Hammerfall

That was where trouble gathered. Those were the people with most to fear. Was it possible, if a mobbing started, that all the vermin in the world could sate themselves with a handful of villages and spare the rest? Marak, Marak, his voices chided him, but mildly now. He was sure Luz now had some idea where he was, and that he had turned back toward his duty: she seemed content with that. Whether Luz had also told Norit what gift he had with him he very much doubted; and whether Luz approved of his collecting Lelie along the way, he had no idea.

But he was glad of the voices as a guide, as an indication that Hati was well and Norit was well. He had no idea about his sister, but he had trusted Hati and Norit to take care of her, and if they were well, then that was cared for.

“I’m coming back,” he muttered aloud, to Luz, if she heard him. “I’m all right.”

They dismounted, unsaddled, and rested a while, at noon, as Kais Kurta pitched its tents. And in that rest he took the child from the woman and tucked her up next to him.

“Is it a child you know?” the lord of Kais Kurta asked him, sitting near him. “Or one you found?”

“My wife’s,” he said, and touched a small hand… incredible to him that a hand could be so small, and his sun-dark and marked with the killing-marks, one for every finger. She played with his fingers like Patya when she was a year old. She made him remember.

“We had enough war,” Andisak said with a sigh. There came a broad shadow in the wind, as the industrious young men put up a side flap of their tent, to give them shelter a while from the constant buffeting. Before them, the next village was camped, and the sun sat at a sullen yellow noon.

But now the wind grew chill as it did at times when a larger storm was coming. Haste, the weather said. Make all possible speed. The ground shook, shivered like a besha with an itch.

“So had I,” Marak confessed, “had enough war. Enough of a lot of things.”

“Is this the whole truth?” Andisak asked. “Is there a safe place?”

“I’ve been there,” he said. “I’ve seen the river, the water. Everyone is fed. Everyone has shelter. The ones who went with me stayed there, all but Tofi and his freedmen.”

“I saw you,” Andisak said, “on the ridge. It was a relief to hear someone we know say so.”

“It’s all true, omi. I wouldn’t bring this many i

“I know you wouldn’t,” Andisak said, and nodded slowly. ”And the tribes aren’t fools. They’re up there at the front of all this. To the umi of the Rhonan: welcome.“

Antag nodded, and took down his veil, as a man did with a friend. So his brothers did, and they all did, while Norit’s Lelie slept, collapsed across Marak’s knee.

They shared the prepared meal, but not to their fill. They had riding yet to do. In no more than an hour, they tightened girths and prepared to set out, with Andisak and his household bidding them a courteous farewell.

The weary beshti launched only token complaint. They did not belong with these beshti, and were restless, outside their own camp.

So were they all. The voices di

From Antag’s hands he then took Lelie up, and she waked and struggled and cried in fretful, constant misery, tears ru

“We owe you,” Marak said to Andisak. The woman who had cared for Lelie was the one who had given the aifad. She had turned up among the foremost to see them off, not without regrets, Marak thought, perhaps very much wanting the baby; but Lelie was Norit’s, and once she resumed her place across the saddlebow, wrapped within his coat, she quieted.

They rode out. He had done nothing that he had set out to do, and acquired something he had never pla

When, as they rode through the dust and fought the wind, Lelie opened her small arms and took a strong grip on his shirt, he found unaccountable satisfaction in that, and hugged her with his free arm, like a close-held secret.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, a guidance as the earth shook, once strongly enough to stagger the beshti.

They had learned to duck low when that happened. No one fell. The beshti had no liking for the sensation, and a few younger ones in the column bolted and had to be reined in.

Lelie, too, waked and cried, and Marak opened his coat and talked to her: “Be still. I won’t let you fall.”

“Mama,” Lelie said. “Mama, mama, mama.”

Not papa. Marak heard that clearly enough, justifying what he had done in taking her. “Hush,” he said, drying tears and leaving mud on her face instead. “It’s just the wind. It’s just the earth twitching its skin, like a besha. Such things happen these days.”

He flinched, himself, when something boomed, and the earth shook like a table jolted by a fist—all of it in murk that only gave them shadows to see, hulking tents with the flaps down in some instances, and others which had only pitched canvas halfway, as windbreaks, not a safe proposition, if the storm should worsen. It was better to have enough stakes down and more canvas spread.

He said as much to villages where they passed in their long, long ride, and they might have listened to those who looked like tribesmen, as villagers were always wise to listen to those who knew. They were not pressing the beshti now, not asking more of them than they could reasonably give. They rode generally to the outside of the column, to left or to right, on untracked ground, and the beshti startled vermin that were otherwise scuttling about at the edges of the pitched tents… flattened a few, which became snarling balls of other vermin. If he had known nothing from the priests, it would have been troubling, that the vermin were so quick, that they came out of nowhere. They were growing hungry. They had found a food source.

In their ride, they passed priests walking along the spread tents, and exchanged greetings with them… these men he had despised proved hardy and resourceful, and carried messages. He gave them one in the Ila’s name, that the villagers should never pitch lean-tos in a gale, and they nodded solemnly and promised to repeat it.

They moved on past the resting tents. In the lulls he talked with Antag and his brothers, idle talk, for the most part, those things that strangers could say to each other… he clarified rumor, and answered questions on the tower, questions about the land there, about the camp and the nature of the strangers… all these things. Lelie grew fretful and wanted down, and went and squatted in the sand with five men to guard her moment of vulnerability. So they all took the chance, and even while they were occupied at that, Marak saw five and six of the beetles that haunted such sites, and one of the creepers that preyed on the beetles, though the sand was blowing and quickly covering any damp spot.

It was not good.

They moved on, and the wind grew fiercer, and they struggled to keep going as the beshti leaned into the blasts and wanted to turn tail to them. Lelie cried, and exhausted herself, and slept again. But they kept going. The time passed that the camps might begin to stir and pack up, Marak thought, but no one moved in front, and so the villages down the line stayed put later, and later.

The dim glow in the murk that was the sun had inclined halfway down the sky and no one had stirred. Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, and he began to fear that Luz was holding the whole caravan for him. On the one hand they might be wiser to rest this storm out, and on the other it was loss of time, precious time, time that was worth lives, if there was any chance of moving at all. He had no foreknowledge of better coming, only of worse, and when he shut his eyes, now, which were crusted with dust and sand and ru