Hammerfall

The beshti Memnanan had ordered arrived to water, too. Marak was glad to see Osan among them: and the rest that appeared were fine animals, decked out in gear that shone with brass and fine dyes.

Memnanan’s men came to report the carts outside the city and disposed under guard of the priests. It was time to move.

Norit slept like the dead, for all the rest she had not had, and they had not disturbed her. But now Marak shook gently at her shoulder, and met for a moment the gentle face, the sensible one. She had a frightened look, in her interludes of sanity, as Marak could only imagine. Norit’s plunges into madness were deep and dark, and left her haunted by things she half remembered, half understood.

He tipped up her face and kissed her, and Norit kissed him back, her fingers woven with his, reluctant to let go.

“Priests have already gone down,” he said gently. “With the last of the books. We’ll ride, with the captain and his men. Can you get up, or shall I help you?”

“I wantto go,” was her answer: Norit’s answer, as if she had half heard everything until now, or as if she wished to say that going back to the tower was her choice, apart from Luz’s wish.

“Come,” he said, and helped her gently to her feet. He and Hati together picked out a fine gentle beast and helped her up to the saddle before they themselves mounted up.

Then Memnanan rode his besha to its feet, and the rest of the company got up, a good twenty men besides, good, agile riders, armed beneath their robes, and carrying heavy quirts, Marak noted, not solely for the beshti.

“I’ve ordered the books to a ridge beside the road,” Memnanan said, swinging in close to Marak as they walked their beasts past the fountain and through the confusion there. “And I’ve sent messages calling the lords of the villages and the tribes there to hear us. If I were doing it, I’d have the Ila down the hill to speak to them, but she says rely on the priests to persuade the people. She sends her messages through the priests. I have less confidence.”

“In the priests?” Marak said. “I have none at all.” The visions momentarily haunted him with sights of fire and destruction to come… then failed entirely, and even the imagination of the next handful of moments eluded him, leaving him bereft of any resource. From instant to instant he believed what he saw… and then saw only disaster in attempting to get all this mass of people on the road in any orderly fashion, without fatalities even in the process itself. He imagined no one would take the books. No one would care. He and Memnanan had deliberately let rumor loose, foretelling the movement of a caravan, and fear became a bitter dose at the fountain, where rumor spread.

Now a tide of worried people shouted questions at them: “Where are the caravans going?” and: “What will the Ila do?”

Marak had no idea on the latter and wanted no pause for questions, not yet, not here, disorderly as the road through the camp proved to be. “Wait,” he shouted at the importunate. “Your leaders are going down to hear. Stay here! Pack your belongings!”

There must be a fervor to carry them, a wild, a mad, an unstoppable urge: he stirred it, and knew what he did… he reminded them of their belongings. He hinted of movement. If the leaders denied him, the people themselves would be behind, pushing, demanding answers of their leaders, who had only one place to get answers. But it was a dangerous action. It could end in looting, in murder, in people trampled, or robbed, or stabbed and shot. Any leader knew it. Any leader who had not gone out to the summons would know he had to go, he had to find out the truth of their situation.

And it could not wait another day.

“You’re ru

“They have to move,” he said. “They have no choice.” More people crowded in on them. Three times more he told them the same, before the rumor was ru

The road poured them out of the camp and onto the vermin-hazard of the open sands, a fast-moving company of riders. A relatively few curious had come, the anxious, the frightened, representatives of households joining their leaders on the flat. They came in their hundreds out to the ridge, a mobbing not for blood but for news, and pressed outward in greater and greater numbers, hysteria in their faces. In some areas of the camp behind them, tents were already collapsing.

A ridge of sand along a face of rock: that was where Memnanan had ordered the priests and the au’it to take their cargo of precious books, and that was where Memnanan had told the lords and the leaders to meet. The Ila’s men had gone out to protect the priests and the au’it, and spread out across the ascent to prevent others.

The priests tried to make themselves heard, trying to take authority to themselves, crying out that the judgment was on the city.

“The god has sent this!” they shouted out to believers within hearing. “The god has decreed a judgment! Repent of your rebellion and your greed, and the Ila will intercede for you!”

“We have to silence that,” Marak said as they came within earshot. “They don’t know a damned thing, and they have no authority over anything but the books. Quiet them.”

Memnanan had a worried look, but he gave orders to his men as they reached the ridge: the guards went to the priests and ordered their leaders off the ridge, down at the base, where the carts were. There the junior priests had spread out and made a useful defense of themselves, a line of bedraggled white between them and the press of the crowd.

A greater and greater crowd gathered, both from the edge of the camp and from the far side of the city perimeter. There were thousands afoot, and tribesmen mounted on beshti, all pressing toward one point, one source.

“This is dangerous,” Hati shouted at him above the noise of the crowd. “They all want to know what’s happening. What will happen when they know?”

“They will know,” Norit said in a loud voice: Luzshouted. “ This is the day of judgment! Hear Marak! Hear the messenger! Listen to him!” But even Luz could not make herself heard, and the soldiers plied their quirts, driving back those the crowd behind shoved forward.

In that moment Marak feared for their lives, knowing he had set too much in motion too fast. The beshti they rode snuffed the scent of the crowd, the palpable scent of fear, and swung their heads this way and that, ready to fight, sensing a mobbing and knowing only one answer to that. Madness was not the sole property of the mad, not now. The crowd stretched now almost as far as the tents, under the clouded sky. The leaders who came forced their way to the base of the ridge, the tribesmen and some few village lords riding, most afoot, pushing, shouting, arguing with the priests and pushing at the soldiers, whose whips only frustrated the press, and did nothing to hold it back.

Then Memnanan drew a rifle from his saddle gear, and fired several rounds into the leaden sky. The reports echoed off the cliffs, startling beshti, bringing a moment of relative silence.

“Marak Trin Tain!” Memnanan shouted out. “The Ila’s answer to your questions. Be quiet! The god speaks through the Ila, and the god has appointed an escape for his people! Be still. Stand still!”

“That’s Aigyan,” Hati said, edging her beast close to Marak’s, pointing. “The man with the red sash. Lord of the an’i Keran. He sees me. He may suspect revenge. Thereis trouble.”

They could not be heard in the mutter around the ridge. Marak saw the veiled tribal lord, one of a handful of the deep Lakht tribes he most wanted well-disposed to them—and one that he least wanted against him. He knew the challenge he would face; but Memnanan had given him his moment, his only moment, and he rode Osan to the center of the ridge, looking out on thousands of misgiving, mistrustful faces. Men below looked up, a moment, a single moment in which the crowd expected an outcome, a miracle.