Hammerfall

And Luz knew. Luz knew exactly where they were, and where she wanted them to go.

Tofi had a worried look and clearly waited for him to say, No, no, let us go the sane and reasonable passage, but he waited in vain.

“We have guidance,” Marak said. He had never been more angry in his life, but never in his life had any man more deserved a plain answer from him than young Tofi. “The woman in the tower speaks to Norit. I don’t trust it, but she wants us to go to Oburan. At least we’re agreed in that.”

“I suppose we have water enough to make mistakes,” Tofi said faintly, and shook his head and walked off to mount up.

They set the au’it into the saddle; and helped Norit, who seemed dazed and hesitant: Luz or Norit, it would be Norit’s bones that broke, and they roused her besha up and set her securely on it.

The rest of them got up, and Tofi turned them north. Beasts that had anticipated one road and now were turned onto another bellowed their frustration to the skies, as much as to say that they remembered Pori, and fools forgot where the water was.

The complaints gradually faded. The sun sank and vanished in a brassy dusk.

“Look!” Hati said, as a star fell.

They looked aloft for falling stars, then, that sign of overthrow and change, and saw another, and a third and a fourth.

Then a fifth blazed bright, and stuttered a trail of fire across the sky. The beasts saw it in alarm, and their heads swung up.

A seventh and an eighth, as bright, traced a path from horizon to horizon.

Marak had viewed the first falling stars as a curiosity, but now he saw a ninth fall, bright and leaving a trail behind it.

A tenth, and thunder cracked among the stars, making everyone jump, and then laugh, caught in foolish fear.

Everyone had seen falling stars. They happened in the sixth and the eighth month, very many a night, but, Marak said to himself, this was the fourth month, no more than early in the fourth month, at that, and the heavens lit up in bright trails, one after another, interspersed with bright interrupted ones.

Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.

“This will continue,” Norit said in a tone both cold and assured, and yet trembling with Norit’s chin. “This will continue. It will likely miss Pori. But the plain beyond isn’t safe.”

Now the heavens showed streaks of a star-fall denser than anything Marak had ever seen. At every moment the sky showed another, and another, and another, then five, ten at once, and more and more and more, faster than a man could count.

“Is this the world ending?” Tofi asked. He had his arms folded over his head as he rode, as if that could make him safe from plummeting stars. The slaves cried out in alarm as another of the bright ones came down, and burst in a long trail of fire.

“Keep moving,” Norit said, and that new vision came, overwhelming, of rock hurtling into sphere, then a swarm of rocks, again and again and again. “This is the lightest of the fall. This is what will happen, here, and across the world, far worse.”

Marak all but lost his balance riding as his eyes revised the scale of those rocks of the vision as equal to the stars above them, careening down in dizzying succession.

And what was the sphere?

“The falling rocks,” he said: those were the only words he could find for what he saw, and the import of them he could not measure by any attack he had ever seen. “The spheres.”

“The death of all of us,” Tofi moaned, hiding his head, and the slaves rode up close to them, pointing at the largest, waiting to die. “Look!” they cried. “Look!” until they ran out of astonishment.

It went on for hours: at times there seemed thousands at once, until the whole heavens were streaked with light, even while the sun was coming up. Norit hugged her arms against herself like a beaten child as she rode, rocking to the besha’s gait.

And the sun rose and reached its height.

They reached a flat, and spread the tent, but kept looking toward the white-hot heavens as they hammered home the stakes. They had lost confidence in the sky. It was long before they slept, and waked and exited the tent to break camp as the sky began to shadow.

Another star fell, herald of another such night.

The slaves cried out. The au’it opened her book and recorded the fall. But a second and a third followed.

“Let us be on our way,” Marak said to Tofi. “If the heavens fall, what can we do? Let’s go.”

But now the slaves went about their work with fearful looks at the sky, while the beasts, often reluctant, put up a mindful resistance and bawled and circled away from attempts to load them.

At a great boom out of the sky, the beasts bolted.

“They know they’re going to die,” the slaves cried. “We’re all going to die!”

“I will free you now!” Tofi cried. “I will pay you wages now! Catch them!”

The slaves took out, ru

Meanwhile the rain of fire continued in the heavens, and a strange cloud hung where the star had burst.

Marak put Norit up on her beast, and the au’it onto hers. He mounted up on Osan as the slaves struggled with the packs and, with Hati, kept the frightened younger animals in place while the slaves made the older of the pack beasts kneel, and loaded up such of the baggage as waited ready.

Seeing the other beasts sitting calmly under their packs, then, the skittish ones began to kneel on their own, the habit of their kind.

They struck the tent. The rest of the baggage went on.

Then they set themselves under way, under the overthrow of heaven, making all possible speed.

Chapter Twelve

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In the afternoon sky in the third day of the third cycle of the first season a strange pale light appeared and the sun seemed to set in the east in daylight. The light endured as a sunset and faded as a sunset fades, but pale throughout. The lord of the tribe asked the grandmothers whether the tribe should go to know the source of this light, but it was near calving time and the grandmothers said it was far away and the walk would risk the calves and mothers. The lord of the tribe asked whether they should tell a village, and the grandmothers said the village priest would make trouble for the tribe.

—The Spoken Traditions of the Andesar

The sky whitened into day, and they reached an alkali pan. They had no need to drink, and would not drink of the well that they could dig in this place, not at the most desperate. They simply used the stony flat for a noontime camp, just off the clinging white powder, and the au’it sat and wrote in her book, flicking now and again at windblown white dust that fell on her pages.

The three slaves bickered with Tofi, who swore he had never freed them, that he had only said he might free them if they caught all the beasts, but Marak, seeing unhappiness and surly workers, took the slaves’ side. “You did say it. They’re free men. Now they have to earn their food.”

Neither side liked that completely, and the beasts sat bawling and complaining while Tofi and the slaves, now freedmen, bartered over wages in the hot sun.

“Pay them what you pay any hireling!” Marak said, to end the dispute. “And no more!” He pointed at the au’it and made such a gesture as the Ila herself might make. “Write it! Besides, the world is ending. What does a little extravagance matter?”

The au’it wrote.