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Chapter Twelve
Bahzell was no city boy. In fact, he preferred wilderness to towns, yet he found the sheer emptiness of northeastern Landria depressing, especially since the stretch from Lordenfel to Esfresia was the longest leg of their journey across the Empire. Both Landria and Landfressa were populated primarily by freeholders and the herdsmen Maehryk had mentioned, so there were few of the large estates found in other provinces. There were occasional large family farms whose owners stayed put year round, but they were rare, with fortresslike homes and outbuildings, fierce and well-trained dogs, and inhabitants who were less than happy to see strangers.
Not that the towns were any better. In fact, they were worse. The travelers were barely thirty miles outside Lordenfel when they passed the first village whose inhabitants had headed south for the winter. It was a small place which no doubt housed a relatively small total population even in summer, and its few permanent residences all clustered around the town square, thick-walled and built very solidly of stone or brick. Most were at least two stories tall, with no windows on the ground floor, and several were enclosed within sturdy outwalls, as well. They might have been home to eight or ten families, but no more than that could possibly have been crammed into them, and it was clear people who chose to stay the winter out in these parts were used to looking after themselves.
The lack of local year-round populations also explained the harder going the travelers began to encounter. With towns so much further apart and so denuded of people, there were simply too few warm bodies available for snow clearance. The high road remained just as impressive as a feat of engineering, but the terrain in this region tended to be flat, with only occasional patches of forest. There were few landmarks, and there were many places where fresh snowfalls would have left the roadway impossible to pick out without the rows of firs which marched along on either flank. The wagoneers had stopped two days out from Lordenfel to replace their wagons' wheels with the sled ru
Bahzell and Brandark were northern-bred and no strangers to snow country, although the city-raised Brandark had less experience with cross-country travel in winter. Yet not even Bahzell had ever experienced such open, lonely, emptiness in what was supposed to be an inhabited land. In an odd sort of way, the existence of the high road actually made the emptiness worse. Its straight line, nailed down by its rows of windbreak trees; the occasional stretches of bare paving, rising up through the snow like whales surfacing to breathe; the stone bridges which appeared suddenly to leap across streams winter had turned into sheets of ice; and, most of all, the villages whose inhabitants had disappeared bag, baggage, and family... all of those things were like relics of a vanished people. They had been abandoned to the armies of winter, and there seemed no hope spring would ever drive those armies back. The air was so cold it ached, and when they woke in the blessed warmth of their down-lined Vonderland sleeping sacks each morning, they found the outsides of those sacks coated in frost. There was something almost sentient about the implacable power of winter here, and the squeak of fresh snow under Bahzell's boots and the jingle of harness or thud of hooves or occasional snatch of conversation were lost and tiny in the vast stillness.
"I never imagined anyplace this... empty, Milord," Vaijon said quietly one morning. He had abandoned his showy cloak for the thick, wooly warmth of the Sothōii-style poncho most of the others wore, and he pounded his gloved hands together as he swept his eyes over the white, sterile landscape. "It's hard to imagine anyone lives here even in the summer!"
"And you from Fradonia!" Kaeritha teased. The young knight turned to her with a grin the old Vaijon would never have shown an ex-peasant whose mother had been no more than a common whore, champion or no, and she shook her head at him. "Didn't you say your family had holdings in Vonderland, as well?"
"We do, Milady. But villages tend to stay put in Vonderland. They certainly don't up and move away when the snows come!"
"No, but their people also tend to be foresters, farmers, trappers, and fishermen, not herdsmen," Kaeritha replied, "and the population density is much lower in Landria and Landfressa. Over half those who do live here are herders whose herds and flocks simply can't winter successfully in these conditions, which means they have to move, and they don't want to leave their families behind when they take the herds south. If you could be in two places at once, you'd be amazed by how many people seem to have suddenly migrated to northeastern Rustum and the North March about now. But that's not where the majority of them have gone."
"Excuse me?" Vaijon looked puzzled. "I thought you just said they were herders and followed the herds."
"No, I said they were herders who didn't want to leave their families behind when they can't be with them. That's why it's been customary up here for—oh, the last four or five centuries, since the Dwarvenhame Tu
"I didn't realize that," Brandark put in. "That the dwarves use other sources of labor during the winter, I mean."
"Those in Dwarvenhame didn't, before the Tu
"Um." Bahzell nodded, then cocked an eyebrow at her. "From what Sir Maehryk was saying, I'd understood as how half or more of his chapter's troop strength was up here." She nodded, and he waved a hand at the emptiness about them. "That being the case and all, would you mind so very much telling me just where they are?"
"We should meet some of them in the next day or two," she reassured him. "There's nowhere near enough of them to make patrolling the roads practical, so they're concentrated in forces large enough to do some good and based on the larger towns—the ones that don't lose so many people each winter. Given road conditions, anything that travels out of Dwarvenhame is going to do so in a caravan, and each force is responsible for seeing each caravan in turn safely from its own base to the next one along the road. After that, it turns around and heads back to pick up the next one to come through." She shrugged once more. "It's not particularly exhausting duty. Actually, the Order's main duty up here is to provide security for the folk who choose to winter over, and our people run patrols through the smaller villages at irregular intervals to make sure somebody we wouldn't like hasn't settled into them."
"It still seems awfully empty to me... and big , too," Vaijon observed.
"Does it, then?" Bahzell asked, and something about his voice made Vaijon look at him sharply. The Horse Stealer's tone was mild, but his eyes had narrowed behind the darkened glass of his snow lenses, and he'd tugged the mitten off his right hand. As Vaijon watched, he reached behind his head, as if to scratch his neck, and unobtrusively unbuttoned the retaining strap from the quillons of his sword.
"Milord?" the young knight asked tautly.
"I'm thinking you should be riding on ahead a little, Vaijon," the hradani replied in that same mild voice. "Don't be making a show of it, but warn Sir Harkon that something nasty is waiting in those trees yonder." He made no obvious gesture, but his ears flicked at a thick mass of snow-crowned hemlock and yew, well to the north of the road at present, but curving closer ahead of them.
"Of course, Milord." Vaijon nodded casually and pressed with his knees to urge his horse to a trot.
"And you, Brandark. It's grateful I'd be if you'd be so very kind as to drop back and pass the same word to the wagons," Bahzell murmured as the youngster moved away. "And tell 'em to get their bows strung, if they can do it without anyone seeing."
"Done," Brandark agreed. He drew rein and dismounted, making a show of checking his girth while the wagons caught up with him. Bahzell and Kaeritha continued moving at the same pace, and she glanced at him as she rode along at his side.
"And what makes you so sure there's something waiting up there?"
"I could be saying instinct," he replied, moving his eyes back to sweep the suspect trees, "and it might be there'd be some truth to that. But the fact is that my folk are after having better sight than you humans, and mine is better than most hradani can claim."
"And?"
"And if you were to be looking just about in the center of those trees, and maybe forty or fifty yards back, it might be as you'd notice there's a break in the snow cover. And if you were after having a low, suspicious mind as notices things like that, you might look a mite closer and be seeing just the tiniest wisp of smoke rising from them."
"You saw a wisp of smoke from here ?" Kaeritha's tone was that of a woman trying very hard not to imply disbelief, and he bared strong, white teeth in a fierce grin.
"Lass, my folk are after cutting their eyeteeth in raids on the Wind Plain, and there's naught at all, at all, up there for cover... especially in winter. Which isn't to say the Sothōii don't manage to hide anyway, whenever they've a mind to. Truth to tell, a Sothōii warrior or war maid could hide on a card table, like as not, if they put their minds to it. So any Horse Stealer who's minded to live to a ripe old age had best learn to keep his eyes peeled and his wits about him... especially when things are after looking safest. And with tree cover as scattered and far about as it's been these last two or three days, I've been paying closer heed to the patches we see than I might otherwise."