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  They left the end of the town proper with its ramshackle buildings, and rode into the barren expanse beyond the valley. The trail led up another steep slope of stone and then down again so that they were looking on the leaning roofs of the barns and broken silos. Berengar could not remember a time that Darkenhauls grew grain, nor could he conceive of where they would grow anything in the solid rock. The miniature valley perched in the steep hills could have provided great defense for a better people, but they had forfeited that to their bandit benefactors as well.

  Berengar thought that perhaps the Elite Guard would have served the kingdom better if their barracks had been in Darkenhauls instead of in the central lowlands. He sighed and realized that they were assigned with defending land the King and nobles deemed worthy of defending.

  The people of Darkenhauls and their miserable lives were meant to serve as a distraction to the bandits and barbarians from traveling farther into the kingdom. Patron’s Hill had not stayed safe solely for its isolation and the position of its roads, but because the border town absorbed the worst of the storms as it shielded the kingdom beyond. Berengar thought the village would still be unscathed if his family had not been in it. The dirty, fatherless Holst made his family safer by throwing himself into the Elite Guard; Berengar had doomed his by doing much the same.

  “What about this one?”

  Berengar shook himself out of his thoughts at the sound of Nisero’s voice. He looked up at a barn to his right. The silo behind was split and collapsed on one side, revealing the empty interior. “They traded for grain and stored it. Now they don’t have enough to trade any longer.”

  “What are you telling me, sir?”

  “Nothing. This will serve fine.”

  They led their animals inside and tied them off to splintered posts which would not hold the beasts if they decided to pull. Their obedience was the only thing truly holding them. Nisero drew oats out of the supplies to feed them, since nothing worthy of cropping grew anywhere in sight.

  Berengar found the clay pipe leading down from the gutters outside still filled the basin carved into the stone floor. The lieutenant looked from the water up to Berengar and shrugged. The captain lowered himself and smelled it. He lifted the handful to his face and parted his lips.

  “Careful, sir. This is no time to become ill.”

  Berengar drank more deeply. “It is pure. Nothing but rain and stone. We should water the horses and refill our skins before we leave. It appears they once built fine working things here, and being abandoned has kept it from being tainted by the filth of the town.”

  Nisero brought up the horses to drink. “It is a sad state to see the people of the kingdom. They lack both in body and in honor. I can’t imagine that the two are entirely unrelated.”

  Berenger pulled his saddle from his horse’s back. He placed it on the stone floor for a place to recline. “Holst was sacrificing himself for his family. There is some honor in that.”

  “I’m not much of an admirer of the boy’s species of honor.”

  “Probably because he tried to kill you with a bandit’s dagger, I imagine.”

  Nisero sniffed and shook his head. “Yes, that is probably the source of my discontent.”

  “Did you excise any of that anger during the beating, or did it just whip up your rage?”

  “With all respect, sir, it was a necessity and I did the traitor a favor. We had the right to slay him in the street, or had we the resources, to send him to the dungeons to rot away until he missed the luxury of his hovel. As he said, if we had left him any less scathed, he’d be dead now at the hands of his own people. If we had given no response, every warrior of the King that passed through for the next generation would be subject to attack. There was no way around it, and I have no more positive or negative feeling about it than any other common duty I must perform.”

  “That ends the matter then,” the captain said.

  “What do we do next, then?”

  “I assume you are not asking about which side of the barn I care to sleep on?”

  Nisero smiled. “No, sir, our next move in the morning.”

  “We take the Deep Pass.”

  “I had hoped we’d find a courier to update the rest of the Guard on the trouble.”

  “We could send Holst.”

  Nisero shook his head. “I’d sooner send Solag himself.”

  “Do you want to go find a messenger and catch up to me after?”

  “No, sir. Now more than ever I do not want you going alone.”

  “The attacks were set upon you, lieutenant. Perhaps you are safer away from me.”

  Nisero sat down against a paddock post that may have once held a horse or other livestock. “The attack was directed at anyone with you in order to isolate you. Solag wants you to come to his feet alone. He hopes to blind your judgment to break you down.”

  “I’m unconcerned with what he hopes, Nisero.”

  “I only say that, Captain, because Solag is executing a plan. There are probably more traps waiting in the Canyon, and beyond, to cut down the numbers he expects us to have in this pursuit.”

  Berengar settled back and closed his eyes. “His first trap was sending a boy with a dagger to try and kill an army. That is either desperate or stupid. If he is setting traps, his first was a poor one and only served to warn us of his plan, and inform us about him. His power seems hinged upon death and threats of violence against boys, mothers, and daughters. He will pay at the hands of men as he should.”

  “Your point is a good one,” Nisero said. “We did learn that he expected us later. He did not know you were coming. He thinks he has more time.”

  “Should we press our pursuit to surprise him?”

  “I still think traveling through the night, especially into the mountains, is ill advised. We are pressing as it is. I am concerned about following him into the Canyon according to his orders. It feels too much like letting him set the terms.”

  “Until we have a sight upon him, lieutenant, we have little choice aside from pursuing him where he has gone, or giving up, and that’s no choice at all.”

  “Then we take the Deep Pass in the morning, come what may.”

  They spent the remainder of the daylight prepping and re-prepping their gear. They considered the loft to lay on, but did not trust the structure. They settled into the back of the barn and went to sleep.

  ***

  Berengar’s eyes shot open and he did not have a clear idea what had roused him. He sat bolt upright and drew his sword. He saw Nisero move next to him. The captain watched and listened to the dark.

  “Captain?”

  “I don’t know. Fighting ghosts.”

  The shape lunged out of the dark and the captain came to his feet. He heard Nisero unsheathe his blade. Berengar thrust. The captain’s blade pierced the chest as Nisero slashed across the abdomen. A loud, shrill cry cut through the barn and the horses stirred.

  A small kitchen knife clattered to the floor and the body dropped to its back, off the end of the captain’s blade. Nisero kicked the small knife away and Berengar held his bloody sword up and ready for other attackers.

  “Nisero?”

  “Holst,” Nisero said.

  The captain lowered his blade and knelt. The boy’s face was swollen and scabbed over from the beating, but as his eyes adjusted to the dark, Berengar was sure it was him. His face paled and the boy’s eyes glazed. A single, long breath hissed out of Holst’s chest in a rattle.

  Berengar wiped both sides of his sword off on the boy’s shirt above where the blood spread from the stab wound.

  “Are you okay, sir?”

  “I am. And you?”

  Nisero nodded. “I’m sorry this happened. We did all we could to try to keep him alive. He probably would have followed us into the Pass, if we had not stopped for the night.”

  “This isn’t our doing, lieutenant. Solag set this in motion and he is responsible.”

  “What do you want to do wit
h the body?”

  Berengar shook his head. “We’ll drag him outside so he doesn’t muck up where we sleep. Let his people deal with it from there. They chose Solag’s dark protection. Let them live with the consequences.”

  Chapter 5

  : The Nature of Ice

  Nisero brought his horse around the far side of the captain and rode up beside him. He had no reason why the southern side of the captain was any different than the other as they rode toward the mouth of the Canyon. The barn lay behind, and the boy’s body lay outside the door. The captain did not turn to look back and though Nisero felt tempted, he did not either.

  The blue mountains stretched out impossibly high before them. The peaks were lost in cloud cover that seemed preternaturally thick, and Nisero wondered if it ever broke. He remembered tales as a child where parents told them with happy endings, and older boys retold them with darker threats. Nisero tended to believe the whispered re-tellings of mischievous boys more.

  Even when he was small, stories that ended happily rang hollow to him. Nisero always felt something was being withheld in the telling. In his heart, he knew the older boys were trying to scare, and they lied as often as they spoke, but there seemed to be hidden truth somewhere between the bedtime stories of his mother and the lies of the boys. The truth felt like it lay somewhere closer to the edge of the darkness.

  In both tellings, the clouds that shrouded the blue mountains were the smoke of dragons. In his mother’s voice, they were tamed by the love and kindness of princesses. The boys told of the snake-like lizards creeping along the night-shrouded ground in search of the meat of young boys. In his mother’s stories, the dragons slept until needed or were held at bay by great heroes in shiny armor. In the boys’ telling, the monsters watched until your guard was down and then they pounced to feed while your heart still beat.

  Even as an adult and a member of the Elite Guard, he looked on the twists of those clouds concealing the peaks and wondered. Through his years of service and in battle, he had learned that there were indeed monsters in the world, creeping through the night shrouded in human skin, and they did watch, and wait, to pounce.

  His eyes drifted to the mouth of the Canyon. Morning mist clung to the stone floor between the rising walls. The stone face on Nisero’s side was wet, and water seeped from holes high in the stone, like open wounds. Berengar’s side was dry, but scarred with scratches high above their heads. He stared at the cuts and gashes in the stone and wondered about the tales of dragons again. In the fog, his adult confidence wavered. As they descended between the rock faces, the temperature dropped by several degrees, and his flesh prickled even under his armor and heavy cloak.

  Nisero cleared his throat. “Why is it called Faithcore?”

  Berengar blinked and looked around at the lieutenant. Nisero felt like he was always interrupting the captain’s thoughts. A shadow crossed the captain’s face as the muscles tightened and relaxed.

  “Everything requires a name that it might be discussed, no?”

  “True enough.”

  Berengar smiled and then pulled his mouth back into a line. “Do you think Deep Pass is a better name?”

  Nisero tilted his head and glanced up at the scars rising higher on the walls above them. “Faithcore seems to paint a different picture.”

  Berengar nodded. “Faithcore is a warrior. He is more of a legend now than a true man probably.”

  Nisero narrowed his eyes, focusing on the misty path ahead of them. It curved between boulders that partially blocked the downward slope into the pass. “I’m not familiar with that legend.”

  “It is a dark one. I believe it is skipped in most children’s stories.”

  “The dark ones hold more truth, I think.”

  Berengar hummed and said, “Sometimes. Truth and lies come in all shades. Most stories have their fair share of both.”

  “Were you told Faithcore’s legend as a child?”

  The captain rode ahead a few paces to weave through a section too narrow for two horses abreast. Nisero followed and fell in beside as the pass widened and the boulders spread out ahead.

  “My grandfather told me the stories my mother would not,” Berengar said. “I grew up closer to the mountains and the Canyon, so it would be natural to come up on one of our trips to Darkenhauls. Faithcore chased dark monsters that vexed the gods into the mountains.”

  Nisero shook his head. “Appropriate to our quest, I suppose. Did you come to Darkenhauls with your family for the scenery?”

  Berengar sniffed. “It was a different place in my youth, but, no, not scenery. Trade and business only. The mountains are beautiful in their own way from a distance, when you are not dealing with bandits.”

  “I prefer the cities in the central plains for that reason,” Nisero said.

  “Truth be told, cities are only beautiful from a distance as well. Up close you see the cracks and the filth. Architecture is appreciated from the long view. Danger is found in the narrows and the dark alleys.”

  Nisero looked up at the wet top of the wall on his side and thought they themselves were entering the most dangerous alley of them all.

  He saw movement along the top. Nisero watched. The shape slipped and splashed up the shallow trickle of water. A loose chip of rock bounced down the face striking the outcroppings as it quietly fell.

  “Captain?”

  Berengar whispered. “I saw.”

  “Was it just one?”

  “I believe I saw three, but it’s hard to tell.”

  Nisero sighed. “Should we expect stone on our heads?”

  “Maybe from the mountain itself, but not at the hands of those fleeing at this point.”

  The lieutenant looked at Berengar. “You don’t think they go to warn the stone droppers farther along.”

  “It’s possible. Hopefully, they are as surprised at our early arrival as Holst was.”

  “We must now assume that Solag will know we are coming.”

  “We must.”

  The canyon widened, but Nisero felt more trapped in the deeper space. He supposed that if he could not see through a fog above, then anyone wanting to drop a stone would be unable to see below. He also figured he would have less time to react by the time he saw the rock. Since Solag seemed to be aiming for Nisero, he decided to do his best to view the fog as a blessing.

  A trickle of water in the furrow of the canyon floor grew to a stony creek. From there, it became a full fledged river, if shallow. The temperature noticeably dropped again, and Nisero saw his breath join the fog above and the swirling mist hovering over the water below him.

  They trudged through the water again as the flat ground shifted sides of the river once more. Moss and lichens clung to the loose stone and jagged walls. Nisero saw bones at the water’s edge. They were small. He assumed they were animal, left by a beast or from the meal of a bandit. They could be from a child or a small adult, but he tried to imagine they were not.

  Part of the decayed material of a cloak and a broken piece of leather from a belt passed under their horse’s hooves. He spotted a folded and dented metal pan between two rocks. It seemed like good metal, if not in good condition. Nisero thought it could be hammered out into a fine dish or cooking pan again. They continued to ride and he left it just like whoever had passed before. He was simply happy to not see more bone.

  Berengar pointed ahead to a shallow cave in the rock face. The back could be seen clearly and it was clean of debris. The floor was raised enough to keep standing water from the river out. The overhang and surrounding boulders protected the interior.

  The captain dismounted and led his horse in first. Nisero followed. It was tight with all four of them, but the interior was noticeably warmer. The captain dared to build a fire from their supply material. As the smoke twisted up, Nisero leaned out to peer up the sheer walls. The afternoon light from above cleared the fog some, and the lieutenant feared that the fire would be easy to spot. Large crags and breaks between sections of the
cliff made him doubt a bandit could traverse the upper edge, much less carry weapons to attack. He decided not to question the captain’s choice.

  Without talking about it, they were sparing with their rations for their cooked dinner. Nisero considered dousing the small fire, but the captain sat close to it and he decided to wait. Nisero continued to look up as he ate.

  The captain stood and kicked down the fire.

  “Are you okay, sir?”

  Berengar turned away. “Never better.”

  The captain mounted and Nisero did the same. “Are we pressing on?”

  “There is still daylight.”

  Nisero looked up at the mists reforming high above them. “If you say so, sir.”

  “I should have waited to start a fire,” Berengar said. “When your day isn’t done, it just reminds you that you are cold.”

  The walls widened further, giving the canyon the feel of open ground. The river grew heavy and loud to their left, with flat rock on the right for the horses to follow down the incline. The walls rose until Nisero decided the fog above had to be legitimate clouds.

  Berengar steered up away from the open ground to weave his horse between the jagged rocks. He snapped his fingers at Nisero who then spotted the patch of ice in the trail ahead. It was one rough pool of white against the gray and brown of the clay caked rock underneath and around it. Nisero followed the captain’s course and they rejoined the open ground together.

  Smaller pockets of ice dotted the trail and they avoided them as best they could, with an occasional shudder or slip from the horses.

  Nisero noticed chunks of ice breaking free in the stream and bouncing between rocks. The river cut down deeper, and Nisero lost sight of it. He heard the roar of an ancient monster ahead, and great billows of mist rising from behind the rocks.

  As they reached the edge of the trail, they looked over a precipice. The water plunged hundreds of feet, to a greater river cutting the rocky land below them.

  Nisero sighed and then shouted over the roar. “A pass within a pass. We should be in the underworld soon.”