Ospan Kariy stood motionless upon the ice. His stooped back, trembling slightly from deep, labored breathing, suddenly seemed agonizingly small, frail, and almost weightless to Erasyl beneath that tattered sheepskin coat. "The staff is powerless now," the old man murmured softly, as if merely noting a shift in the wind. "Ulgen has drunk its chime to the very last drop." Then, indifferent to the fact that his aged bones might freeze to the core, he sank directly onto the mist-slicked ice and cast off his mittens. His slender, gnarled digits—crooked, with nails darkened and hardened by old age—tore frantically yet skillfully at the ties of the leather case slung across his back. Erasyl dropped to his knees beside the elder, shielding him with his broad shoulders from the vicious ground blizzard. The wind had begun to whip across the frozen expanse of the Bozbolyk, sending out the first white, serpentine flurries that hissed and snapped at the old man’s bare fingers. From the case, the elder drew a kobyz. It was an ancient, darkened instrument, carved from a single block of relic juniper. Its slightly bulbous, curved resonator was covered with the taut hide of a tuyek camel. Uncharacteristically, it bore not two strings, but three—thick strands braided from undyed horsehair that loomed obsidian-black against the white hell of the river ice. "Ata... A kobyz? Here?! Now?!" Erasyl gasped in astonishment, his thick breath instantly settling as a fine frost upon his fur collar. "The staff begs answers from the air," old Ospan replied, his sightless white eyes flickering for the first time as if with regret—the way water ripples when a stone has just been cast into its depths. "But my kobyz is accustomed to begging answers from the bone. And the bone of this river, in this bitter season, is the ice beneath our feet." The old man’s bare hands, already as pale as a fish's belly, settled with absolute poise upon the strings of the dark instrument. A faint, sickeningly sweet scent of frostbitten skin began to drift from his fingers. The curved bow in his grip, fashioned from a supple branch of meadowsweet with a bone handle carved from a saiga horn, pressed against his knee as if clinging to it. The elder showed no emotion, not even flinching; he treated the frost as just another spirit to which he had to submit. Oooo-oooo-yyyy... The sound began to crawl from the wooden womb of the kobyz like a wounded beast creeping from its lair. It resembled the guttural, ancient wail of a she-wolf, weaving together with the howl of the steppe blizzard into a single, unbreakable cord. It did not linger in the air; instead, it dropped heavily, sinking deep into the river ice, plunging beneath the snow crust and through the very bone of the Bozbolyk like a blade sinking hilt-deep into raw flesh. Erasyl felt the sound not with his ears, but through the soles of his boots, piercing all three layers of felt. Beneath his feet, the very body of the earth seemed to shudder under the immense weight of the river and its skeletal icy shroud. And a heartbeat later, the ice answered. Receiving that answer, blind Ospan saw. Not with his ruined eyes, but within the cavern of his mind. The icy map of the Bozbolyk unfurled before the elder's inner gaze as if seared onto the backs of his eyelids. The blind man could not see the fog, but he could hear its insidious, creeping whisper. The resonance of the kobyz continued to spread through the monolithic ice like veins, tracing fractures and uneven ridges, feeling them out the way a blind mortician gropes the face of a corpse during the ritual washing of the dead. Where the ice was as thick as granite, the kobyz hummed with a velvety, profound resonance, like the native steppe soil thundering beneath the hooves of a thousand-horse herd. This vibration rattled the teeth and jawbones of every remaining Moyyr in the party. But where a malicious patch of open water, porous frazil slush, or a treacherous, thin crust slumbered beneath the snow, the instrument's voice seemed to bog down, stifled and splintering into a rattling, squelching crunch. The sound brought a slow, rising nausea to the throat, accompanied by a foul, sour aftertaste reminiscent of spoiled koumiss. "I hear it..." the old man rasped, his eyes rolling back as the enveloping resonance of the kobyz consumed his body. His voice sounded like the groan of freezing timber just before it snaps and crashes down. Genuine, warm, salty tears streamed down his cheeks, pooling in his deep wrinkles and instantly freezing into thin, icy furrows. The tears stung the old man’s cracked skin, while the agony of Ospan’s frostbitten fingers rang through every single note bleeding from the kobyz. "I hear the path!" Suddenly, the spirits of the canyon howled all at once—the way a pack of steppe dakh-gals bays when their prey vanishes from under their noses. Their voices coalesced into a swirling vortex of a hurricane, until it was impossible to tell where the wind ended and the screaming began. The air turned as thick as pitch, as though one could chew it. A woman's voice materialized, calling out to Ospan Kariy through the blizzard, using his childhood name: "Ospanchik, my boy, come to your mother, come here, it is warm..." At those words, the air instantly filled with the scent of a hearth fire, of comfort, of sour milk, and of a home the blind man had not possessed in ages, save for the village of Kartal that had taken him in. The voice of the newly drowned Nurlan rose right at the old man’s temple—it sounded warm and fiercely alive. Yet the elder continued to draw his bow across the strings with the clinical, surgical precision of an experienced executioner, for whom another’s agony is merely one more note to be struck. The skin on every one of his fingers had already split open from the cold and the sheer strain. Dark droplets of Moyyr blood, freezing mid-air like black beads in the biting cold, sprayed across the dry camel hide of the kobyz. Seeing the old man’s blood, Erasyl felt the taste of iron flood his own mouth. "Erasyl, listen closely!" the elder roared through the pain, and that roar, animalistic and bear-like, held the strength of ten seasoned warriors rather than a frail, blind storyteller. "Gather the people behind you and lead them to the kobyz! Follow the low hum, and nothing else! Anyone who steps off it is a dead man!"