"They should be. You can cut steel with them."

"They're that sharp?"

He nodded. "Given how strong you are, you could tear them through a solid block of steel. The edge lets them do it, but it's your strength that makes it happen. The metal's unbreakable and it covers the backs of your paws, so they double as pretty effective shields. If you ever find yourself needing to defend yourself, use the bracers, or curl up your fingers and use the claws."

She nodded. "Well, I hope I never have to use them," she said as she retracted the blades, then she reached down and picked up his sword. She handed it to him, and he absently sheathed it and put it back in the elsewhere.

"I hope so too, but let's be realistic," he said as he touched the roasting meat with a finger. It was almost ready, which was a good thing, because his stomach was demanding food. He almost couldn't wait any longer.

"I intend to stick these in that Demon woman's eyes," she told him hotly, holding up her paws, though it was the bracer blades she obviously meant. "I guess I should be glad you gave them to me. Now I can pay her back for hurting me and stealing our daughter."

"That's the spirit," he told her with a heavy smile. "Now then, these are done. Let's eat."

The meal was hot and filling, and Tarrin managed to denude a good amount of the carcass with repaeted trips to it to reload the roasting stick before his appetite was satisfied. Between him and Jesmind, they managed to clean off all the good parts of the caribou and left little behind to serve as a later meal. Both had been running hard and used up alot of energy, and their Were natures didn't entirely depend on the All for its energy. It wasn't the first time he'd eaten like that, eaten five times more than his stomach could possibly hold, for his stomach was emtpying itself out even as he filled it. They fought briefly over the liver, always a choice part for a carnivore, and ended up splitting it.

Tarrin felt re-energized after the meal, was up and moving around spryly as Jesmind lounged a bit by the warm fire. "What now, my mate?" she asked.

"I'm not sure," he said, Conjuring a very detailed and fully accurate map of Ungardt and the tundra to the east of the Frozen Mountains. "We have forty-one days to get there, and we have to make sure we arrive in exactly forty-one days," he reminded her, sitting by her and putting the map on the ground. "We're right here," he said, pointing just to the right of a dot that represented Dusgaard. "There's only small villages of my clan and Clan Vjolgir east of us, but then it gets populated again when you get to the Frozen Mountains," he added, sliding his finger towards the right on the map, to where several symbols rested that represented mines and mine camps.

"What's out there?" she asked.

"Iron mines," he replied. "The Frozen Mountains are stained red from all the iron in them. It's the same in Daltochan, but they have other metals, like silver, tin, gold, lead, Mithril, and copper down there. There only seems to be iron in the Frozen Mountains. Ungardt makes half its money off the mines and the smelting camps. The other half comes from trade."

"I didn't know the Ungardt were so heavily into mining," she mused.

"We didn't used to be, but the Dals showed us how much iron we have," he shrugged. "In fact, we have alot of Dals at our mines. They're better at mining than we are, and they'll go where the mining pays the most."

"If you want to find a Dal, dig a hole," Jesmind chuckled, quoting an old saying.

"Mining's one of the very few things they can do up in their mountains," Tarrin told her. "So it only stands to reason that they'd be very good at it. Ungardt are too big and unruly to be good miners," he admitted. "There are alot of Ungardt there, but the Dals do alot of the mining with the more patient Ungardt, and the Ungardt usually work on refining the ore they bring out."

"What did you call it? Smelting?"

He nodded. "They mine coal from the hills just west of the mountains and use it in the smelting foundries up there," he told her. "That means we can do it cheap, so we can sell our refined iron cheaper than anyone but the Dals. And when the Dal iron gets imported out of Daltochan, it makes the price for Dal iron at ports about the same as ours."

"Ah, so there's no competetion with Daltochan," she noted.

"Not really. They mine alot more than we do, and there's never a shortage of people wanting to buy iron."

She looked at the map. "How long is it going to take us to get to the mountains?"

"About six or seven days," he said. "It's the crossing the mountains that's going to be tricky. There's bound to be heavy snow up there, and I may have to use magic to get us through the passes. And it won't be a direct route. We have to follow the passes," he said, snaking his finger up and down the map in the mountains, following a narrow, treacherous path, "and we'll be spending as much time travelling north, south and west as we will east. I have no idea how long that's going to take, but I'm guessing that it's going to take us at least twenty days. But it's after we come out on the other side that's up in the air. We can't go slow when we get out on the tundra, so we might be forced to wait in the mountains until it's time to move down onto the tundra."

"It's too open, isn't it?"

"It's flat as a board and there's not a tree between the mountains and the polar ice," he nodded. "It defines open. They'll see us coming from days away, and we'll be in the most danger when we come out onto the tundra plain. We very well may have to fight our way to Gora Umadar."

"How long will it take?"

"If nothing gets in our way, we could reach Gora Umadar in three days from the pass leading down out of the mountain," he said, pointing to the pass that was almost directly southwest of the black triangle representing the place where they were holding Jasana. "But I expect plenty of things to get in our way, so I'm giving us five days to get there. That means we have to be at the mouth of the pass here in thirty-six days," he said, pointing to the pass again. "If we're early, we hunker down and wait. If we're late, then we rush right out onto the plain and get a bit more direct in clearing a path to Gora Umadar," he said with an aggressive snort.

"What kind of weather will we face?"

"Not much but snow out here," he answered. "There's going to be some fierce storms up in the mountains, and there's nothing to stop the wind out on the tundra, so I'll bet that it's pretty strong out there."

"That doesn't sound too bad," she said with a neutral expression, examining the map. "As long as we don't mess around, we should reach the pass opening with time to spare," she surmised.

"I'd rather not," he said with a slight frown. "I'll go stir crazy if I have to sit in one place and wait. As long as we're moving, I feel like we're getting somewhere. But as soon as we stop, I'll get impatient, and I can't let that distract me. We absolutely have to get there on Gods' Day. Not a day sooner or a day later, and we have to arrange it so we reach the pyramid itself as close to the first hour after noon as we can possibly arrange it."

"Why then?"

"According to Phandebrass' charts, the conjunction is going to happen a little after noon on Gods' Day," he said. "Phandebrass got a book of charts from the library that had all the information in it that I needed, but he wisely wrote all sorts of helpful notes in the margins for me. He figured out what time it would be in Gora Umadar when it happened, and added that for me in his notes. I'm glad he did. It's different times in different parts of the world at one time, because the sun isn't in the same place in the sky for the whole planet."

"Mother explained that to me once. It sounds weird."

"The planet is round," he said, drawing a circle in the dirt by the fire. "The sun doesn't move, we move around it, but since the planet is round, only one side of it faces the sun at any one time." He drew a smaller circle representing the sun. "Dawn and dusk are nothing but us sitting on the border between day and night, and noon is when we're directly facing the sun." He drew lines from his representation of the sun to the planet, lines to its edges and its center. "We reckon time by sunrise and sunset, so that makes the time different for different parts of the world. As far as I can tell, the conjunction will line up over Suld at exactly noon. Since we're going to be so far east of Suld, it's going to make it later in the day for us when that happens. Phandebrass figured that out. Hold on," he said, taking out the book and leafing to the page with the diagram of the conjunction on it, a page he'd marked by folding its corner. "Here it is. It'll be one hour and seven minutes after noon, time local to Gora Umadar," he told her. "The entire key for us is to get inside the pyramid and confront Val as close to that time as we can possibly make it," he told her. "With the conjunction so close, it's going ot make him desperate enough to bow to my demand to release you and Jasana before I give him the staff. After you two start out, I'll stall, telling him I won't give it to him until after you've cleared the enemy army. A dragon is going to land outside the pyramid and pick you up after you get out. When he clears the army with you, I'm hoping that the conjunction will be about to start, and that should be about when the Elder Gods are going to transport in the army to attack Val's forces. That's the signal they'll be waiting on to do it. That's when I'm going to try to make my escape, when Val is distracted by the appearance of the Elder Gods and the army."