He’d worked his way past most of Kilaltian’s riders when behind him, there was a sudden flurry of motion. Thaul shouted a curse as his dnu half reared, and Tchouten’s dnu backed wildly, jamming against Merek’s beast behind him. Something small and dark—could have been a rabbit, might have been a whirren—flew down the trail beneath the hooves. The edge of the trail crumbled. Tchouten’s dnu panicked. Tchouten felt his dnu’s head go down for the buck and tried to kick out of the stirrups, but his left boot caught in the irons. He half unseated to the left and grabbed for the saddle horn. His dnu actually leaped off the cliff, and Tchouten screamed as the dnu started to tumble. He broke free—moons alone knew why he did so—he wasn’t going to land any better without the dnu than with it—and they fell apart for an infinite, shrieking moment. Then they hit, far below, and the screaming ceased abruptly.
Thaul and Merek fought their dnu back under control. The sides of the other dnu heaved in the thinner air as the line jerked to a halt. Curses rippled through the riders until finally the beasts were quieted. “Well, shit,” Ebi muttered softly. Strapel nodded silently.
“Trail’s weak by the boulder.” The warning was called back along the trail. The line began to move again, and Tchouten’s body, far below, got barely a glance from the others. Talon shrugged off his anger and kicked his dnu up the trail. There was no sense of grief for the man, but only an icy rage at the waste. He wondered if he would have felt differently if it had been one of his men, not Kilaltian’s, who fell so uselessly. He already knew the answer.
Near the top of the ridge, the wind grew to a buffeting series of slaps. They plodded into the thick layer of windfern, and the whipping motion made the steep trail disorienting. It was beautiful in its own way: a sea of vibrant green and gold with waves that threatened to push them off the cliff. There was no place to rest. Stopping meant losing momentum, and it would have taken a whipping to get the dnu going again.
The lead riders went over the thin crest, waist-deep in ferns and skylined in spite of their caution. Then the pack dnu started over. Like the others, Drovic’s face was wind-whipped red, and Talon tucked half his face into his elbow as he urged his dnu up those last meters. From up ahead, a faint shout reached him. For a moment, his eyes teared from the wind, then the violent gust brought the rest of the shocked sounds to his ears.
“Look out!”
“Get down!”
“It’s an attack!”
Talon went off the saddle like a rabbit seeking a bolt-hole. A ragged hail of war bolts shot wildly through the front part of the line. NeHrewni fell heavily at the feet of his dnu, and maClea was dead before her head hit the rock that split her skull on the trail. Stobner was caught like an overstuffed target in the saddle, a war bolt buried in the V of his shirt, and his thick body only beginning to shudder. The others threw themselves into the ferns.
The fire became suddenly heavier, and Talon hugged his sword and bellied into the stalks, gagging on powdered spores as he scrambled away from the dnu. His father elbowed in fast beside him. He glanced at Drovic, noted that the man wasn’t harmed, and felt some of his tension ease. “We surprised them,” he said, his voice just sharp enough for Drovic to hear him over the wind. “They can’t know.”
Drovic signaled agreement. Drovic’s lead riders and pack dnu looked like a merchant’s train—it was what the man counted on to keep them safe from the venges. What they hadn’t planned on was another group of raiders setting up an ambush for merchants on the shortcut.
Another hail of war bolts tore through the ferns. An attacker popped up like a prairie dog, shot in a tiny, useless lull in the wind, and disappeared back into the green before the arrow skittered over a saddle. It was almost impossible to hold sight on anything in the waving sea of ferns. Except—a pocket of fronds whipped with abbreviated movement, and Talon knew there was a man beneath it. He drew his knife and waited for the wind to gust. Then he lunged to his feet and duck-ran with the howling burst of air, leaving his startled father behind. Ferns snapped and crushed beneath his boots, spores puffed up like dust. He was nearly on the man before the other raider heard him. The man twisted and, startled, released the bolt too quickly. The arrow ripped through Talon’s sleeve. He blocked the pain and the bow aside and stabbed down hard, slicing stalks and flesh. The other man thrashed wildly, clubbing Talon’s arms, face. Then the blows weakened and the man went still. Talon rocked to his feet, crouching, listening to the sounds in the wind.
Kilaltian’s men wormed over the ridge, leaving their dnu behind. Two went down immediately, but the ambushing raiders took one look at the amount of steel coming over the ridge, loosed their last shots, and fled. Talon followed, scramble-tackling a man who burst up almost beside him. A fist caught Talon on the cheekbone, and another on the ribs, but his knife was already moving. Blade met blade; steel skittered; Talon drove in. Ferns puffed. His fist caught the other man’s arm, half turning him. The arc of his knife sliced clean. Spores released. The carotid spurted. The man jerked back and down. It was in his blue eyes, that knowledge of death. The raider grabbed at his neck. Talon stabbed again, punching his knife through leather, ribs, lung. Blue eyes glazed. A weak arm blindly cut air. Golden spores floated down onto momentary pools of blood, speckling the rich red color. And the green-gold sea washed overhead in a lovely rippling pattern while blood soaked into the soil.
Talon crouched in the broken ferns, alone and breathing harshly while the other raiders fled. His heart was pounding, his gray eyes hard and searching for threat, for movement. He didn’t notice the green or gold, only the sounds in the wind. Finally, he rubbed his arm, felt the warmth, and looked down. He cursed quietly, coldly. Blood soaked his sleeve. The jagged cut was shallow, but as his heartbeat slowed, it began to sting like a son of a worlag. His ribs ached where he had hit the ground hard, and one of his legs was weak. He heard Fit and Strapel killing someone they found hiding, and nearby, he heard the deliberate snap of ferns as his father searched for him hastily. Carefully, he wiped his knife on the other raider’s jacket. The sense of the wolves kept him silent.
Drovic found him there, sprinkling wound powder in the gash. The glint of fear in Drovic’s eyes vanished as he saw his son alive, and flashed to cold anger as he saw the blood. “What the hell were you doing?” Drovic demanded. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth where a knife had cut a tiny line across his lip. “Jumping an archer but moving as slow as a gods-damned Lloroi?”
Talon gave him a hard look and snapped, “I don’t see you racing to Ariye to take the post.”
“When I’m ready,” Drovic snarled, “I’ll take that post and everything that goes with it.”
“You damn well ought to be ready now,” Talon returned coldly. He one-handed the vial shut and stuffed it back in his belt pouch. His anger seemed to grow with every breath. “Thirty years you’ve been skulking toward that county. We’re so close to Ariye I can taste the dust in their bakeries, but you keep turning away.” He pressed on his arm to force the wound powder deeply into the gash. “Get me a bandage,” he snapped. He ignored the glint in Drovic’s eyes. “What the hell is stopping you, anyway?”
Drovic jerked a wad of gauze from his belt pouch and thrust it at his son with equal anger. “The people didn’t want me. Moons!” he said explosively. Then, to Talon’s surprise, Drovic dropped beside his son. Talon noted with petty satisfaction that someone must have loosened Drovic’s teeth, not just cut his lip, because the older man dug out a pain stick to chew on desultorily.
“They didn’t want me,” Drovic repeated quietly. “They wanted soft words and soft plans, not my brutal”—he spoke the word with an almost dispassionate sarcasm—“honesty. They didn’t want the hard path to a better future, but the comfortable life instead.” He swatted at a grafbug attracted by the blood on his lip. “They knew as well as I did that the Ancients manipulated power like the Aiueven. We could have that power again, or even create something better if we would just stand up to the birdmen.”
Talon wrapped the gauze smoothly around his arm. “Leading by steel is always dangerous. ‘The warrior, unwanted after victory.’ ”
“Warriors and swords, elders and plague; black steel, blood steel. What does it matter? Any goal that requires a single death is equal to any other.”
Talon could not help his words. “Some goals are more destructive.”
Drovic’s lips tightened. “Which is more destructive, boy? The languid, lingering death of the hairworms? Or—” He nodded at Talon’s forearm. “—the sudden strike of steel? Would you rather die because you slept in the wrong place in the dirt, or risk great war once, and after victory, have the choice of turning your steel blade into towers and ships of the sky? We lived in domes built from marvels when we first landed on this world. Now we live in trees and huts and scrabble to stay alive. Steel is freedom, boy. It’s the path to the stars and beyond.”
Talon wrapped the ends of the gauze tight over the thick wad, then tied a one-handed tight knot over the bulge. “Steel destroys not only those it kills, but those it leaves behind.”
“Pah.” Drovic got to his feet. “Steel strikes swiftly, so the grief it brings is a single event—over like a bloody sunrise as soon as day begins. The soft death, the wasting death, is the one that drags you down, not only for the victims, but for all who must care for them. We use up our resources trying to treat the dead who still breathe, and there is nothing left for the future. But it is ‘comforting’ to the living, and it bolsters our righteousness, assuages our guilt and sorrow by serving the living grave.” The older man paced the broken ferns. “Leave the bodies,” he shouted as other men began to drag them free of the ferns. “They’ll see no difference between ours and theirs.” His blue-gray eyes glinted back at Talon. “I offered our people a harder path, one with privation and sacrifice and the reward of regaining the stars within a hundred years. Face and fight the twice-damned Aiueven, or acknowledge that they rule this world.”
Talon picked up the sword and knife from the dead raider. His heartbeat was still high, and the adrenaline was only now beginning to soften in his body. “And the Lloroi?” he asked.
“He twisted the choice and offered the people a dream instead, as if life on this world should be our goal should our sciences fail to free us. So he wasted men and time and money on making the world livable in a limited way instead of treating it like a prison.” Drovic squinted across the ridge. “The people chose. Aye, and they did not choose me. So we maintain our barbaric appearance aboveground and hide our science in cellars. People.” His voice grew sharp. “Blind as glacier worms, soft as gelbugs, and ambitious as cats in the sun. In this world, with these Lloroi, the stars will never be close at hand, but always far away. But the people are comfortable with their businesses and tree-shaped homes, their careful limits on growth and goals. Comfort!” Drovic spat the word. “It is comfort that will kill us.”
Talon glanced at his father’s expression. Time had dried his father of softness and left him hard as bone, but it had made Talon dangerous with ambition. He wanted leadership of this group, and if he could not have that, he wanted a group of his own. He said deliberately, “It has been nearly thirty years. There are new elders, new guild heads. The Lloroi—”
Drovic cut him off with a sharp gesture. “The Lloroi took my job, my future, and my family. He stole my son and my daughter to raise as his own, without memory of me, and left me a shell of a father.”
“And my sister?” He thought of a girl with light brown hair and laughing green eyes, and the wolves in his head started growling.
“My son was destroyed by the Lloroi, and my daughter fled the county as we did. The Lloroi has done his best to erase me from his history, just as he’s done the same to you.”
“You will hold that grudge till it turns to stone and paves your way to Ariye.”
“And you of all people should understand that. You were abandoned as I was, left for dead, your children taken away.”
Wolves howled with a blur of images, and Talon stifled a gasp as a lance of pain shafted through his head. “Why focus on Ariye when the whole world is ours for the taking?”
“Because it is my home, as it once was yours. And no matter how much I want the world, I want Ramaj Ariye more.”
And I want my family back, Talon thought savagely. The Lloroi may have erased Talon from Ariye, but Drovic was doing the same by keeping him out of the county. Someday, he would find his mate again, and moons, he hoped she was strong, for his fury at being abandoned was more than a moonwarrior’s rage, and it would need a long, long venting. Like the woman in the wolves, he swore his mate would find no peace, for he would send her to the seventh hell and back, just as she had cursed him when she stole his sons.
East, Talon thought. To the north and east. First the wolfwoman, then Ariye. “Let me go in your place,” he bit the words out. “I will speak to the council for you. I will face the Lloroi.”
“Not if all nine moons met on solstice.” Drovic’s voice was hard. “The last time you rode through that county, you rode carelessly and fast. You were seen. You were recognized. Your actions have not been forgotten.”
Talon’s lips tightened at the implied criticism, but he said calmly enough, “One rider leaves little backtrail and is as hard to see as a white mink in the snow.”
Drovic regarded him for a long moment. “Talon, I tell you this utter truth: If you set foot in Ariye, you will die.”
Talon stared at his father. It was not the conviction in Drovic’s voice nor the steadiness of his gaze, but the bleakness in his father’s eyes that convinced him of that truth. Slowly, Talon nodded.
Drovic turned away and stalked to his dnu, leaving his son to follow.
Talon did not immediately move out of the ferns. The wolves pulled him east toward the ramaj that would kill him; his father drove him west for blood. The venges were beginning to close like a noose. He was caught like a hare between worlags. He found his lips curled as if he would snarl, and he forced himself to relax. One of his goals was already shifting, growing stronger, closer with the wolves. That gray woman was no longer waiting for him in Ariye. She was riding like him, pounding the roads to dust with the same rage he ate with his stew. He rubbed his half-crippled left hand and smiled grimly as he realized that he looked forward to their battle. He had been raised to fight—that will was half his nature, and his weakness was growing less each day. He tested his legs, and although he limped, the muscles bunched and took the pain well. One more ninan, he promised himself; then he would tear through Ariye on the backs of the wolves, and hunt down the wolfwalker woman. He howled with the gray in his mind.
XI
Rhom Kheldour neKintar
What is the bond between brothers?
Is it love, hate, or blood that binds?
And does it even matter,
When to each other they cannot be blind?
—From Questions, the fourth text of Abis
By late afternoon, the desert heat peaked, and Rhom and Gamon pulled up in a well-used camping circle on the edge of the desert proper. Gamon dismounted, stretched, and checked the stone-lined well. He didn’t expect much. The well cover was coated with dust, and as he suspected, the brittle grass that clung to the wall rocks had not seen moisture in ninans. But he lifted the cover aside, looked below, and sent the bucket down. When he winched it back up, he ran his finger across the bottom of the bucket, then reset the container and recovered the well with care.
“Anything?” Rhom asked.
“Dry as a winter sow.”
Rhom studied the older man. Like Rhom, Gamon’s ears, face, neck, and hands were smeared with sun-grease. They wore Ariyen-made sunglasses that wrapped around their temples to protect their night sight; the desert light was bright enough to degrade their night vision for a day and a half after each harsh exposure. Both men had discarded their heaviest garments for lightweight, tight-weave, billowy clothes. Last night, when the temperature had dropped like a stone, the
y had layered everything and slept spooned to keep each other warm.
There had been almost no gradual change from the Randonnen peaks to the high-desert drylands. Instead, the mountains had simply flattened into layers. For the past thirty-six hours, the sun-shrunk hills had been broken only by the beginnings of the mesas. Gamon glanced back at the black-haired smith. “Still sure?”
“Aye.” Rhom did not hesitate.
“Even with that on your boot?”
The younger man looked down and jerked back from the edge of the well. The head of the thin worm that had been exploring the leather sank back into the sand. Rhom swallowed. He could have sworn he had seen teeth in that tiny mouth, sharp fangs like a mudsucker. Mudsuckers, sandworms, cave-bleeders, eels—they were all related. He had forgotten how calm his mountains were, where it seemed as if the only things that tried to kill him were the rocks and the run-off floods. He forced himself to shrug in answer to the other man’s question. “It’s just a sandworm,” he said steadily. “And a small one at that.”
“They aren’t the only things with teeth.”
“Glacier worms,” Rhom said absently.
The heat that wavered up in sheets mocked the dusty, rain-split canyons, while overhead, the sun burned the sky away to a cloudless, thalo blue. “Dion?” Gamon asked obliquely.
Rhom stared across the mesas. “I can feel her, up in the cold, in the mountains.” He gestured toward the ravine. “I look at this drop-off and see a different cliff. Or I look at that sandworm and see a glacier worm instead. It’s like a flash of fear or a memory that isn’t mine. She’s traveling south, but it’s into the mouth of danger.” He rubbed his left hand unconsciously, and Gamon frowned as he noted the gesture. Dion’s left hand was scarred, and she often rubbed her fingers along the old marks when she was thinking.
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