5. The Mackalan Pass

> “Nikol walked the surface of the planet while his brother Cornun remained in one place. ‘You won’t believe the many different things I’ve seen,’ Nikol said when he returned home after many years. ‘You won’t believe the many different ways I’ve seen the same things,’ Cornun replied” - The Midrol Psalms, VII

Without followers, we’ve no powers, he had said. She knew the truth of his words. She felt it. The Aeseri gained power through their followers, no matter where they were from, and her powers were proportional to the power of those who followed. If Vegdar had followers then perhaps his loyalty would be enough for her to escape to the mortal plane for a short time. But he had none and although his pledge alone gave her something, it was very little.

It gave her the seed of an idea, though. If she could gain power from Vegdar’s allegiance, even here, then why not others? She had no idea how many on the astral plane would need to follow her to give her enough power, but surely it was possible. Gaining those followers would not be easy, but then, Athena thought with a laugh, she did have all eternity to try.

Vegdar might not prove the strongest of allies, but he was a start. In the hour before she fell asleep she considered escape attempts once more, before dismissing them all as futile, even with Vegdar’s help. She would have to bide her time and wait for an opportunity.

She overheard snippets of conversation while she pretended to sleep, not that anyone paid her any attention. Aguel, the Engella that had pulled her through the Wasteland, was indeed the leader of the caravan. The other members of the caravan seemed to regard him as a father figure as much as a leader.

Within the protective circle of the caravan, and wrapped in a blanket, Athena’s second night in the Wastelands was much better than the first, despite being unable to stretch out to full length within the confines of the cage. Although sleep did not come easily, it did come, and she was awakened by the sound of the caravan being dismantled; tents being packed away, boxes reloaded, the huge lizard beasts being burdened by it all without complaint.

“They look like the rokkars I saw in books,” she said as Vegdar passed by her cage.

“They are rokkars,” he told her, “But something happened to them during the Ascension. Their size increased and they became much stronger, although thankfully they are placid animals.”

“I thought nothing survived the Ascension apart from us Aeseri and the Engella?”

“So did I, before I came here.”

Everyone had a role in the packing away of the caravan, including Vegdar, and he had no time to stop and talk.

Athena expected to be released from her cage and to struggle along behind the group, tied at the wrists once more and suffering another day of painful falls. She was taken by surprise when four Engella lifted her cage from the ground, with her still in it, and another four took hold of it and tied it to the top of one of the rokkars.

It was the first time she had seen the Wasteland from an elevated vantage point. Rock and rubble and soil stretched in every direction. There were no landmarks to navigate by; no features to break the monotony of the flat plane that, if lore was to be believed, stretched into infinity in all directions.

The horizon was hazy and Athena peered into the distance in the direction that they had been travelling on the previous day. It could be an optical illusion, but were there mountains in the distance? Was this another secret of the Wasteland: that it was not as flat as they had been led to believe?

“Today we make for the Mackalan Pass,” Aguel called from the head of the caravan, “So be alert. The Orques will see us coming from a long way and they might decide an attack is worth the risk.”

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Athena wanted to ask what Orques were but Vegnar was much further down the line of the caravan. From the sound of things it would be better if she didn’t find out. Yet one thing seemed clear: if there was a pass, what she had thought might be mountains almost certainly were. The Wastelands really were as featureless as the Aeseri were always told.

The caravan lurched into motion and Athena found the movement of the rokkar was not quite as slow as it had appeared from afar. She held onto the sides of her cage to steady herself as she slowly adapted to the uneven movement, and with time she found herself swaying and shifting her balance in time with the irregular step pattern of the oversized lizard that carried her.

As they marched Athena looked around at the caravan. There were only a handful of passengers who were carried by the rokkars, including Aguel, who spent the whole time in discussion or directing others.

The rest walked, or sometimes trotted, behind or alongside the giant lumbering beasts, and Athena was glad she didn’t have to try to keep up at that pace. They probably knew she couldn’t travel at their speed which was a reason, apart from potential escape attempts, that she was in the cage up here. It was humiliating to be on display like this, but she had the benefit of being able to watch what was going on.

The mountains became increasingly clear on the horizon and as the caravan approached them Aguel sent two Engella and two Aeseri, one of whom was the woman Sekardi, ahead to scout the route. She had been the one that had navigated their way to the caravan on the previous day and appeared to have an instinct for the terrain and the dangers that might lay within it.

Their destination was clear: a feature that appeared at this distance to be a giant fissure between the mountain ranges. It had steep sides and was overlooked by stepped plateaus, and after Athena’s many years of battles she knew exactly how good a place that would be to wait in ambush. It was the reason Aguel had sent scouts ahead.

The closer they came to the mountain range the more layers it seemed to reveal. Those that Athena had first seen were merely foothills, and behind it were even greater slopes, and so on and on, each range towering over the previous, until those mountains themselves faded into the distance. It was only the ravine that formed the Mackalan Pass that was in any way passable.

The scouts returned as they entered the ravine between the lower slopes and reported to Aguel. He turned and lifted himself to his feet, balancing with ease as the beast beneath him lurched from side to side.

“Caravan be alert! Orque raiders were here two days ago. They won’t be far away. Keep your eyes on the mountains and call out if you see anything.”

A frisson ran through the caravan as they passed between the cliffs, all eyes scanning the rocky sides for any sign of movement. Athena watched too, believing that, whatever might lay ahead, she was safer within the caravan than without it.

She had been wondering how Sekardi and her companions knew the Orque raiders had been here two days before, and then she saw it. A rokkar, dead, its bulk half-buried under a rockslide and with spears longer than she was tall and thicker than her arm buried in its side. It was the first time she had seen anything dead on what used to be Aeserus, either inside the Walls of Jashard or out. Crates lay scattered around the ground, which she assumed were its cargo. There were no signs of any other travellers so either the group had fled or been captured.

Then she saw other bodies, three of them, and she was certain they were neither Aeseri nor Engella. Their faces were misshapen with sharp noses and high cheekbones, but each was very different from the other. Eyes were misaligned, an ear was missing from one, and another had only a hole in the centre of their face where their nose should have been. Their wounds were not fresh, but the blood that spilled around them told her they had been killed in the fight. So, she thought, there are other humanoids here too, and these ones can be killed. They must be the Orques Aguel had warned of.

So be it, she thought. She may not be adept at travelling at speed across rocky ground but even without her powers she knew how to put up a fight.

She studied the creatures as the caravan passed by. They wore a kind of armour, possibly made from the skins of dead rokkar. The weak points were around the joints, she saw, although that knowledge wasn’t going to be much use to her whilst in a cage and weaponless.

If the raiders had lost three of their number in an attack on what appeared to be a small group perhaps they would think twice before attacking the caravan, even if they were lurking somewhere nearby. She scanned the tops of the cliffs nearby and a shiver ran down her spine. Seeing into the future had never been one of the Aeseri’s powers, but she knew the feeling of danger. She felt it now, and it was rarely wrong.

Then she saw something move.