortals planned to bring it under their sway.
“We are fools,” said Sludig from just behind him.
Isgrimnur turned and looked at him. “Fools? Why?”
“Why? By the good God, my lord, look at that. That is no tower or crumbling wall. That is the Lord’s own work, set down in the first days of Creation and still burning with His fires. How can we think to conquer it?”
Isgrimnur was disquieted by how closely Sludig’s doubts echoed his own, but he only said, “If we do God’s work, we need not fear God’s creations, however mighty. Besides, we do not seek to conquer the mountain, old friend, just the creatures hiding within it. All that holds us back is a gate, made by the work of hands, not God.”
“Fairy hands,” said Sludig glumly. “Fairy magic.”
Isgrimnur spotted the Sitha-woman on her white horse just a short distance behind them, her soft gray garments fluttering in the wind. Unlike the rest of the riders, huddled deep in their saddles with hoods pulled close against the flying snow, she seemed utterly unconcerned about such trivialities as wind and weather. “Ho, Lady Ayaminu!” he called. “Will you talk with me?”
She made no discernible movement but her horse sped its pace until she was riding between Isgrimnur and Sludig. “I am here,” she said.
“What of the gate?” He did not trust her forbearance toward the Norns, but she had not yet told him anything false and was the best resource they had until they could send out scouts. “Is it as strong as stories tell? Are there spells or some other Norn trickery protecting it?”
She gave him a look that had a small edge of amusement. “You do not really understand the ways of our people, Duke Isgrimnur. The two great doors of the gate were forged of bronze and witchwood long ago. What you call ‘spells,’ the tools used in making them, are a part of them, not something that has been put on like a coat of whitewash on a mud hut.”
“Are you saying that we cannot knock them down, even if we rebuild the great Bear? Our weapons are iron—we can smash through any bronze. But this witchwood . . .” He shook his head. “That is something I do not understand, a magical wood as strong as forged metal.”
Ayaminu made a swift gesture with one hand, as though catching a bird in mid-flight and then letting it go. “Anything can be knocked down. And even witchwood can be broken. Surely you have shattered a few Hikeda’ya swords in battle, so you know that it can be destroyed. But the older it is—the closer it is to its roots in the Garden and the purer its preparation—the more difficult it is to destroy. The gates are old. They have stood for thousands of years. Can you defeat them with a single iron ram? Only the Dance will tell.”
“The dance?” Isgrimnur saw that Sludig was glaring. His liegeman did not like talk of spells and magic even in the context of preparing for a fight.
“The Dance of Time,” the Sitha said, weaving her fingers in a swift pattern the duke could not follow. “The Dance of What Will Be. It is going on all around us and inside us. It seems to follow a set course of steps, but in truth there is no fixed pattern.”
Isgrimnur scowled. “In other words, you don’t know if we can knock the gate down.”
“Of course not.” This time she actually smiled. “But the tide seems to be with you. If there is ever a time when the gates might fall, that time is now. But many things still remain to be seen, and many steps must still be danced.” Before Isgrimnur could protest the uselessness of her answers, Ayaminu pointed to a tall ring of standing rocks at the nearest edge of the ruined outer city. “There,” she said. “Do you see that vast jumble of unroofed stone? That was once the great Sky Palace, the observatory where the Queen’s Celebrants watched the stars.”
“What happened to it? And why do you point it out?”
“What happened was that it was abandoned when men became too many and too fierce, as was all the rest of Nakkiga-That-Was, the city outside the mountain we are approaching. The reason I show it to you is because it would make a good place for camp. You do not wish to get too close to the mountain before you are ready, I think.”
“Of course not. We will need to send out our scouts.”