At the head of the pass, he found something else waiting.
At first, he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was even real. It was big and menacing, rising out of the rocks beyond, vague and indistinct in the whirl of the storm. It was man-shaped, but something else, as well, the limbs and body not quite right for a human, not quite in proportion. It appeared to him all at once as he crested the pass and walked into a wind howling with such fury that it threatened to tear the clothes from his body. He watched it slide through veils of white snow, then fade away entirely. He moved toward it, drawn to it instinctively, afraid and intrigued both. He had the sword, he told himself. He was not unprepared.
The shape appeared anew, further in, waited a moment for his approach, then disappeared once more.
This game of hide-and-seek continued through the pass and down the other side, where the walls of the mountain were thickly grown with conifers and the force of the storm was lessened by their windbreak. He had left the mountain off which he had fallen and was now beginning to ascend the one adjoining it. The trail was narrow and difficult to follow, but the appearance of the ghost ahead kept him focused. He was convinced by now that he was being led, but there seemed no reason for concern. The ghost had not threatened him,—it did not seem to mean him harm.
He climbed for a long time, winding his way westward around the mountainside, his path twisting and turning through sprawling stands of huge old trees, deep glades of pine needles dusted with snow, and rocky hillocks slick with dampened moss. The storm’s fury had diminished. The snow still fell, but the wind no longer blew the flakes into his face like needles, and the cold seemed less pervasive. Ahead, the shape took on clearer definition, becoming almost recognizable. Quentin had seen that shape before somewhere, moving in the same way, a wraith of the woods in another time and place. But his mind was singing with fatigue, and he could not place it.
Not much farther, he told himself. Not much longer.
Placing one foot in front of the other, eyes shifting between the ground below and the swirling white ahead, between his own movements and the ghost’s, he pushed on.
“Help me,” he called out at one point, but there was no response.
Not much farther, he told himself again and again. Just keep going.
But his strength was failing.
He went down several times, his legs simply giving way beneath him. Each time, he struggled back to his feet without pausing to rest, knowing that if he stopped, he was finished. Daylight would bring light and warmth and a better chance to survive a sleep. But he could not chance it here.
In a clearing leading into a deep stand of cedar, he slowed and stopped. He could feel himself leaving his body, rising into the night like a shade. He was finished. Done.
Then the dark shape ahead seemed to transform into something else, not one but two shapes, smaller and less threatening. They came out of the night together, walking hand in hand, angling toward him from his left—how had they gotten all the way over there? He stared at the new figures in disbelief, again uncertain that what he was seeing was real, that it wasn’t some new form of phantasm.
The figures hesitated as well, as they caught sight of him. He moved toward them, peering through the curtain of snow, through space and time and hallucinations, through fatigue and a growing sense of recognition, until he was close enough to be certain whom he was seeing.
His voice was parched and ragged as he called out to the one who stood closest and who stared back at him wide-eyed in disbelief.
“Bek!”
NINETEEN
Bek Ohmsford’s journey over the past two days had not been as eventful as Quentin’s, but it had been just as strange.
After leaving the shape-shifters, and with Grianne in tow, he had continued into the Aleuthra Ark, the ghost of Truls Rohk an unwelcome guest borne with him. An image of the hooded cloak and scattered bones spread carelessly across the frozen ground lingered in the forefront of his thinking all that first day, a haunting that refused to be banished. He found himself remembering his protector in life, seemingly indestructible, offering his incomparable strength and unshakable reassurance. Though much of the time Truls Rohk had been an invisible presence, he had always kept close watch over Bek, fulfilling his promise to the Druid.