cleared recently. He blinked in surprise and tried to smile. His face was too numb.
“How are you?” Gavril’s voice cut through Taniel’s thoughts. The words were a welcome change to the howling wind and the mountain’s mocking laughter after three and a half days of climbing. Taniel realized that they’d not said a word in that time, not even during their camps at night, when the four of them huddled together for warmth in Gavril’s small tent.
“Hine.” Taniel came to a stop beside the big mountaineer, and they waited for Ka-poel and Darden. Taniel closed his eyes and worked at his mouth, trying to form words.
“Fine,” he said. “How much harther? Farther?”
“There,” Gavril said. He pointed upward.
Taniel shaded his eyes and squinted into the sun. “It’s so bright up here. I can’t see. How can you?”
“Years on the mountain. You don’t need eyes after as long as I’ve been here. Novi’s Perch. We’re just beneath it.”
Darden grinned at Taniel through cracked lips, his dark-skinned face split with the size of the smile. He was a small man, and easily as old as Tamas. “Almost there,” he said. He was barely breathing hard, Taniel noticed with annoyance, though Taniel himself gasped for breath.
Taniel held his snuffbox of powder up to his nose and snorted straight out of the box. He carefully returned it to his pocket—he didn’t trust his numb fingers. The rush of the powder trance made him dizzy for a brief moment, then his breathing came easier and his muscles relaxed.
They removed their snowshoes and finished the climb to the monastery. It was only a few hundred more feet. The trail narrowed as they went. To the left, the mountain rose above them in a sheer rock face. To the right, only white sky was visible—the cliff seemed to have no bottom. They moved into the shade of the monastery, and Taniel was able to look up and really see it for the first time.
Novi’s Perch seemed to be part of the mountain. It had been built of the same dusty gray rock, and parts of it had even been hewn into the bones of Pike itself. It blocked the trail—that is, the trail ended at the doors to the monastery, and the building rose up above them for a hundred feet or more. It overhung the cliffside to their right by a dozen feet, and Taniel wondered how the monks could sleep, knowing they were suspended above thousands of feet of nothing.
The monastery was plain and unadorned. The stones were chiseled flat, the arches of the doors and windows rounded at the top. There were no spires or grand façades. Only the location of the place gave it grandeur, and the daring of its construction hanging out over the abyss.
Taniel stepped off the road and onto the stone doorstep. He gazed upward, unaware that he’d been wandering, until Gavril reached out and grabbed the front of his coat. He jumped. He’d been not two feet from the edge of the cliff and its perilous drop.
The double doors of the monastery opened with the whine of unoiled hinges. Taniel’s pistol was half drawn before he realized it wasn’t Bo. A man and woman, both about Taniel’s height, bowed their heads in greeting. They were tall for Novi, and their skin was olive—just a shade lighter than Darden’s.
“It’s very early in the year for pilgrims,” the Novi man commented when they’d all come inside.
Taniel glanced at his weapons, at his thick furs and leathers, and at his companions with their climbing gear. They were obviously not pilgrims.
“I’m here to see Privileged Borbador,” Taniel said quietly. The words echoed in the long, stone hallway, and Taniel felt like he was whispering inside of Pike’s own old bones. “Where can I find him?” Taniel needed to get this over with as quickly as possible. If Bo had an inkling Taniel was after him…
The woman nodded solemnly. “I see. I’m afraid your journey has not quite ended.”
“Pit.” Taniel glanced at the monks apologetically. “Sorry, sister.”
“He’s a few miles up the trail past the monastery. A cave.”
“I know that cave,” Gavril said.
“Did Bo tell you why he came up here?”
Both monks shook their heads. “He said someone might come looking for him,” the man said. “He asked us not to stop him from coming.”
Bo was definitely expecting someone. No getting around it.
“How do I get up?” Taniel asked.
“Through the monastery,” the woman said. “This is the only true path up the mountain, even in