Hammerfall

That was the measure of Tofi’s courage, his loyalty to a stranger… that he would lie to the Ila’s men and rescue Hati. It was what happened to men on campaign together; and Tofi was no longer a boy, no longer a youngest son, struggling with a man’s burden. The ex-slaves obeyed him… respected him, that had happened day by day.

Now Marak discovered the courage that was in Tofi, as great as any man’s he had ever ridden with; and he went to Norit, too, riding alongside her.

“Tell Luz,” he said, “if anything goes wrong, go to Tofi and tell him to get you to the tower. You’ll need Hati, too. I can promise you, you’ll get nowhere without her. Hati’s of the tribes. You don’t know enough about the desert on your own to live the day out. Your advice is dangerous to the inexperienced.”

Norit looked at him, frightened, as all her waking hours were a chaos of fear and Luz’s presence. For a moment it was Norit, wholly Norit who gazed at him. Then the fear dimmed, and it was Luz. “Do what you came to do,” Luz said sharply, and that was all she would say, leaving him angry and worried both.

He delayed talking to Hati. He knew it would be an argument.

Haste, the voices said. Don’t stop. Don’t rest.

The sky remained the same dirty yellow toward the night, until the sun went down in a red sky the like of which none of them had seen; and that night the stars were hidden by cloud. Now and again in the far distance a trail of fire came through, and once a great boom resounded across the pans.

Day came with a different shade, gray murk above their heads, streaked with dirty yellow high, high aloft.

They had ceased to point at wonders. Tofi looked up gape-mouthed at this one, and so did Hati. The au’it began to write, and seemed to lose heart, and folded her book under this leaden sky.

Norit had nothing to say.

“We should keep moving,” Tofi said. “The mirage has failed us. But I know we’re not that far.”

The yellow dust of the western pans was on the move. Sometimes, being newly fallen, dust ran along the ground, a light film of it, streaks across the red sand of the Lakht.

But by midmorning a dark haze was on the northern horizon, and by noon a low black pall obscured the face of the Qarain’s red rock.

“Fire,” Hati said. “ Smoke.”

It was the city itself they were seeing. They saw nothing like the tall graceful towers. The city lacked its towers and was surrounded by a field of dull gray and red-brown their eyes had taken for sand.

Tents stood on the outskirts of the holy city… many, many tents spread all about it.

But there was no city. All the fine dwellings, all the wealth, all the power of Oburan had come to this. The holy city was a hill of ruins.

Chapter Fourteen

« ^ »

The extent of the calamity of the heavens has yet to be known, but Oburan has opened its gates to the desperate: everyone who comes to the Ila’s Mercy may come in.

—The Book of Oburan

They did not rest. the beasts remembered water or smelled it in the air, and even after so long a trek they stretched out in that smooth half-run the self-saving creatures rarely sustained, flagging occasionally but still moving at a walk, until they caught their breaths. Then one of the riding beasts would take it in his head to run, and off they would go again toward that distant ruin, maintaining the pace so long as their wind lasted, pack beasts jogging along behind.

The leaden sky had turned red with sunset before they reached the outskirts. The color dyed all the canvas in sight as they reached the first of the tents that ringed the city—dyed their party, too, with its ill-omened stain.

In a certain area were Ogar tents, round and center-poled; and others were tents from the west, longer than wide. There were tents from the deep Lakht, square, with rope webbing; and tents from northwest, a simple cone-shape, made of hides.

“This is not all Oburan,” Marak said. Hope rose in him, seeing that motley gathering. “Those are from the lowlands.”

“Those are Keran,” Hati said, rising on one knee in the saddle, pointing to a group aside, on the outskirts. Herpeople were here, and they rarely came in from the deep desert.

“Kopa,” Tofi said excitedly, naming a tribe from the south. “Drus. Patha. And Lett!”

When the stars had started falling, then from all about the inhabited lands, people in terror of what was happening must have come here, using the summer tents, the shelters they used in festival, in harvest, in birthing. They must all have crowded to the holy city for answers, thousands of them, an army of the desperate, the shattered, with possessions, with domestic herds, with beshti, whatever they could pick up and bring.

The outermost tents were entirely catch-as-catch-could, tents of varying size and style, and they had suffered from the recent storm: sand was piled up, in many cases well up on the tent walls.

But, proof of authority somewhere at the heart of this confusion, some rule had laid out a broad road on which those tents did not encroach, and work, not nature, kept it clear of sand. Some power had said, camp here, and not there. Some of the encamped tribes had feuds, and none were completely at peace with Oburan, but here they camped together.

Might Kais Tain have come? His father had signed the Ila’s paper, her armistice. Might he have gathered up the district and come here, seeking escape from the star-fall and the storms? Dared he hope that, though the west had suffered, his father had come in?

Might his mother’s tribe? Haga tents, though the Haga visited the Lakht, were like the rest of the west, long, light canvas, the common fiber, neutral brown, green-striped with dyes. He sca

They entered and rode past disheveled groups who paid them little attention, children who stared, adults who failed to look at all. They were only a handful more arrivals. Of what interest could they be?

And the beasts were bent on water. They resisted the rein; they had nothing else in their heads but their thirst and the relief from their packs.

Marak, the voices said. Fire ran like water across his vision. Marak! the voices cried, while his eyes searched desperately in the fading light, through the distraction of the visions. Marak, Marak, Marak!

One thing the visions wanted. One thing he was supposed to do. If anyone could find his mother and his sister in this mass of people, the Ila could find them; if anyone could save a life or damn one, it was the Ila. He had to go there first and take the risk.

And if shot through the heart now, the beshti would continue to seek water, where, at the end of this single street, up past all this chaos of tents, it poured out at the Ila’s Mercy, under the glass-crowned walls of the city.

Those walls came into view, cracked and ruined, above the tents. The gates stood lastingly ajar on a heap of rubble, and the Ila’s Mercy spilled out a flood that wet the cracked pavings and seeped into the thirsty sand. People came and went here with jars, with waterskins, and crowded close not only about the drinking basin but about those troughs below it that were meant for beasts.

No one stood against the beshti when they arrived, squalling and threatening. Men and women scattered from hazard as Osan forced his way to the trough, as Hati’s mount did, and Tofi’s. Men scrambled for safety, scooping up a precious last jarful of water, taking a half-full water bag, as the ex-slaves’ beshti, and Norit’s, and the au’it’s, shoved and pushed their way in, heads down, gulping up water as if it would never exist again. Then the whole string of pack animals arrived and pushed their way in, nipping and yanking at the rope that prevented their maneuvering: two tangled, and bit, and squalled, a fight that itself made the two room at the trough, the two ex-slaves risking life and limb to get the pack line free.