They kept to the lee side of the ridge as much as possible, but as they climbed higher it became more difficult to find a path among the eruptive, cold-shattered rocks, and several times they had to cross on to its exposed face. There, the wind shook them and they slipped and stumbled, scraping hands raw on the sharp stones. The ground plunged precipitously away in vast scree slopes. Clouds were spilling from the peaks ahead, boiling off into the vast spaces of the sky. They had neither the clothing nor the strength needed for such a battle with the elements, yet Varryn led them remorselessly onwards and upwards.
At last the ridge broadened and opened out into the shoulder of a mountain. The ground rose in a great sweep broken only by occasional gullies and granite boulders. Lines of snow lay across the slope, and the wind strung it out from every hummock. There was a brief pause, then Varryn turned his back to the gale and set off around the mountain’s flank.
The light began to fade. Varryn halted beside a massive boulder that lay on the mountainside like the discarded toy of some giant’s child. A diagonal fissure divided the stone, running a split through the lower two thirds of its body. The Kyrinin gestured at it wordlessly.
‘You don’t mean us to spend the night here?’ said Rothe. ‘The cold will kill us.’
‘Wind kills first,’ Ess’yr replied for her brother. ‘This is shelter. We will be close, share warmth.’
‘No fire?’ Anyara asked.
Varryn’s only answer was to upend the bark tube he kept embers in. Cold ash was all it held.
‘There’s nothing to burn anyway, I suppose,’ Anyara murmured.
They pressed themselves into their unyielding crib. Though the crack was deeper and wider than it appeared from without, it was an oppressive space. There was no room to lie down, and all they could do was slump against the stone. The weight of rock above and around them filled Orisian with a grim anticipation of being crushed in his sleep, but then finding even a moment’s sleep in such a resting place seemed an impossibility. The bodies of his companions blocked out most of the light. As Varryn, the last of them, scrambled into place Anyara murmured, ‘This is some kind of nightmare.’
It was the longest night of Orisian’s life. The five of them stayed wedged in the hard centre of the stone, their bodies shaken by occasional shivers as the night touched, and then retreated from, its coldest hours. Ess’yr had been right, though. The heat they shared kept the fatal chill at bay. Through the long hours he could feel her body against his; her shoulder on his, the length of her thigh stretched alongside his own. Once or twice he thought he felt the warmth of her soundless breath upon his cheek and though he could see nothing, he imagined her face there, so close that a tilt of his head might be enough to touch it.
It seemed an eternity before a diffuse light came seeping through the clouds. Staggering out into the open, Orisian groaned at the pain and rigidity in his joints. The wind had died. Formless banks of flat grey cloud now concealed all the high peaks, but he could feel their insensate mass lurking behind the veil. He gouged and rubbed at his legs with his numb hands, hobbling about like an old man. The others looked just as exhausted and battered as he felt, except for Varryn: he appeared as alert and rested as if he had slept in perfect comfort.
‘How much further is it?’ Orisian asked.
‘Hours,’ said Varryn.
The weather was a little kinder to them that second day. There was hardly any wind, and instead they had to contend with clammy banks of cloud that drifted across the slopes. At such moments they could see no more than twenty or thirty paces ahead.
Enclosed within a narrow world, with sight and sound stifled, the threat of the hidden landscape felt more imminent than before. Few of Orisian’s Blood came here. To climb so high into the Car Criagar at this time of year was something none but the foolhardy would attempt. The great chain of mountains had a grim reputation, for its inhabitants—the Kyrinin who roamed its forests, the great bears that lurked in its wildest corners—as much as in its own right. And there were the ruins: the remnants of cities built when the Gods still watched over the world. There were tales of adventurers who had come seeking relics of those distant days and found only death of one kind or another. Sometimes the mountains killed them, sometimes pits or crumbling walls amongst the ruins, sometimes wild beasts.
Orisian could not say how far they travelled that day. In the afternoon, the weather turned against them. The wind returned and what began as a light snowfall gathered strength until a fully fledged storm was threatening to engulf them. They came over a rise and paused on the crest. The wind clawed at their clothes and snatched the breath from their mouths. Snow flew at them. Orisian bowed his head and winced.
‘There,’ cried Ess’yr above the buffeting wind.
Below them, across a vast flat sweep of land, lay a city. A gigantic crag rose to one side, its highest reaches lost in storm, and spreading out from its foot a sprawling network of broken walls and streets and crumbled houses: Criagar Vyne. In its decay and dereliction, in its utter possession by the mountains and by the turbulent sky, it was as if the rock of the earth had broken chaotically through the surface to express a memory of what had once been in this place. It was a sight so barren that Orisian felt a vague horror of it stirring within him.
‘Who could live in such a place?’ shouted Rothe.
‘Huanin, once,’ Ess’yr replied, ‘a na’kyrim, now.’
Varryn was already striding on, descending towards the ruins. Ess’yr followed him. Anyara glanced uneasily at Orisian.
‘We’ve come this far,’ Orisian said, shielding his eyes from the stinging snow with his hand. ‘There’ll be some shelter, at least.’
Highfast: squatting atop a massive pinnacle of rock, defended as surely by the precipitous cliffs beneath as by its own thick walls, it was the most impregnable of all the holdings the Kilkry Blood had inherited from the Aygll Kingship. Marain the Stonemason built it, and that feat alone had ensured that his name was better remembered than that of the monarch who commanded him. Its purpose, the need that had driven more than a hundred labourers to their deaths on the crags and narrow paths of the Karkyre Mountains in the decade it had taken to build, was the defence of an ancient road. Since then the current of history had shifted course. The road fell into disuse during the Storm Years that followed the Kingship’s fall. Highfast had become a forgotten fortress, sunk deep into the ferocious solitude of the mountains. There had been bloodshed beneath its walls many times in its long, slow life, but it was a place of peace for those who now inhabited it.
The rocky peak upon which Highfast perched was no mere foundation for its walls and turrets. Marain’s armies of workers had burrowed down into the bones of the mountain, threading a warren of chambers and tunnels through the stone. In places, where the cliffs were sheer and invulnerable to assault, those tunnels broke the skin of the mountain. Windows and platforms opened out onto vertiginous views across a plunging gorge. Just as they admitted some small quantity of light, so too these apertures gave access to the unceasing winds that coursed around the mountain tops. Sometimes the network of passageways would reverberate beneath the rushing air, as if they were the lungs of a living giant.
That sound, almost beneath the reach of even her na’kyrim ears, was one that usually gave comfort to Cerys the Elect. She had lived within the confines of Highfast for fifty years, and knew all its moods. Its permanence and familiarity anchored her. She felt safe in its body.
She stood now upon a high balcony, looking down on the cavernous Scribing Hall. Beneath the light spilling in through high, narrow windows, a dozen na’kyrim pored over manuscripts and books, transcribing, copying, preserving. There was no sound save the rumbling of the wind in the rock, the rustling of quills and the occasional brittle sigh of a page being turned. With its seamless blending of stillness and industry, it was a scene that in years gone by would have taken the edge from any disturbance in Cerys’ breast.