Hammerfall

He knew, too, that if he lost Tain’s track, he might lose more than he had lost. Tain might immediately double forward again to attack Tofi’s camp, and he might be wandering back here; or if he followed too fast, Tain might realize who was on his trail and lie in wait for him.

He expected ambush minute by minute, as he was sure Tain expected him. The dust made shadows of the encamped tents and the resting beshti… themselves a temptation for a man who might want a relief mount; but Tain had not struck here, not yet: beshti disturbed at their rest would not settle so complacently, would alarm their owners and rouse out a camp, and nothing of the like had happened.

Marak, Marak, his voices whispered to him. It came to him they had spoken before and he had not been attentive… nothing had been in his head at all but the necessities and the dangers of the chase. Go back, his voices said to him.

“Go to hell,” he said to Luz. “It’s my mother. Do you understand that? Did you have amother?”

Marak, the voices whispered.

“Go to hell!” he said, and, on clear trail for a moment between dunes, he diverted Osan into a tribal camp. They were the Rhonandin, allies of the Haga. “Rhonan!” he shouted out, waking the camp, and roused men out from under their sheltering canvas. They came in alarm, clutching swords and pistols.

“My name is Marak Trin,” he said to the Rhonandin. “Marak Trin Tain, to the point. My mother is Kaptai of the Haga, Menditak’s cousin, Tain Trin Tain’s wife, and she’s dead.”

“What do you want of the Rhonandin?” a man in authority asked him.

“Tain’s murdered my mother up in the Haga camp and killed four of them in ambush when they rode after him. I ask you send a messenger to lord Menditak and tell him his men are dead. Tell him I’m on Tain’s trail, to kill him, and I can’t lose it.”

“Montend,” the man named one of his own. “Go to the Haga. Antag, you and your brothers, go with this man.”

“I’m in your debt,” Marak said fervently, “for water and peace. I honor you as my grandfather, omi. But they’ll have to follow me. The wind’s taking the trail, and I can’t stop that long.”

Beasts were unsaddled for their noontime rest. Men ran while he rode out to recover the trail. He recovered it, and in a very short time Antag and his four brothers appeared out of the dust behind him, armed with hunting spears and swords and one long rifle wrapped against the dust. Under the circumstances it was a weapon worth ten men, and one which Tain would kill to get into his hands.

“Omi,” the foremost said. “My name is Antag. These are my brothers.”

“In your debt, all.” He never delayed, scarcely took his eyes off that quarter of the horizon where he guessed the trail to lie. “My father intends to raise a war within the caravan. He’ll ride across the camps somewhere. There are those that might join him.”

“The Ila is no friend of ours,” Antag said. “But the Haga are.”

“I’m outside the Ila’s orders. This is a blood matter. And life and death for us. If Tain starts a war between the villages and the Haga, and these villagers get to acting like fools, they’ll shed blood, and we’ll feed the vermin, all of us. He doesn’t care. He’s angry, and now he’s attacked the tribe that were his friends.”

“You’re sure of his track, omi.”

It was tacit acceptance, respect for him. And an essential question. “He has no second beast, unless he got it from the Haga, and I didn’t detect it.” It was a tribesman’s trick, to confuse the trail, steal a second besha and let his own go, to confuse pursuit as the freed beast wandered confused between the known company that abandoned him and the larger lure of the caravan.

“The Haga are friends,” Antag said, and the four Rhonandin stayed with him, following the tracks in among the dunes, over the edges.

The blowing dust made it harder and harder to keep the track, but it remained a single track. They passed one and the other of the tribes, and sometimes the trail came close, and then veered off. Tain had found the beshti too restive, set within the circle of tents as the tribes tended to keep such valuable possessions.

“We’d best tell the tribes as we go,” Marak said. “Their livestock is at risk, if not their lives, tonight. Are these near us within your kinship?”

“These are cousin-tribes.” Antag sent the two younger brothers off to the side, into the camps, where a kindred tribe would meet fewer questions and gain quicker compliance. Meanwhile Antag and the one brother stayed with him, in and out among the dunes, trusting the other two brothers to find them again by their pace and their direction.

“He’s ru

“He taught me every trick,” Marak said grimly. “And he’s not panicked. He has a lot of them left.”

He tried not to plan what he would do, or what he would say when he found Tain. He pla

They passed the last of the tribes and along beside the village camps. There Tain’s track moved inward, ran beside the tents, past one camp and a second.

Then as they might have guessed, that trail went into the midst of a village camp, and straight through its center and into the next.

Here was where Tain might change beshti, and steal one or two, but as yet they found no trace of that: besides that, the trail grew confused, Osan taking the scents of dozens of his kind, growing distracted: they would have to pick up the trail outside again, and that would cost time.

Sleeping men stirred beneath the tents, lifted heads from their arms. Or they were not quite sleeping, since the last intrusion.

“A man rode through,” Marak said to the villagers. “Where did he go?”

Several pointed the same way, back through the length of the camp, not to the side.

“Which villages will shelter him?” Antag asked, as they followed that track.

“The western,” Marak said. It made him think of home, of the walls of Kais Tain, irretrievable. Of neighboring villages, red walls and known wells, and boyhood friends, and pranks, and the shade of village gardens.

Marak, Luz said, trying to recover him. He had shown weakness and she found it. Marak, Marak, Marak, listen to me.

He refused.

He tried not to think about the villages, those times, those lessons, the years he had loved and respected this man as the god of his life. In his boyhood the sun had come up every morning over Tain’s shoulder, and all the world had been right… or would be if he could be quick enough, hard enough, strong enough, to win Tain’s approval.

In those years the western lords had all been Tain’s allies, and there had been no hint of the quarrels that would break the abjori apart. They had all fought against the Ila’s rule, which was eternal, remote from care of them and their needs. They had fought, and their cause was right.

The western villages clear to the edge of the Lakht had gone to war. They had engaged the sympathy of no few of the tribes, who themselves had disdained the Ila’s law. Tain had had close and friendly relations with the Haga, and won a Haga wife.

Now they would chase him to the ends of the earth.

Now Tain had lost all virtue in tribal law. He had struck at the woman who had run his household and shared his bed for thirty years, at the woman who had borne his children and bandaged his wounds… struck at her because the war failed, because even then there were cracks in the structure of alliances Tain had built.