Rihwin looked pained. "You just shattered one of my few remaining illusions."
"I'm not saying he's not a brilliant man. I do think he presents his ideas too forcefully, though, and makes too little allowance for variations and exceptions to his rules."
"I can't quite agree with you there. . . ." All but oblivious to their surroundings, they fenced with ideas, arguing in low voices until Rihwin exclaimed, "Is it growing light already?"
They made good progress the next day, and the next, and the next, reaching the Pranther River at the end of the fourth day out of the capital. They camped near its southern bank.
The night was quiet, save for the river's gentle murmur. Pale clouds drifted lazily from west to east, obscuring now the pale thin waxing crescent of Nothos, now Tiwaz's bright full face, now rosy Elleb, which came into the sky halfway through the midwatch. Gerin, whose watch that was, endured the muttering of the ghosts for another couple of hours, then nudged Van.
His friend woke with a thrash. "Anything happening?" he asked.
"Not so you'd notice," Gerin said.
"Aye, it seems restful enough." Van looked down. "What's this? Look what I've been all but sleeping on, captain—another aoratos plant." He plucked it from the ground.
Gerin eyed it with distaste. "Now that I'm only standing one watch in three I don't need anything to keep me awake at night, and the leaves are so bitter they shrivel my tongue. Throw it away."
"I'd sooner not. I want to see if Rihwin knows of it."
"Suit yourself. As for me, I can hardly keep my eyes open."
It was still nearly dark when Van woke him. "Something moved over by the river, behind that stand of brush," the outlander whispered. "I couldn't quite make out what it was, but I don't like it."
"Let's have a look." Grabbing for sword and trousers, the baron slid out of his bedroll. He roused Elise and Rihwin, told them to give him and Van a few minutes and then to use their own judgment. Then he slipped on his helm and followed Van down toward the Pranther.
As always, the Fox marveled at Van's uncanny ability to pick his way through undergrowth. His own woodscraft was better than most, but once or twice an arm or shoulder brushed a branch hard enough to make it rustle. His comrade made never a sound.
Van froze when he came to the edge of the brush. A moment later Gerin eased up beside him, following with his eyes the outlander's pointing finger. "Trokmoi!" he hissed, hand tightening of itself on swordhilt.
A pair of the barbarians sprawled by the riverbank. Their attention seemed focused on the stream. Their tunics were not checked in the usual northern fashion, but were all over fylfots. These were Balamung's men!
But they did not move, not even when Gerin parted the curtain of bushes and walked toward them. His bafflement grew with every step. He came up close behind them, and still they were oblivious. Then he bent down and prodded one of them.
The Trokmê toppled. He was dead, his face an agonized rictus. In his throat stood an unfletched wooden dart, half its length stained with an orange paste. A matching dart was in his companion's unmoving chest. A fat green trout lay between the Trokmoi, bone hook still set in its mouth.
"What in the gods' holy names—!" Van burst out.
A grim smile formed on Gerin's face. "I do believe the rivermen have done us a good turn," he said. "Can you think of any reason Balamung would send men south, except to hunt us? And here, almost up with their prey, they stopped to do a little fishing—in the one river in all Elabon men don't fish." He explained how the rivermen had come to the Pranther.
Van shook his head. "Poor damned fools, to die for a trout. But it will make us a fine breakfast." He stooped to pick up the fish.
Gerin grabbed his arm and stopped him. A reptilian head was watching them from the river. No expression was readable in the riverman's unwinking amber eyes, but he held an envenomed dart ready to throw.
"All right, keep the blasted thing!" Van flung the trout into the Pranther. The riverman dove after it, surfacing a moment later with it in one webbed hand. A grave nod and he was gone.
"What's toward?" Riwhin called from the bushes. The baron was glad to see he'd had sense enough to don armor and to carry his bow with an arrow nocked and ready. He was a good deal less glad to see Elise behind Rihwin; he wished she wouldn't always run toward trouble. Frowning, he told them what had happened.
Rihwin said, "That Trokmê must hate you indeed, to work so hard for your destruction. Or perhaps he fears you."
Gerin laughed bitterly. "Why should he? I doubt I'm more than a pebble underfoot to him—a sharp pebble, aye, but a pebble nonetheless."
Hooves thuttered on the bridge called Dalassenos' Revenge. Rihwin half drew his bow, expecting more Trokmoi. But it was only a dour courier in the black and gold of the Empire, a leather message pouch slung over one shoulder. He headed south fast as his lathered horses would take him. "Make way!" he shouted, though no one blocked him.
"Just once," Gerin said, "I'd like to see one of them have more to say than 'Make way!' It's no more likely than a wolf climbing trees, though."
The Fox disliked Elabon's courier corps. All the barons north of the Kirs saw it as part of the thin web binding them to the Empire, and they were right. The couriers carried news faster than anyone else, but only on imperial business.
Later that day another courier came south at the same headlong pace. Gerin called after him for news. He got none. They refused even to gossip, fearing it might somehow compromise them. Cursing, Gerin hurried his own northward pace.
Rihwin, as it happened, did not know of the aoratos plant or its uses. "And that is passing strange," he said, "for I thought surely the Collegium's herbalists were aware of the properties of every plant that grows within the Empire." He took the little bush from Van and studied it. "I must say it seems ordinary."
"Which is likely why no one's bothered with it here," Van said. "On the plains it stands out a good deal more."
"I must try it tonight," Rihwin said.
"The taste is foul," Gerin warned him.
"What if it is? If the effects are as interesting as claimed, I may be on the brink of discovering a whole new vice." He gave a voluptuary's leer, but spoiled it by winking.
"If you were half the carpet knight you pretend to be, you'd have debauched yourself to death years ago," Gerin said.
"And if you were as sour as you let on, you'd long since have pickled in your own juice," Rihwin retorted, a shot with so much justice that Gerin chuckled and owned himself beaten.
He stood first watch that night. By sunset he had grown so edgy that he decided to chew some aoratos leaves himself, regardless of their flavor. He felt fatigue flow away as the juice coursed through his veins. The curious extra sense the plant conferred showed him a squirrel asleep in its nest high in an aspen tree, a fox stalking a vole, a nightjar whipping after fluttering moths. The ghosts seemed troubled; thanks to his added perception, Gerin could almost make out the cause of their alarm, but in the end it eluded him.
He did not know whether he'd swallowed more leaves this time or this was a more potent aoratos, but its effects were still strong in him when he woke Rihwin. They made the baron reluctant to seek sleep at once. He was also curious to learn what the southerner would think of the plant.
"Pah!" Rihwin almost choked on the first mouthful, but choked it down. "A gourmet's delight it is not." He chewed more leaves. A few minutes passed. His breath began to whistle more quickly through his nostrils. His voice grew soft and dreamy. "How bright Tiwaz is, like polished silver!" After another moment: "Is that a ferret over there, Gerin?" He pointed into the darkness.
The baron felt his own mind reach out. "I think it is."
"Remarkable. And the ghosts—hear them wail!"
They talked idly for a while, trying with scant success to find some everday sensation comparable to that induced by the aoratos. "This is foolishness," Gerin said at last. "If there were half a dozen things like it, it would not be marvelous
at all."
"Astutely reasoned," Rihwin answered, his tone mildly sarcastic. "From that, it would follow—" He paused in mid-sentenced, exclaimed, "The ghosts are gone!"
They were, fled away as suddenly and completely as if driven to shelter by the rising sun. The gloom outside the campfire's glow seemed somehow strange and flat. Surrounded by this great stillness, the cry of a hunting owl came shockingly loud.
Gerin's surprised senses were still groping for an explanation when Rihwin, now feeling the aoratos more strongly than did the baron, whispered, "I know why they fled. Look north."
Looking was not what was required, but Gerin understood. The blood froze in his veins as he sensed the approaching demon. Only the aoratos plant let him do so; without it, the flying monster would have stayed unseen, undetected, until it descended on the travelers like a hawk stooping on roosting fowl.
The huge demon drew swiftly nearer, like a stone hurled from a god's hand. Even with the aoratos, its shape was hard to define. Gerin was most reminded of the jellyfish that floated in the Greater Inner Sea, but the analogy was imperfect, for Balamung's sending—the baron had no doubt it was such—surveyed with three bright, pitiless eyes the landscape over which it sailed. For mouth it had a rasping sucker disk, set with hundreds of tiny curved teeth. The edges of its gross body blurred and wavered, like a stone seen through running water.
Still, while in this plane it had to be vulnerable to weapons, however fearsome its appearance. Though fear gripped him, Gerin strung his bow and set an arrow in it. His fingers worked more of themselves than under his conscious direction.
But the demon halted well out of bowshot. The baron's heart sank. He saw no way to lure it into range before it began a killing rush too swift to give him a good shot. Whistling tunelessly, Rihwin glanced from bow to demon.
The creature gave no sign of immediate attack. It seemed as uncertain as the men it faced. Words formed in the baron's mind: "How do you know of me? The man-thing who sent me forth promised easy meat, not warriors with weapons to hand."
For no reason Gerin understood, Rihwin was grinning. "Nor is that the only way in which your master deceived you," he said. He spoke softly to avoid waking Van and Elise, who could not sense the demon; it felt his ideas as he and Gerin perceived its.
"I name no man-thing master!" Its thought dinned in Gerin's head. More quietly, it asked, "And how else am I deceived?"
"Why, by thinking you can do us harm, when you cannot so much as touch us," Rihwin answered airily.
"How not?" the demon asked. Gerin was tempted to do the same. They had no protection against it, as it surely knew.
But Rihwin was not perturbed. "Consider," he said: "To reach us, you first must traverse half the distance, not so?"
"What of it?" the demon snarled.
"Then you will travel half the remaining interval, and then half of that, and half that, and so on forever. You may come as close as you like, but reach us you never will."
Gerin felt the demon muttering to itself as it pursued Rihwin's chain of logic. It did not seem very intelligent; relying on invisibility and ferocity, it had rarely needed much in the way of wits. At last it said, "You are wrong, man-thing, and my showing you this will be your death." Terrifyingly quick, it was twice as close as before. It halted for a moment. "Do you see?"
It halved the gap again, paused to show itself—and Gerin drove his arrow cleanly through its central eye.
It screamed like a woman broken on the rack and was gone, fleeing back to whatever plane Balamung had summoned it from. Gerin thought that agony-filled cry had to wake everything for miles, but only he and Rihwin seemed to hear it. Van and Elise slept on, and all was unchanged out in the darkness. No, not quite—the ghosts returned, their murmurs now far less fear-filled than before.
The baron picked up the denuded aoratos bush. He hefted it thoughtfully. "Thank the gods for this little plant," he said to Rihwin. "Without it, we'd've been nothing but appetizers for that devil."
"At the moment I am still too terrified to move, let alone think about anything so abstract as giving thanks. You have an unpleasant and powerful enemy, my fellow Fox."
"I've already told you that. Didn't you believe me before? As for fear, you handled yourself better than I did—I thought we were done for till you stalled the demon."
Rihwin shrugged. "That paradox always did intrigue me. I first heard a variation of it posed at the Collegium, purportedly to demonstrate that a longtooth could never catch its prey, even were the victim five times slower than it."
"It's logically perfect, but it can't be true. Where's the flaw?"
"I haven't the faintest idea, nor did my instructor. Your elucidation with the bow seemed as elegant as any."
Gerin tried to sleep. He was too keyed up to find rest quickly. He was still awake when Rihwin passed the watch to Van, and listened to his friend's sulfurous oaths at not having been waked to help fight the demon. Van was still grumbling complaints into his beard as his comrades at last gave in to slumber.
The next morning, Gerin let Elise drive for a while and tried to get more sleep in the back of the wagon. He knew Van had managed the trick on the way south. Now he wondered how. Every pothole was magnified tenfold when felt all along his body, and rumbling wheels and creaking axles did nothing to help his repose. Red-eyed and defeated, he came forward to take the reins again.
Traffic was light, for which he gave thanks. He wished Van had been able to buy a pair of Shanda horses instead of just the one. The shaggy little animal pulled magnificently. It seemed never to tire.
Its harnessmate the gray gelding was willing enough, but lacked the steppe beast's endurance. It exhaustedly hung its head at every rest stop. Gerin was afraid its wind would break if he pushed it much harder.
From the chariot Rihwin was sharing with him, Van pointed up the road at an approaching traveler and said, "Someone's coming in one awful hurry."
"Probably another whoreson of a courier," Gerin said. He reached for his bow nonetheless.
A courier it was, whipping his horses as if all the fiends of all the hells were after him. The beasts' scarlet, flaring nostrils and lathered sides said they had been used so for some time. "Way! Clear the way!" the courier shouted as he thundered past.
He was gone in the blink of an eye, but not before Gerin saw the long Trokmê arrow lodged in the crown of his broad-brimmed hat. North of the Kirs, the blow had fallen.
Rihwin stared blankly at the dismayed looks his friends wore; like Gerin, Elise and Van had recognized that arrow for what it was. Elise hid her face in her hands and wept. When the baron put an arm around her, he almost steered the wagon into Rihwin's chariot.
"Careful, captain," Van said.
Gerin's laugh was shaky. "Here I am trying to make Elise feel better, and look at me."
"Will someone please tell me what the trouble is?" Rihwin asked plaintively.
Gerin did, in a couple of curt sentences. Despite the gray gelding's exhaustion, he urged more speed from his horses.
"That's good thinking," Van called. "You can bet there's a mob a few hours or a day behind that courier, all of them hightailing it south as fast as they can go. Best make haste while the road's still clear."
"A pox! I hadn't even thought of that." Gerin added another worry to his list. He tried to comfort Elise, who was still sobbing beside him.
She shook his arm away. "I wish I had never left—I should be with my father." She cried even harder.
"I know," he said quietly. "But no one can change what you did, not god or man. All we can do now is wait to see how things are north of the Kirs and not borrow trouble till we know." Wonderful, he told himself, you talk as if you thought you really could do it—and if your own guts knot any tighter, you can use them for lute strings.
Despite his own doubts, his words seemed to reach Elise. She raised her tear-streaked face, trying without much success to smile. As the hours passed and the Kirs loomed ever taller on the horizon, a
spurious calm came to the northbound travelers. They talked of life in the capital, legends from Kizzuwatna, swordfish-fishing on the Bay of Parvela south of Sithonia—anything except the Trokmoi and what was happening on the far side of the mountains.
As Van had guessed, they soon began meeting refugees fleeing the Trokmê invasion. The first one they saw brought a sardonic smile to Gerin's face: there stood Carus Beo's son, tall in his chariot. He used his whip with more vigor than the baron thought he still had. He shot passed Gerin's party without recognizing them.
The Marchwarden of the North was but the precursor of a steadily swelling stream of fugitives, many with better reasons to flee than his. The warriors who appeared had the look of defeated troops: they straggled south in small, dejected parties, and many were wounded. Now and again Gerin saw a minor baron among them, sometimes leading his family and a small party of retainers, more often alone, haggard, and afraid.
The Fox kept hoping to find a man he knew, so he could stop him and grill him at length. For two days he was disappointed. On the third, he spied a merchant who had been to Fox Keep two or three times, a man called Merric Forkbeard. The trader was still leading a string of donkeys, but their packsaddles were all empty. Gerin looked in vain for the two youths who had accompanied Merric in times past. When Merric heard the baron call his name, he pulled off the road to share what word he had. He took a skin of wine. His hands shook as he raised it to his lips. He had only a few more years on him than did Gerin, but looked to have added another ten in the past few days: his thin face, which Gerin remembered as full of quiet humor, was gray and drawn, his eyes haunted.
"I can't tell you as much as I'd like, Fox," he said, running fingers through thinning sandy hair. "Six days ago, I was on the road between Drotar's holding and Clain the Fluteplayer's—a good bit southwest of your keep, I guess that is—when I saw smoke ahead. It was the plague-taken woodsrunners, burning out a peasant village and acting as if not a soul in the world could stop them. I turned around and headed south—and ran into an ambush." He bit his lip. "That's when I lost my nephews. They died cleanly—I think."
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