We camped there, by the abyss, and for the next two days, Nissikul worked her powers on Thukkar, crafting subtle, complicated magicks to try to restore his damaged spine. It turned out that his back was not actually broken, rather, it was badly misaligned, and the muscles all around his spine had been torn and destroyed. Her powers were not well suited to healing, she said, and she had to apply them carefully to restore the ranger’s ravaged body. For his part, Thukkar got over his hesitation to allow Nissikul to try to heal him fairly quickly, and soon, the two of them were chatting amiably while she worked. I spent most of that time ranging out in ever widening circles from our campsite, searching for signs of Joanna in the crevices, tunnels, and caves that I could reach. There was little for me to find, for the most part, though a frozen pool of some foul black substance that I found in one of the rubble-strewn caves drew me up short. I couldn’t figure out what the stuff was- it was unlike anything I had ever seen. I had the feeling that Joanna had something to do with it, but I couldn’t guess what connection there might actually be.

When I returned on the second night, bearing the day’s catch, I found Thukkar standing shakily, partially supported by a smiling, exhausted Nissikul. She had let the witch-ice arm lapse the previous day, and she looked nearly as frail as the battered ranger she was supporting. They both looked in my direction as I approached, each of them showing their teeth in hungry anticipation at the sight of the dukkar seal I had slung over my shoulder. I bared my own fangs in a possessive grimace, but I simultaneously smiled my eyes at them to show that I was joking. “I’m glad you’re both feeling a little better.” I noted as I approached. I noticed that Nissikul’s twisted leg had straightened itself out. It was still horribly bruised, but she looked less like a walking corpse than before. It seemed that no matter what her limitations were when trying to heal others; Nissi’s magicks had no problem taking care of her body, given that she gave them half a chance to work.

I strode into the camp and dropped the blubbery seal to the ice before them. It had been a clean kill- I had climbed down a deep crevice to find one of the places where the ice had turned to water, and held a scrap of meat above the surface. When the inquisitive dukkar lunged up to snatch at the morsel, I had caught it instead and broken its neck. They really weren’t the smartest animals that managed to live beneath Ravanur’s skin, but I was grateful that it had been there. There was little food down here unless one managed to kill a burug, and that was quite difficult if you didn’t catch it from above. We were lucky- our path had kept us fairly close to a mountain ridge, and so some of the heat of the great mother allowed for the sort of life that we needed, if we wanted to eat better than the occasional barnacle or rodent.

Nissikul helped Thukkar sit down, while I swiftly gutted my kill. My hunting knife was gone, along with the rest of my original gear, and while the Deepseeker had supplied me with a complete complement of ranger weapons, he had forgotten some of the little things. I made do with my claws, and despite some difficulty, I was able to field-strip the carcass in an acceptable amount of time. I tossed the liver and entrails over towards my companions, and busied myself draining the body and preparing it for travel. The dukkar I had caught wasn’t large, but if it was rationed, it would sustain us for quite some time. There was nothing to burn to make a fire, but in a pinch, my people survived just fine off of raw meat. We preferred it cooked, but when you walked the deep frozen paths of Ravanur, you didn’t have the luxury of being picky.

“So,” Thukkar said between mouthfuls. “Which one of your Elders is right?” Both Nissikul and I looked over at him quickly, frowning. He put up both hands, placating, the effect somewhat ruined by the blood spattering his hands and face. “Not to start any trouble, but Nissikul, your Elder isn’t exactly acting in good faith, and Volistad, the Deepseeker isn’t the most trustworthy type either.”

“I see what you mean about Lot,” I said, gesturing toward my own chest. “But why doubt the Deepseeker? He did save my life after all.”

Thukkar took another messy bite of his food and chewed contemplatively before continuing. “He did, but look at it from the outside. You were dead, and he revived you, so you would be in his debt. You would do whatever he wanted. He gave you all kinds of powerful weapons and tools, so that you would be overwhelmed, and wouldn’t question what he was saying.” The ranger pointed to Nissikul. “I’m not saying that Lot isn’t a bastard, but what if he was right about the Deepseeker? Even if he wasn’t right about your god, Volistad.”

I frowned and opened my mouth to protest that Joanna wasn’t my god, but Nissikul cut me off with an upraised hand. “That’s definitely possible,” she said. “I mean, he has been watching the Deepseeker for a very long time. I have been keeping an eye on the crazy old goat for him, and there is definitely something wrong with him.”

I snorted. “That’s just the way the Deepseeker is, though. And your master is hardly normal. Or does he talk like that just because he feels like it?” I smiled with my eyes to soften my words. “I mean, let’s be honest here, you Stormcallers aren’t exactly bastions of normal, rational behavior.”

Nissi stuck her red tongue out at me. “That’s not the same thing,” she said. “We are all a little strange,” she admitted. “But that comes from the-” she hesitated. “That comes from the ritual we go through when we earn our power.

“How do we know it’s not the same with the Deepseeker?” I asked, choosing to ignore Nissi’s discomfort over mentioning “the ritual”. I had asked her about it before, and she had never told me a thing. It was a secret. “He’s been around for longer than anyone can remember, and even the oldest members of the tribe say he was old when they were children. He deals with some powerful magicks, just like your people, and they had to have changed him over his long life.”

Thukkar cut in again, frowning with concentration. “But we know where Stormcaller power comes from. All Stormcallers possess in them the Breath of Ravanur, one of the great winds that bring the storms. Their power comes from the Great Mother herself.” He gestured to my armor, scrawled as it was with strange symbols and seals, glowing with strange arcane power. “But we don’t know where that comes from. The Deepseeker always just goes down into the dark and brings back his ‘blessings’, and we accept it because they keep us warm when we leave the village.”

“So?” I shrugged. “The power of the Stormcallers and the Deepseeker are both things we don’t understand. Why does it matter how they are made. We’ve seen what they do.” I gestured to Nissikul. “Stormcallers keep the wrath of Ravanur at bay when we go to the surface, and they reshape the ice to keep the village from being crushed beneath the glacier.” I gestured to myself, and then pointed to the glowing blessing that Thukkar wore as a thick cuff about one wrist. “And the Deepseeker keeps our people warm on our journeys into the cold.”

“But that’s not how it has always been,” Nissi whispered, staring down at her hands. “I actually know of a time when there wasn’t a Deepseeker.”

This time, Thukkar and I stared at her in astonishment. “What do you mean?” I asked. The Stormcallers were known to keep many secrets, and the way Nissi wasn’t looking at either of us, made me wonder if I wanted to know the answer.

Nissikul met my eyes. “I snuck into Lot’s hut a couple times when he was out training the new ‘Callers.” She grimaced. “Don’t look at me like that, I was curious. Anyway, I have read some of his scrolls, and there’s one written by the Elder before the one that trained him.” She paused for a moment, letting that sink in. The Stormcallers could live for a very long time, and if the writer of the scroll Nissikul had read had been the predecessor to Lot’s own predecessor, then this scroll was older even than our grandparents. No one in the tribe would remember anything about this- everyone who had been alive when that had been written was dead. Our people’s history was maintained by the Stormcallers. If they didn’t record it, it didn’t happen, at least in the long run. Most of us didn’t actually know how to read or write. Vellum wasn’t very common, and teaching every one of the Erin-Vulur to read and write would have been a waste of resources. Most of the rangers could read, but our ability to write was limited to whatever untidy scrawl was needed to produce our trail sign. I looked over at Thukkar and was pleased to see that he also seemed to have come to the same understanding of the situation that I had.

Seeing that we were both caught up with her, Nissikul continued. “The writings of Elder Averama said that there was some kind of horrible accident in the deep places beneath the mountain, back when the Erin-Caval still lived down in the depths beneath us- before the Eater-King came down. They had always been the ones to find the blessings that kept the rangers warm, back in those days, and they were usually rooting around in the dark down there. I think they considered it their people’s holy quest to find the Great Urn, the vessel that Palamun used to carry all the Erinye here to Ravanur. Anyway, they found something they should have left alone, and many of their people died in a mysterious plague. We sent rangers to investigate, and to help them seal away whatever they had found. In the process, one of those rangers went missing, and Averama thought he was dead.”

Thukkar and I looked at each other, frowning. The wounded man spoke first. “If this involved so many rangers, why don’t we know about this?” He looked over at me for support. “Our people don’t keep scrolls like yours, but our history is kept in song and story, told around our great hearth all the time. There are no stories about the world-shaking, and no stories about a plague among the Erin-Caval.”

Nissikul turned her palm up in a gesture of “who knows”, and took another bite of her food. She chewed and swallowed, and continued. “Averama doesn’t speak much about the ranger’s, except to note that one of them disappeared. She says that after Erin-Caval were safe again, the missing ranger reappeared, bearing bundles of strange metal things, dragging them up out of the ice. He had no memory of what had happened to him during the efforts to help the Erin-Caval, only that he had woken in a place deeper than he had ever been before, wounded, and surrounded by ancient metal magicks. He was able to make use of some of them to keep himself alive, and when he realized that he could use them to help our people, he brought as many of them back as he could carry.”

“The Deepseeker,” I said, understanding. “That lost ranger is now the Deepseeker we all know.”

Thukkar hadn’t stopped frowning. “But if that’s how it happened, why didn’t Averama accuse him of being corrupted then?”

Nissikul laughed, not entirely kindly. “You said it yourself. We Stormcallers are strange, and you all fear us. The Deepseeker brought back things to protect our people, better magicks than even the Erin-Caval could procure. In Averama’s time, no one but Stormcallers could stay alive on the surface for more than a day. When the Deepseeker appeared, he made it possible for you warriors to range much further, seek much better prey. The Erin-Vulur were able to take down many more burug since our rangers could follow the great beasts for much longer, rather than just waiting for them to come close to our village. We all ate better, and people were happier. Many more babies were born. Our tribe grew stronger, stronger than any of the other tribes. And Averama knew that without hard proof that the Deepseeker was corrupted, she could never accuse him, not without risking our own tribe turning against her and the rest of the Stormcallers.” Nissikul shrugged. “She never found that proof and neither did her successor. Neither did my master as far as I knew, though he tried very hard to find something he could use.”

We all sat there in silence for a while, contemplating what this all could mean. Finally, Thukkar spoke. “So we can’t really trust the Deepseeker because we don’t know where his power came from. And we can’t really trust the Elder of the Stormcallers, because he has lied and used us, and don’t really know what he wants.”

Nissikul sighed, using the corner of my cloak to wipe her mouth and hands clean. “So what can we do?”

I stood, looked out over the chasm, and said, “We find Joanna. If Palamun sent her, she might have some idea what we should do.” I sounded more confident than I felt. If the Deepseeker was corrupted, if he had always been corrupted, then what did that mean for my people? We had been using his blessings for three generations. And what did that mean for someone with one of his metal blessings beating in his chest instead of a heart? What did that mean for me?