This wouldn’t do, he decided. Twice before, he had been compelled to listen to those exact same words—first from a seeress, then from a dog. Arms upraised in a gesture of defiance, he turned a slow circle and challenged the sky.
“A beauty gave me that augury, and then a witch. I did not heed their warnings, and I certainly will not heed this one!”
Nearby, his friend Simna ventured to comment hesitantly. “Etjole, you’re arguing with the weather. That’s a quarrel any man is bound to lose.”
Ehomba begged to differ, but silently. Question he would, even the weather if need be, or he and his companions might never break free of the malicious atmosphere. They could not stay, and he would not turn back. Choosing, he reached back over his shoulder and drew the sky-metal sword Otjihanja had made for him. Crystallized iron caught the few isolated flashes of light that managed to penetrate the haze and broke them into sparks.
With his arm restrained by the cloying, clinging mist, he could not slash and cut with his usual ease, but he hacked away at the surrounding fog with as much strength and determination as he could muster. Results were immediate.
Bits and pieces of fog, cut off from the rest of the main body by the otherworldly blade, fell to the earth. Each squirmed glutinously across the ground as if seeking to rejoin the rest of the hovering gray mass, before finally falling motionless and evaporating. A louder moan surrounded him: a malign breeze off the mountain slopes wending its way among the rocks—or something else. He found himself wondering if fog could feel pain. It did not matter. There was work to be done, and he was the only one who could do it.