Olvir first heard it in the early afternoon, and the sound made him lick his lips. He’d been drinking regularly but never indulgently, always careful of their supplies, and the water itself had gone stale several days since. It did its job, but the taste of leather pervaded it. The thought of refilling their skins with a new supply, clear and cold even with the necessary purifying wine, was sufficient good news to break through his gloomy mood.
For three nights running, he’d been reaching for the fragment, never quite succeeding. He thought he was getting closer with every attempt, but the difference was subtle enough to easily have been wishful thinking.
That had almost been worse than complete failure. If Olvir had reached for the fragment and gotten no response, he wouldn’t have been left wondering if he could have found some practical application or discovered more about the thing had he just been a bit stronger or smarter.
He wouldn’t have been fearing what else he could almost have done either.
It never felt bad. Oh, the dagger looked sinister, the scene with the insects was revolting, but the sunset was beautiful and the bridge fascinating. In addition to that, the impression he’d gotten beneath the images hadn’t been malice.
As much as he’d gotten any impression from the fragment, it had been loss, in many senses: of being broken, abandoned, cast off, but also of beinglost, unable to get its bearings on a world so fundamentally alien to what it had known.
The gods didn’t often manifest directly through people. Priests had very specific powers, which were generally all that mortal flesh and minds could channel without permanent effect, though there were occasional stories about exceptions. Even more occasionally, some of those exceptions survived with all their wits. Those few had described presences that they couldn’t quite put into words, perspectives completely different from that of any human or elder folk.
“Do you think,” he asked Vivian as he led them up the ridge toward the Vadar, approaching the highest point they’d have to reach in the mountains, “that a god would find us as disorienting as we find them?”
She gave it some consideration. At any rate, she was silent. Olvir liked to assume that she was contemplating the question rather than trying to contain her impatience with him or evaluating whether or not he was showing symptoms of possession and should be stabbed in the kidneys.
“I don’t see why not,” Vivian eventually said. “And it could depend on the god. Poram, for example, doesn’t deal with mortals as regularly as the other three.”
“Animals are mortal.”
“Fair point. But I don’t get the impression that they contact him much. Is this about the fragment?”
“It is. I wonder if one problem may be that we need to learn to speak each other’s language, as it were—that it’s not just strength of mind separating us but the need to find common ground, or at least common terms.”
“That’s more your area of expertise,” she said, “but I can’t find any argument against it as a course of action. None that wouldn’t also argue against us being here”—Vivian gestured at the mountain trail—“to begin with, at least. Do you have any notion of how to start translating?”
“Nothing firm yet. Understanding languages is one of our gifts, though, at need. Maybe I can find a method that’ll let me use that. Or maybe it’ll come as we get to know each other.”
“You talk as if the fragment is its own person.” Vivian’s voice drifted forward to Olvir, carefully pitched to carry no judgment, no question, simply observation.
Nonetheless, the first words that occurred to him were defensive:It surely isn’t me, and thenWhat are you suggesting?Irritation tightened Olvir’s neck and shoulders. The fragmentwasn’thim, and he was trying to handle it, and—
And Vivian wasn’t wrong. He stared at the dark line of rock ahead of them and kept silent until he’d given her words a chance to sink in. “I do. I’m not sure if that’s right or not. It’s on the same, oh, level of my spirit as my bond with the Silver Wind, and I’d never presume that He and I were the same person, but…it is a different situation, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” said Vivian. “I’m not going to claim to be an authority. And—” She tilted her head a little and waited as Ulamir spoke. “There’s a reasonable chance keeping a distance, in your mind, is wise. Then again, there’s a reasonable chance it isn’t. I just figured that being aware is likely a good thing, and gods know it’s as much as we can manage.”
Olvir nodded. “We’re on unfamiliar ground,” he said, consciously throwing his bad temper to the winds. “In many ways.”
* * *
At the highest point of the pass, the road joined with the stream, which rushed past in a torrent of white foam and curved away down in the opposite direction from the trail Vivian and Olvir had followed. Small trees, more like shrubs, had grown up on its banks, and moss coated the ground nearby. The current was too fast for them to fish, and they didn’t have time, but Vivian filled her waterskins, adding a bit of wine to each, then stood watching the path while Olvir did the same.
The trail wound too much to give her a straight view of the road they should take. She could see down the slope of the mountain below them, though: sheer blue-gray stone, striped with irregular ridges and dotted with patches of green.
Below that, the land ran flat and rust-red—Vivian thought it was covered with a sort of grass, but it was too far away to tell—for what looked to be five or ten miles. Then it…stopped.
She recognized the Battlefield, because it couldn’t be anything else. Vivian was very far from her youth, but a child’s instinctive shudder worked its way up her spine at her first sight of the place.
The…“surface,” she decided, because her mind tried to connect what she saw with the wordlandand gave it up as a bad job, was glossy, nearly transparent. At first, it seemed black. Then, as Vivian watched, it rippled. Parts rose and fell in no discernable pattern. Vivian thought it had a green tinge, or maybe lightning-flash blue. Beyond the spot, she saw a thin trail of red, probably the place where the world grew normal again, but her gaze immediately went back to the shifting colors.
It is stone, of a sort, said Ulamir, but he sounded as thunderstruck as she felt.
“The stories said it was like a scar,” said Vivian, knowing that she sounded faintly, foolishly betrayed.
“It might be,” said Olvir. “That… Scars aren’t regular flesh, are they? Why should a scar on the world, one the gods made, be regular…” He spread his hands, grasping for the right word and not finding it. “A regular part of creation?”
“Ugh,” said Vivian, not disagreeing.
