Four days on the road had settled the ache in Vhar’s ribs and refilled what he had spent at the den and just over the horizon he saw the smoke.
It was not cookfire smoke. Broken rock was still settling over the ridgeline.
"That’s the pass," Nyra said, already angling off the trail toward higher ground so they could see the shape of it before they walked into it blind. "Or what’s left of the way through it."
The climb up the shoulder took only a few minutes, and what it showed them erased any question of Kessendrel Pass being merely blocked. Half a hillside had come down across the throat of the gap, boulders the size of wagons scattered through churned earth and splintered trees, the old road buried under debris that hadn’t finished shifting. Small slides still ran down the newer slopes in slow trickles of gravel, hissing faintly even from this distance.
Below the slide, on the near side where the road had once run clean, a line of wagons sat stopped dead. Six of them, maybe seven, canvas tops and draft animals still in harness, people moving among them in the particular stiff way of travelers who had been stopped somewhere they hadn’t planned to stop.
Three men in House Talvern colors held the ground between the wagons and the road east. Two carried grounded spears. The third had his spear slung across his back and a coil of rope over one shoulder. He walked toward a woman kneeling beside a wagon wheel with an open loop in his hand. He meant to bind her wrists.
He ran downhill.
Vhar came down the scree hard enough to spray stone across the road.
The nearest spearman raised his weapon. Vhar caught the shaft and drove his fist into the man’s chest.
BANG! SPLORT!
Ribs gave. Blood burst over the second sentry as the first man’s body slammed into him and drove both men into the road. The rope carrier saw them fall and ran.
Nyra was already closing on him before he’d covered ten strides. He turned at the sound of her behind him, swinging the coiled rope wide in a clumsy arc that had more panic in it than training, and she stepped inside the swing rather than away from it, driving Thronebreak’s haft into his knee.
CRACK!
He went down screaming, the rope falling loose and useless beside him.
The two Vhar had put on the ground were scrambling up by then, and the nearer of them had a hand raised, empty, palm out.
"Wait." His voice cracked on the word. "We’re not the ones you want dead."
"You picked a strange trade to work in, then." Vhar kept his weight forward, ready, watching the man’s hands rather than his face. "Who sent you to hold this road?"
The man’s eyes went past Vhar’s shoulder, toward the wagons, toward the woman who’d nearly had a rope around her wrists a moment before. Whatever calculation ran through him settled fast.
"Corvain Talvern." He said the name like it cost him something to give it up so easily. "He’s not here yet. We were told to hold the crossing and take names until he arrived."
"Take names for what?"
"I don’t ask him that." The man’s good hand stayed raised. "I do the holding. That’s the whole of my job here."
Vhar looked at the wagons. Travelers edged closer after the spears went down. Red marks already rose on the woman’s wrist where the rope had touched it. The three sentries could wait until the travelers reached cover.
"Get up," he told the one with the raised hand. "You’re going to help me clear a path wide enough for those wagons to move, and then you’re going to answer for the rest of it."
The man got up slowly, favoring a shoulder that had taken the worst of his fall, and didn’t argue.
Nyra had already crossed to the woman by the wheel, crouching to check the reddened wrist without quite touching it. "How long have they had you stopped here?"
"Since yesterday morning." The woman’s voice shook only a little, more anger in it than fear now that the spears were down. "They said anyone who tried to go around would be treated the same as anyone who tried to fight through. We believed them. Ren didn’t."
She nodded toward the wagons, toward a shape lying still beneath a spread blanket that told its own story without needing to be uncovered.
Vhar crossed to it anyway, because leaving a dead man unlooked-at felt like its own kind of lie. Ren had been young, a spear wound through the chest that had killed him fast if nothing else could be said for it. Whoever had done this hadn’t hesitated over it.
"How many more of them were here?" Vhar asked, straightening.
"Just these three, since the wagons stopped moving." The woman’s eyes had gone to the ridge above the slide, to the thin haze still hanging over it. "But there were more up on the rock two nights back, when it came down. I counted at least a dozen before they moved off east."
A dozen men had cut the slope, and Corvain had given orders before the wagons arrived. Vhar looked toward the buried road and the ridge beyond it where Corvain’s men waited.
"A dozen who brought the slide down on purpose, and only left three behind to hold it." Nyra had come up beside him without his noticing, her eyes tracking the same distant ridge. "That’s not a full operation sitting here waiting for us. It’s a gate, and Corvain’s on the other side of it."
"These three were not meant to beat us." Vhar looked back at the two men getting up and the third curled around his ruined knee. "They were meant to hold travelers until Corvain’s men arrived."
"East," he said. "That’s where he’ll be."
"That is where we go." Nyra looked toward the ridge. "First, these travelers need wagons through the debris."
The three sentries worked in silence after that, hauling smaller stones aside under Vhar’s watch while the travelers pulled their wagons closer, and by the time the sun had climbed another hand’s width the road held a gap wide enough for a single wagon to pass through at a time, slow and careful over ground still settling underfoot. It wasn’t clearing. It was survival, bought an hour at a time.
A waist-high boulder still blocked the middle of the gap. Vhar crouched beside it and shoved both hands beneath its rough lower edge.
"Keep the wagons back," he said.
The sentries and travelers moved aside. Vhar lifted until the stone tipped, then drove it sideways into the ditch with his shoulder.
GRRNNK! THUD!
It tore through loose soil, struck the ditch bottom, and stopped below the road. The lead driver stared at the open space, swallowed, and clicked his reins. At last, the wagon moved.
The woman with the marked wrist found Vhar again before the first wagon rolled through, her own hands steadier now than they’d been an hour before.
"You’re not Wildblood Desolation." The woman looked from the broken road to Vhar. "Nobody local moves like that."
"No." Vhar watched the lead wagon creak forward over the churned earth, its wheels finding purchase where the ground allowed it. "But whatever’s happening on this road isn’t local anymore either. It hasn’t been for a while."
She didn’t ask what that meant. She climbed back onto her own wagon instead, took up the reins, and followed the one ahead of her through the gap that hadn’t existed an hour ago, out toward the ground on the far side where nothing waited for her but open road.
A boy rode in the wagon behind hers, no older than ten, small enough that he’d spent the last hour watching everything from behind a crate rather than helping haul stone. He looked at Vhar as his own wagon rolled past, not with fear exactly, more the particular open study children gave things they hadn’t yet decided how to feel about.
"Did you kill them?" he asked.
"They are alive." Vhar nodded toward the three bound sentries. "They will tell me who else works for Corvain."
The boy considered that with the same seriousness he’d probably give any answer an adult offered him, then nodded once and let his wagon carry him on through the gap without another word.
Vhar watched the last wagon clear the slide before he turned back toward the three sentries, now bound with their own rope and looking considerably less certain of their employer than they had that morning.
"Now," he said. "Tell me everything Corvain told you to watch for, starting with why he wanted names."