Through Snow and Stone

Synopsis

They left the keep the way they had come in, and getting home took the better part of a fortnight.

Mikhail sat up the last night over the volume carried out of the ruin and took what he had learned back to the Peren ghost in the morning. The study jogged something loose. The old spirit remembered a name: Telvanius, a scholar he had known with frustration and love both, and who had turned out to be instrumental in the Peren uprising against the Mól. He remembered what the books are for as well. There are thirty and more of them. They are alphabetical for anyone reading them as an encyclopedia, and the color of the filigree on each binding indexes a second, hidden subject: the alchemy that would strip the empire of its power, war, the court gossip that would set its clans against one another. Same color, same secret, spaced along a shelf so the pattern looks like none.

Aldo said goodbye to the great eagle and promised to come back in spring. On the way down he watched another column of fire go up far across the valley. Koa locked the keep behind them from the outside.

Yara asked for a detour to her band’s ransacked camp and got very little back: a falchion, a coin-sack, and Orsk’s unfinished idol of Vroga Waruk, cut from Mól ruin-stone and marked with the broken chain and axe of his order. She put it in Koa’s hands, with two healing draughts besides, brewed from river water and communal prayer, and, she said plainly, stronger in a body that holds Vroga in its heart. Aldo, who has had proselytizers at his table before, took that badly and then apologized for it.

A gnoll pack found them on the ridge. Koa drew it off on Nightstorm and lost it, and rejoined the others on the Goat Trail, five days of ice that nearly took Aldo’s horse out from under him. They buried Orsk in a cave under a cairn; Yara walked away without a word and Koa stayed to say a few.

Then the winter caught them in the open, half-paced and down to a day’s rations, with Yara going off the back of the horse without a sound. What saved them was Aldo’s nose: he smelled a still through the storm and led them to a barn. The farmer met them at his door armed and certain of robbery; his two sons, who distill there to sell in town, let them in regardless. Aldo drank enough of their liquor to nearly die of it, and a whole day went to Mikhail bringing him back with charcoal and chalk.

Loshev received them as heroes. Their granted estate had stood shuttered open all winter and the floors had taken snow and water. The Broken Shield sang the Dan song at them and then a song about the Valiant Few, and Mikhail played, and a flutist volunteered to fetch Elliot for two copper. Yara went to find a room of her own instead.

Elliot came, heard the whole expedition, and was mortified, a linguist who has handled these books for years and never once saw the code. His own volume went down beside theirs, and the map with it: six of the seven keeps found and marked, the seventh nowhere. He has seen other volumes about, in Haudh-Gwenn, and one that sat on the party’s own bookshelf until it was carted off for the estate sale.

Then the money. Elliot had agreed to fund the expedition and never to pay a fee for it, which he said aloud for the first time along with the fact that he is deep in debt to a bank. Aldo demanded the red volume in lieu and Elliot held it with both hands. Mikhail brokered something workable, then heckled the flutist’s pitch in front of the room, which will cost him. It was Koa who followed Elliot out into the cold (a man carrying a valuable book away from a tavern that had heard all about it) and told him that glory sounds very well in a bar, that every one of these journeys takes something out of a man, and that not everyone is built for it. Elliot handed over the satchel and stayed the winter.