Owlknight

. . . and down . . . and down ....

Hywel whistled his astonishment; Darian shook his head in disbelief, and Keisha gasped. Even Shandi forgot her misery for a moment and stared.

Havens - it must be a league or more to the bottom! And it goes on forever!

“The Great Pass,” their guide said simply. “And here I must leave you. The track down is plain, see? You no longer need my help.”

He pointed to a much clearer track than the one they had used to climb up here, one that zigzagged down the steep slope (more of a cliff than a slope) from where they now stood.

The Great Pass; that was far from being any kind of a descriptive name for it. Keisha had pictured a mountain pass like any other - perhaps deeper, certainly longer, since it was supposed to go straight through all the way to Raven territory.

What she saw, however, beggared imagination.

It was as if someone had taken a giant knife and carved through the mountains to form a passage. The bottom was as level and flat as a good paved road, and it disappeared in either direction into the mists of distance. Right now the sun was high above them, so the bottom was in full light; she caught a glint of water down there, shining between the branches of trees made so small by distance that she could scarcely make them out.

“Gods of my fathers,” Darian murmured. “Who could possibly have possessed the kind of magic needed to make such a thing?”

Only then did Keisha realize that it was magic, and not nature, that had created this place.

“Huh,” Shandi said, rousing herself out of her misery. “I guess you don’t know your history very well. The northern mage that Herald Vanyel fought, that’s who - and I guess Vanyel must have had even more than he did, since Vanyel stopped him.” She peered off into the south and east, following the gash with her eyes. “It’ll come out just north of the Forest of Sorrows - or it would, if Vanyel hadn’t blocked it. I had no notion this thing still existed.”

Nor had anyone else, except the northern tribes, who clearly knew very well it existed, and provided easy access to the south. Only luck and Vanyel’s Curse had kept them from taking it all the way into Valdemar in the past - and now, save for that final blockage, the north stood open to invasion.

Now it was more imperative than ever to find out what sort of state the rest of the northern tribes were in. They had joined together once to invade Valdemar, and only Vanyel had stopped them. What if they should band together again? They wouldn’t need a great mage this time, only a strong leader and a good strategist - all the work of creating an easy path to the south had been done for them.

She was the first to break out of the trance of fascination that the Great Pass exerted on them, and ask her dyheli to start down the trail before them. Darian quickly shook off his own bemusement and followed her. One by one, the others did the same, as their guide remained on the top of the pass behind them, watching them solemnly as they began their journey downward.

It took them all day to make their way to the bottom, and once there, the great age of the place was self- evident. Far from being the barren cut it must have been for years after it had been made, a hundred thousand different plants and animals had taken advantage of the shelter it provided to move in and flourish. A stream ran right down the middle, fed by the runoff of the mountains above it, and where there is water, there will always be life. Leafed trees and evergreen trees had taken root here, and a variety of plants flourished along the banks of the stream. There was game in plenty, too, which was just as well, since the mountains cut off the sunlight and night would come very quickly here. There wasn’t a lot of time left to set themselves up for the night.

So they didn’t hesitate when they reached the bottom; they made camp immediately. They still had some provisions in the form of dried meat pounded together with dried berries, provided by their hosts of Gray Wolf. That would do for now; in the morning they could hunt.

“How are your heads, all of you?” Keisha asked the others as they quickly gathered deadfall for a fire.

She got variations on “Fine, now,” from all of them, and Shandi in particular looked much more like her old self. Evidently their guide had been right; there was something about going up very high that made people sick -

Unless they’re used to it? That must be it; Keisha didn’t want to contemplate what it would be like to try and become accustomed to the heights. How long would the sickness last?

How long would I be willing to bear it before I gave up? That’s the real question.

Perhaps it would be possible to become accustomed gradually, without the symptoms.