Hammerfall

“It’s only been two days I’ve been out,” he said.

“It’s been two days you were gone, before that, omi,” Tofi said.

His brain had been rattled. Time had slipped away from him. Location-reckoning mingled with the trip back and forward in the line, and with the fever. For a moment of panic, he had trouble recalling even which trip this was, and which trail of the two possible routes they were following. That eye-blink lapse scared him.

But he remembered: he was clearheaded on the facts. It was the northern route. They were approaching an area of alkali pans, where concealment was much more difficult. The open land was a protection… for a time, and if the weather held. If the water did. The pans might hold some water. He hoped so. They had not tried here, on their way to Oburan.

Marak, the voices said, if only to let him know they were there. And dizziness assailed him with, East, east, east, so that he gripped the saddlebow.

“Would you truly have killed your father?” Tofi asked him, out of nothing. They were all in a group, he and Hati, Norit, and Tofi, with Patya not far distant. His family. His people. Would you have killed your father? Tofi asked him, and he gazed at the horizon, trying to steady himself in that answer and Tofi’s assault on his purpose.

“Yes,” he said, trying to mean it, trying to insist everything he had done had been a good idea.

But he suddenly discovered the limit of his detestation of his father, and perhaps the limit of his love of his mother, now that he had wives, now that he had others leaning on him. Now he found he agreed with Tofi… and hoped that somehow even with blood between him and his father, that the matter of his mother’s death would dwindle to a lifelong feud, with never any further action.

Shoot Tain if he had to… yes, that he still thought he would, and after all his father had done. He thought he would do it without regret. But he knew what Tofi was saying to him, a son who lately had buried his father. He had no wish to be a parricide, at any price, mother orfather, and his parents’ quarrel with each other had never been his. He had no idea the roots of it, only the bitter fruit.

“I feared you wouldn’tkill him,” Hati said under her breath, an’i Keran, and far harder than Tofi, from birth. “That was my greatest worry, all the time you were gone.”

“It was a question I asked myself,” he said. His time among the abjori, the killing-marks on his fingers, those had changed him in one direction—but Kaptai had changed him in another, reshaped all his father’s work in him year by year. And that, he decided, was his father’s ultimate and personal defeat. It was Kaptai who held all debts, now, forever; his father had nothing from him or in him, not even the desire to shoot him dead. “I know I would, now, if I had to, but I won’t look for him, not even for this. I don’t give a damn whether he lives or dies; that’s all it’s come down to. I don’t give a damn for him, not before the duty I have up here. I won’t take that chance again.”

That satisfied Hati, he thought. He wanted to set himself back where he had been, in the post he had deserted—not with a right to have it back, but understanding the way his obligations balanced, now, better than he ever had done. He was fitto lead, he said to himself, now. He was fit to lead: he understood things better than he ever had.

But the thought of riding forward, of reporting to the Ila, daunted him. He saw the red robes in the distance ahead of him, but he still felt a certain dizziness and unsteadiness, effects of the fever, and doubted whether he could deal with her subtleties and her threats. He felt a queasiness, too, in the voices that di

A ridge lay due east of them, uncrossable. East, the i

Pori was two, three days from this plain of stones, at the pace they had traveled on their way to Oburan. He knew that ridge. He began to know where the rim of the Lakht was, just beyond that horizon line, that implacable, uncrossable ridge.

Memnanan, meanwhile, dropped back in the line, reining in his besha until he fell in beside him and Hati and the rest… the Ila’s voice, it might be, the Ila’s curiosity personified.

Or Memnanan’s own.

“Faring better,” Memnanan observed. “No end of miracles, it seems.”

“Better than I expected,” Marak said.

“The Ila was not pleased,” Memnanan said.

“My apologies,” Marak said, not contritely enough; but his own stubborn will would not admit to her what he had learned about himself. “Well enough that the tribes stepped in where I wasn’t.—How does the Ila view our escort?”

“She knows,” Memnanan said. “Where they ride is nothing to her.”

It was the Ila’s sort of answer. That meant the Ila knew she had no practical way to stop them, and would not try.

“She wishes to speak to you,” Memnanan said.

“I’ve no doubt,” Marak said. He was sore and entirely unwilling to deal with the Ila today. His head spun. But he valued Memnanan’s goodwill, and he knew he had tested it to its limits in the last several days.

“He’s not recovered,” Hati said. “He needs his rest.”

Useless excuses with the Ila. “No, I’ll go,” Marak said.

“Then I’ll go with you,” Hati said.

“Best not.” Hati and the Ila alike had hot tempers, and Hati’s, like the Ila’s, had been sorely tried. “Do me the favor: stay here.”

Hati frowned. He fixed that dusky stare in his heart and rode off with Memnanan, alone, and straight up through the column, among the red robes.

The head of that group was the Ila herself, veiled in red, gloved against the sun.

“Ila,” Memnanan said. “I’ve brought him, at your order.”

Marak drew alongside. “I’m here.”

“I sent last night!” the Ila said peevishly. “And where were you?”

“Dying.”

“Deservedly! You left against my order!”

“I’m here now.” It was the old give-and-take with her, not unreasoning anger. He was reassured in her purposes, her demeanor, her control of her anger. “You wanted something?”

“What is this baby?”

“My wife’s baby,” he said. “Mine. I take it for mine.”

The Ila did not look at him, rather sniffed and stared straight ahead, thinking what, he could not guess, until she asked: “And Tain? Tain shot you. Taingot the best of you, Marak Trin.”

“He did.” There was no denying it. “The Haga lost four men on the trail, shot from ambush, and I don’t think he was alone. The Rhonandin helped me search back along the track as far as I was willing to go, but he wove back and forth through the column. We lost them in the storm.”

“Those helping him.”

“I know he gathered certain followers. Not an army, I think. If I thought that… I’d be concerned.”

“Water is ru

“We’ll come to water at Pori. As we pla