Rising, he looked first at the haunt and then at her. She glanced down at her bare arm, but the viper had tucked itself safely away inside her. Fulmo hadn’t seen, although she couldn’t be sure he didn’t already know. He could taste poisons and toxins, after all. Wasn’t it possible he could sense the presence of the viper? If so, he had said nothing. Likewise, if he knew a disembodied soul possessed the prince’s body, he’d not given the haunt away.

Elen sat there, still stunned by all she had witnessed in such quick succession. But Fulmo and the haunt rose and walked together to the north face. They started climbing.

The haunt called merrily back, “Best to get out of here while we can still see to climb. Our pursuers will happily take potshots at us once they regroup.”

All at once she felt parched, exhausted by all the surprises. She cupped a hand into the cold water of the streaming river and drank. Its icy sweetness was as bracing as a draught of pure-water. Local tradition said the river was partly fed by pure-water springs rising in these hills.

Refreshed, although still shaken, she rose and followed, questions like swarming wasps in her mind.

46 A MORE COMPLICATED STORY

ACCORDING TO THE imperial archives, the imperial roads were built in the early years of the empire, commanded into being through the foresight and wisdom of the Lotus General and his heirs. It is certain that a number of roads were built at this time to accommodate the armies of the Lotus Clan as they moved swiftly to bring order and peace to lands riven by strife and disorder. It is also known the imperial roads allow the wardens, then and now, to communicate by means swifter even than griffin scouts. This secret is not shared outside the Imperial Order of Wardens.

However, extensive travels along the so-called witch roads and the other primary imperial routes, combined with the discovery of fragmentary evidence gathered from locally held scrolls not found and burned by the imperial censors, suggest a more complicated story.

The witch roads differ from the other imperial roads because of their ability to fend off the Pall. Yet the Pall had not yet risen when the Lotus Clan established the Tranquil Empire.

It would be two hundred years after the founding of the empire before a white mist seeped upward out of the ground to form shallow seas and rivers of deadly fog and irrupting Spore that inundated large swathes of land and one entire province. The records show that the Azalea Emperor and his officials had no warning and no prior knowledge of that which came to be called the Pall.