'There is no other choice.'
Harpirias shrugged and clambered into the floater next to the Shapeshifter. Korinaam touched the controls and the vehicle glided forward. The other floaters followed.
For a time the ascent merely seemed strange and beautiful. The snow came upon them in luminous wind-whipped ribbons that swirled and gusted in a wild frantic dance. The air before them took on a wondrous shimmer from the glittering flecks that were tossing about in it. A soft white cloak began to cover the black walls of the pass.
But after a time the storm intensified, the cloak wrapped itself closer and closer about them. Harpirias could see nothing but whiteness, before, behind, above, to the right and left. On every side there was snow, only snow, a dense swaddling of snow.
Where was the road? It was miraculous that Korinaam was able to see it at all, let alone to follow every twist and turn.
Though it was warm enough inside the floater, Harpirias found himself starting to shiver and could not stop. From such glimpses of the pass as he had had in the early stages of the climb, he knew that the road was a treacherous one, switching back from side to side above terrible abysses as it rose between the two stolid mountains. Even if Korinaam did not simply steer the floater over the edge on one of the sharper turns, the wind was only too likely to pick the vehicle up and send it crashing down the slope.
Harpirias sat still, saying nothing, fighting to keep his teeth from chattering. It was not proper for him to show fear. He was a knight of the Coronal’s court, a beneficiary of the severe and rigorous training that such a phrase implied. Nor was his ancestry that of a coward. A thousand years before, his celebrated ancestor Prestimion had ruled this world in glory, doing deeds of high renown, first as Coronal, then as Pontifex. Could a descendant of the resplendent Prestimion permit himself to display cowardice before a Shapeshifter?
No. No.
And yet — that driving wind — these curves — those blinding surges of ever-thickening snow -
Calmly Korinaam said, turning casually toward Harpirias as he spoke, 'They tell the tale of the great beast Naamaaliilaa, who walked these mountains alone, in the days when she was the only being that lived on this world. And in a storm like this she breathed upon a cliff of ice, and licked with her tongue the place she had breathed on, and as her tongue moved, she carved a figure from it, and he was Saabaataan, the Blind Giant, the first man of our kind. And then she breathed again and licked again, and brought forth from the ice Siifiinaatuur, the Red Woman, the mother of us all. And Saabaataan and Siifiinaatuur went down out of this icy land into the forests of Zimroel, and were fruitful and multiplied and spread over all the world, and thus the race of Piurivars came into being. So this is a holy land to us, prince. In this place of frost and storm our first parents were conceived.'
Harpirias responded only with a grunt. His interest in Shapeshifter creation myths was no more than moderate at the best of times, and this was something less than the best of times.
The wind struck the floater with the force of a giant fist. The vehicle lurched wildly, bobbing like a straw in the breeze and veering toward the brink of the abyss. Coolly Korinaam set it back on its course with the lightest touch of one long many-jointed finger.
Harpirias said through clenched teeth, 'How much farther is it, would you say, to the valley of the Othinor?'
'Two passes and three valleys beyond this one, that’s all.' 'Ah. And how long will that take us, do you think?' Korinaam smiled indifferently. 'A week, maybe. Or two, or three. Or perhaps forever.'
2
It had never been part of Harpirias’s plan to go venturing into the dismal snowy wastes of the Khyntor Marches. As a member of one of the great pontifical families, a Prestimion of Muldemar, he had quite reasonably expected that he would pass his days comfortably on Castle Mount in the service of the Coronal Lord Ambinole, perhaps rising in time to the rank of counselor to the Coronal, or possibly some high ministry, or even the dukedom of one of the Fifty Cities.
But his upward path had been abruptly interrupted, and for the most cruel and trivial of reasons.
With a band of six companions he had ridden out from the Castle, on his twenty-fifth birthday, a fateful day for him, and down into the forested estate country close by the city of Halanx . His friend Tembidat’s family long had maintained a hunting preserve there. The outing was Tembidat’s idea, Tembidat’s gift to him.
Hunting was one of Harpirias’s greatest pleasures. He was a man of short stature, like most of the men of the Prestimion line, but agile and broad-shouldered and strong, a genial, outgoing, athletic young man. He loved the chase in its every part: the stalking, the sighting of the prey, the sweet air whistling past his cheeks as he gave pursuit, the moment of pausing to take aim. And then, of course, the kill. What finer way to celebrate one’s birthday than by slaughtering a few bilantoons or fierce-tusked tuamiroks in an elegant and skillful manner, and bringing the meat back for a joyous feast, and taking a trophy or two to hang on the wall?
All that day had Harpirias and his friends hunted, and with the greatest of success, bagging not only a score of bilantoons and a brace of tuamiroks but a fat succulent vandar as well, and a dainty high-prancing onathil, and, as the afternoon was waning, the most wondrous catch of all, a majestic sinileese that had a splendid glistening white hide and glorious many-branched scarlet antlers. Harpirias himself was the one to bring it down, with a single well-placed shot at an astonishing range, a clean shot that filled him with pride at his own marksmanship.
'I had no idea your family kept such rare creatures as this in its park,' Harpirias said to Tembidat, when they had recovered the body of the sinileese and he was preparing it for transport back to the Castle.
'In fact I had no idea of it myself,' said Tembidat in an oddly somber and uneasy tone, which might have served Harpirias as a hint of what was to come. But Harpirias was too swollen with delight at his achievement to notice. 'I confess I felt just a bit of surprise when I saw it standing there,' Tembidat continued. 'Rare indeed, a white sinileese — I’ve never seen a white sinileese before, have you?—'
'Perhaps I should have let it be,' Harpirias said. 'It may be some special prize of your father’s — some particular favorite of his—'
'Of which he’s never spoken? No, Harpirias!' Tembidat shook his head, a little too vigorously, perhaps, as though trying to convince himself of something. 'He must not have known of it, or cared, or it wouldn’t have been roaming loose. This is our family estate, and all animals here are fair game. And so the sinileese is my birthday present to you. My father would feel only joy, knowing that you were the one who had slain it, and that this is your birthday hunt.'
'Who are those men, Tembidat?' asked one of the others in the hunting party suddenly. 'Your father’s gamekeepers, are they?'
Harpirias looked up. Three burly grim-faced strangers in crimson-and-purple livery had stepped from the forest into the clearing where the hunters were at work.
'No,' said Tembidat, and that curious tautness had returned to his voice, 'not my father’s keepers, but those of our neighbor Prince Lubovine.'
'Your— neighbor—' said Harpirias, with apprehension growing in him as he considered the ample distance at which he had killed the sinileese.
He began to wonder, now, just whose beast the sinileese had been.
The biggest and most grim-looking of the crimson-and-purple strangers offered a careless salute and said, 'Have any of you gentlemen happened to see— Ah, yes, apparently you have—'
His voice trailed off into a growl.
'A white sinileese with scarlet antlers,' another of the newcomers finished tersely for him.
There was an ugly moment of hostile silence. The three were peering in a dark-visaged fashion at the animal over which Harpirias was crouching. Harpirias, putting down his skinning knife, stared at his bloodied hands. He felt a rushing roar in his ears, as of a seething torrent passing through his skull.
Tembidat said finally, with an unsteady touch of defiance in his tone, 'You surely must know that this is the hunting preserve of the family of Duke Kestir of Halanx, whose son I am. If your animal strayed across the boundary onto our land, we regret its death, but we were completely within our rights to regard it as legitimate prey. As you well know.'
'If it had strayed across,' said the first of Prince Lubovine’s gamekeepers. 'If. But the sinileese, which we have been pursuing all afternoon since it broke from its cage, was on our prince’s domain when you shot it.'
'Your— prince’s— domain—' Tembidat said, faltering.
'Indeed. Can you see the boundary marker over there, blazed on that pingla tree? The blood of the sinileese stains the ground well behind it. We have followed that bloody trail to here. You can carry the animal over the line to Duke Kestir’s land, if you wish, but that does not change the fact that it was standing in Prince Lubovine’s domain when you shot it.'
'Is this true?' Harpirias said to Tembidat, with an edge of horror sharpening his words. 'Is that the boundary of your father’s land?'
'Apparently so,' Tembidat muttered hollowly.
'And the animal was the only one of its kind, the grandest treasure of Prince Lubovine’s collection,' the gamekeeper said. 'We claim its meat and its hide; but your foolish poaching will cost you much more than that, mark my words, my young princes.'
The three wardens hoisted the sinileese to their shoulders, and stalked off into the forest with it.
Harpirias stood stunned. Prince Lubovine’s park of rare beasts was legendary for the marvels it contained. And Prince Lubovine was not only a man of great power and immeasurable wealth and high ancestry — he traced his lineage back to the Coronal Lord Voriax, elder brother of the famous Valentine, who had been Coronal and then Pontifex during the Time of Troubles five centuries before — but also he was known as a man of petty and vindictive nature, who brooked no affront lightly.
How could Tembidat have been so stupid as to let the hunting parry wander right up to the border of Lubovine’s estate? Why had Tembidat not said that the boundary was unfenced, why had he not warned him how risky it might be to aim at that far-off sinileese?
Tembidat, plainly aware of Harpirias’s dismay, said gently, 'We will make full amends, my friend, have no doubt of that. My father will speak to Lubovine — we will make it clear that it was simply a mistake, that you had not the slightest intent of poaching — we will buy him three new sinileeses,
But of course it wasn’t as simply dealt with as that.
There were profound apologies. There was the payment of an indemnity. There was an attempt — fruitless — to find another white sinileese for the outraged Prince Lubovine. Highly placed kinsmen of Harpirias’s, Prestimions and Dekkerets and Kinnikens, spoke on his behalf, urging leniency for what had been, after all, an innocent youthful error.
