Irbis Chuluun's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Irbis Chuluun stood at the threshold of two valleys and could not tell which one would kill him. The wind off the snowfield pushed at his trousers and dragged at the beads around his neck. He counted them without looking: eleven peaks climbed, eleven beads, and one more he meant to add before he died. The twelfth peak waited somewhere past this fork. A dying monk had told him about it in a whisper, asking nothing in return. A sleeping god lived inside it. Irbis meant to wake the god and ask one question. The trouble was the sky. Cloud was building behind the eastern ridge, gray and low, the kind that swallows a valley in an hour. He had no map. The monks at the last monastery had only pointed and prayed. From their gate the peak sat at the far edge of sight, and most of them had looked away before they finished looking. Irbis had stared until his eyes watered. He had a direction. He did not have a path. He turned back along the ledge and found the temple he had passed at dawn. Its sashes hung in long bright strips from the eaves, snapping in the wind like flags planted on a summit. He climbed the worn steps and pushed the red door open. Inside, an old woman in robes was grinding tea. She did not look up. He asked which valley led toward the peak the monks would not name. She said the temple did not give that bearing. She said the temple had stopped giving it three winters ago, after the last two who asked for it never came back. Irbis left a coin on the floor and went out into the wind. He worked along the cliffs above the fork, slow on the loose rock, tail counterweighting each step. Where the trail split he found what he had hoped for. A cairn stood waist-high on the lip of the southern valley. Stones stacked careful and square, bound at three heights with monk sashes, the orange one weighted by a braided knot. A traveler before him had wrapped a true path in cloth and left it for the next climber. The northern valley had no marker at all. Its mouth was wide and inviting and wrong. He was kneeling to touch the lowest sash when something dropped past his shoulder and tore the strip of dried meat from his open pack. A flying squirrel, purple and yellow, banked off the cairn and landed on a rock three paces out, chewing fast. It watched him with one bright eye. Irbis laughed once, short, and did not chase it. The cairn pointed south. The clouds were closing. He shouldered his pack, set his hand on the chipped stone blade at his hip, and started down the southern valley before the storm could choose for him.