Page 89

It was snowing again.

It was as if nature itself had determined to thwart him in this final ascent, with sky and mountain and devils fighting to cast him down.

Howling winds, a treacherous climb, and snow swirling so thick that Remin could hardly see Auber four paces behind him, let alone a strangler concealed in a snowbank.

At last, they had come to a place where the snow was deep enough to hide the devils by day, and Remin kept to only the narrowest ledges and tested every foot of it with the sharp point of his sword.

Two nights had passed since they left Tounot and Jinmin behind, with bare supplies and six injured men to defend.

If anyone could do it, they could, but Remin knew he was flirting with catastrophe, torn between an instinct that swore the answers to all their questions were just over the next rise, even as his head warned that it was already too late to go back.

As if it had heard that thought, his stomach gave a roar of agreement.

They were all hungry.

Remin was monitoring his own body as closely as everything else, and it took a lot of food to keep him going under these conditions.

His was always the heaviest and most dangerous labor: breaking paths through the snow, testing their footing to make sure it would bear everyone’s weight, and even just using his own tall body as a ladder in the high places, as one man after the next stepped into his hands and scrambled onto his shoulders, climbing to the next ledge.

His injured arm was not enjoying this at all.

And stars, when had he last slept?

The devils had come like a blizzard themselves the last two nights, a howling storm like nothing Remin had ever seen.

All he and his men could do was strap themselves down tight in the narrowest and most sheltered place they could find, too large to be dragged out in a mass and too protected by their shields and armor for the stranglers and ghouls to do any significant damage.

It was like spending the night rolling down a glacier in a barrel, and Remin felt like an old man when he finally staggered upright every morning, aching to his bones and colder than he had ever been in his life.

And still they pushed on.

Climbing higher, aiming steadily north-northeast, following his own sense of where the devils had swarmed thickest.

His vision narrowed to the slit between his hood and muffler, his breath hot and his face cold, the muscles of his thighs blazing with effort.

It wasn’t that the mountains were that high, but climbing in these conditions meant they might grind along for an hour and only cover a single mile.

When the sky began to lighten, at first Remin thought it was just his hood coming loose.

When the wind began to die, he thought the storm was finally clearing.

And then he stepped above the clouds into a high and empty space, where the icy glitter of the peaks spread for miles all around him, blinding in the sunlight.

“Stars and ancestors,”

breathed Auber as he clambered onto the ledge beside him.

They had not reached the mountaintop, far from it, but this shoulder was wide enough to give the illusion of infinity as they gazed east, floating above banks of clouds.

“Where are we?”

“Still Mount Orval,”

Remin replied, extending a hand to haul the rest of his men up, all of them pushing back their hoods and blinking dazzled eyes in the sudden brightness.

They hadn’t seen the sun in days.

“On the north side, I think.

That looks like Mount Grivald over there, and we wouldn’t see Mount Elun until we came around the other si—”

“My lord!”

one of his men called behind him, and Remin turned to find that the adventurous Breccey had already gone off down the trail behind them and started climbing.

“Your Grace, you’ll want to see this!”

“I’ll want to tie you to my belt with leading strings if you wander off one more time!”

Remin shouted back, scrambling onto the rocks behind him.

At least there was no danger of devils above the clouds.

“Stay there, we haven’t tested our footing…”

Auber whistled.

“Stars, look at that,”

breathed one of the soldiers, as a dozen heads swiveled upward.

Far above them toward the summit, it looked as if the mountain had broken open, a cavern yawning at the sky.

Even the deep snow couldn’t conceal the… spray of rocks, which began at the cavern mouth and gouged down the mountainside, leaving a trail of massive boulders and whole trees flung down like jackstraws.

“It looks like something…came out of there,”

said Breccey, glancing back at Remin.

“Doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It does.”

That was a deeply unsettling idea, especially alongside the appearance of a large devil that purred, but Remin forced himself to stop and look at their discovery, without any preconceptions.

What kind of creature could claw its way out of a mountain? He had heard of natural explosions in mines before, from dangerous vapors deep underground, and there was hardly going to be a sign saying Den of the Devils in any case.

Remin sat down and loosened the straps around his injured arm, squinting up the mountainside.

“Galliard, make a sketch,”

he ordered.

“Tilet, mark it on the map and send up some smoke.

They might be far enough behind the storm to see it back in camp.”

There was no way up there.

Craning his neck, Remin searched and searched again, mentally backtracking down the trails they had seen on the way up, wondering if there was another route that would carry them to the summit.

The problem was the snow; the blizzard had left a hard and glittering crust that obscured the terrain, and stumbling up the side of the mountain was suicide.

Was there some way they could get up among these boulders?

Picking a path among the outflung boulders and broken trees, Remin’s jaw tightened.

No.

They could not reach it now.

They were all of half a mile away, but that cave might as well be on the other side of the Empire.

“What do you think, Rem?”

Auber asked, coming to stand beside him.

“We’d lose half our number if we even tried,”

Remin replied, rubbing weary fingers over his eyes.

It had been so long since he’d had a decent sleep, he could feel the hollows beneath them, the dull ache behind them, the strain of just looking at snow, day after day.

And yet he found himself willing something to move within that shadowy mouth.

Just a glimpse of green fire would be enough.

Did he dare wait until nightfall to confirm it?

“We can’t defend from here,”

said Auber, quieter, echoing Remin’s own thoughts.

“No, we can’t.”

Remin rose and grabbed Breccey, shoving him toward the trail.

“Come on, lads.

Let’s get the fuck off this mountain.”

They had found something.

It was better than any something he had hoped to find, and now they had to live to bring word of it home.

Remin pushed them as fast as he dared, setting off signal smoke whenever the weather cleared, hastening down to Tounot’s camp, where one of the injured men had died.

It only made him more determined to bring the rest of them home.

Back into the foothills, where his reserve camp had passed increasingly exciting nights as the devils fled the forest for the mountains, though there had been no sign of the purring devil.

Lancer had proved better than any guard dog, for he had caught—and trampled—no less than seven stranglers that had slipped into the camp, and his armor was flaking dried black blood.

Now they were racing back to the forest, for it was safer in the trees than on the rocky promontories that had sheltered them two weeks ago.

It was a cruel march, for rations were tight, game was scarce, and everyone looked like scarecrows after weeks in the mountains.

Remin himself had lost fifteen pounds of muscle in the heights, and by the time he and Jinmin dragged their entire camp into the trees, he collapsed into his bedroll and lay like a dead thing until morning.

But there was one more surprise waiting for them, near the crossroads that led to Nandre.

The first climbers were just scrambling into the trees to make their evening camp when it happened, a small commotion at the edge of the clearing.

Remin squeezed between the wagons just in time to see a small figure stumbling out of the underbrush, exhausted and almost incoherent with terror.

“Are you Duke Andelin’s men?”

she asked, reeling forward and stumbling to one knee.

There was a second, even smaller child clinging to her back.

“You are, aren’t you? He said we should wait here, and you would come, he said to look for crossed swords—”

“I am Duke Andelin,”

Remin replied, without moving.

Auber was already going to look the girl over; they had been deceived before, child assassins sent by both Valleth and the Emperor.

“Stay where you are, girl, let Auber have a look at you.

You’re safe here.

Where are you from?”

She was shaking so badly, he could see it even from thirty paces.

How old was she? Ten? Eleven? He wasn’t good with children’s ages.

“Nandre.

We’re from Nandre.”

She clung to the little boy, who was sucking a filthy thumb and looking at them with huge, frightened eyes.

“Sir Rollon came, and he said they would take us to Tresingale, and we left, and we’re all that left.

There’s a devil, it will come for us, it kills everyone, everyone!”