Chapter 111 The Ten Thousand Steps (Part 1)

The first thing we did was give Alisa the Wraithsteel and the Protean Steel. She stuffed them into the satchel, along with the coin pouch. The girl was already carrying much, and this added weight only made her shoulders sag more. Just by a fraction.

"Give me the satchel," I said, hand outstretched.

The girl looked at it, and shook her head. "I am well enough. I can carry one measly satchel easily enough."

"Can you carry it down those many steps, in a journey that might take hours?" I asked.

The girl shifted under my gaze. The sound of her shifting crunched upon the snow. "Yes," she said.

A naked lie. I looked to Ash for assistance. While I could have easily wrenched the thing from this Alisa, I did not want to. Not with the way she held it close to herself, as if the duty of carrying it were something worth defending.

"Alisa, are you sure?" Ash asked slowly. The girl raised her chin and nodded. This was when the Hero would argue, and persuade her. For she knew the ways of these humans far better than I. "Okay," Ash said instead. I blinked. "But if you start lagging behind, I'll take it from you."

"That's fine. I won't lag behind, though," Alisa said, and she stood straighter. I had thought she had already been standing as straight as her back would allow. I had been wrong.

Ash looked at me, and I slowly nodded. Very well. If Ash believed this was for the best, then I would believe her.

And after that we walked through the snow, in the direction of these Ten Thousand Steps. Ash took the lead. I moved behind her, and Alisa moved behind me. Solara let out small chirps from her place inside my collar every few steps. I could feel her turning her neck left and right, up and down, as she took in everything. There was not much to take in. Only trees covered in white. The occasional root, breaking black through the snow. A few birds, far out against the grey sky. The forest around Hamel had been far more lively.

Make it there before nightfall, Arianrhod had said. A warning of some kind. It was not a warning against beasts, for there was nothing left out here to warn against. No, this cold place would simply grow colder still come night. Cold enough to kill, I suspected.

We made slow progress. The snow made each step difficult. After the first ten minutes, I forced Essence into my legs, for muscle alone had begun to tire.

"It's almost too quiet," Ash murmured, her boots crunching on the snow. "I can hardly hear anything at all besides the wind."

The Hero's senses were far keener than mine. If she could hear only the wind, then there was only wind to hear.

"It's one of the effects of the Great Hunt," Alisa said absently from behind me. "Azareth is home to many, many people. It's not just all of the people who come for the Hunt. It's blacksmiths. Trainers. Fletchers and tanners. Potion-brewers, and the beast-handlers who mind everyone's familiars. The local Adventurer's Guild. There are even scribes whose whole trade is taking down the accounts of the ones who return. They've slowly but surely killed everything bigger than a squirrel anywhere near the city."

That would certainly explain things. Even from a distance, this Azareth had been impressive in terms of scale alone.

"How do people eat?" Ash said, glancing behind her. "I can't imagine a lot grows out here." I found myself waiting for the answer as well. I had read much about the Great Hunt, and had spared only the smallest interest for the city it set out from.

"Well…" Alisa trudged a few more steps before she answered. "It's many things. There is some farming. Not much of it, but some. Then there are people with marks who can stretch those few crops a great deal. They are valued quite highly. And finally, it's considered something of a pilgrimage to come to Azareth bearing food. For many merchants, it's an honor to make the trip at least once, carrying as much as their packs will allow and donating all of it to the city. Of course, not every merchant sees it that way, but quite a few still do."

We kept trudging, and eventually a breeze blew in from somewhere in the east. It made the cold more biting. Solara let out an angry chirp and slid herself deeper into my coat, until the only parts of her I could see were her beak and the top of her head. I brushed at that head idly as I walked.

It took another hour before we reached the start of the steps, and we were not alone. We came out of the forest and onto a paved road half-buried by the snow, and on it were people, huddled against the cold. A small party of four came up the long stairs. Three men and a woman, all of them bundled in clothes far thicker than our own. They were fighting men, judging by the long swords across their backs.

Only their arms were uncovered. They all bore Sigils. They glanced at us as they passed, and two of the men gave our covered sleeves odd looks. None of them looked at my horns. The three of us looked at one another, and reluctantly uncovered our own arms, enough to display our marks. The cold bit at the bare skin, but flooding the arms with Essence proved some defense against it, at least.

We came to the head of the steps and looked down. The name was literal. There were thousands upon thousands of them, leading down into the crater. I saw more people walking them, almost always in groups of four. And from this angle I could see another thing clearly. Great ringed walkways, carved out on either side of the stairs at set intervals. There were many of them. The farthest were little more than a blur, and doubtless there were more still, past the blur.

"This will take a while," Ash murmured next to me. "A few hours, at least."

"I do not relish the thought. Even with Essence," I murmured back. Solara let out a supporting chirp from my collar.

Alisa huddled her arms closer to herself. "They say the Divine climbed out of this crater after she slew the great dragon Azael. She climbed out one step at a time. There were no stairs then. So if these Ten Thousand Steps are difficult, one must simply imagine how much more difficult it was for her, without them."

It was almost amusing. These people believed their Divine had slain a beast with bones the size of mountains, and yet had been made to walk out of its crater on the strength of her own two feet.

"What are those?" Ash asked. She was pointing farther down. She had found the same ringed walkways I had.

"Those are the Rings of Remembrance. Though I think most people just call them the Rings," Alisa said. "There isn't much to see this far up. We'll need to go about halfway down before there's anything worth looking at."

What that was supposed to mean, I did not know. I did not ask. Whatever waited halfway down these steps, I would see it for myself soon enough. We began our descent.

We spent much time walking down those many steps. The wind was biting near the crater's lip, and grew softer the deeper we went. By the time we crossed the first thousand, I could hardly feel it at all. Sol poked more of herself out from my collar and looked around. She let out a chirp, and the chirp echoed loudly from all around us. Solara seemed to find this fascinating, and so she chirped again, louder still.

"I… I don't know the exact customs here, but I believe that's considered rude," Alisa said at this second chirp.

I looked down at Solara, who regarded this Alisa with some degree of suspicion and indignation. "Do not cause trouble, Sol," I said, and brushed her head. She considered it, and reluctantly chirped quieter, low enough not to echo.

We descended. Minutes turned to hours, and we passed more people in the descending. Again, almost always in groups of four, with their marks bare. The stairs were more than wide enough for a dozen to walk abreast. Each time, they looked at us, and we looked at them, and neither party said anything. Nobody looked twice at my horns, as if the sight of them here was normal. Solara drew far more attention than I did, and she basked in it with great enthusiasm.

Alisa began to tire. I heard it in the pace of her feet upon the stone. I turned back, and found her several steps farther behind than she had been when I had last looked. She caught me looking, and straightened immediately. It was too late.

"Give me the satchel," I said. Alisa hesitated, and for a moment I thought she would refuse me. Then she unslung it from her shoulder and handed it over without a word of protest. But when I turned back around, the Hero was looking at me, one hand already held out. She was already carrying a satchel with all of the books we had taken from the Academy, and now she wanted to carry another one? I hesitated. Then, reluctantly, I deposited the thing into her waiting hands. Heroes made for excellent packmules. It was good to remember that.

We made better pace after that. Freed of our possessions, Alisa could keep stride with us, and in turn, we could all move faster. Soon there was no wind at all, and much of the cold went with it. I wondered whether I would be shedding the coat entirely by the time we reached the bottom.

Every one of the strange walkways we passed had been empty. There had been ten of them, each as empty as the last. The eleventh was not empty. It came a few hundred steps farther down, flanked on either side of the stairs by rows of standing stone. The girl had said we would see nothing worth seeing until halfway down. It seemed this was what she had meant.

Ash and I broke off the main path together, though neither of us had agreed to. From this approach, the slabs revealed themselves as small pillars of stone. There were twenty of them on this ring, and, as far as I could see, twenty on every ring below. Only the first, the one closest to the stairs, was carved with text.

To remember the bravest warriors who walked the one hundred and eighty-first Hunt, in the nine hundredth year of the New Dawn.

And beneath it were four names, scrawled in large, bold letters that were easy to make out.

Party: Four Man Army

Talyha Ironbow, the Single Arrow

Thorn Marrow, the Unmoving Sea

Emrys, the Shining Star

Zalachim, the Silver Terror

"What impressive names," I murmured to myself. Solara let out a chirp, as if she were agreeing with me.

"Alisa, are these…" Ash paused. She looked back at the stone. "I'm guessing these are the ones who returned, right?"

Alisa shook her head slowly, staring down at the slab. "They are not the only ones who succeeded. They are simply the only ones who were considered worthy of an audience with the Divine. Everyone like that is-" she gestured with one arm, and seemed to take in the entirety of this strange crater with that single sweep, "-everyone like that is remembered here. It's said you can find the names of everyone worth writing songs about somewhere on these rings. From before they became who they were. Everyone gets a Namestone -everyone worth remembering," Alisa muttered, her voice cracking at the end. She composed herself quickly, but not quickly enough.

And her gaze had travelled far down the steps somewhere in the telling. It lingered there. I watched her. I caught the Hero watching her too. We did not ask.

I reached out and brushed the slab. No, the girl had called it a Namestone, had she not? It was coarse between my fingers. The only ones deemed worthy of an audience with their God, and there were only four of them. Only one party. And beneath the four names lay a great expanse of empty stone, room enough for ten times their number and more. It seemed these people carved even their monuments larger than they needed to.

"And these titles," I whispered, "these people did not come to them on their own." I said it, and did not ask it. I already knew the answer.

"Yes," Alisa said. "The Divine grants them. There are… well, there are very few honors greater than earning a title from the Hunt. They are called Mantles. But the one at the top, their party name, is one they picked out themselves before they set out."

I had figured that last part out as well. "Mantles," I murmured. Ash was looking at me, and I could tell that she knew without my having to say it.

Mantles. They were the Titles of this strange world. In the old one, a Title was earned only by accomplishing great, nearly impossible deeds. A strange replacement for them, if this was that. And I was increasingly certain that it was.

Twenty Namestones to a ring, and a Hunt every five years. Each of these rings, then, held a full century of this Covenant's history. And so, when a man walked up and out of this crater, he walked up through the whole history of his world's founding, from its first stone to its newest.

It was elegant. It was exactly the kind of religious grandeur a priest would love.

Before we returned to the stairs, my gaze lingered on the pillar beside the one already carved. This one was ours. For the one hundred and eighty-second Hunt. Would our names be here someday with one of these Mantles? Strange, that I might one day be a single name among hundreds in a crater of my own making.

I looked at that blank stone for a moment longer than I had intended to. Then I turned away, and we walked on.

The ribs rose higher on either side of us as we went. From the crater's lip they had been arcs against the horizon. They were great fingers in the sky now.

We kept walking down the many steps. Somewhere down there, at the very bottom of all these rings, where the history of this world began, stood the first of these walkways. The oldest stones of all. And there would be a pillar -the very first.

I did wonder what it would say.