‘Malevolence in the night, Rhulad? Whose?’
‘I could not be certain. But I felt it.’
‘Fear,’ Trull said, ‘have you no questions for Rhulad on this matter?’
‘No,’ Fear replied drily. ‘There is no need for that… when you are around.’
Trull clamped his mouth shut, thankful that the night obscured the flush on his face.
There was silence for some time after that.
The trail began climbing, winding among outcrops of lichen-skinned granite. They climbed over fallen trees here and there, scrambled up steep slides. The moon’s light grew diffuse, and Trull sensed it was near dawn by the time they reached the highest point of the trail.
The path now took them inland – eastward – along a ridge of toppled trees and broken boulders. Water trapped in depressions in the bedrock formed impenetrable black pools that spread across the trail. The sky began to lighten overhead.
Fear then led them off the path, north, across tumbled scree and among the twisted trees. A short while later Kaschan Trench was before them.
A vast gorge, like a knife’s puncturing wound in the bedrock, its sides sheer and streaming with water, it ran in a jagged line, beginning beneath Hasana Inlet half a day to the west, and finally vanishing into the bedrock more than a day’s travel to the east. They were at its widest point, two hundred or so paces across, the landscape opposite slightly higher but otherwise identical – scattered boulders looking as if they had been pushed up from the gorge and mangled trees that seemed sickened by some unseen breath from the depths.
Fear unclasped his cloak, dropped his pack and walked over to a misshapen mound of stones. He cleared away dead branches and Trull saw that the stones were a cairn of some sort. Fear removed the capstone, and reached down into the hollow beneath. He lifted clear a coil of knotted rope.
‘Remove your cloak and your weapons,’ he said as he carried the coil to the edge.
He found one end and tied his pack, cloak, sword and spear to it.
Trull and Rhulad came close with their own gear and all was bound to the rope. Fear then began lowering it over the side.
‘Trull, take this other end and lead it to a place of shadow. A place where the shadow will not retreat before the sun as the day passes.’
He picked up the rope end and walked to a large, tilted boulder. When he fed the end into the shadows at its base he felt countless hands grasp it. Trull stepped back. The rope was now taut.