The unlikely companions continued up the mountain in silence. Guin was drawing on his animal endurance now, never stopping as a man might to wipe the sweat from his brow nor pausing to catch his breath. When a boulder-fall blocked his path, he swiftly climbed up and over it. When the path changed to a ledge along a cliff-face, he carefully sidestepped along it, never falling far behind his swift-footed guide.
The scenery was not the kind that made for a pleasurable climb. The Dog’s Head was a rocky, Nospherus peak, and though it was nominally part of the Kanan range, it jutted out alone into the desert, far from the main spine of the mountains. Although it was less tall than many of the lofty Ashgarns to the north, it had no rival in the parched desert nearby, and it could bee seen clearly from a great distance across the dunes.
The mountain looked like nothing so much as a mythic creature, a huge and sharp-faced dog that had sat so long in the stony sand that at last it had changed to rock itself. Though wolves lived in its skirts, and other desert creatures roamed its lower rifts and gullies, there was no green copse of trees to adorn its rugged slopes. In fact, nothing at all grew upon the higher ridges aside from the stone-mimics and a dry, gray lichen. Lower down, where Guin had found himself deposited by the sandstorm, there were thickets of sparse, thorny shrubs and cacti, but above them the mountain was as barren as the sands of the desert floor.
It was a difficult and increasingly tedious climb. The rock surface where the boulders had tumbled and split was the same ashen gray as that of the wolves, and its harsh contours gave no welcome to any grass or flower that might have hoped to catch in a cranny and grow. Once or twice the leopard-man glimpsed gray rock lizards scuttling across the stone; these along with the slender rocksnakes and scurrying alpine insects were the primary food source of the desert wolves that made these heights their home. Guin wondered where all the wolves that had assailed him the night before had now gone. Not a single one crossed the path of the Wolf King and the strange interloper he now led toward the summit.
The sun had already risen quite high in the eastern sky. There was no obstruction of tree or cloud in the Nospherus highlands to block its rays, and the difference between the chilly nights and the blazing days was dramatic—and harshest of all here up the Dog’s Head. The cycle of fiery sun and frozen night had given the rocks a hard sheen and kept even the hardiest of mosses from gaining purchase on the dry crags.
Guin walked, half in a dream, along the monotonous ashen-gray path. The glare off the rocks gradually put him in a sort of trance, and his mind wandered through the bizarre landscape that surrounded him. Up here is the true no-man’s land, he thought. There are many mysteries in the world, half of which man may never see or understand in this age. In Nospherus alone there are numberless places where no man has ever tread, gullies and crannies teeming with strangeness. Guin felt suddenly that he was in the presence of some unearthly will, as invisible and yet as real as the dry wind upon his face. It was almost as if the land had a fierce awareness of its own.
In a sense, the vast desert and rocky hills of Nospherus that stretched from the Kes River seemingly to the very edge of the world formed a single living entity, and the yidoh and bigeaters that dwelt in the wild land and the sandstorms that scoured its surface were nothing more than parasites upon it. This, then— the malevolent life-force of the land itself—was the source of the unnatural aura that hung in the air, indefinable but nonetheless distinctly present for Guin, the twins, and every soldier in the Mongauli expeditionary force. Each of these travelers in Nospherus had a sense that there was always something there, watching them, but look though they might, all they could ever see was sand and rock and sky.
Still, the reality of the place had a way of sinking in. Something about Nospherus was wrong, something more than its strange tangled chain of life, its monstrous flora and fauna, though these were peculiar enough. There was something in the land itself that was twisted. Those who crossed the Kes might not understand it, but they could feel it in their very blood.
Guin knew that it had not always been this way. He knew it the same way he knew the words of the Sem tongue and the history of the realms of the Middle Country. He could not remember learning it; the information was simply there. Nospherus had not always been the cursed home of Doal-spawned monstrosities and wildling tribes, Guin thought to himself now. He paused, gazing out across the ravaged land. The Wolf King shot him a questioning look and came back to him, brushing alongside his leg.
This is where the great Empire of Kanan, built by the Sun King, RaIIah, once laid its long roads. All Nospherus was its glorious domain, a vast empire thriving between sand and rock. The Kananites used the desert and the mountains as natural defenses; they rode in boats that could sail the sands, and great waterworks carried their water from the high mountains so that even in the midst of the desert there was never thirst or drought. The glory of Kanan was greater than that of any kingdom in the Middle Country today…
Then Guin recalled the story told in Alzandross’ History, of how a strange disaster had befallen the Empire of Kanan, a punishment sent down from the heavens that turned the majestic palaces and wide boulevards into dust overnight. Since then the domain of Kanan had been deserted and had lain unclaimed by any lord to the present day.