Chapter 62: The Pass

The iron mountains weren’t grey at all. They were black.

From the moor, Aren had seen them as a dark line against the stars and naturally assumed they were grey, as mountains are from far away. Up close, climbing them, he finally understood the name. The rock was black and hard and faintly shiny, like old iron left out in the rain, and it rang when you kicked it. Rust-colored streaks ran down the cliffs where water had seeped out of the stone. In the moonlight the whole range looked like the ruins of some enormous forge that had gone cold a thousand years ago.

The road climbed through it in long slow turns cut into the mountainsides. It was a good road, wide and paved in places with square black stones, with low walls on the outer edge where the cliffs dropped away. Old mile markers stood beside it, half buried in snow, carved with the crest of Aldermere on one side and something on the other that centuries of wind had worn away.

They kept carefully off the road, because the road had people on it now.

On the thirteenth night they saw the first soldiers.

A column of at least a hundred was coming up the road from the south in the grey wool and steel of the King’s army. They marched in perfectly good order, four by four, with lanterns on poles at the front and back, and at their head rode an officer on a tall black horse with a white plume on his helmet.

Aren and Roderick lay flat on a ledge in the snow above the road and watched them pass silently.

These weren’t Brask’s tired, hungry men. They walked like soldiers who had eaten well and slept well and been told where they were going. Some carried tall shields and some long spears. Near the middle of the column, six walked apart from the others, without packs or spears, in long grey coats with a silver badge at the collar.

Aren looked at them with Street Fighter’s Instinct and felt something cold go down his back.

[Royal Battlemage. Rank C.]

Six of them, Rank C, walking in the middle of a column on the road to the border.

"That’s not an escort," Roderick whispered.

"No. That’s an army."

They watched the column wind away up the road and around the shoulder of the mountain. Long after it had gone, they could still hear its boots, faintly and steadily, in the cold air.

Peace Summit, Brask had said, and laughed.

’Six battlemages for a peace talk! Somebody’s expecting the peace to go badly.’

They kept to the high ground after that, climbing over black rock and through deep snow where no patrol would follow. It was slow and cold, and it was the hardest climbing Aren had ever done, harder than the ceiling of the Abyss, because in the Abyss there had been no wind.

Here the wind was everything. It came down off the peaks in long screaming gusts that tried to tear them off the rock, and it drove the snow sideways into their faces so hard it stung like sand. At night it dropped to a bitter whisper that went straight through fur and wool and skin and into the bones.

The cold in Aren’s side hated it. It shifted all the time now along the long white scar, restless and hungry. He fed it twice a night, then three times: a stone’s weight, the hardness of a sheet of ice, the friction of the snow under his boot, which taught him to fall very carefully. It was never quite enough.

"Your side’s doing it again." Roderick was watching him press a hand to his ribs.

"It’s hungry."

"Everything up here is hungry. Feed it a mountain."

"Don’t tempt me."

And still, every night before they climbed, they trained. In the wind the New Moon was harder to shape and easier to lose, so he learned to throw it low and short, under the gusts. He learned to step on rock glazed with ice without sliding, and then to step on the ice itself on purpose and land where he meant to.

[New Moon. Mastery: 58% → 60%.][Moonlit Step. Mastery: 43% → 46%.]

On the fifteenth night, he finished his bones.

He had expected it to come like the Skin and the Flesh had, slowly, with a long grinding burn and then a sudden end like a fever breaking.

It came with an avalanche.

They were crossing a steep white slope below a ridge in the dark, roped together, Roderick in front. The snow was deep and soft and quiet, far too quiet. Aren had just enough time to see a long crack open across the slope above them, thin and black like a line drawn with a pen. Then the whole mountainside moved.

It didn’t roar at first. It hissed softly, a soft enormous sound like the sea pulling back from a beach. Then it hit them.

Aren was thrown, rolled and buried instantly. Something struck his chest and something else struck his back and his legs, over and over, white and black and white again, the whole world tumbling. The rope around his waist jerked tight and then went slack. He couldn’t tell which way was up, and he couldn’t breathe, because snow filled his mouth.

There was nothing to use Write-Off on and nothing to touch but white.

When it stopped, he was lying on his back in the dark under the snow, pressed down by a weight like a stone door. He couldn’t move his arms. He could feel every one of his bones, every rib and vertebra, the long bones of his arms and legs, and they were all burning. It wasn’t the slow grinding heat that had lived in them for three weeks. It was much bigger and hotter, all at once, as if every blow he had ever taken had come back to collect.

Then, with a sound he felt rather than heard, deep in the center of each one, something set.

[Rank D: Bone Tempering complete.][Rank D: Blood Tempering cannot begin. Requirement not met.][Strength: 168 → 251][Agility: 162 → 189][Endurance: 197 → 288]

He pushed upward desperately.

The snow on top of him moved. He pushed again with arms that felt like they belonged to someone much stronger, and the snow broke apart and he came up out of it into the freezing night, gasping and coughing and alive.

Roderick was already digging frantically toward him from three paces away, his black cloak white with snow, his bare hands tearing at the drift.

They stared blankly at each other.

"You’re bleeding from the ears."

"So are you."

Roderick touched his own ear, looked at his fingers, and laughed, a short wild sound that echoed across the broken slope. Aren laughed too, without knowing why. They sat in the wreck of the avalanche, two dead men covered in snow and grey blood, and laughed until the wind took the sound away.

’Two hundred and fifty-one strength! A mountain fell on me and I got a raise.’

Later, in a hollow under a rock while Roderick slept, he looked at the window again.

Blood Tempering cannot begin. Requirement not met.

He knew the requirement. He had worked it out on the moor, thinking about what Crane had said in the basement and what the Abyss had done to his body. The skin was tempered by pressure, the flesh by strain, the bones by blows.

The blood needed blood.

Not his own. It needed the blood of a creature far above him, its essence fierce enough to burn through his veins and leave them changed. A Rank C beast at least, and not a few drops of it. Enough to drink. Enough to bathe in.

He had no idea where he would find that in the iron mountains.

On the seventeenth night, he found out.

They were lying on a ledge above the road again when an Imperial patrol came down from the north. These weren’t soldiers in grey. They wore black iron, with the long cloaks the songs called Imperial red, which Aren saw only as dark grey, and tall helmets that covered their whole faces. There were ten of them, on foot and moving quickly. They stopped below the ledge to rest, lit a small fire in the shelter of a boulder, and talked.

Aren didn’t speak their language well, and almost nobody in Aldermere did. But it was close enough to his own, an older, harder version with the words cut short, that if he listened carefully he could follow most of it.

They were talking about the Summit, and the Aldermere column that had passed the day before, and the battlemages and what they meant.

Then a young one with a scar across his chin laughed and said something about the pools.

"...won’t matter," Aren heard. "Half their mages are only C. Captain Voss had the whole garrison in the Blood Pools last month. We go into that fortress, we go in tempered."

Another one said something sharp, and the young one shut up immediately.

Aren lay perfectly still on the ledge and held his breath.

The Blood Pools.

’Well. That’s convenient. Suspiciously convenient. I’ll worry about that later.’

On the eighteenth night, they reached the top of the pass.

The road came around the last shoulder of the last black mountain and stopped, and so did they.

Below them, filling the whole width of the pass from one wall of black rock to the other, there was a fortress.

Aren had never seen anything remotely like it. It wasn’t a castle. It was a wall as tall as a cliff, built straight across the pass, with towers rising out of it every hundred paces and a great gate in the middle large enough for a hundred men side by side. Half of it was grey stone, the stone of Aldermere, with the King’s banners on its towers. The other half was black iron, cold and smooth, with the Empire’s banners, which Aren saw only as dark. The two halves met in the middle at the gate, where a single tower rose higher than all the others.

Kharn.

Lights burned all along the wall, thousands of them. In the valleys below on both sides there were camps, rows and rows of tents, Aldermere’s grey ones on the south side and the Empire’s black ones on the north, with fires burning between them and the faint sound of thousands of voices drifting up the mountain on the wind.

And beyond the fortress, in the valley below the northern wall, there was a glow.

He couldn’t tell its color. Once he would have known. Now it was only light, heavy and dull, like coals under ash. He’d seen that light before, in a burning city at the bottom of the Abyss.

"The mines," Roderick murmured.

Aren nodded grimly.

Somewhere down there, under that glow, were the Blood Pools. And somewhere in that fortress, or those camps, or that mountain, was a man with grey eyes and a silver box who had come all this way for a reason.

Twelve nights since the moor. The Summit was in six days.