Page 130 of Stardust Child

“Yes, Your Grace, it was.” It was as if she had given Edemir some absolution. He shrugged his shoulders and straightened. “Thank you. I will send a message when we see a signal.”

When he was gone, Ophele sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Through the windows, she could see the forests and the faraway mountains, where gray clouds hung like a shroud.

* * *

It was snowing again.

It was as if nature itself had determined to thwart him in this final ascent, with sky and mountain and devils fighting to cast him down. Howling winds, a treacherous climb, and snow swirling so thick that Remin could hardly see Auber four paces behind him, let alone a strangler concealed in a snowbank. At last, they had come to a place where the snow was deep enough to hide the devils by day, and Remin kept to only the narrowest ledges and tested every foot of it with the sharp point of his sword.

Two nights had passed since they left Tounot and Jinmin behind, with bare supplies and six injured men to defend. If anyone could do it, they could, but Remin knew he was flirting with catastrophe, torn between an instinct that swore the answers to all their questions were just over the next rise, even as his head warned that it was already too late to go back.

As if it had heard that thought, his stomach gave a roar of agreement.

They were all hungry. Remin was monitoring his own body as closely as everything else, and it took a lot of food to keep him going under these conditions. His was always the heaviest and most dangerous labor: breaking paths through the snow, testing their footing to make sure it would bear everyone’s weight, and even just using his own tall body as a ladder in the high places, as one man after the next stepped into his handsand scrambled onto his shoulders, climbing to the next ledge.

His injured arm was not enjoying thisat all.

And stars, when had he last slept?

The devils had come like a blizzard themselves the last two nights, a howling storm like nothing Remin had ever seen. All he and his men could do was strap themselves down tight in the narrowest and most sheltered place they could find, too large to be dragged out in a mass and too protected by their shields and armor for the stranglers and ghouls to do any significant damage. It was like spending the night rolling down a glacier in a barrel, and Remin felt like an old man when he finally staggered upright every morning, aching to his bones and colder than he had ever been in his life.

And still they pushed on. Climbing higher, aiming steadily north-northeast, following his own sense of where the devils had swarmed thickest. His vision narrowed to the slit between his hood and muffler, his breath hot and his face cold, the muscles of his thighs blazing with effort. It wasn’t that the mountains werethathigh, but climbing in these conditions meant they might grind along for an hour and only cover a single mile.

When the sky began to lighten, at first Remin thought it was just his hood coming loose.

When the wind began to die, he thought the storm was finally clearing.

And then he stepped above the clouds into a high and empty space, where the icy glitter of the peaks spread for miles all around him, blinding in the sunlight.

“Stars and ancestors,” breathed Auber as he clambered onto the ledge beside him. They had not reached the mountaintop, far from it, but this shoulder was wide enough to give the illusion of infinity as they gazed east, floating above banks of clouds. “Where are we?”

“Still Mount Orval,” Remin replied, extending a hand to haul the rest of his men up, all of them pushing back their hoods and blinking dazzled eyes in the sudden brightness. They hadn’t seen the sun in days. “On the north side, I think. That looks like Mount Grivald over there, and we wouldn’t see Mount Elun until we came around the other si—”

“My lord!” one of his men called behind him, and Remin turned to find that the adventurous Breccey had already gone off down the trailbehind them and started climbing. “Your Grace, you’ll want to see this!”

“I’ll want to tie you to my belt with leading strings if you wander off one more time!” Remin shouted back, scrambling onto the rocks behind him. At least there was no danger of devils above the clouds. “Stay there, we haven’t tested our footing…”

Auber whistled.

“Stars, look at that,” breathed one of the soldiers, as a dozen heads swiveled upward.

Far above them toward the summit, it looked as if the mountain had broken open, a cavern yawning at the sky. Even the deep snow couldn’t conceal the…sprayof rocks, which began at the cavern mouth and gouged down the mountainside, leaving a trail of massive boulders and whole trees flung down like jackstraws.

“It looks like something…cameoutof there,” said Breccey, glancing back at Remin. “Doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It does.” That was a deeply unsettling idea, especially alongside the appearance of a large devil that purred, but Remin forced himself to stop andlookat their discovery, without any preconceptions. What kind of creaturecouldclaw its way out of a mountain? He had heard of natural explosions in mines before, from dangerous vapors deep underground, and there was hardly going to be a sign sayingDen of the Devilsin any case.

Remin sat down and loosened the straps around his injured arm, squinting up the mountainside.

“Galliard, make a sketch,” he ordered. “Tilet, mark it on the map and send up some smoke. They might be far enough behind the storm to see it back in camp.”

There was no way up there. Craning his neck, Remin searched and searched again, mentally backtracking down the trails they had seen on the way up, wondering if there was another route that would carry them to the summit. The problem was the snow; the blizzard had left a hard and glittering crust that obscured the terrain, and stumbling up the side of the mountain was suicide. Was there some way they could get up among these boulders?

Picking a path among the outflung boulders and broken trees, Remin’s jaw tightened.

No.

They could not reach it now. They were all of half a mile away, butthat cave might as well be on the other side of the Empire.

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