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But this was the contract’s sixth year Only four re

Maybe

She turned once more, and studied the pass ahead They were less than a hundred paces’ worth of elevation froh, centuries-old dwarf oaks and spruce flanked the uneven path Mosses and lichens covered the enored down by the rivers of ice in ages past Crusted patches of snow re to shadowed places Here the wind , not the wiry spruce, not even the crooked, leafless branches of the oaks

Against such immovable stolidity, it could only howl

The first wagon clattered onto level ground behind her, Nerek tongues shouting as it was quickly rolled ahead, past Seren Pedac, and anchored in place The tribesmen then rushed back to help their fellows still on the ascent

The squeal of a door, and Buruk the Pale claon He stood with his stance wide, as if struggling to regain the id wind, reaching up to keep his fur-lined cap on his head as he blinked over at Seren Pedac

‘I shall etch this vision against the very bone of my skull, blessed Acquitor! There to join a host of others, of course That urace as you stand there The weathered hts

‘You – Nerek! Find your foreman – we shall camp here Meals must be prepared Unload those bundles of wood in the third wagon I want a fire, there, in the usual place Be on with it!’

Seren Pedac set her pack down and ed Buruk’s words away Thirty paces on, she ca of the trail, where level stretches of scraped bedrock reached out to the sides and the walls of the flanking mountains had been cut sheer On each flat, boulders had been positioned to form the full-sized outline of a ship, both prow and stern pointed and ht menhirs The prow stones had been carved into a likeness of the Edur god, Father Shadow, but the winds had ground the details away Whatever had originally occupied these two flanking ships had long vanished, although the bedrock within was strangely stained

The sheer walls of rock alone retained so of their ancient power Smooth and black, they were translucent, in the manner of thin, smoky obsidian And shapes moved behind them As if the mountains had been hollowed out, and each panel was a kind of , revealing a mysterious, eternal world within A world oblivious of all that surrounded it, beyond its own borders of ie panels, either blind or indifferent

The translucent obsidian defied Seren’s efforts to focus on the shapeson the other side, as it had the past score of times she had visited this site But that very ain and again

Stepping carefully around the stern of the ship of boulders, she approached the eastern panel She tugged the fur-lined glove froainst the sers, taking the ache fro powers she had discovered when she first touched the rock

A lifetirew brittle, misshapen with pain The endless hard rock underfoot soon sent shocks through the spine with each step taken The Nerek, the tribe that, before kneeling to the Letherii king, had dwelt in the range’s easternmost reach, believed that they were the children of a woman and a serpent, and that the serpent dwelt still within the body, that gently curved spine, the stacked knuckles reaching up to hide its head in the centre of the brain But theit back to the ground, to return it oncein the cracks and coiled beneath rocks And so, in the course of a life, the serpent was made to bow, to bend and twist

Nerek buried their dead beneath flat stones

At least, they used to, before the king’s edict forced them to embrace the faith of the Holds

Now they leave the bodies of their kin where they fall Even unto abandoning their hutsIt had been years ago, but Seren Pedac re upon the vast plateau where the Nerek dwelt The villages had lost all distinction, ether in chaotic, dispirited confusion Every third or fourth hut had been left to ruin, e, or tooChildren wandered untended, trailed by feral rock rats that now bred uncontrolled and had become too disease-ridden to eat

The Nerek people were destroyed, and fro out Their horown cemetery, and the Letherii cities proranted no sympathy The Letherii way of life was hard, but it was the true way, the way of civilization The proof was found in its thriving where other ways stumbled or remained weak and stilted