“Come.” Pelter placed a silver coin on the table and stood to leave. “Time we were going.”
Glass rose slowly. She broke a piece from the brick of penitents’ bread before her and began to chew.
• • •
THE GRAND PASS proved less grand than its name. Although the Grampains boasted no deeper or broader pass this side of the Corridor, the Grand Pass was neither deep nor broad. The road grew narrow and wound its way up slopes of frightening steepness to gain altitude. With the increased elevation the winds grew fiercer and colder. Ice clung to the rock and gathered in any hollow. The dark stone of the Grampains became white-clad, the carriage frost-bearded. They left the trees behind first, then the grass, until all about lay pale as death, unmarred by any sign of vegetation.
Small forts studded the pass at regular intervals. Not primarily for preventing passage—Blenai’s Fist served that purpose on the eastern slopes—but to house the soldiers who made regular sorties into the peaks, patrolling for Scithrowl spies, or raiders, or the forerunners of any mass invasion. Smoke rose from behind their battlements and firelight bled between their shutters but still they looked bleak and isolated amid the vastness of the mountains, mere points of warmth and light scattered across an untold weight of cold stone. The wind ceased to moan and took up howling instead, running its teeth along the carriage’s slatted windows. Ice fragments peppered the backboard and the stronger gusts set the whole vehicle lurching first one way then the other. Although all manner of perils lay ahead for Glass she found herself at that moment feeling rather sorry for Regol, leading the way on his painted mare, sorry for Heb the driver, hunched in his seat, and even a twinge of sympathy for Sera atop the wagon whose job it was to cut her down should she try to escape.
The sky above was a deep maroon, shading towards black, strewn with dark ribbons of cloud that looked like lacerations where jagged peaks tore the heavens.
• • •
DESPITE THE TWISTY narrowness of the route, the road they followed was not without traffic. The dim way-lights of carriages, carts, and wagons punctuated the sinuous length of the pass, snaking up towards the highest point and the long descent that followed. And there, cradled and largely hidden by the arms of a side valley, a glow that might have risen from a small town but instead hinted at the lights of Sherzal’s lonely palace.
“I would say that anyone who secretes themselves so high in such a forsaken place must be plotting something.” Glass continued to peer through the slats, speaking to nobody in particular. “But that might hold just as well for a convent atop a rock or an inquisitor in a tall tower.”
The three senior inquisitors dozing on the seat opposite made no reply. Brother Pelter only curled his lip, but Melkir, though he stiffened his face into the guards’ mask, couldn’t help but twitch the corner of his mouth in the direction of a smile.
• • •
THEY ADVANCED IN fits and starts, seeming to halt at every second one of a hundred and more passing places to allow wagons and carts coming in the opposite direction to go by. Trade flourished across almost every border in the Corridor. Any closed border sealed off the world to the east from all nations to the west. The pressure that then built to reopen such a border grew rapidly and was exerted by a growing number of nations, starved of whatever delicacy or local rarity their people craved. And as conflict threatened trade boomed, merchants suddenly desperate to stockpile goods that might not be available again for long and bloody months, even years. Glass had no real basis for comparison but given how many heavily laden wagons they were having to stop to let pass, she guessed this might be a boom.
• • •
TO MANY OF the Sis, Sherzal’s decision to isolate herself amid the Grampains had seemed like madness. Granted, the emperor’s youngest sister had also taken herself to the very edge of the empire, but Velera’s palace lay in the thriving port of Gerren, a city that had few equals in terms of wealth and society.
Sherzal’s palace was, by necessity, more of a fortress, at least from the outside. In fact it had been a fortress before she took command of it and set her masons to work. The Grand Pass offered no hospitality, no concessions to the frailties of humankind. For grounds and gardens Sherzal had windswept rock. Her home’s reply to the constant gales was to offer only slit windows, and few of those. The emperor’s eldest sister lived behind thick walls of dark grey stone, quarried from the mountains themselves. Her palace squatted between the arms of a side valley, seeking shelter, with only three towers brave enough to push above the sullen bulk of stone.
High walls enclosed a courtyard in front of the main palace. Glass watched through the window slats as guards drew open the huge gates and ushered them within. No plumes and pomp for the hardy souls manning Sherzal’s door or patrolling her battlements: these were soldiers, dark-cloaked, armoured veterans who had known both victory and defeat.
Wheels clattered over flagstones and crunched over gravel. The driver brought his horses to a stop. Sera opened the door and Brother Pelter stepped down into the swirling wind. Glass followed with Melkir holding her elbow to steady her on the step down. She took in the scene. Constructing a level area wide enough for the scores of carriages now lined up within Sherzal’s courtyard must have been the largest feat of engineering involved in the whole project. The emperor’s sister might have taken herself away from society but clearly she had intended
