Hammerfall

He did not immediately see Norit, but he knew her coming, knew her presence as a magnet knew iron. He saw her riding through a gust-borne cloud of dust and waved to her, signaling her.

She rode toward them, and priests labored in her wake, white-clad men afoot, crying out after her, but a surge of ru

Norit reached them, her besha wild-eyed and still trembling from fright. But they were made whole, the three of them together again, and safe for the moment. Their madness had become linked, one to the other, and where one was, the others would come, and where Luz was, they would know Luz’s intentions, all three of them: there had been no chance they would lose her while she was free to ride, Marak was sure of that now.

“Everyone’s gone mad,” Tofi lamented, standing on the ground beside him. “We can be robbed if we stand still!”

“Far worse than that can happen,” Marak said, conscious of the lead-colored heavens over their heads and the crowd seething back into the camp on the edge of outright panic, a narrow margin between the urge it took to move this number of people and the fear it might set off an utter panic. “Stay mounted,” he said to Hati and Norit. “All the rest of you, mount up. Let no one cross here. Use the quirts. Make stragglers go around us and the baggage!”

Luz was satisfied, exhausted. The voices and the visions dimmed in his head and ceased to drive him.

In the gray sky above them a shooting star streaked beneath the clouds, sputtering fire as it fell. Tofi’s men cried out and pointed, and priests, in the chaos of the crowd, pointed aloft and raised their hands in prayer.

“The priests may come into our camp,” Marak said. “They’re useful. But for the rest, don’t pity anyone. We know the way. Our resources are for us and the Ila to stay alive. Without us all the rest will die.” He felt a chill as he made that pronouncement, facing the scene in front of him, the ruin of a city ringed with tents as far as the eye could see. He made an exception for the priests. With all his heart he hoped his mother and his sister were safe, but he knew his mother could ride, and knew they were safer with the Haga, come what might: the Ila’s close company had dangers of a kind he had to be free to deal with.

Most of all they would be happier not seeing him as he was, prey to madness and harried at times beyond love for anyone.

For the rest, there was one, only one alive who could hold this mass of people together, and she, red-robed, their lifelong enemy, amid that tangle of canvas and ropes and panicked crowds.

If no one else in the city escaped, shemust come down, soon, very soon, because if this mass became a mob, it was no more rational than any other mobbing in the desert, no mind, no wit, only desperation and self-seeking, devouring its own to satisfy the panic hunger, and they would have to take to the road and get ahead of it or die.

The ex-slaves had gotten up on their beasts. Tofi’s common sense for convenience, never knowing this would happen, had set them out of the convenient track for traffic going back and forth along the edge of the camp, and well toward their road. So when men took a notion to go far out of their way to encroach on their stacks of baggage, or to cast desperate, covetous eyes on their beasts, they could be sure it was no i

But quirts would not be enough when dark fell, as the camp ripped up the stakes and folded its canvas and began to quarrel about the life-and-death question of who rode, and who walked, and what they had to leave behind.

There would be a brief period of looting, Marak was well sure: when this huge camp utterly broke up, the wise would leave what fools would think they desperately needed; and there would be that sorting out of goods. Some, too, would elect to stay with the ruins, seeking shelter there, in the ruin of the Beykaskh, ignoring prophecies as they ignored the evidence of their eyes. Those few might even be right. The wealth there, and the burrows they might make in the shattered stones, might suffice to save them.

He would never wager his own life on it.

The sun sank in the clouds. He kept his eyes sweeping the south, where the caravan had to form, trying to discern whether the tribes had yet moved, sure that the first hint that one tribe was on the road would set off the others determined to secure their place in the march. He had said sundown: sundown was what he aimed for, and he feared delay for its own reasons: tonight the ones in utter lack would run riot in the ruins, predators and prey alike.

He waited, and he waited, and sure enough, as the sunset widened across the clouds. A handful of the more organized rough element made a determined sortie against their belongings. Marak saw it developing, and joined Tofi and his men, not just quirts now, but knives as well. None of the knives in fact drew blood: the skilled snap of a loaded quirt across a man’s arm or head was no small deterrent, and the ex-slaves enjoyed giving back what they had gotten. The ruffians drew back to regroup, nursing bruises.

“ Marak.” Norit caught his attention, pointing.

A line of riders descended the hill among the collapsed tents, tall beasts gliding through the smoky chaos of the camp with the beshti’s classic arrogance. The foremost of those riders were armed men and the center of that column were riders all in red.

At that presence people all across the camp were distracted, and the straggling priests found a focus for their prayers to heaven.

A great number of the dissolving camp surged toward the Ila, those who worshiped her posing a more serious threat than bandits. Silver flashed in the dim sunlight as the Ila’s guards cleared a path for her safety.

So the Ila and her court came down from the hill.

“Get the packs on,” Marak shouted over at Tofi, who sat his saddle sweating and pale from the latest fight. “Pack up! We’re through with this! We have an armed escort now. And we’re going to move!”

Chapter Seventeen

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Give shelter to an enemy and you hold a knife by the blade.

—Miga proverb

The ila might never have ridden in her life, Marak thought, but ride she did, at Memnanan’s side, and behind her rode the au’it, a broad gout of jewel red in a landscape otherwise brown and rust and yellow, under a murky sky. Behind them came the Ila’s guard and the Ila’s household, down to the servants.

Then came the pack beasts, to the number of about a hundred, all under Tofi’s direction, and under the management of his freedmen and his slaves: the Ila’s staff had no idea how to pitch a tent.

For so large a group, including tents for the guard, it was a modest number of beasts: Memnanan above all that staff understood the necessities of the Lakht, and might have enforced his choices on the Ila’s will. Tofi had had the foresight to gather help, at a time when skilled help had become as precious as water.

None of Tofi’s doings needed question. Marak only waited while that line of riders clove its way through the confusion and turned toward them.

At the last, calmly despite the recent armed confrontation, he simply lifted his hand to confirm his location, if Memnanan had doubted it. Memnanan lifted his hand. They saw one another. It was accomplished, all they had set out to do.

Now it was a matter of getting this mass of people directed south in some kind of order.

Hati moved off to consult with Tofi, but Norit stayed by his side, silent, watching as Tofi’s men hurried to attach the packs to the saddles. “Hup-hup-hup!” Marak heard, that call that had afflicted the mad on their march, but this time it came as a welcome sound, a promise of freedom. Beasts snarled and grumbled and got up to work.