"She's been out on the mountains? Why on earth would a woman—"
"She told me it's one of the duties of all the Watchers to take a kind of long-range patrol in rotation even when nothing's threatening us. She's gone out at least twice a moon since she was promoted from novice."
Halun was briefly annoyed at himself for forgetting something so basic; if he intended to take the Master's seat away from Felaras, he should at least keep in mind that the women of the Watchers were not the sheltered creatures his mother and sisters had been! It would behoove him to keep that factor ever in mind when dealing with his rival.
Zorsha was continuing. "Anyway, the point is that while it's pleasant enough here in Fortress Pass, she says that those thunderstorms we see over the mountains can literally be killers even for the young and fit. For the old, the sickly—it would be suicide."
"It would be folly to think we could hide from these nomads," Halun mused, drumming his fingers on the wood of the table. "If we know about them, they most assuredly have learned of us. And while some of my less worldly colleagues may have forgotten the fact, we are hardly self-sufficient. While our Vale land-folk are hiding in the caves, they are not out planting crops. And if they are not planting, there will be nothing to harvest. I have seldom seen foodstuffs coming to us from the west side of the Pass. . . ."
Zorsha nodded tiredly. "Exactly. That's exactly what Kasha said."
"A bright young woman, is Kasha," Halun said absently, then saw a tiny twinge, almost too insignificant to be called a reaction, pass across Zorsha's thin, bony face at the sound of her name.
Hm? Something odd there, Halun thought. I think perhaps a change of subject is in order.
"Zorsha, I hesitate to interfere in your personal life—but I was your Master when you were a novice, and I feel a certain—ah—proprietary interest in your life. Is there some trouble between you and Kasha?"
Zorsha flinched a little. "No . . . well, not precisely trouble . . ."
"Something troubling you, then?" Zorsha had been Halun's favorite among all the dozen or so novices he'd trained. The cheerful young orphan passed up from the sister-house in Albirn had quite won his solitary heart, and was the nearest he had to a son. "Would you care to talk about it?"
Zorsha sighed. "You know how long we've been friends, Halun; practically since the first moment I arrived here."
Halun nodded. "The Unholy Trinity, we called you—Zorsha, Kasha, and Teo. We never saw one of you without the other two somewhere about." He shook his head with a reminiscent chuckle. "You children!"
"We aren't children anymore," Zorsha said glumly. "And—I would like to have more from Kasha than to just be a friend. And she's not interested."
"Why?" Halun replied in amazement. "Hladyr bless, I thought every young woman wanted—well—" He coughed. "Well, a marriage and a family, anyway."
"Not Kasha, at least not from me—and the worst part of it is, I have to agree with her reasons." Zorsha looked as forlorn as a lost spaniel puppy. "She says that if she—favored me that way, Teo would be hurt. And if she favored Teo, I'd be hurt. And no matter which of us she favored, we'd never be the same kind of friends again, afterward. So she isn't going to favor either of us."
Halun was totally dumbfounded. "Hladyr bless. I didn't think there was a young person in the world capable of thinking past his cr—ahem. Past his primal urges. She could be right, you know. At least for now."
"Oh, she is." Zorsha's thin face grew longer. "That doesn't mean I have to like it. I know very well that if I knew she and Teo were lovers, I'd—I'd—well, I'd be angry, and pretty hurt. And it would take an awfully long time to get over that hurt. And even if I could, well—they'd always be two, and I'd be on the outside. We'd never be three again. And the same would be true if the positions were reversed for me and Teo, only worse, because Teo would be terribly hurt and try not to show it. He'd probably just sink into his books like Master Diermud and we'd never see him again except at meals. But—" He colored. "—sometimes I can't help but wish he'd fall in love with somebody else, or—have a religious conversion or—or—something—"
Halun nodded sympathetically, and put one paternal hand on the boy's—or rather, young man's—shoulder. So my Ancas imp is grown up enough to think beyond the moment. I shall have to cease thinking of him as a boy. "Well, never having been afflicted with your problem, I can't very well advise you. I fear I never was that attracted to anyone, inside or outside the Order. But you have my sympathy, if nothing else."
"Thank you." Zorsha smiled wanly. "At least if you'll let me wear your ears down about it, now and again—?"
"Of course."
"Well, that'll help."
"But the cost to you, young man—" Halun wagged an admonishing finger at him "—is that you are going to have to keep me informed. While I can understand Felaras not wanting every bird-brained flitter-head in the Order to go flying off on tangents because of a little bad news, I rather resent that she feels she needn't tell those of us who are levelheaded until she's ready for us to hear things."
Zorsha grinned. "Well, I kind of tend to agree with you there. No fear, Master Halun. What I know, you'll know. But right now, I'm afraid I've got brush-cutting detail, so I'd better get to it."
Halun stood up with a scraping of chair legs across the wooden floor to let him out, and thought with some little satisfaction that Felaras hardly reckoned on his having an ear in her camp.
Yes indeed, my dear rival, he thought, shutting the door behind his former pupil, I know very well you've been getting information on the Seekers from Zorsha. But this time you have forgotten something. A window like Zorsha can let you see out into the -Seekers—but he can also let me see in—to your plans. And I just may be able to turn those plans to uses you never imagined.
* * *
Young Vredai riders showed off their horsemanship and high spirits, yipping and catcalling each other as they milled in an eddy of barely controlled chaos with Jegrai in the center. The raiders were all of them Jegrai's age and younger, but tough, and far from inexperienced.
The pity of it was that there weren't any inexperienced fighters over the age of fifteen in the Vredai. Not anymore.
Jegrai raised his fist high over his head, and the riders reined their mounts in with instantaneous obedience. Quiet hung in the air like the dust they'd stirred up. Now there were only the camp-sounds, the clink of harness, the occasional stamping of an impatient hoof.
Then, when he thought he'd held them long enough—
"Hai ya!" Jegrai shouted, bringing his fist down, and digging his heels into his own mount's sides.
The entire party swirled out of the encampment in a tangle of tails and legs and dust, with Jegrai in the lead on his tough little roan gelding.
Jegrai had taken charge of this raiding party himself with two purposes in mind. The first—well, his people required frequent reminders that their Khene was also a warrior. His father had led raiding parties—
—yai-ah, and it was a raiding party that killed him—
But that was a thought Jegrai would not dwell on for long. There had been other reasons for the failure of that raid, and none of them applied here and now. This was a different set of circumstances, and a different sort of raid.
The fact was that the Khene of Vredai had best be prepared to prove himself on a regular basis, and it had again come time for Jegrai to do just that.
The other reason for leading this raid was more personal. Jegrai was hoping, in his deepest heart, that in the excitement of the raid he might forget the spectre of Yuchai moaning in pain and delirium in the Shaman's tent. At least for a time.
But at first there was little to distract him. There was no one and nothing at the first few farms they came upon, only the fields and deserted buildings. It was a good land they rode across, and Jegrai felt a twinge of guilt at driving the land-folk from it. Rich black soil, well watered, but now going to grass and weeds; windbreaks of strange, tall evergreen trees with
pungent needles. And all of it deserted, forlorn in the morning sun.
Still, that was hardly surprising; the scouts had been reporting for days that the land-folk were packing up and fleeing—westward somewhere. Some—few—had gone over that far pass guarded by the wizards.
Ah, but the rest had just disappeared, as if the ground of the western mountains ate them, their goods, their livestock. They simply vanished, leaving neither trace nor track. It was a mystery. It was one Jegrai did not care to have solved, particularly. He would just as soon not slaughter defenseless farmers; such a slaughter had no honor in it, and bought Vredai nothing but the possibly dangerous ill will of the land-folk that remained.
And it felt too much like the time the Talchai had ridden through the camp, slaying combatants and noncombatants indiscriminately. Riding down children. No, Jegrai wanted no such stain on his hands.
He shook off the dark thoughts and listened instead to the jokes and jibes of his followers. They rode in sun-gilded high spirits for most of the morning, without seeing a single thing worth stopping for. As morning turned toward noon, they penetrated deeper into the valley—much deeper than any Vredai party had ever passed before. And as they topped a rise, they found themselves riding into the yard of a dwelling-place that bore the unmistakable signs of having been abandoned mere hours ago.
Possessions had been dropped on the roadway, strewn as if kicked out of the way, and discarded by those in too much haste to bend to retrieve them; a thin tendril of smoke still curled up from the chimney of the house.
With the wariness of long habit, the raiders scattered and took cover. But when there were no sounds of life, they crept from shelter and began prowling the abandoned buildings.
They found a few animals still remaining, two nursing sows in their pens and a couple dozen half-feral goats and chickens; the former too large and too protective of their young to move from their styes with any speed, the latter too stubborn and wild to catch. The warriors made fine sport with what they found, slaughtering the pigs to take back to the camp, rounding up the goats, decorating themselves with the strange garments and utensils. One young warrior flung a bright quilt about his shoulders like a motley cape; another topped his helm with a foolish-looking cap, and a third traded his helm for some kind of metal basin. Jegrai sat his horse, aloof from it all, checking for signs of which way the land-folk had fled—until his sharp eyes caught an unmistakable sign on the soft ground of one of the empty pastures.
The print of horse-hooves!
He whooped to get the raiders' attention; they abandoned their foolishness and joined him in following the tracks all the way to the western fence.
One panel of the fence was down; had been taken down. "What do you make of this?" he asked Abodai, the best tracker of the lot of them.
Abodai pursed his lips, which made his moustache squirm on his upper lip as if it had a life of its own. "I would say that this was a true herd, mares, foals, and a stallion. I think perhaps the fear of the land-folk spoke to the herd, made them spooky and impossible to catch. This may be what delayed these folk so as to abandon so much. So. It may well be that the herdsman felt that to let the horses free would keep them out of our hands, no? Or it may well be that the herdsman is with them, mounted, driving them before him. And he thinks we cannot catch them."
Jegrai grinned. "Foolish herdsman!" The shiny copper, brass, and silver trinkets, the other booty they had picked out of what had been abandoned, was now cast away. The goats were left in the care of the youngest, least experienced member of the raiding party to be driven back to the Clan. He would lead a foraging party back for the pig carcasses and the rest.
But the remaining members of the raiding party would be going after the booty that truly mattered: the horses. Gold and silver were fine for ornamentation, brass and tin useful, but horses were life itself. So far they had captured only two old mares, both too old to breed, and one half-broken gelding. The young gelding had called up a fire of lust in the heart of every person of the Vredai that had seen him; nearly four hands higher than the sturdy little steppes horses, he was cleanlimbed and strong and swift. Jegrai badly wanted a stallion of his kind to breed into his herd, and mares to breed to his stallions. With such tall, swift horses, they might hold even against the Talchai.
"Hai-ya!" he cried, giving his gelding his head and urging him with his legs into a gallop. "Let us ride!"
They pounded after the vanished herd, the excitement of the chase building as the trail grew fresher and fresher; they urged their mounts over pastures of lush grass of a thickness and luxuriance that no one of the Clans had seen since before the drought. And their building excitement was such that they hardly noted the rich pasturage except as something to cross. They raced through orchards of tall trees covered in white and pink blossom without a backward glance. All that mattered was the trail, and the quarry at the end of it.
Jegrai was the first to actually see them, so far in the distance and high up on a mountain road that they were little more than moving dots beneath a cloud of dust. He gave a whoop of victory, and the others looked up almost as one to see what he had spotted. Their fierce warcries must have been loud enough to carry up the side of the peak, for the little group of dots sped up a moment later—sure proof that they were being herded.
It was only when they were halfway up on that trail themselves that Jegrai realized with a shock of dismay just where that unseen herdsman was taking his horses.
This is the wizards' mountain! he thought with a chill, and fought down the urge to rein in his gelding there and then. Wind Lords—he's heading right for the wizards' pass! If they see us—oh, Wind Lords—what if those are the wizards' horses?
He wanted, with a desperation the like of which he had not felt except when faced with Yuchai's illness, to turn the party back around and give up the chase. But one look at the faces of the others told him that he dared do no such thing. He would lose face before them—and they would go on without him.
And when they all returned to the camp, there might well be a challenge for his rank of Khene. Probably from his half-brother, Iridai.
So he whipped his horse up to the front, and prayed to the Wind Lords that the raiders would be able to overtake the herd before they passed into the wizards' protection.
The Wind Lords were not listening.
The track turned into a trail cut into the very face of the cliff. Their quarry had vanished somewhere up ahead, but the dust of the herd's passing still hung in the air, and the nearness of their goal heated their blood still more. They pounded around a bend in the trail in a cloud of dust and sweat. . . .
Only to pull up in startlement at the sight of what lay across the place where the main road joined the trail they had been following.
They had scarcely a moment to take in the incredible size of the structure before them—larger than anything any of them had ever seen before, even Jegrai, who had been to the Suno Lords' city once as a child. They had just enough time for their hearts to stop dead and start again with the astonishment of it.
There was an eerie whistling that seemed to come from somewhere above—
And Jegrai had a fleeting impression of something large and boulderlike thudding down into the trail before them—
Then the wizards called lightning down upon them out of the clear and cloudless blue sky.
Thunder roared in their ears, flames and dirt sprang up before them; the trail itself was torn and flung into the air in front of their panicked horses, and scarcely ten horse-lengths away.
The horses screamed and fought their bits—but not for long. As one man the raiders let them have their heads, and turned tail and ran for the shelter of the cliff face they'd just come around. There they did rein their panicked, sweat-sodden beasts in, before they could break legs in their headlong flight. Afraid to move lest the lightning find them, the Vredai cowered under the cliff and looked to Jegrai to get them safely out—
—Jegrai, who had no more n
otion of what to do than the rest of them did.
* * *
"Felaras!"
Teo burst into the Master's study, white-faced and breathless. Kasha dropped the mug of chava she'd been drinking, and the pottery cup shattered unnoticed on the floor.
"Fe—Fe—laras—" Teo panted, clinging to the door frame. "Zetren's—on the—wall. With the—gunners—"
"Damn!" Felaras spat, "that mad dog will ruin everything!" She leapt out of her chair and vaulted over the desk, but Kasha beat her to the door. Kasha sprinted down the dark staircase as fast as she dared, with Felaras right behind.
Gods above—Kasha thought angrily.—we go to all this trouble of setting this trap, risk young Eldon and the horse-herd—if Zetren ruins it for us—
She hit the entrance to the hallway with enough momentum to have bowled over a dozen tall men, had there been anyone blocking her way. The stone floor was slippery; she skidded, bounced off the wall opposite the staircase, and kept going. Behind her she could hear Felaras making the transition from stairwell to hall with a little more control.
At the end of the hall was the wooden door to the outer yard that lay between the Fortress building and the wall. She hit the door at a dead run, and it slammed against the stone. The sun nearly blinded her, but she didn't stop to give her eyes time to adjust, just ran, scrubbing at her watering eyes, and trusted to memory and habit to put her feet where they should go.
She ran up the stairs to the top of the Fortress wall still half-blinded, just a little ahead of Felaras, hoping Teo's breathless warning hadn't come too late. At the top of the flight of stone steps were three of the six permanent mortars, their -Watchers—and Zetren.
As she ran through the gap in the waist-high barrier on their side of the wall, she could see Zetren talking to the gunners. He was facing her, a wall in human form, and his dark eyes glittered like a half-mad bears. He ignored Kasha's presence entirely. The bloodthirsty glee in his voice could not be concealed, and the Watchers manning the mortars on the wall did not look to Kasha's eyes to be comfortable hearing it. "When they reach the first mark," he said, "touch off the—"
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