The Eastern Mountain Pass

At first he took the logging road, well-trodden and wide, until its course split into too many tangled branches for him to follow, and the cries of 'Tree~faaaall!' faded in the distance. He then took the hunters' paths, narrow and marked with spots of ochre, a colour that had been sieved from the clay of the silver river and painted onto bark, with resin, to show the way home. As he was heading in the opposite direction, that proved less than helpful to him. For one day he joined a group of trappers – 'no 'eroics,' the leader drawled, 'we jest check what the snares 'e've caught and 'ead back. But we'd welcome another blade.' The bird-dragons in the forests around Port Argentium were known to be ferocious. Thankfully, they did not meet any. The trappers were careful, and they taught him how to wrap meat in leaves and string for transport. They even gave him some cooked gibbets for his dinner, when they departed. Perhaps, Gray assessed with a grin, it was out of respect for the insanity of a man who would travel alone into the deep forest.

After that he followed the river – an affluent of the Argentium. He met people only twice the following week – small homesteads, where he was welcomed with the unfriendly ends of weapons first, and with the best food available second, in exchange for stories and pinches of salt. He looked, one lady of the house opined, too polished to be a bandit. Here, his soot-coloured clothes held no meaning. His oversized sword was but insurance. Gray asked about the man he was following – yes, he'd passed through about a month ago, they said, together with a porter and two rangers. Gray traded some salt and other fineries for a tinderbox, and a small axe. 'We call it Gilt. The river,' one homesteader volunteered. 'Because it passes over the yellow earth, but also because it lies. Be careful.'

After that, it was just him and his steps.

All days were the same. Wake up before dawn, gather camp, cover his traces, walk on. Have a cold meal, walk on, find a safe place, start a fire, eat, collapse. Walk on. That felt oddly...peaceful. He began to walk in his dreams. And every day was different. He passed by marvels that sometimes stopped him in his tracks. A lake full of water-lilies. Strange ruins in the forest, circular and carved with swirling bas-reliefs. Something twinged in his chest, for he realized that he could feel joy again.

The ruins that were actual buildings had mostly been occupied by wildlife, but every now and then Gray would wrap his cloak around him and curl to sleep atop a large, alien chess-piece structure. The craft style reminded him of the subterranean amphitheatre that Nina had struggled to hide from him. How much, Gray wondered, looking down, was buried under the soil of this jungle? Perhaps even the answer to how could one avoid the next world's end.

Slowly, Gray was beginning to understand the joy that Nina found in travelling.

He cared not for the man he was meant to find. Aleku, as the prospector's name went, may have been valuable enough for someone in the empress's office to send the griffin-riders with supplies, but he was also likely dead. The hut-basecamp had been found empty. The subsequent flight had been unable to retrieve him or his colleagues. Griffins were too precious to risk on the increasing autumn winds; Gray wasn't. He'd made sure he was being paid enough for it.

What bothered Gray more was his expedition's lack of replicability.

The assassin had a vague feeling that he could no longer assess danger. He had strengthened his body enough against poison that, apart from that black-spotted white frog that left the left side of his body paralysed for one day, Gray could no longer be sure if what he ate, or drank or touched could kill a man – or a hundred. In addition, his cloak shielded him from the notice of much with a mind, often without his notice. Once, a family of bobcats decided to mistake his sleeping form for shelter, and he'd had to pick kittens off himself at tops speed before the mother returned. Yet some dangers did not have minds. One day, he had walked into the river to cool his feet, and stepped onto a stone whose many barnacles proceeded to turn inside-out and attach to his sole. It took enough flesh to remove them, even with a red-hot knife edge, that his limp still bothered him at times.

About three weeks later, the terrain started going up, steeply. By now, Gilt was a young thing of a river, a creek, sparkling and heady, with temperament enough to crack rocks. Gray had reached the eastern mountains. The traveller welcomed the quiet, the cooler air, the sparser forests. He walked more slowly here, and often had to retrace his steps as impassable landforms kept blocking his way when he wasn't looking. But the puzzle of it kept him entertained. There were strange landforms here, underground rivers that he could hear under fields of flat boulders covered by thick moss. The remains of two old camps crossed his path, but no other clues. At night, the sky was filled with strange howls, and stars shimmered impossibly bright.

It was getting colder, but Gray paid it no mind. Pine-like trees shaped stretches of dark, quiet forests. When he found an open vantage point, he struggled to match the sharp peaks in the distance with the wiggly blobs on the griffin-rider's sketch. He supposed he should try to cross the mountains. Then he saw a narrow edge, a thread of a path, heading between two peaks, that was not on any map. The peaks seemed so close together that they nearly touched. Could the previous investigations have missed it? Could the prospecting crew have taken it? Gray decided to follow.

On one side, a near-vertical rock wall. On the other, a precipice. With a hand against the wall, Gray walked on.

The wind picked up as he was halfway up. It had icy teeth. Then a snowflake hit his face, and Gray looked up to wonder where had all the sun gone. Gray paid it no mind. To him, snow was something that happened for a day or two around New Year's.

He walked on.

A snowflake hit Gray in the eye.

He blinked, and became aware of the sound of the wind. Of the way he had been holding his cloak at his chest so it wouldn't whip around him, for...how long? He slowly extended and clenched his fingers, while he looked to the side. The sky seemed so wide. Listened. The wind rolled against the stony sides of the mountains like the waves of a great ocean. With the isolation that he had been enjoying for the past weeks, Gray's mind seemed to put even words in that rumble of air through the dwarf trees. He called it the white room effect, and he had built one such place in the limestone cliff back at base camp. Nina would not find it, and even if she did, the girl would never understand the terrible allure of four empty walls. Gray walked on.

The voice repeated, clearer now.

Gray did not stop. Not immediately. Moments later, sheltered in the shadow of a juniper and a rock, he noticed the voice approaching. He heard footsteps, though it could have been an illusion of the wind. Could it be one of the people he had been looking for?

Soon, the stranger came into view. Gray glanced down on his path, and saw himself.

The sky stuttered silent. Himself, or the fairytale version of. A dark cloak, black with thread-of-gold details to his own fine dark grey. Hair, as white as his, in a strand pulled by a gust of wind from under their hood. The man thought of what he knew of the Mists' proficiency to mess with time, and wondered what would he do if he had to meet himself.

For the stranger, the trail of steps seemed to end. Had the last few steps seemed...heavier? Slightly behind the newcomer, a shadow that may have not been important in their hurry, seemed to shift. Or perhaps he had been spotted much earlier. By the side of a juniper, Gray bowed.

“Traveller.” He spoke.

Just under his pack, above his left shoulder, there was the hilt of a sword.

“Evidently,” Gray spoke, when asked if he knew their location. “We are here.”

A few snowflakes passed between them. Gray stared, with his eyes of washed-out ice, into a gaze even more colourless than his own, into a face as expressionless as his own. A scar of gold crossed it. Snowflakes did not cling to it, did not melt.

He thought of trees around Port Argentium, rumoured to mimic people and lead those approaching them to their doom, he thought of the yuki-onna of his old land. A kiss, of unspeakable longing and burning frost, in exchange for one's life.

The stranger sounded calm. Too calm? With the wind, it was impossible to tell if he was speaking to a man or a woman.

“As to the issue of where 'here' is...” Gray continued. “That is an issue perhaps best discussed outside of the elements. Do your allies have a camp nearby, where we could talk?”

Are you alone here, Gray wondered. A mapmaker, lost, without a map?

“If not, then we may need to find shelter.” He pondered. He found himself having to speak louder in order to hear himself, and became aware of his face burning with cold. “We could go back...” His head tilted slightly. “ Or forward:” Backwards would lead them back into the forest, eventually, but the whole intervening flank of the mountain was exposed the wind. It might explain, some small part of his mind added, why nothing grew tall there, why all that grew was lopsided and twisted, broken into submission. Forwards pitted them against the wind, but reaching the deep mountain pass should shelter them.

In the wind, even the stranger's shadow seemed to shift. From below, barely distinguishable from the wind, came the hair-raising howl of a wolf. Wolves. Several.

“I propose forward.”

There was something off about the newcomer that went deeper than the skin.

Words. Gray pondered, while following Safa. The steep terrain claimed his attention, lest he cartwheel to the bottom of the precipice. Words did not quite fit together. One did not 'map' land that one was lost in. Too many words. 'My ship sank far out at sea.' To explain a missing wreck? Gray slipped, and caught himself against a sharp-edged juniper. Snowflakes scattered. Having been blissfully away from people for so long, his mind crackled against the subtleties. Step by careful step. Perhaps he was imagining things. Dialects of the common tongue varied. He had met, perhaps, one as uninterested in human interaction as himself...or one wise enough to know that he could not be trusted.

Even so, Gray preferred to have Safa walk in front of him. He wanted to keep an eye on them...and on their twisting shadow.

Shadows magic was as old as the earth – perhaps older than language. Much like blood magic, or name magic...“You can call me Gray,” the man answered. Anyone who tried to steal his name was clearly in the mood for wrestling teeth out of a tiger. Or just sociable.

There was power in intent, in silence. They walked for about a watch, as darkness fell around them and light seemed to come mostly from the large snowflakes that kept on falling. His body told him it was too early for nightfall, even as the constant effort made him feel bruised all over. Inside his leather gloves, his fingers hurt. Safa kept a surprisingly constant pace. Despite their lithe frame, they never looked tired – at most, stiff. Gray paused to look down at his past path. Earlier that morning, he could gaze all the way to the green river-valley below. Now, he barely saw a few feet away. He helped guide them mostly from memory, but a thin blanket of snow now covered the ground, making landmarks look flat and unnatural. It somehow made everything feel quiet even as the wind howled around them.

Woven through the wind, the wolves. Their calls were distant enough to have Gray double-guessing himself yet, once he considered them as a pattern, there was no doubt that they were getting closer. And with them too, there was something wrong.

Gray was fairly sure that wolves were not meant to sound liquid.

“Keep on guard.” He told Safa.

He was the rear guard. He kept his eyes open, even as the blizzard burned them. Clenching his fingers, he found them at once painful and numb. When they reached a snow-dusted rock wall to their right, he welcomed its shield. They kept walking. Once, down below, he saw a flicker of eyes.

“They'll be upon us soon.” He said, frozen lips barely moving above Safa's shoulder. His arm pointed right ahead. There, the rock wall crashed down into a precipice, just about at the point it would turn left into the more sheltered zone. The wall was near-vertical, impassable, except for a barely guessed ledge of rock. From earlier, he knew that it continued. It could be treacherous to navigate, but also improve their defence.

“Run to the ledge, if you can. Prepare your weapon.”

Snow much like this fell around New Year's, in his old land, for the high nobility to express the appropriate amount of wonder at, in the appropriate style of poetry, wearing the seasonally-appropriate colours in the approved colour combinations (three layers of increasingly lighter purple robes, followed by four layers of white, like his disguise had been, was old-fashioned; two layers of purple showed poor taste; an orange overcoat was rakish and daring). It fell on the heads of the laundry-maids, who had to wash all those robes in water that was boiling to start with and freezing before the end. It fell on the rice fields, the harbours, the pleasure-quarters, where the fashion had his informants smiling through their discomfort as they paraded down the streets in brocade and sandals. It fell on hay roofs and wood and tile, on huts and houses and mansions and castle. In the castle courtyard, it fell on the black stone of the tower that was a prison where people were broken. It was cold in the Tower, save for his quarters and for those of his prisoners, which he kept warm; the guards captain had complained that those on the death row lived better than him, and His Highness had asked if he would like to visit. And the snow kept falling like a dream.

Gray's foot slipped. He realized he was running, and that his mind had wandered. He wondered if that meant the danger wasn't so great after all. His eyes could barely follow his travel companion that was right in front of him. He should have lit up a torch a while ago. It was not like there was a lack of branches around.

Why had not he thought of it?

The cold here was different from the cold in his land. That one sunk into your muscles, slowly seeped your strength. This cold ripped your flesh up and bit down straight into the bone.

He ran. He followed the stranger's fluttering cloak as one would a mirror image - he fell – he ran again. When Gray moved his hands, they hurt. When he stopped moving them, it's like they weren't there.

The rocky ledge. They'd made it. It almost took Safa speaking for him to realize it. The wind was quieter now. A thin layer of snow varnished the side of the wall like stucco, but it seemed older. The path he had seen continued into a narrow grassy plain, some way away...except for a portion of five meters or so, which was missing. They were trapped. By then, the assassin had taken out his sword. The familiar weight of it (two times that of a normal sword its size) reassured him just as the way he could not feel the hilt in his hands, did not.

“I shall cover us. You cover my back.” He said.

At the corner they'd just turned, he heard the pack gathering, grumbling, growling, presumably reckoning whom to send ahead. Him and Safa could not fit side-by-side; the wolves might not either. He did not know much about nature ('Dirt. Dirt all around,' the old shudder of disgust went across his skin), but something about these animals in particular felt wrong.

Gray thought again of the cold. He thought of his sister dying, in a cold room in the Tower, of that terrible cough that sounded like her lungs tearing. The torturer had killed people in many ways, yet he loathed- Why had he thought of that? The wolves. They sounded...sick. Wrong. That bubbling sound in the throat. A shadow finally went past the corner, its steps smooth and janky at the same time.

It was not a wolf.

As it came into view, the creature appeared as big as a calf. Wolf-shaped, or rather the shape a wolf might have after they've been dragged through tar and dirt and dirt and whacked out of shape with a poker. Was that a...branch? coming out of its ear? The tar-like substance covering it was dripping on the frozen ground. Gray dug his heels better. Here, the snow had time to melt, then freeze again: a careless step, and they would slide down all the way to hell.

The thing growled at them, its eyes red as if rabid, glowing. It jumped.

Gray's sword was ready; he moved almost without thinking.

He missed.

He had aimed for the neck; the sword bit into its shoulder and side. It should have still disabled the thing, but the beast did not seem to have been told that. It felt like fighting in a dream. Pinned by the weapon, it pushed madly ahead, reaching with its jaws. Its maw smelled like a cadaver. Gray slid back on the ice. He bent his knees. When his heel struck rock, with a grunt, he put all his strength into the blade, twisted it, and threw the beast off the cliff.

By then, another of those creatures had made it past the corner. A smaller, sleeker beast. All right, next-

His sword was on the ground. He had heard it fall.

His frozen fingers had failed to hold on to his own sword.

“Now.” He said.

All that Gray could do right then was to twist out of the way, allowing Safa space to maneuver.