anyway?’
Asandir attended the packstraps, in need of commodious readjustment to fit his slimmer anatomy. ‘What did you use here, spider’s knots?’ He abandoned the tangle, and more efficiently called a spell to clear the ties.
‘I’m no sailor, to be handy with strings or a sewing awl.’ It served any sorcerer properly, Dakar thought, to have left him in charge of such matters. He watched, envious, as the rawhide slithered free of itself with a sinuous ease of living snakes. ‘How did you do that?’
Silver-grey eyes now flicked up, keenly bright in their scrutiny. ‘Which question did you actually want answered?’
Hopeful, Dakar said, ‘Both.’
But Asandir’s mood since Etarra had not been the least bit forgiving. ‘When a peak such as this has served through two ages as a prison, prudence would dictate a check to be sure the rock is still willing to absorb the antagonism of the entity we wish to confine.’
‘And how does one bribe old stone into becoming a sewer for human refuse?’ Dakar smirked.
Asandir looked back at him, serious. ‘Rocks outlast all our doings. Longevity gives them great respect for politeness, a tendency you would benefit from copying.’
‘You can have your stones and your trees, and your communion with both for permissions,’ Dakar retorted. ‘I’ll save my appreciation for a paid woman, if we don’t break our necks on this peak.’
A warning shift in Asandir’s regard prompted Dakar to spin around and resume clambering up the trail. As stones gouged his knees, he vowed under his breath that henceforward he would restrict his inquiries to spells that could untie string. Then the next time he attracted a pack of mischief-bent iyats, he need not cut his laces to pry his boots off.
The ledge faded out at the snowline. Confronted by a rock face cracked into vertical ladders and packed under scabs of blue ice, Dakar swallowed. ‘We’re not going up that.’
Nobody answered. He blinked, rubbing sweat from his eyes. ‘Well, I’m not going up that.’
‘You could spend the night here,’ Asandir agreed. ‘You might even be comfortable, before the storm.’
‘What storm?’ Dakar studied the sky, which deepened now toward clear aquamarine. Sunset was nigh, but the air smelled of glacier, not snow. ‘There aren’t any clouds! I could spit and hit the moon.’
Asandir kept climbing. The Mad Prophet fidgeted from foot to foot while arcanely frigid air eddied upward, as Kharadmon also passed him by.
Dakar scrubbed his face on his tunic sleeve, then reviewed his position. The pitch they had already climbed was frightful, Rockfell’s southeastern exposure a needle to split the wind. The nethermost spine of the Skyshiels nipped the horizon all around, while below, hulking as somnolent dragons, two ridges hoarded the valley between. Farthest down, dark tarnish in a gloom of cut-off sunlight, river Avast’s ice-fed streamlets wound through forested ravines napped and ledged like rumpled velvet.
Just looking made Dakar’s head spin. He could wait, but if he nodded off to sleep for one second he would tumble off the cranny that marked the trailhead. Above, sharp rocks as bleak as nightmare swooped up, lost in clouds gilt-hemmed by failing daylight. Asandir had already disappeared. Beaten at last to resignation, Dakar stuffed his fat hands in a cleft and inched upward toward fog that was powdered with whirling snow. He inhaled the flakes repeatedly as he climbed. Eyes squeezed shut, he spoke through teeth clamped against a sneeze, and hoped to Sithaer that Asandir would take pity on him. ‘How much further?’ His muscles felt wrapped in hot wire.
Kharadmon’s chuckle answered. ‘Not far at all. Unless you prefer to keep scrabbling along by your fingernails?’
Suspicious of some prank, Dakar risked a look.
Then he, too, laughed aloud. Not half a pace to his left, some capricious carver had fitted a staircase into the rockface. Elegant to the point of absurdity, the risers were black marble adorned at edge and corner with leering, haughty gargoyles. An extravagance of scrolled newel posts had once supported railings, until weather had scoured the brass away. Now only fastening holes remained.
‘Damn me,’ exclaimed Dakar. ‘What fool engineered that?’
‘Davien.’ As if bemused by the quirks of his mounte-bank colleague, Kharadmon qualified. ‘Fifteen centuries back, when he fashioned the pit into Rockfell, Davien insisted the stone of the mountain might decide one day to shrug him off. He was right to assume that anyone who braves the ascent thus far does a mage’s business here.’
Crabbing sideways across the face, Dakar was ill-inclined to argue with the Betrayer’s skewed sense of logic. He caught a post, swung onto the stair, then bit back his relief as the inimical gazes of gargoyles seemed to follow his progress hungrily. He tested the risers with suspicion. Everything else Davien had built was untrustworthy and clever with traps; if this stairway was either harmless or safe, it should be the glaring exception. Dakar almost wished he was clinging like an insect to wild rock.
Dewed with clammy fog, the Mad Prophet broke through the cloud layer. Ahead, the last sunshine glared off Rockfell’s knifepoint summit. Suspended between that pinnacle which supported heaven, and a netherworld floored with combed cotton and shaded rose and purple by the encroaching twilight, Dakar sucked in a nervous breath. Dire cold froze the hair in his nose. He coughed, which caused Asandir to beckon impatiently from the ledge where Davien’s stairway ended.
The pack by then rested at Asandir’s feet, a lump of weather-stained canvas that Dakar gave a wide berth upon his arrival. The thing might appear as innocuous as somebody’s bundled picnic, but even an apprentice’s awareness could sense the hedging sting of guard-wards from two paces away.
Asandir poised before a vertical slab of black rock, his ear pressed to its mirror-smooth polish and his palms resting flat on either side. He seemed prepared to spend motionless hours that way, while his apprentice shivered, abandoned to boredom.
A whining snap split the air.
‘Kharadmon,’ Asandir commanded, and suddenly, sharply, stepped back.
Dakar smelled ozone, then all but fell over as a bolt stark as lightning seared across the blank stone. A
