“Yes,” said Nicostratus. “In Emesa, they worship Sol under another name — I forget what it is in their own language now — but I know it means ‘the God of the Mountain.’ You can see the writing.”
Otson squinted at the writing for a moment.
“Did any of Libo’s men come from there?” he asked.
Nicostratus looked at them both, momentously.
“Quaestor Rufus visited Antioch,” Nicostratus said. “That’s not far from Emesa. Perhaps he also went there.”
“Or he might have met someone in the one place who came from the other, and gave that to him.”
“Or perhaps, one of the soldiers?”
Otson began perusing the ground again.
“I think that was stolen from one of Libo’s men.”
Tullus squinted at the talisman.
“Here!” Otson called a moment later. He had found footprints in soft earth that lay in a little strip at the base of a low ridge and which was shielded from the elements by a boulder. There were a number of shallow depressions that must have been heel marks, and one distinct imprint of the pad of a bare foot, complete with the four dimples the toes had made. Otson put his hand alongside it, and they saw that the print was smaller than his hand.
Teuser sniffed at the prints and then began tracking. In only a few minutes, they had found a crumbled spot in the rock face that formed a fairly gentle, if rocky, stairway up. Otson turned in place, looking in all directions, when they reached the top of it, then pointed again. Nicostratus saw the second low heap of rocks at once. The shadow that lay beneath them on the slope made them seem to float there uncannily, just above the ground. Standing directly above the pile, Otson could see the first heap, which, although it was below them, was magically visible through what appeared to be a natural scoop in the ground. He drew an imaginary line from that pile to this, turned to see where it pointed, and at once found the next pile. Even in the dimness of the incipient dusk it leapt out at him, neatly framed between a protruding stone and a solitary tree trunk.
They retraced their steps along the natural terrace and found a place to camp. Nicostratus wanted to be out in the open, so they could see everything around them, but Otson pointed out that they would need a windbreak if they didn’t want to freeze. After a hasty meal, Nicostratus sat pondering the talisman they’d found, trying to reconstruct in his mind the long voyage it had taken to get here, the image of a mountain on one side of the world, found on another mountain on the world’s other side.
He awoke once in the night, for a natural enough reason, but he did not budge from his place, nor dare to move. There was motion outside the tent.
“Tullus! Otson!” he said quietly.
Otson awoke first. He looked at Nicostratus, then at Teuser, then snatched at his knife. He dug Tullus in the ribs and Tullus awoke with a start.
“Listen…”
Outside the tent, there was the sound of furtive movement. It was impossible to describe, just a sound of air moving deliberately, like panting, and a rustle that should have been nothing but wind. It did not move like wind. It was now here, now there. The donkey made a sound then, a very strange sound. Tullus got onto his knees and drew his sica, which glinted dully in the gloom. Nicostratus picked up the long stick he had been walking with. Tullus glanced at him and nodded, then at Otson.
They rushed outside all together. Something none of them could see, but that was like a puff of all too solid warm air, streaked toward the slope above them. Tullus ran after it, swiping. They stood listening a long while before they checked the donkey and went back into the tent. Tullus remained sitting by the opening with his sica in his hand until dawn.
When dawn came, Otson and Teuser emerged first into the light, and searched the ground outside for tracks. They found their own.
That day, they followed an invisible thread that linked one cryptic heap of rocks to another. Otson led them, becoming more obviously disconcerted as they went. The way was certain, but the landscape was not. It was only with increasing difficulty that he could identify even major landmarks, including mountain peaks.
“The farther we go on like this,” he said, “the more dependent we are on these piles to get us back.”
“It has to end,” Tullus said, and Nicostratus agreed. They would go on.
It happened when the sun was nearly overhead. Otson had reached the fifteenth heap of stones in the line, and was turning in place to site the next, when his eyes went wide and he shouted with surprise and alarm.
In order to make himself understood, after many failed attempts to say what had happened, Otson took Nicostratus by the shoulders and compelled him to do as he had done. Nicostratus approached the pile, raised his eyes, and turned in place… and it was like looking around the corner of a building. A whole other landscape turned into position before his eyes, as if the pile of rocks at his feet had been the corner of a vast wall, painted with a blandly benign landscape so expertly reproduced that he had mistaken it for the real thing. Now he was seeing behind that wall.
The terrain was riddled with cave mouths. The mountains must have been honeycombed with them. And there were much vaster structures of heaped rock, and rings of upright slabs. The light, too, was different. Unclean. It was like looking through an empty bottle of cloudy glass. The light had warps in it, and an actinic bite that he somehow could taste, like a dry bitterness in his throat. The sun overhead was transformed into a slanted nexus of steely knife edges, cold and venomous. Then, with a start, Nicostratus saw a black object standing motionless in the sky, perhaps half a mile away. It reminded him of a huge black kite, but it was bizarrely fixed in place, like a hole in the sky. The path was entirely distinct now, and it would take them in the direction of that black thing.
Tullus grunted when he observed the change, and Teuser went completely silent and sat down firmly in place, refusing to budge.
“That’s where they went,” Nicostratus said. “I’m sure of it.”
He had formed the idea that perhaps not all of Libo’s party were dead. The prospect of what they might be going through at this moment, if this was the way they had gone, was a strong incentive to find them.
Otson ventured out into the transformed landscape. As he passed by, from Nicostratus’ point of view, Otson almost immediately changed, taking on a bizarrely overcast sort of look, as if there were a dulling film over his image. He was as sharply outlined as everything else, with an even exaggerated clarity, but his appearance took on an artificial lifelessness in there. When he returned again, there was a brief instant when he seemed to loom out at Nicostratus, and then he was standing in the natural sunlight, himself natural again.
The animals took a great deal of persuading, but eventually all of them crossed into that other landscape. A new silence received them on the other side. The air did not move. They passed solitary standing stones with dubious, almost living shapes, and the sun seemed to be plunging toward the horizon more rapidly than it ought to. Nicostratus looked at his own hands in its sickening glare, and saw his own flesh grey as lead and the veins and arteries a curiously pronounced green.
That black thing in the sky watched them come. It shed a polluting radiance. Whenever he looked at it, a sharp aversion lanced Nicostratus’ eyes and brain, and yet he couldn’t stop himself from repeating the experience. They discovered what lay directly beneath the thing after they’d climbed a while. It was a colossal mound which loomed from out of a dense crowd of dead trees whose roots were hidden within a shallow tarn. The top rose high above them, but they looked down at the tarn, which seemed to cling to the ground, a little sideways. But now the glare from that black thing was intolerable up close and they hurried to gain the cover of the trees.