‘Orisian,’ snapped Rothe from behind them, ‘keep going, keep going.’
He took another step up into the darkness and the shapes were gone.
‘Do not stop,’ Ess’yr was calling back from above.
Do not stop, Orisian thought, and came back to himself with a dizzying sense of immediacy. He felt a fluttering in his chest, the sudden bloom of fear. He reached out and brushed the wall. It steadied him, told him the world was still there even though he was blind. He began to climb again. The minutes dragged by. Orisian’s legs were flimsy twigs, a mass of aches. He thought of his father, brother, mother without being able to recall from one moment to the next what he had thought. For a while he felt Inurian walking at his side. The feeling passed. Inurian was behind him, he knew. They all were, save Anyara and Rothe. He had come loose from everything he had known like a boat slipping its mooring and riding the current out into a limitless sea.
There came a point when the thought was clear and certain in his head that he could go no further. He must stop, let the exhaustion in his legs and lungs abate. Then, without warning, it was over. There were no more steps and he stumbled forwards into a flat passageway. Ess’yr and her brother were standing together, waiting for Orisian and the others. He could see them. Ahead, there was a sliver of white daylight that shone in his eyes like a blade of white fire. Robbed of the mechanical rhythm that had sustained him, he slumped against the wall, sliding down to the cold floor. Anyara came and sat down beside him. Rothe stayed on his feet, but grasped his thighs and bent forwards, his chest heaving.
Ess’yr gazed down into the black pit they had climbed out of.
‘They do not follow,’ she said.
‘I thought that was the whole point,’ Rothe gasped.
Varryn had moved on. He was silhouetted in the opening for a moment, then stepped outside.
‘Come out,’ he called.
Ess’yr went first. With the last vestiges of his strength Orisian rose and he, Anyara and Rothe followed the Kyrinin out. The daylight was harsh. The wind blew sudden, cold air on to their faces. They gazed up in silence at the landscape before them. They had emerged amongst a great chaos of boulders that hid the entrance to the stairway. A bleak valley ran away from them, rising gradually between stone-crowned ridges into the heart of the range. Not a tree was to be seen as the land mounted in buckled ramparts towards the towering peaks of the Car Criagar. The summits were muffled in clouds. A narrow, fast-flowing river—the Snow—cut its way down the valley between boulders and tussocks of sharp grass, rushing towards the waiting falls somewhere out of sight.
‘What a place,’ muttered Anyara.
The wind was keen, and carried a wintry edge, but it filled Orisian’s chest and washed the stale, dead air of the stairway out of him. His head spun, his skin tingled as if his blood was only just starting to flow once more.
Varryn glanced around. ‘Rest,’ he said, pointing towards a small dip in the ground close by. ‘For a little.’
They sat on the ground. Orisian pulled at the rough grass. Varryn was murmuring to Ess’yr, his mouth close to her ear. She left him and walked slowly towards the river. She knelt by the water for a long time. Orisian could not take his eyes off her. She undid the thongs that held her clothing and raised her tunic up over her head. Her naked back was white and flawless, revealing every lithe movement of the muscle and bone beneath the skin. She raised handfiils of water in her cupped palms and spilled them over her face and head. It ran down her back and matted down her hair.
He saw Ess’yr lean forwards and dip her face, then her whole head into the river. He glimpsed the pale curve of her small breast as it brushed the surface of the water. When she straightened again, she did so violently, flicking her head and loosing a shower of droplets. She held her hands to her face. It all looked like grief.
‘She was his lover,’ he heard Anyara say at his side.
‘I see that,’ he snapped. ‘I’m not stupid.’
He at once put his arm around his sister, ashamed of his vehemence. She leaned her head on his shoulder. When Ess’yr came back from the river the rims of her eyes were red, but she was eerily calm.
‘We must move on,’ she said.
‘I cannot,’ said Anyara.
‘Nevertheless,’ whispered Ess’yr. She stooped to take up her small pack, bow and spear and walked off, heading north into the wilderness.
Orisian stood. Varryn was following his sister. Orisian watched him for a moment or two.
‘Anyara, Rothe,’ he said, listen to me. Whatever happens from now on, no one is left behind.’ He looked at each of them in turn. ‘Do you understand? Enough loss. This is our fight, not theirs,’ he gestured towards Varryn. ‘The choices are ours to make. And I will not leave anyone else behind.’
First Anyara, then Rothe nodded. Orisian could see the trace of surprise in his sister’s eyes. I am not quite the brother she knew, he thought. I am not quite the person I knew myself.
‘Let’s go, then,’ he said.
‘Fill your waterskins first,’ said Rothe.
The water of the Snow was icy cold.
They climbed steadily, trudging over tussocks and heather. They followed as close to the river as they could. Sometimes for a short distance they were forced to work their way around boggy patches of ground, but always they came back to the edge of the rushing water. It rained a little. The temperature fell quickly and the raindrops turned to a wet sleet. White smudges appeared on their clothing, but melted away in the blink of an eye. The sides of the valley grew steeper and shed their thin covering of turf and grass, exuding boulders and sheets of rock. The sun was hidden behind a flat grey sky that deadened sound and light. Even what little vegetation there was took on the muted shades of the rock and cloud.
Each of them was lost in their own thoughts. Orisian’s legs took each monotonous step unbidden. He felt himself to be huddled in some corner of his mind, longing to forget for a time all that had happened. This was a place he knew, the same place he had found himself when the Heart Fever had picked apart the seams of his life, but it was none the easier for having been there before. He told himself again and again that Inurian might not be dead. He lifted his eyes briefly from the ground. Ess’yr, a little ahead of him, was shivering as she walked. She must be dangerously cold, after her strange, ritualistic bathing in the river, he thought. He knew better than to suggest that they stop.
They came to a broad expanse of moss and rushes—the Snow’s source—where they could go no further without climbing on to higher, exposed ground. As they laboured upwards the wind sharpened its teeth and the sleet drove almost horizontally across the slope. They had to lean to keep their footing. Great rock outcrops reared from the hill like the heads of gigantic creatures frozen in the act of tearing their way out from the earth.
When at last they emerged on to the brow of the ridge, a gale greeted them. Orisian lifted an arm to shield his eyes. What he saw was almost as unsettling as the buffeting wind: the true Car Criagar showed itself. For as far as he could see through the sleet and wisps of low cloud, there were bare slopes and peaks jostling against one another to reach up into the sky. The highest reaches were almost white with accumulated snow and ice. Varryn set off in that direction, into the barren heart of the Car Criagar.