Hammerfall

“No safety,” Norit said.

He was not talking to a sane woman. He feared if he let go of the rein, Norit would be off through the column, creating a panic, and as it was, the Ila’s servants looked at them askance, and the slaves looked fearful.

In time Memnanan came to ask what the disturbance was, and went to report Norit’s vision. The au’it stored up things to write at sunrise.

“It will be the worst,” Norit muttered under her breath, and hugged Lelie to her while dying stars streaked the heavens in their hundreds. “The earth will crack and pour out blood. Smoke will go up and blot out the sun. It’s coming, and nothing can stop it. Fool, Marak. Go east.”

“No,” he said.

“What does she expect from us?” Hati asked. “Why won’t she just give up and let us go at our own pace?”

“Who knows if the ondateven exist?” Marak said in despair and exhaustion, and regretted saying it, knowing that Luz was listening. He amended it. “Probably they do exist.”

“Someone’s throwing stars at us,” Hati said, a bitter try at a joke. “If it isn’t these ondat, it must be their cousins. Maybe their uncles.”

“That’s clearer than we’ve gotten from Luz.”

Norit held her daughter close now, and sang to her, not a madwoman’s song, but the clear, quiet tones of a lullaby.

“ Child, sleep soundly in my arms. Nothing can harm you here. Dream of springs rich in water, Dream of palms of shade and fruit. Dream of fields gold with grain. Dream of cool breezes. Our house is shut against the night. Our door is strong, our shutters tight. Stars are brightly shining.”

A star exploded on the horizon while she sang. The explosion lit the sky like a northern sunrise, so bright the column cast shadows.

A wind came after that and ran up the beshti’s backs, a wind from off the Anlakht, where the blow had struck, but it did no harm.

At dawn, the au’it began to write, and wrote and wrote, furiously, fighting the pages flat in a light breeze.

At midmorning Norit suffered another fit, and Marak was quick to seize her rein again and bring her under tight control.

The rocks that broke the horizon were those of Pori, that height which poured out the water.

East, east, east, the voices said, maddening, frantic, and he could no longer believe that Luz was blind and deaf to their situation.

“I’m going ahead,” he said to Hati. “I’m going to have a look.” He no longer took responsibility for Norit: she was in Luz’s hands. But they were close enough to see the landmarks, and he had his strength, Hati her keen eye for situations on the Lakht, and for the lives of all of them, he could no longer ignore the two-way pull on his instincts. It was another day to the descent, another waterless day, with no water at the bottom of a climb that was itself bound to cost lives, and the villages’ strength was surely ru

He rode forward, Hati riding beside him, and they paused only to let Aigyan know his intention.

“What of Tain?” Aigyan asked. “What of ambushes?”

It was possible Tain had gotten ahead of them. That was always possible. It was possible for the rest of their lives.

“We have a premonition,” Hati said, “and we need to know where we’re leading, omi. We need to be sure about Pori. We’ll go and be back before noon camp.”

“Not without escort,” Aigyan said, and named two men and two women to go with them, men and women of Hati’s kind, dusky-ski

Marak made no objection. They quickened their beshti’s pace and rode out to the fore, and far separate of the others. Another rider joined them. Norit, with Lelie held close, had come for a look of her own, and he said not a word to note her presence. He bent all his attention to the land, keeping his eyes tracking every roll of the sand, every stone that might mask ambush: sand-colored robes and a well-laid ambush was the abjori style of attack, and he was alert for it.

It was the way they had plundered the Ila’s caravans and killed her soldiers. It was the way they had enforced Tain’s will on the villages and made the west for the better part of a decade a difficult place for Memnanan’s men to travel. But he saw nothing of ambush, only a furtive movement of vermin that vanished ghostlike into tumbled rock, persuading the eye it had been mistaken.

“Paish,” Hati said. That was one of the larger sort, knee high to the beshti, strong and tracking mostly by scent. He saw it go over a ridge just ahead of them, a red-brown flash of a flank and a tail, then gone.

One rarely saw them.

The beshti, on their own or subtly cued by the Keran riders, picked up the pace. For half an hour or more they proceeded, up and over ridges, down again into the general pitch of the land toward the edge of the Lakht.

Two stars fell by daylight, paired bright streaks across the sky that vanished beyond the hills. The boom that went out shook the air and made Lelie cry.

One more ridge, and the roll of the land gave up a strange sight, the ruined sticks of trees, the jagged edges of walls.

A star had fallen here. The well had broken open and continued to flow, soaking the sand.

Marak drew Osan in atop the ridge. So all the rest reined in. They stood atop the ridge and looked out on what had been an oasis, and now was a sky-reflecting pool of water, around which the red sand writhed. Small clumps of bodies detached at various places around that edge and floated out… hundreds, thousands of vermin gathered and pressing in on the sweet water, a living carpet of predators and scavengers that fought and preyed on each other, and waited only for the smell of death or waste to draw them all outward in a ravening swarm.

“Dead.” Norit said faintly. “Pori is dead.”

“Marak,” Hati said, pleading with him, turn, move, and quickly.

He drew Osan’s head about—his hands moved before his vision had finished taking in the danger. He was wrong. He had been wrong all along.

“Ride softly,” a Keran tribeswoman said. “Quietly, please, omi.”

He knew. The sound, the scent, any whisper of presence might send the outermost of the mob toward them. They had the whole caravan advancing toward this place, and he could only be glad Norit had raised the doubt in him, and could only wish he had listened to Norit, to Luz, to the warnings Luz had tried to give them before now.

They rode away behind the ridge at a restrained pace. Lelie began to fret and to cry. Norit hushed her with a hand over her mouth, and hugged her close. It was more than their own escape they had to manage. They dared not draw the mob after them, and the beshti, uneasy, wanted to travel faster, to break into a run that would take them back to the herd… that was the beshti’s view of things, get to the herd and bolt for the horizon, faster than the mob could follow.

Osan fought to get free. Norit’s besha, beyond her strength or skill, suddenly jerked the rein and pulled Norit half from the saddle, and a tribeswoman seized her before she could fall free… seized her robe in one hand as she swung to the side, but the besha went out from under her. Lelie fell from her grasp, and Norit herself fell to the sand, her besha ru

Hati reined in beside the accident as Marak did, and before he could get from the saddle, Hati jumped down and swept Lelie up in her arms. Lelie had had the wind knocked out of her, and got her breath back, and screamed, Hati trying in vain to prevent her crying. Meanwhile one of the two tribesmen, retaining a tight grip on his rein, had leapt down to haul Norit to her feet.