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This was a land of wild and hungry beasts that roved with impunity. One morning a pack of ten or twelve shambling great-haunched creatures bigger than Skandars approached the floaters and began energetically to rock them, as if hoping to tip them over and crack them open from below. Harpirias heard one pounding with the force of a giant hammer against the roof of his vehicle. "Khulpoins," Korinaam said. "Very disagreeable."
Harpirias took his energy-thrower from its rack. "I’ll try a warning shot, perhaps, to scare them off."
"Useless. Nothing scares them. Give me the weapon."
Reluctantly Harpirias let the Shapeshifter take it from him. Korinaam opened the hatch of the floater a little way and poked the energy-thrower’s tube through. Harpirias had a glimpse of wild fiery eyes, slavering jaws, a row of teeth like yellow scythes. Korinaam sighted calmly along the barrel and fired. There was a chilling howl of pain and the khulpoin sprang away from the floater, streams of blood spurting in startling violet gouts from a gaping hole in its shoulder.
"You only wounded it," Harpirias said, with some contempt.
"Exactly. Maximum blood flow, that’s the trick. Watch what happens."
The khulpoin, roaring, had begun to run in a lopsided staggering way across the icy ridges, biting frantically at the wound in its shoulder as it went. A trail of purple blood sprang up behind it. Instantly its companions left off their attack on the caravan and gave pursuit. They caught up with it a hundred yards away, surrounding it, clawing at it, leaping upon it as it fell. Even at this distance their growls of satisfaction reverberated through the floater with appalling force.
"Now we leave them to their meal," said Korinaam, sending the floater into high acceleration. Harpirias looked back only once, wincing at what he saw.
A day and a night and a day and a night more, and all the while purple Elminan stood above them like a scornful sentinel; and then at last they reached the mountain’s western edge and began to pass around to the far side of it. That transition took another day and a half, until Harpirias found himself looking up at Elminan’s north face, a horrifying vertical slab, a sheer straight drop that terminated in a pile of tremendous boulders at ground level. Small wonder there could be no traveling over this mountain, but only around it.
The country beyond was desert-dry and altogether stark. From time to time, as they crossed it, lightning would break without warning or apparent cause out of a cloudless sky, striking the ground with the vehemence of an angry god’s wrath and sending up a quick puff of flame. Even Korinaam seemed distressed by this place, and they put it behind them as quickly as they could.
The last of the nine great mountains of the Marches could be seen on the horizon now: two of them lay to the east, Thail and Samaril, the Wise Sister and the Cruel Sister, and to the west, so far away that it was no more than a dark nubbin against the sky, was triple-peaked Kantavinorka, the Eldest Sister. But the route that Korinaam was following took them straight onward, ever northward, past the last campfire of the March-men, past the northernmost zone of known exploration, deep into an empty ice-locked wilderness of perpetual winter, as silent as though it stood under some solemn enchantment. It seemed to Harpirias that they were heading for the roof of the world.
Had anyone ever ventured here before, in all the history of Majipoor? Yes, yes, it must be so: it was clear that Korinaam was familiar with these roads and knew where he was going.
None the less this place seemed to Harpirias like a virgin world, untouched, unknowable. The familiar cities of Majipoor, lying somewhere far behind him in the warm happy haze of summer, had ceased to be real for him: they were dream-cities now, myth-cities, places that had sprouted in the fertile compost of his imagination but could not possibly have any tangible existence. The inconceivably great curve of the giant planet, stretching on and on behind him into the unknown south polar regions, no longer had any substance for him. Only this was real, this bitter land of snow and mist and gleaming rocky walls. Would the journey ever end? No, no, no: he became convinced that he was fated to go on and on forever, deeper and deeper into these bleak and sterile mysteries, led eternally onward by this somber, enigmatic Shapeshifter in a journey to the end of time and space.
But journeys end, even this one.
Korinaam, one morning, gestured toward a dark line that lay against the horizon from east to west, what appeared to be an unbroken vertical wall of stone a hundred times the height of a man that sealed them off from any hope of further advance.
"The domain of the Othinor," he said.
Harpirias looked around, mystified. "Where?"
"Behind that line of mountains."
"But there’s no way through!"
"Oh, yes, prince," said Korinaam. "One way. Just one."
It was a wedge-shaped opening in the rock face, a mere crack hardly wader than the floaters themselves. Korinaam needed two days to find it, and there were moments when Harpirias was convinced that the Metamorph had no real idea of where it was; but then, suddenly, the narrow entrance presented itself to them. Korinaam brought the floater to a halt, opened its hatch, signaled to Harpirias to dismount.
"We must enter on foot," the Shapeshifter told him. "It’s the only way possible. Come: follow me."
Harpirias disliked leaving the floaters behind; but obviously there was no choice. The vehicles could never fit through this little breach in the rock. Arranging his troops in a double column, the biggest and fiercest-looking Skandars in front, he took his position at the head of the line with Korinaam beside him and marched through into the realm of the Othinor.
He found himself in a secret world of extraordinary beauty and strangeness.
The looming snow-crowned mountain palisade that hid this place from the awareness of outsiders ran off to the right and left, then curved inward as though to meet and unite with itself, somewhere not too far to the north — thus creating a deep, roughly elliptical pocket canyon, entirely enclosed and shielded by lofty walls of black stone. Within lay a flat shimmering snow field, glinting brilliantly under the noonday sun; and at the farther end of this broad plaza, clustered at the foot of the rock wall, was a shining city made all of ice: sturdy buildings two and even three stories high fashioned from square-hewn blocks of the stuff, laid with impressive precision one atop another and showily bedecked with a bizarre, complex array of fanciful icy parapets and turrets. From their myriad angular surfaces came a thousand thousand dazzling beams of reflected sunlight, like a swarm of diamonds tumbling through the air.
Into this sheltered place the sun would intrude, Harpirias calculated, only for a few hours at a time on just a few days of midsummer. The steep angle at which the canyon wall ascended probably kept the village of the Othinor in shadow all the rest of the year: a claustrophobic place of darkness and mystery, cold and grim. But just now it was radiantly lovely.
As he stood gazing wonderstruck at this eerie little frostbound empire of the high country, figures emerged from the city of ice and began to run across the open plaza toward them.
"The Othinor," Korinaam said. "Remain calm, make no menacing gestures."
They looked like demons. The name "Othinor," Korinaam had explained, meant either "The Hidden Ones" or "The Holy Ones" in the native language: which one was the correct translation was still uncertain. But there was nothing very holy about those who came charging forward now. There were perhaps twenty of them, a band of snarling, hairy, uncouth-looking men, dressed in haphazardly sewn pelts of fur, with jagged stripes of clashing colors painted across their faces and arms. Though they appeared to be armed only with spears and crude swords, they looked ready and eager to go on the offensive against the newcomers.