Descending the mountain

 Garret clung to the rockface, the tips of his fingers white with the effort and long-since numb.  His feet were half-on, half-off a narrow ledge and his toes were starting to ache with the strain of holding himself in place.  He was trying to edge along the ledge to the next patch of cliff-face where he could actually stand but Samara had stopped in front of him and he was biting his tongue to prevent himself from demanding what the problem was now.

The crumbling of the path ahead of them had turned out to be a much bigger problem that he’d expected; when they’d turned around to backtrack a little and find another way down they’d discovered that the steep slope they’d been descending was unclimbable.  The loose scree that they’d carefully nudged aside with their feet coming down was impossible to avoid when going up, and it just slid from under them and dumped them unceremoniously on their arses, unpleasantly close to the drop.  Or plummet, considering it was definitely far enough to the steppe below to be fatal.  Samara had cursed a blue streak, letting go some of the rage she had for the path crumbling in the first place and conveniently not letting Garret ask any more questions about whether the whole situation could have been avoided if she had been more trusting.  Then she’d glared around her as though the cliff and the sky and the mountain were somehow conspirators against her and sat heavily down and sighed as though she was carrying the weight of the whole world on her shoulders.

“Am thinking: is time to climb,” said Efimov looking over the edge. Garret, who didn’t have vertigo or a particular fear of heights did not join him; the view was spectacular but made him feel uneasy.  There just wasn’t quite enough space on their path to stand back and feel secure in his opinion.

“There’s no chance we could fly instead?”

Efimov looked over at him and grinned, a light dancing in his eyes that made Garret more uneasy than looking at the drop to the ground.  “Ah flight,” he said.  “Difficult magic, that.  Taught at Bogbones and Atul schools, however.”

“They teach all magics,” said Samara but it sounded automatic and less defensive than she’d been so far.

“They teach this one,” said Efimov.  “Problem is, the way they teach it is about leverage.  Flight is achieved by pushing on something else, typically the ground.”

Garret’s forehead, which could charitably be compared a freshly ploughed field, furrowed further as he thought about this.  “Isn’t that right though?” he asked. “I mean, a bird flaps its wings and pushes the air against the ground to stay aloft, right?”

Efimov shook his head.  “No, bird pushes air against air when it flaps.  Ground is a long way away and there is a lot of air between it and bird.  Also, air moves when pushed.  Flying is not like rowing boat.  Flapping is not for support, flapping is for direction.  Bird curves wings, adjusts direction.  Bird flaps to turn, but relies on being light enough not to fall too fast.”

Garret puzzled over this.  “Ok,” he said at last.  “I don’t think I understand that, but magic does it differently anyway?”

“Exact,” said Efimov.  “And here is problem.  Magic flying here — ground is too far away.  So we have only falling until ground is close enough, and then magic probably not strong enough to slow fall and start flying before ground catches us.”

“We die, but more slowly,” said Samara.  She was staring into the blue sky and Garret wondered for a moment if he’d ever seen her look so hopeless.  “We’re stranded on the side of this stupid mountain and we’re going to die here.”

“Time for climbing,” said Efimov.

“We can’t climb, you idiot!  There’s no way up.  The scree will kill us just as much as jumping off the mountainside will!”

“Not climbing up,” said Efimov.  Garret plucked up his courage to look over the edge of the mountain and wished he hadn’t.  The side of the mountain was yellowish-grey rock and while there were lots of bumps and crags and cracks Garret didn’t like the idea of clinging to them for dear life while trying to inch his way towards the ground.  Somewhere overhead a bird chose that moment to scream and the cry echoed around them eerily.

“You want to climb down?!  Have you gone mad?”

Efimov gestured at the path.  “Path continues below us,” he said.  “Only need to climb down to rest of path.”

Garret thought Samara was going to start shouting but she stood up instead, and took three quick steps to the edge.  Then she knelt and peered over, then stretched out, lying down and let her head hang over the edge.

“You’re right,” she said, sounding surprised.  “The path switches back and carries on below us.  We could climb down to that.”

“We?” asked Garret and wasn’t at all surprised when the other two ignored him.  “I might be a bit heavy for that,” he said into the silence.  “My pack, that is,” he said when he still got no response.

“You will have to carry only what is necessary to you,” said Efimov.  “But I think we have a plan now.”

“We?” asked Garret again. A chill feeling of dread started in the pit of his stomach and spread outwards.

Samara led the way as though it had been her idea all along until they’d reached the first point where they could rejoin the path.  Garret, gritting his teeth and sweating so much that water seemed to run off his head in a rivulet, had struggled down with his pack intact.  When his feet finally settled on the path and his heart stopped pounding in his chest like it was going to burst the pain in his fingers and toes started up.  As he massaged his hands and got his breathing back under control, Efimov looked over the edge again and said,

“I think we could climb a bit further.  Would save time.”

“Lead on,” said Samara.  Garret bit his tongue and wondered at the unfairness of the world that his companions seemed determined to take the hardest approach to everything.

“I might prefer the path,” he said, even as Efimov slipped over the edge of the path and started to climb down.  “I don’t have any spiders in my ancestry, you know.”

“It’s getting dark,” said Samara, glancing up at the sky.  It was a deeper blue than it had been earlier and Garret now noted, with dismay, that there were hints of red and orange, sunset colours, amongst the sparse clouds.  “Sure you want to be up here on your own when that happens?”

“Extortion,” muttered Garret under his breath and resigned himself to following Samara.

Now, with the path once again in sight, she had stopped in front of him and he was wondering how long he had before his fingers just stopped working and he fell off the mountain.

“There’s a problem,” she said and Garret had to restrain himself to keep from shouting that there better bloody had be.  “Efimov had stopped.”

“Great,” said Garret, unable to help himself.  His jaw ached from gritting his teeth.

“What?”  Samara turned her head to look at him and then she sneered. “Oh, was that sarcasm?”

“What else?” said Garret.  He reminded himself that while he was only to fall off this cursed mountain the way things were going, he didn’t have to anger Samara into pushing him off.  “I don’t think I can go back.”

“I don’t think any of us can,” she said.  “But… oh, Efimov’s done it!”  She sounded impressed, which was very unlike her.  “That was quite a jump he made,” she continued.  Then she looked at Garret again.  “You might have a problem with that pack though.”

Garret had regretted keeping his pack eight times so far and would have taken it off and picked it up from the bottom of the mountain if he’d thought it was at all possible without it pulling him down with it.  He was certain that as tired as he now was, it wasn’t going to be easier.

“Right,” he said.  “Got this far though, so you never know.”

“Sure,” said Samara.  She edged forwards at last.  “See you if you make it!”

Bon Amba

 The path down the mountainside was as treacherous as Garret could imagine; there was a large amount of loose scree that regularly slipped underfoot and rattled off, pulled by gravity to the steppe below, and the path was little more than a goat-trail with large sections that needed to either jumped over or skirted around on tiptoe.  In an hour they’d barely progressed a kilometre and he suspected that they were barely a hundred metres lower than the cave they’d started off from.

His pack was weighing heavily on his shoulders but he stubbornly refused to think about it.  If he did he’d have to set it down and sort out what he really wanted to keep and that would upset Samara as she would resent the delay, think he should throw it all away, and then start shouting when he inevitably decided he wanted to keep all of it.  So he flexed his back muscled and gritted his teeth and trudged on after the other two.

Efimov was in the middle and seemed least bothered by the whole ordeal.  Garret found himself puzzling over that a little: they were headed to Blinton where the people had apparently disliked Efimov enough to want him dead and he didn’t seem too concerned.  Granted, he’d rotted their eyes out of their heads, which could be seen as making a point, but even so… Garret had been hounded by people before and hurt by names such a ghoul and graverobber (what, exactly, was the point at which grave robbery turned into archaeology and became respectable, after all?) and he doubted that he’d be as sanguine as Efimov seemingly was.

“What is Bon Amba?” said Samara suddenly.  She had apparently found a stretch of path clear of scree and long enough to consider talking instead of breathing heavily and wondering how to get past the next obstacle.

“Is magic system,” said Efimov easily.  “Rock ahead is rotten, watch footing please.”

Samara halted and stared at the path in front of them.  “Where?” she said after a moment.  She sounded as though she was getting angry again, but wasn’t quite there yet, and her shoulders were hunched up just a little.  Garret took the opportunity to set his pack down and sit on it.

“Slightly to your left,” said Efimov.  He edged forward a little and pointed so that his arm stretched past Samara and she could see the slightly darker patch of rock he was indicating.

“That?”  She shrugged and drew a dagger from her belt.  Kneeling down she reached forward and poked the rock experimentally.  “Nothing wrong with — oh shiiii—“

With a crack and a dull rumble the end of the path splintered into fist-sized rocks and cascaded down the mountainside, bouncing and throwing up clouds of yellowish dust.

“Not careful enough,” said Efimov.

Samara rounded on him, the dagger raised in the air above his head and the muscles of her biceps and triceps standing out like thick cords.  Her eyes were wide with anger and her lips had pulled back to reveal cat-like canines and sharp, flesh-tearing teeth.  Musk rose on the thin, cold air and Garret got off his pack and crouched behind it.

“Be keeping calm, please,” said Efimov as though she were pointing out a particularly nice area of scenery.  “Path is still crumbling.  You should come this way please.”

Garret peeked out from behind his pack and saw Samara hesitating, her arm jerking as she fought the urge to launch herself at Efimov and stab him to death.  When she lunged he was certain that she’d lost the internal battle and ducked back behind his pack, waiting for the screams and the spatter of hot blood.

There was a crash and another cloud of yellowish-brown dust surged over him, stinging his eyes and filling his mouth with an earthy-bitter taste.  He spat, trying to clear it and rubbed at his eyes though that made the stinging worse as the grit seemed to work its way further in.  It took him a good few minutes to finally be able to see again, and then, to his surprise, he found Samara disentangling herself from Efimov, the dagger dropped on the path behind him, and him helping her away from the new end of their path down the mountain, which was now a vertical drop.

“Thanks,” said Samara curtly.  Garret was well aware that that was as grateful as she got, and Efimov nodded as though not expecting even that.  There was a moment of silence and then, clearly forcing herself to speak, Samara said, “That could have been tricky… uh, more tricky to handle if you’d not spotted it.”  Her mouth clamped shut and her lips started turning white with the pressure she was applying.

“Bon Amba,” said Efimov.  He picked her dagger up and returned it to her; she refused to break her tight-lipped silence as she put it away.  “Is different kind of magic; not taught at Bogbones or Atul schools.”

“They teach every kind of magic at Bogbones,” said Samara.  Her cheeks reddened though as though she’d not meant to speak.

“No,” said Efimov.  “I do not believe all kinds of magics are yet known, so that is not possible.  And Bon Amba is not taught anywhere.  Is learned from studying the residues, is left-over magic from some other time.  Bon Amba will show you where the connections are missing or where they can be made.  But is dangerous, some of those connections were broken for the reason, and who knows what reason is any more?”

“Bon Amba makes connections?” asked Garret.  Efimov’s accent wasn’t usually a problem for him, but he didn’t feel like he was understanding what he was saying about this.

“No.  Bon Amba reveals connections.  People with magic can then use it to change those connections.”

“Could you have used it on the path?”

Efimov looked directly at him and Garret felt like a particularly stupid student in front of the teacher.

“I did,” said Efimov gently.  “That is how I was able to warn Samara.  I think you mean to ask, could I have used magic to stop the path disintegrating, after I used Bon Amba to find the problem?”

“Yes,” said Garret.  It sounded like what he should have asked, he thought.

“Yes,” said Efimov.  “If there had been more time.  But now the path is gone and there is nothing to connect.  We must find another way down.”

Caryfell

 Garrett was sitting on a large mushroom despite the complaints of Samara who thought it was unsafe.  Around them the grey-orange walls of the cave rose up to a vaulted ceiling several metres overhead, and it felt like the heat from their campfire was rising up and away from them as well.  Water trickled down the cave walls in thin rivulets and pooled here and there in depressions in the cave floor; green-blue lichen and mould grew wherever it felt like it, and a cold breeze chilled them whenever they weren’t near the fire.  Light came from the fire itself, though before they’d lit it there had been a lessening of the darkness towards one end of the cave.

There were four mushrooms, growing in a cluster that shielded the campfire from the breeze.  Two of them were lumpy and semi-spherical; the other two, growing on thick stems that had found purchase on something below the rock floor of the cave, had flatter tops.  Garrett had claimed one and the other, rejected disdainfully by Samara, was being squatted on by Efimov.

“Tomorrow, we should reach the end of the cave,” said Samara.  Her blue hair, long enough to reach her waist and normally braided to keep it out of her way, was covering her head and the map she was staring at.  The map was drawn on terratta-parchment in fluorescent inks and was easier to see when protected from the light.  “We should come out on the side of the mountain, and then somewhere below us will be Blinton.  I think we should be able to see it from above.”

“More than they can do,” said Efimov.  He was dark-skinned and muscular and had three eyes; the third was set above the other two in his forehead and often looked in a different direction to what Garrett thought of as the ‘regular two’.  His hair was black and kept back from his head by a thin woven band in red and orange; there was a pattern to the weaving but it was hard to discern in the flickering light of the cave.  He sniggered to himself.

“You keep saying that,” said Samara sounding annoyed.  “Are you going to explain yourself before we get there?  I’d like to be prepared for whatever we’re going to find.”

Efimov sniggered again.

“Seriously,” said Garrett.  He was squat and grey-skinned with warts and bulbous tumour-like excretions on his visible skin.  He was half-ogre, though the size and strength of his father had eluded him, replaced instead by the cunning and mercantile drive of his (mostly-human) mother.  “This is a business trip, Efimov.  What gives?”

“Everything is business trip with you, Gar,” said Efimov easily.  His third eye stared off into the darkness, as though hunting for something to watch.  “Even this cave, you managed to find things to sell.”

“He’s got you there,” said Samara.  She tossed her hair back and lifted her head.  The glow of the maps inks persisted for a moment, squiggly lines floating in the darkness, before fading in the light of the campfire.  Her slightly-yellowish skin cast and triangular face made Garrett thing of the large cats that his ogre father had kept for food.

“We got lucky!” he protested.  “I had no idea that people had left things behind when they came through here before.”

“They died,” said Samara.  She’d objected to ‘looting the dead’ while Garrett had been going through the bags that he’d found when he’d bumped into a stalagmite, broken it off and discovered the first corpse.  There had been much that was rotten or water-logged, but in one split-open and disintegrating satchel he’d found a couple of handfuls of uncut gems and a long mahogany stick that Efimov thought was a magical staff.

“People do that,” said Garrett.  “All the time, in fact.  And they don’t have any use for what they leave behind and there’s no-one here to tell us who their inheritors might be.  So that means we get to inherit.”

Samara shook her head, her hair rippling in waves behind and around her.  “Corpse-robbing,” she said softly.

“Did you figure out what the staff does yet, Eff?” said Garrett.  He’d failed to convince Samara of the rule of finders-keepers already and wasn’t in the mood to try again.

Efimov shifted position so that he was sitting cross-legged.  “Is staff of way-finding,” he said.  “Out of charges, obviously.”

“Obviously,” said Garrett, nodding.  “And Blinton?  What’s so funny about that?”

Efimov tilted his head back so that all three eyes stared at the distant ceiling, which even to his magically-acute vision was still mostly shadowed.  “Was there once,” he said.  “They… didn’t like me.”

After the silence had drawn on for several seconds Samara said, “Is that it?  It’s a funny place because they didn’t like you?”

“They offered reward for my capture,” said Efimov.  Garrett shifted uneasily: Efimov’s past was a mystery to both him and Samara, and they’d both done some digging around as discretely as possible.  Having him on the team was undoubtedly a good idea — he was a skilled mage and his appraisal of magical artefacts had been spot-on so far — but knowing so little about him made them both just a little nervous.  “Wanted me dead or deader.”

“Dead or alive, usually,” said Samara who couldn’t accept that Efimov’s accent didn’t mean he didn’t speak Common as well as the rest of them.

“Dead or deader said poster,” said Efimov.  “I can read, Samara.”

“Yes, sorry.”

“Poster said I was to be reported to authorities on sight,” said Efimov.  “So I… arranged things a little so that that was no problem for them.”

Garrett’s eyes widened.  He might not know much about Efimov, but what he’d seen so far suggested that he had a very literal approach to the world.

“Clouds of darkness?” he asked, wondering what spell Efimov had chosen to cast.  “Some kind of permanent night?”

Efimov chuckled now, a deeper, more sincere sounding laughter.  “I had no idea how long I would need to stay,” he said.  “Plus at that time I had not learned much of magics of Bon Amba.  Was little more than sophisticated necromancer and vivimancer.  Skilled vivimancer, naturally, but my talents lay with life and death.  So I took tree pollen, since was Spring, and modified it a touch so that when it got in eyes, it took root and rotted eyes out of head.  Took maybe four weeks before entire town was blind.  Hence new name of town.  Used to be called Caryfell.”

Samara’s gasp was genuine shock and Garrett had to quickly stifle the laughter rising in his chest.  He coughed, and then again.  “That sounds effective,” he said, hoping not to offend Samara.

“You blinded a whole town of people?” She wasn’t shouting but she sounded like she wanted to be.  “A whole town!  So much that they changed the name of the town!”

“Was them or me,” said Efimov, shrugging.  “No-one died and we all along together living happily.  For six months or so, and then I left.”

“You turned them all blind!”

“He didn’t kill them,” said Garrett.  “I think that’s important too.  They wanted to kill him, after all.”

“That’s not the point,” said Samara and then stopped.  Garrett risked looking over at her.  She was staring at Efimov but her hands were braiding her hair; it looked like she wasn’t aware she was doing it.  “I mean, that’s sort of.  Well, that’s not quite.  Damn it, wasn’t there another way?”

“Maybe?” Efimov shrugged. “If we find ourselves in similar situation I’m happy to ask you for alternative solution.”

Samara dropped her hair and seemed to realise she’d been braiding it.  “Well.  That’s good,” she said. “Yes.  We can discuss it.”

Garrett started to relax.

“Can you unblind them now though?  Undo what you did?”

“Maybe,” said Efimov.  “Can probably grow new eyes if I think about it. But have they stopped wanting to kill me?”