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.
“We would - if we can find any,” Darian replied. He didn’t have to add anything; she’d seen the condition of the walls on the way down herself. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of caves. “If I have to, I can use magic to enlarge a cave or fissure that is already there, depending upon the conditions at the time. I could maybe make us a shelter, before there were any rains, but that would put out an easily readable magical signature. It’s best if we just make a camp as usual, though, because I’d rather not advertise to whatever may be out there.”
They could camp on the trail itself, but that carried its own risks, and how many more trails would they find as they made their way up the Pass?
She resolved not to think any more about it. They would be vigilant, and improvise. There had been too many surprises on this journey already to try to anticipate all the possibilities and plan for them. Meanwhile, she could gather wood and water, and do what she could to make certain that none of them would suffer any long-term effects from their mountain sickness.
Steady marching brought them to the end of the Pass in three days, and they had pressed themselves to do so in that short a time. The terrain, at least, provided nothing to impede them; it must have been an easy trip for that long-ago army that Vanyel defeated.
The tall mountains around them never grew lower, but the valleys between grew broader - and wetter. More of their time was spent crossing valley floors, some of them thickly greened valleys that were filled with plants that were entirely new to Steelmind. Here they did find furtive signs of people, but never saw any. Kuari reported that the tribes he saw were all small, no more than twenty or thirty people altogether, and they kept away from the travelers and their strange beasts and stranger allies.
More streams joined with theirs, and they started to see fish more abundantly. With that, Wintersky began throwing his line in every time they camped, and they enjoyed the results of his labor.
The end of the third day brought them to the end of the Pass; it opened out into one of those broad valleys, heavily forested, green, and wreathed with mist. All that day Keisha had noticed the clouds becoming thicker overhead, and the air growing more humid, although there was no sign that it was about to rain.
“Hurrrr,” Kel said, as he landed beside them. “Thisss isss like the Haighlei Forrressstssss, except that it isss not ssso hot.” He looked about with interest. “The trrreessss arrre asss big, and it isss damp therrre, like thisss.”
Moss and lichen grew thickly underfoot and on the trunks of the trees; and moss hung from the boughs high overhead. All of the trees were varieties of conifer or evergreen, and some were awe inspiring in their size, even to someone who was used to a Vale and the huge trees that grew there. These giants towered above their heads, so high that their tops were lost to sight among the branches of lesser trees.
Those trunks were like great, smooth columns, without any branches for such distances that Keisha couldn’t see how they could possibly be climbed. This was how they differed from the Vale trees, which branched out no more than two or three stories above the ground; these trees went on forever without branching out. It was unlikely that anyone would be using these trees to house an ekele any time soon, unless they built from the ground up!
But the raptors and Kel all loved the new surroundings, and cheerfully went out on scouting forays while the rest moved away from the mouth of the Pass and found a secure site to set up camp.