But the King of the Mansions knew his Amustakhi Mountains. He knew the cracking cold and the taste of lichen; the dead air of the mines and the dead soil of the overworked terraces; the dysentery and cholera that swept downslope settlements who drank water tainted by sewage from above. He knew the pink flamingos in their high lakes, and the pink sunburnt faces that smiled at him when he came out in his shining armor plate. He knew the silent old women who swept the babies off the exposure shelf and down the crevasse.

When he imagined the way his mountains rose from Aurdwynn he saw a great ramp. And he was like a bale of grass on that ramp, trying desperately not to roll downhill. His crown burnt with the cold, but he could not take it off.

“Ziscjaditzcionursz,” he said, zish-jaditshionursh, softer than the wind; it meant, more or less, may a rusty nail be driven into my bloody flank by a traitor, though really it meant, oh, fuck me. Very few lowcomers ever learned Mansion Stakhi, which could not easily be pried apart. Would only that the same could be said of the Stakhi mansions themselves.

His name was Atakaszir, of the Mansion Hussacht. From the peak of his mountain, Karakys, he could see more than a hundred miles down over Aurdwynn, when weather permitted. He could see the great green forests of Vultjag, and the high stony fells of Lyxaxu (he clicked his right incisors together, thoughtlessly, by tradition, at the enemy name, the Maia name) and the bright river that carried their food and wealth away from him, to the sea.

But closer beneath him was the crest of the col, a strip of naked wind-raked rock that crossed the saddle between Camich Swiet and Karakys. His Mansion stood high above the green line where the last trees grew. There were no forests, no rivers, no checkered pastures where horses could breed. The flanks of Karakys stepped upward in huge terraces buttressed by walls of interlocked mortarless rock. On those stone terraces the Mansion would soon lay out fields of potatoes to freeze-dry, sheafs of winterwheat, sorghum, and sour red pitahaya. When the wet air shoveled up off the Ashen Sea in summer crashed and fell as snow, Hussacht would live or die by its stores. Yaks wandered the upper terraces in herds of fifty or a hundred, females mostly, producing the milk that would go into the salt-and-coca tea which all the Stakhi drank. Atakaszir had yak butter on his lips right now, to stop the cracking, and a wad of coca in his cheek, to keep him strong. Down in the lowlands they called coca mason leaf and used it for fun and sex. Here it was as vital as water.