Hammerfall

“He’s gone straight through the camp,” he guessed suddenly, and rode through the traveling column, dodging between riding beasts and pack train.

It was the same story there, tracks on the far side of the line, perhaps another diversion. More, it was the village of Mortan, and two men he asked for by name in this village of the western Lakht were both missing.

They rode on. Another and another village they searched, and heard nothing, and found nothing. The next village had seen men riding through, and had no idea who they were, except they thought they were bandits.

Tain might have abandoned diversions, ridden straight back to Kais Tain, wherever it fell in the order of march.

But in his doubt the voices, hitherto silent in this business, began to echo in his head, Luz’s summons, Luz’s urging: Marak, Marak, come back. This is too far.

They passed new graves, walking staffs marking the place where someone of the villages, likely the old, had simply given out during the last rest. Vermin had already dug up the dead, and fought and snarled over the pits, not a good sight. But there was no longer any hint along the trampled side of the tents that a band had gone this way or that. There might by now be ten or so men weaving in and out of the camps to confuse pursuit, men going off across the sand to lay false trails and coming back again.

Marak! the voices insisted, out of patience with his desertion, and he knew, as surely by now Antag and his men knew, that they had lost Tain’s track.

“He may double back on us,” Marak said when they reined to a pause, and as the caravan had begun to move. “I can’t ask more than you’ve done. He may double back tonight, he or some of the men with him. He’s gotten away.”

“He deserves his reputation,” Antag conceded, leaning on the knee of the leg tucked against his besha’s neck, while the wind battered them. “Now our tribe is against him, and he may strike at us.”

“Go back. Spread the word among your allies. Spread it among all the tribes, and into the villages. He’ll try to kill the caravan guides—the only ones that know where we’re going. He’ll try to stir up the old abjori, as many as he can find, to take the leadership for himself. Then he’ll lead everyone away from the only safety there is. He doesn’t know what’s coming down on us, and what he does know, he doesn’t believe.” In his vision the ring of fire went out again and again, and he shivered in what had become a chill wind. “Nothing we’ve seen yet equals what’s coming.”

“You’ll go back with us, omi.”

“I want to go on. I need to find Kais Tain. It’s my village, as well as his.”

“It’s foolish to go on. You’ll be traveling in the dark.”

“I’m a villager. I know these people. I can talk to their lords.”

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, but he ignored them.

Antag asked his brothers what they thought, and they shrugged. Antag said: “We’ll stay with you a while. You’re taking too much risk, for one of our guides.”

“I know I am. But my wives are up front. They know.”

“We’ll still stay with you,” Antag said. “We’ll be sure you get back. Easy to go back in the column. Hard to catch up with it while it’s moving.”

It was the truth Antag told him. The beshti had their limits, too, and almost, he surrendered to the voices, almost, he was willing to go back.

But not with his father loose, not with harm apt to come on the whole caravan, and him with a chance to prevent it.

They rode in on village after village, he and Antag and Antag’s brothers, asking their question, naming their names and spreading their news. They rode beside the village leaders in each village only long enough to do that, and then reined back moved farther back in the line, quickly lost in dust and dusk.

Two more of these village lords Marak knew: Kefan of Kais Kefan, and Taga of Kais Men.

“Killed Kaptai?” Taga asked, in a tone of great indignation. “That was a good woman.”

Taga had always loved Kaptai, had always been a friend of the house, and Kaptai had always welcomed the old man.

“He’s gone madder than I was,” Marak said. “Now I’m the sane one, and he’s trying to kill the lot of us. Stop him if you see him. At best, persuade the rest not to follow him.”

But in all their wandering back in line they had not yet come to Kais Tain, and they had come a long way back. They rested the beshti beside the column, letting them sit a while as the dark gathered about them. Some village bands, passing them, sent to know who they were, and they told them, and advised them about Tain and the danger to all of them.

Meanwhile the dust stayed up and the wind kept blowing, a stiff wind at the caravan’s back… far better than a facing wind. The sand piled up against the beshti’s feet as they stood by the wayside, and vermin prowled about, prompting an occasional stamp and threat.

In that rest they shared a little of their provisions, that water and that food which every tribesman carried against emergency, and to increase the food and water store of their group.

It was soon dark, a sand-choked night in which Marak saw it was folly for the villages to keep going: the weak lagged, and if not for the beshti’s following, other beshti might well stray off the track and lose themselves in the dunes. If he were at the fore of it, secure in the heart of the tribes, he might not himself realize the struggle back here, the fragile contact between straggling village groups, with village-bred beshti, many of them not the swiftest, not conditioned for long treks, rather beasts of local burden, soft as their local handlers.

As the Keran and the Haga had not realized it. As Hati had not. He tried to make Norit hear him, through Luz, but that never succeeded. Luz seemed to look through his eyes only seldom, and with difficulty, and if she spoke, it was less loud and less real than the wind rushing past him. The villages dared not stop, and the vermin got in among the beshti, quarreling over the latrine sites and the cook sites, which became a seething mass of small, unwholesome bodies.

How long they traveled then they had no idea. There were no stars to measure time, no light at all in the heavens. The earth shuddered briefly, and people on the march cried out soft, weary alarm.

Something mid-sized and furtive slipped up on them, encountered them, and shied away, vermin that feared the beshti. After that several others likewise shied back from the beshti, and lost themselves in the dusty dark.

Antag and his brothers were brave men, and not stupid ones. They must long since have known what had taken him longer to admit.

“There’s no hope in this,” Marak said, tugging Osan to a halt. “He’s gotten away from us. The best thing we can do now is go into the line and move up gradually, and tell every camp we meet that he’s outlawed. It may take us more than a day to reach our own tents, the way the weather’s going.”

“As you will, omi,” Antag said, and no more than that. But Antag and his brothers were relieved, Marak was sure. They rode in among the line, and passed the word to the village of Faran as they did, a Lakhtani village out of the south, where Tain would find little sympathy—it was their goods, their caravans that Tain had raided in the war, and Tain’s son was little welcome: Antag did the talking. Marak was glad to ride out of their midst, bound forward, but it was only to another Lakhtani village, one he had no more knowledge of.

Then in their moving forward they came to a village contingent they had not addressed, one that had passed during their rest.

“What village?” Marak asked, and hearing it was Tarsa, asked after the lord, having no idea who it was.

The lord of Tarsa turned out to be an old, old man, Agi, wrapped in the wind and the dust and the night, and drowsing as he rode.