Chapter 31: The Mountain Road
The road to the Temple stopped being a road after the second checkpoint.
The Guild's outer perimeter was a standard rotating patrol, two person teams, six hour shifts, scanner arrays covering the main access trails. Jonathan had the patrol timing from the Guild's internal schedule, which Chloe had accessed through a maintenance contractor's login that had never been deactivated.
They stopped the transport half a kilometer below the first checkpoint, in a clearing ringed by pine trees that smelled sharply of resin and altitude. Arthur spent ten minutes with his hand on the pod's surface and reported that integrity had stabilized at seventy eight percent.
"She can be moved," he said. "But not far. Not rough terrain."
"I know," Jonathan said.
He looked at the mountain.
He turned to face the others.
"From here I go on foot. The scanner arrays don't cover the eastern ridge. There's a geological dead zone in the rock that eats the signal. If I haven't sent the all clear in three hours, move the pod to the secondary location Arthur has."
"And if you send the all clear in one hour?" Chloe asked.
"Then bring the pod up the east trail. I'll mark it."
She nodded, already typing.
He looked at Arthur.
"The inner sanctum protocol," he said.
Arthur produced the folded card, the sequence, the declaration, transliterated from the old tongue. Jonathan took it.
He looked at Seraphina last.
She had her arms crossed. She was watching him with the particular focus she had when she was memorizing something. He had learned this about her over months of working together, the way her eyes went slightly still when she was committing something to keep.
"I'm not saying goodbye," she said.
"I know," he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she uncrossed her arms and stepped forward and straightened the collar of his jacket. It was not crooked. She straightened it anyway, her fingers quick and light, and then stepped back.
"Be careful with what you find up there," she said. "Not the wards. Not the Temple. The part of yourself you discover when you're in there alone." She met his eyes. "You've been finding out who you are under pressure and terror. The Temple won't have any of that. It'll be quiet." A pause. "Be honest with what comes up in the quiet."
Jonathan looked at her. At her hands, back at her sides now. At the steadiness in her face that was not the same as the steadiness she'd had three weeks ago. Something had shifted in it, or perhaps something had been added, a particular quality of waiting that he could not find a clean word for.
"Okay," he said.
He turned and walked into the trees.
The eastern ridge was steep and rocky and utterly silent. Birds tracked him from the canopy for a while and then stopped. He felt the moment they decided he was something they didn't understand and quietly left.
He climbed for forty minutes.
He thought, once, about the straightened collar. He thought about it the way he thought about the mug moved two inches and the light left on for three days and *never mind*.
He filed it under: things I am not thinking about right now.
But the filing was getting crowded.