Paks asked him, and Ardhiel answered that those mountains were home to elves, but not of his family. He seemed troubled by something, but Paks knew better than to ask. Balkon, looking north, muttered eagerly about stone. He had confided to Paks that his family, the Goldenaxe clan, was looking for more daskgeft, more stonemass for the increase of the family. He hoped to find some; the descriptions Luap had written of the land made him think the stone there might be “dross,” or suitable. Paks wondered again how dross could have so many meanings in dwarvish: courage, wit, strength—almost anything good, it seemed to her, was dross.
Day by day the mountains seemed to march nearer their flank. Ahead was only the rolling level of the desert, broken by watercourses. Paks began to feel a pressure from those mountains; she understood why the caravaners would go around rather than through them, for that alone. Then one morning an edge of red rock showed ahead. As they marched toward it, it rose higher and higher. By the next afternoon, they could see the lighter rock below, great sweeping curves of white and yellow—the same color, Paks thought, as the walls of Cortes Andres. And two days later, marching under those great stone ramparts, the Girdsmen turned aside.
Here a river emptied itself from those stone walls into the sand and rubble outside. The caravaners muttered and made gestures, but finally moved on, while High Marshal Connaught examined the map again. When the caravan was gone, he mounted his bay horse and led them up the watercourse, the horses lunging through the dry sand. Ahead, Paks could see towering white walls closing in. She wondered how they could ride in such a narrow space if the water came up.
“Bad place for an ambush,” said Amberion beside her.
“Yes, sir.”
“By the map, we’ll be leaving this soon, and climbing into another stream’s valley. I hope the route can be climbed by horses.”
Paks had not thought of that, but looking at the sheer walls of stone, she realized what they might face. “If they can’t—”
“Then we’ll leave them. Build a stout camp, leave the novice yeomen and most of the men-at-arms.”
Before the canyon walls closed completely, High Marshal Connaught turned left away from the river, leading them onto a rough slope of broken rock. He seemed to find a trail; Paks, far back in the group, could not see anything ahead to guide them. Socks heaved upward, stride by stride. They stopped often to rest the animals; the warhorses were curded with sweat. Amberion’s horse, alone of all the animals, never showed the marks of hard riding, always slick-coated and fresh. Paks had noticed that about all the paladin’s mounts in Fin Panir. Far back she could see the mules, head down, picking their way delicately and almost without effort over the rocks. Below, the canyon they had come from disappeared into a jumble of shadow and light. Now she could see far to the right, more swooping curves of stone, patterned by dark cracks. Far up on the heights, she thought she saw trees.
By late afternoon, she could see a strange shape against the sky: a dark cone with a scoop out of the point. Amberion pointed to it.
“That’s marked on the map. Blackash cone, it said: we must bear left of it.” As they came nearer, always climbing, the rock changed abruptly from white to red. The trail led through a break in that vertical red wall. Suddenly the black cone was close; it looked like a loose pile of dark rock sitting on the red stone around it. Paks stared. Had someone—some giant, surely—built a cairn? Long shadows streaked the land, making weird shapes of the wind-blown rocks around them. Now they could see that the canyon they had climbed from was only a small section of something much larger that extended far to the east, ending at last in a higher rampart of white topped with forest. South, the land dropped abruptly into that hole. It was hard to believe they had climbed anything so sudden. Westward the land dipped to a rumpled plain of sand, and that again dropped sharply: Paks could just see against the setting sun distant mountains beyond that drop. Northward, their view was blocked by the black cone and the higher land behind it. Red cliffs, these, with fortress-size blocks lying at their feet. Paks wondered if the others felt as small as she did.
That night they camped on the sandy plain just southwest of the black cone. A cold wind brushed the camp; stars blazed brighter than Paks had ever seen them. She woke several times to hear Ardhiel singing. Dawn came early on that high place. Paks saw the white stone below begin to glow even before she was aware of light in the sky. Then the high wall to the east stood clear against a green dawn. First light turned the red peaks north of them to fiery orange; then the light crept down to meet them, throwing blue shadows below.
They had some trouble to find the trail from there. Just to the left of the black cone, layers of stone like those that peel from a boiled egg curved downward, but the horses skidded and slipped. High Marshal Connaught sent Thelon ahead; he reported that the stony way ended in a drop four or five men high. Then they searched for a way around. Paks decided that walking in deep dry sand was harder than any marching she had ever done. The wind rose, blowing sand into their eyes. The horses flattened ears against it. The first three trails they tried led to sheer cliffs, and it was early afternoon before the scout found a safe route.
It began in a narrow grove of pines, where broad low boles rose from drifted sand, old trees bent by strong winds into a tangled thatch of branches. Below the trees, the trail followed a twisting ravine, its bed choked with boulders of garish red and black on a bed of sand; they radiated heat like coals. Across the ravine, as they went down, they could see outcrops of red rock. Suddenly the cleft they traveled angled back to the left, then crooked right again. They stood on a narrow platform above a small valley that led straight away toward a tangle of cliffs and canyons. On either side, sheer cliffs rose hundreds of feet, rose-red and orange, striped with black. To the right, an arm of the valley angled back away from them. Down the valley a stream reflected the sky; it looked wider than Paks had expected.
As they rode down into the valley, Paks heard conflicting opinions.
“What a farm that’d make,” she heard from one of the yeomen with the mules. “Wind-shelter from those cliffs—water—must be good soil with all that grass.”
“A long way to market,” said another. “Unless you founded a grange out here, Tamar.”
“Marry me, and we might,” said the woman, laughing.
“Marry—I’d have married you in Fin Panir, but you wouldn’t have it.”
“And miss this? Come on, Dort, you weren’t any more ready to settle down than I was. But couldn’t we make a farm here?”
“I’ll tell you that when I find the nearest market.” Paks heard them laughing for some moments after.
“It is not good,” muttered Balkon, who had turned his pony aside from the others to look closely at the rock wall nearest them. “See—” He poked at it with his axe-haft and a chunk came away; sand sifted after it. “It is soft here. Good rock there—” he pointed at the east wall of the valley, and at great cliffs beyond it. “But something is wrong here. With those cliffs, it must be deeper.”
“Strange,” murmured Ardhiel as Paks rode by. “It has an odd feel—very strange.”
But most of the company liked its looks—green grass and water, walls far enough apart to allow maneuvering, yet close enough for protection. Then they rode out of the last rock-strewn mouth of the ravine, and found themselves once more in deep sand—this time damp.
“Ah,” said the dwarf, eyes gleaming. “It is that this valley is choked with sand—something blocks it there—” he pointed at the far end. “The side rock goes down, very far below this; I feel it meet under our feet.”