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.