Penumbra - Book 2 (15)

They saw the camp before they saw its guards. It was a small gathering of covered carts and pitched lean-tos that surrounded a fire which glowed gently from the distance they viewed it, illuminating the faces of the gathered tribesmen that surrounded them. They were still two month's ride from the penumbra, so the sky still held nothing but inky blackness and stars, with only the faintest line of blue on the horizon signifying the light of the sun, so far in the distance. The air was not yet warm enough to melt the endless snow, but as it was on the dawn-ward side, some tribes chose to travel at different distances along the Great Path, sometimes on different paths entirely (although all paths, no matter how widely they strayed, crossed over at certain points, such as the valley through the Rashada mountains where Kerron's story began), each for their own reasons. Most tribes chose to stay on or very close to the umbra, the line that divided night from day, as that was where plant and animal life flourished, where the hunting and gathering of food was the most fruitful and abundant, which the larger tribes needed to survive. Yet not all tribes were large, and some could not compete with each other over the same ground. Some were driven, or chose, to travel further into the night, to avoid competition from the larger tribes, yes, but also to avoid interference from them, to avoid being consumed by them. An added advantage was that they were never bothered by constant attacks from the lightsiders, a perpetual feature of life in the penumbra, as the Enemy also competed for the same rich resources the penumbra offered. It was a quieter, harder life for those who walked the night path and stayed within the arms of the black winter, and many tribesmen viewed them as strange, as oddities. But Kerron had spent his whole life viewed as an oddity, and so did not judge them so harshly. All the same, it made them harder to predict- there was not the same cross-tribal sense of threat from the Enemy to encourage them to look kindly on their fellows.

Rather than approaching the camp quietly, Kerron felt Salazar made more noise than usual, shouting at the dogs and cracking his whip in the air, as if to announce their arrival as something without subterfuge. He hoped this was the correct strategy and that they were not taken as a disruptive, or possibly even arrogant, arrival. While the camp was small, it was large enough to have posted sentries, as they discovered when two men popped up from beneath the snow to either side of them, each bearing a crossbow- a sophisticated weapon that Kerron had never seen before, but one that Salazar had described to him and which he recognized instantly on the basis of that description. They wore bearskin cloaks that still had the skulls of the bears they had belonged to attached to them, worn like helmets at the top of the cloak, so that at a glance they appeared to be bears themselves, but with men's faces where the jaw should have been.

One of the two sentries called out to them and Kerron felt a moment of panic when he could not interpret what the man had said, and feared that perhaps no-one on this side of the penumbra spoke the same language as he. Coming into a potentially hostile camp was one thing- coming into it unable to communicate with its occupants, hoping to trade and rest with them without being able to express your intentions delicately was quite another set of variables. However, Salazar seemed to understand what the man had said, as he bought the dogs to a halt with a gentle pull on the reigns of the lead mutt and calling out the command for the dogs to slowly come to a stop. After the sled had ceased it's forward movement, Salazar spoke to the men in a voice that was slightly different to his regular voice, and as the men responded Kerron realized to his immense relief that they were all speaking the same language, the night-dwellers were simply very strongly accented, so much so that they were almost incomprehensible, but Kerron found if he listened hard, he could make out most of what they were saying.

"Hile." Salazar said with a wave.

"Hile to you, strangers." The lead sentry responded. His crossbow was still at the ready, and he took cautious steps forward through the knee-deep snow as he spoke. He looked back at the trail their cart had left behind them, extending backwards into the night. "You came through black winter, from the other side." he asked flatly, more a statement than a question. Salazar treated it as one nonetheless.

"Aye, we did."

The sentry looked back along the path, considering this. Salazar kept his silence, as if sensing that it was best to let the sentry set the agenda for the conversation. The man looked back to them, then nodded gravely.

"You've had a long trip, and look bone weary to my eyes. You're welcome to a spot at our fireside, if your intentions be without malice, and welcome to move along be they not."

Salazar grinned widely. "That would be most welcome, friend."

The sentry did not return the smile, simply gestured towards the firelight with one hand, then turned away, mumbling a few words to his compatriot as they both started shuffling back towards the snow-caves they had previously been ensconced within.

Salazar turned to Kerron and winked at him before shouting "Ya!" to the dogs and whipping the reigns to bring the cart up to speed again. It was a downhill run to the camp and they crossed the distance in less than a minute.

"It's interesting that they didn't ask what tribe we were from." Salazar said conversationally as they approached. "That's usually how scouts determine if they can trust you, through the word of your tribe."

Kerron had not been surprised, and said as much. "I suppose when you've come as far as we have, individual differences like what tribe you are from seem... petty, I suppose."

Salazar looked at him with a raised eyebrow, but said nothing, then turned back to the dogs in order to bring them down to a slow trot, then to a halt. He had not bought the cart right into the camp, but rather parked a respectful distance from the camp's perimeter. He unhitched the dogs from their harnesses, letting them gather around the lead dog and whispering friendly nonsense to them as he patted their heads, congratulating them on a long journey that was not yet over. They then made their way through the snow, which was shallower at the foot of the hill where the camp had been set up, and took their greetings to the various tribesmen gathered about the fire, who had been watching them with interest ever since they had come into view. Their reception was not warm but was certainly cordial, and soon they were sitting by the fire with their hosts, enjoying a warm meal of fish that had been given to them freely, before they had even offered to trade.

Kerron's natural shyness kept him quiet, smiling when asked questions but offering only minimal responses. Salazar, on the other hand, was clearly delighted to be in the company of others once more, and was positively boisterous in a way Kerron had never seen him before, asking questions, clapping the night-dwellers on their shoulders, and asking for more fish after he'd wolfed his down and ensuring that the dogs were able to be fed also. His questions mainly focused on the nature of the political and military situation on the dusk-ward side of the penumbra, and the answers he received were not reassuring.

Just as they had been doing on the trailing edge of the night, the lightsiders had been getting more and more aggressive in their posture and were pushing further into the territory of the darksiders, sometimes past the umbra itself. The recent creation of the frontier, the long string of moving towers that the lightsiders had previously only used to defend themselves, had now given the Enemy the military might to be far more aggressive than they had ever been previously, throwing the balance of power askew. The delicate détente that had existed between the lightsiders and the darksiders for centuries was crumbling, and many feared that it was the intention of the former to wipe the latter out entirely. If anything, the situation was worse here, on the leading edge of the night, than it was on the dawn-side. Where Kerron came from, the towers needed to actively speed up in order to gain additional territory, and their speed could be reduced by the efforts of the nightsiders if they, for example, built traps for the beasts that pulled them, or obstacles for the wheels they ran on. Here, all the rolling towers had to do was slow down, or stop entirely, and night would overtake them, trapping the forward-moving darkside population between the coldness of winter and the steel of the frontier. Although individual raids could be made behind enemy lines when conditions presented themselves, the strength of the frontier was not just that it was an unbreakable wall of defensible positions- it was also a very effective tool for communication, running messages up and down the line at incredible speed, meaning troops and resources could be diverted to where they were needed as soon as a strike was made. These two strengths combined gave the Enemy an almost overwhelming advantage, and while they had only pushed up to the umbra itself so far, there was nothing to stop them pushing further into darkside territory whenever they chose. Pushed further and further from their usual twilight gathering fields, food resources were already becoming a problem, and would only grow more scarce as the Enemy realized they could push deeper into the penumbra without significant opposition. These were indeed grim times for those that walked the Great Path, the tribesmen revealed grimly.

Still, they admitted, the war did not affect them directly this far from the penumbra, what they spoke of had only reached their ears via a process of filtration: visitors to the camp who fell behind in the constant march towards the penumbra, or indeed travelers who passed them on their way into the black winter, seeking to pass through it as Kerron and Salazar had done (the journey to the dawn being considerably shorter than the one to dusk, Salazar noted smugly). Being so deep into night, this tribe would often be the last point of call for those who were about to attempt the passage, and also the first to welcome those who had crossed it from the other side as their new friends had just done. When Kerron expressed surprise that others had made the crossing -it being such a monumental achievement in his own life that he was sure no others could have survived such an ordeal- they disabused him of his notion quickly, saying that they met with up to a dozen such adventurers every year or so, and always offered them sanctuary and relief if they required it. (This explained why the sentries they encountered responded with such indifference to them, and why they had sentries on the night-side at all, Kerron supposed.) As such a way-point, they heard much of the news that crossed from each side of the world, and Salazar's revelation that the dawn-side had been experiencing the same sort of aggression that they were experiencing here. The last group of travelers that passed through, they said, had been on their way to the other side in order to ask for assistance from the dawn-side tribes, to supplicate for additional manpower in order to combat the increasing aggression of the Enemy. From what Salazar told them, they said sadly, such help would not be available.

"Oh, I don't know." Salazar said with a smile and a wink at Kerron. "We're here, after all!" Salazar was clearly joking, and roared with laughter at his own wit, but for one terrifying moment Kerron was convinced that he was referring to the power of black powder that he still carried with him. In spite of the closeness that had been forged between them during their winter travails, Kerron had still not told his friend of the true nature of his quest, stating only that he carried an important message that he could say to the elder of his sister tribe and no other, as a matter of oath. There had been many times when Kerron had wanted to tell him. Indeed, there had been many times when Kerron had wanted to dash a handful of powder into the embers of a dying fire, just to feel a flash of warmth in the face of such an overpowering algor. But he had kept his oath and kept the powder a secret, and refused to let himself burn the sealed message paper for warmth. Still, it had been many months, and Kerron had often slept while Salazar had driven the cart, and vice versa. Had his friend discovered the powder? This, in itself, would not have been unusual after so many months, but how would he have uncovered its secret properties? Kerron dismissed the thought as foolish, but he was sure that there was a knowing look behind the eyes of the man as he winked at him.