As he made his way back to the camp he wondered at the landscape that lay before them on their journey. Rak and Sarek both seemed keenly ashamed whenever the name Barak-nor was spoken. It sounded a harsh and cruel place, perhaps almost as forbidding as the farak gorin. But it could not be worse than Raheen.
Gawain felt a little pleased that when he was thirty paces out from camp, he heard the creak of bows drawing, spaced widely apart. He paused, and squatted, and waited. No challenge came, no shafts were released. Silence, until Gwyn's gentle snuffling carried through the night air, and bows creaked as strings relaxed. Gawain stood, and strode quietly into camp.
Again he squatted, and began to cut a strip of frak from a lump while he whispered his instructions. "Tomorrow before dawn, I and Sarek and Rak will move ahead to survey the land. The rest of you must remain alert, and take cover. We will no longer be able to travel so openly in daylight."
"Did you see anything?" Rak whispered.
"Nothing. I will wake you before dawn. Who has the watch?"
"Valin is higher up the slope." Elayeen said softly, "And I have the next watch."
Gawain nodded in the gloom. "At daybreak you must muffle the horses' hooves. Move around the point, and settle on the slopes facing the Teeth. Do not proceed around the track to the south until we have returned. Understood?"
Nods, and no denials.
Gawain looked around for his bedroll, and spied it laying beside a boulder, next to Elayeen's. Without hesitation, he strode over to it, laid down, and within moments was asleep.
Dawn found Gawain creeping through the trees with Rak and Sarek, almost to the point he'd reached the previous night. When the sun rose, it shone brightly, and Gawain sighed as he closed his eyes. He would have preferred a sky full of dense black thunderclouds, not a sparkling parody of summer before spring had arrived. Not now.
Gawain paused, and sniffed the air. Again, the acrid earthy scent, until it was lost on the breezes. He glanced north, out across the farak gorin, looking for signs of movement. There were none. He raised his hand, and the others moved off again, quietly, chirped on their way by feeble and sparse birdsong.
An hour later they halted once more, and Gawain shielded his eyes with his hand against the glare of the early morning sun. He held his breath, staring at the broad expanse of shimmering brown bitchrock that seemed to flow all the way to the distant horizon. Then he turned his head to the south, and let out that breath in a long, silent oath.
Before him lay a landscape beyond imagining. Where Raheen was a flat and featureless plain of ash, the Barak-nor was a ghastly pock-marked wasteland of craters and tiny mountains of jagged glazed rubble. When Gawain turned his gaze to the hills slightly to the southwest, he stared in disbelief. It looked for all the world as though a giant had cut a vast chunk from the Threlland highlands, leaving a sheer cliff where once gentle slopes had run down to the plain beneath them.
He scanned the landscape, agog, taking in the tiny dwarfmade mountains of jagged ore-slag, the glazed remnants of the great fires that had melted the metal from the ore. Nothing moved, but some of the craters he could see were deep, perhaps as deep as the great rift beneath the Teeth. He couldn't tell, for most were rimmed with high walls of spill and slag, and even had he stood upon the top of the hill that had been sliced in two, he doubted he could have seen into all the craters.
Sea-breezes occasionally wafted in from the distant ocean, vying with the northerly downdraft from the Teeth. They carried a fresh hint of salt air, but they were ephemeral, and in their aftermath Gawain was assailed by that strange acrid and earthy odour. It was as though the great gaping wounds in the land were festering, and the odour spoke of decay and infection. The scene below him was awful, almost volcanic, and when Gawain glanced over at Rak and Sarek, he saw them slumped against trees, eyes downcast and brimming with shame and loathing.
A glint, in the distance, too brief for Gawain to locate. He stared at the general area, to the southeast, and waved a hand to attract Rak and Sarek's attention. They caught his movement, and followed his gaze. Again, a few moments later, a glint. Sunshine reflecting off metal. Gawain frowned, and began silently counting. When he reached twenty, the glint sparkled once more. Again he counted. Twenty, and then another glint. Gawain smiled grimly, and eyed the terrain once more, and motioned Rak and Sarek to him.
"A watchman." Gawain whispered.
"More likely a trick of the sun, shining on ore-slag." Rak sighed.
"No. Every twenty counts. A watchman on patrol, walking, turning, walking, turning. See."
They watched, and counted, and Sarek nodded in agreement.
"Do you doubt me now, my brother?" Gawain asked, his voice flat.
"We must see them all, my friend, for Eryk to believe us."
"Do you know an easy route there?" Gawain nodded towards the sloping sides of the great crater from which the regular glints of sunlight flashed.
"No." Rak sounded pained. "I have never set foot on the Barak-nor. I know of no-one who has. I saw it once, as a child, from the top of the hill. My father brought me here, for my education."
"A harsh lesson."
"Our ancestors did this. This is their legacy. We are not proud of it, Traveller. That is why no-one ventures near. It is too painful."
"Then look long and hard, my friends, for that is what lays in store for all the southlands if Morloch is not defeated."
They sat for an hour, Sarek drawing a map on a roll of calfskin, and on every count of twenty, a glint from the top of the far distant crater wall, until the sun moved too high for the reflection to reach them.
"He has a tedious duty, that one." Sarek muttered.
"Yet maintains it without pause or deviation." Rak agreed.
"That is the nature of our enemy. They are fixed in their purpose. Relentless. Oblivious to personal discomfort. I daresay that watchman will continue that duty until he drops dead in his tracks, or is relieved."
"Still, we must see them all, for Eryk's sake."
"Aye. Are you done, Sarek?"
"I am."
"Are you confident that the map will guide us unerringly to that place?"
Sarek glanced at his map, and then out across the Barak-nor. "Aye."
"Then let us return to the others. We must all commit this map to memory, and then rest. An hour after sunset, we set out into that foul landscape."
Rak sighed, and nodded, and they set off.
The rest of the group had followed Gawain's instructions to the letter, and were encamped in the trees on the slope of the point facing the Teeth. From the campsite, the farak gorin could be seen stretching away to the east, but nothing of the Barak-nor could be seen. Perhaps it was just as well.
Gawain cast a critical eye around them while they gathered expectantly. The horses had been tethered in the trees, bedrolls laid up the slope behind the trunks of tall evergreens so they could not be observed from the north.
"Sarek has drawn a map, you should all study it well. An hour after sunset we set out, down onto the plain and around the point to the Barak-nor. The terrain is uneven, and difficult."
Sarek unrolled the map and they squatted on the damp earth to study it, as Gawain pointed out the route.
"It is essential that the horses' hooves are muffled. And once we set foot on the Barak-nor, we shall not speak, except in whispers a hair's breadth from ears. We cannot take the chance of alerting the enemy. This is our goal…" Gawain pointed to the great crater Sarek had drawn. "The watchman we saw is positioned overlooking the north and the west. We must move around then, here, to come upon them from behind. I doubt they will have set a watch on the land towards the coast."