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The wind becaht, colder and capricious, see to press us to the rocks one ht tumble back the e’d coress of our pursuit They had ridden harder than us and abandoned their horses later A bad sign These were drivenfor during the long climb He still hobbled, but his injury seemed no worse than it had been at the start
“Crap” The Aral Pass ran between two huge e on the Scorron borderlands I had always felt that er—the rocks at the bottoht I had been wrong The Aups above Chast the they are A whole city would be little more than a stain on the flanks of the tallest Beyond the ridgeclung to, defying a e and a third and a fourth, each separated by deep-cut gorges, the slopes between variously lethal with scree or unclimbably steep And all the ways open to us lay divided by ss, each poised to fall
Snorri set off down, grunting once as his foot tried to slip out from under him I knew if he started to slow me I would leave him behind I wouldn’t want to, and I would dislike ainst twenty mercenaries It sounded better like that More reasonable Twentywould coainst one mercenary, but twenty sounded like a better excuse to leave a friend in the lurch A friend? I pondered that one on the way down An acquaintance sounded better
By the tiain, there were few parts of ree of resilience when it co, none at all “W-wait ato snatch a breath from the wind—less fierce in the valley but still insistent The air sees Snorri didn’t appear to notice, his breathing scarcely harder now than e started the climb
“Corown h place Good for the battle Good for the soul We’ll e we descended fro has been dark But there’s nothing of darkness in warriors met for battle on a mountainside beneath a wide sky That, end Valhalla awaits!” He thumped ive their father if he dies fighting to be with them”
Rubbing at my shoulder and at the stitch in my side, I followed His “warriors met beneath a wide sky” nonsense was full of darkness as far as I was concerned, but as long as ere still doing our best not to meet the mercenaries anywhere at all, then ere in accord
We had to scra so far forwards we practically kissed thefor crevices in the folded bedrock to haul ourselves up My breath cas like knives I watched Snorri path-finding, sure,He had spoken of his dreaside hiht aith so on the tavern floor his eyes, usually a Nordic blue, sky pale, were black as coals By the tie remained and I could pretend it a trick of shadows in a hall lit only by borrowed light But I had not iined it
I sighted the first of the pursuit cresting the ridge behind us while we closed the last hundred yards to the ridge above us Losing sight of theave h without having to look at theh as I had and that at least a few of the bastards would take the last tumble of their lives
The shadows started to reach, striating the slopes My body toldfor a month at the least, but ht would at least offer a chance to stop—to snatch soate slopes like these in the dark
Mountains are pretty at a distance, but et to be more than scenery If you have to crane your neck to look at so the top of the third ridge I was practically crawling Any disloyal thoughts about abandoning Snorri with his injured leg were cast aside far below us I had promoted him to best friend and to man most likely to carrybut sheer exhaustion, s unable to draw sufficient breath to work es littered with boulders fro each ledge for climbable access to the next