Hammerfall

“Marak!” Hati cried. He reached out blindly for her, found her arm, held to her for a moment that the whole world seemed to turn and sway under them. Then he began to walk, urgently, desperately, toward the tents, and Hati stayed with him.

“Every tent,” he said to those he met. “If you’re done, help others. Fast as we can make it. Storm’s coming. Eat. Drink.”

“The water, omi,” Tofi reminded him. “We’re almost out of water. Even the Ila’s out of water.”

“Every man drink a sip, and eat a bite, and turn out to pitch tents as fast as they come in before the wind hits. Free and slave, the Ila’s men, the tribes, all of us. We’ll be doing it as long as we have time, all night and into the morning—in the calm or in whatever rolls in on us.” He still could see nothing but the ring of fire, over and over again. He had held Luz at bay this long. He had ridden to Pori and back. Now Osan’s strength was spent, and Osan would not kneel for him, so blind and half deaf to the world, he walked and walked, and tried to maintain his awareness of the world under feet gone all but numb.

He thought that Tofi and Patya had mounted up again, and he thought the au’it had lost her grip on her besha’s rein and it had gone ahead of them toward the tents, but that was all right. The beshti all knew where their own herd was, and where their own tents were pitched.

Thirst had his mouth and throat all but incapable of swallowing: the air was dry as dust, and over the course of their walking, this close to safety, he offered Hati a sip of the water he personally carried, but, prudent, she had her own, and drank a sip. For himself, he drank the skin dry, the last bit, telling himself somehow there would be more, and somehow Luz would see them supplied, after all they had passed, but he was not through with his work. He had to wring more out of a body already exhausted, which needed water now, and no matter the thirst to come. He would not be through until every living survivor was down the cliffs and under canvas.

“The waters will rise up,” Norit’s voice cried behind him, thin and high, a voice divorced from reality. “The bitter waters will rise up like a wall and that wall will go out to overflow the edges of the world! It’s coming down! It’s already falling!”

Marak wished her quiet. He saw these things in his own mind when she said them. He had no idea what he was seeing until Norit named them, but she pulled the images into terrible clarity.

“The earth will crack! The bitter water pour in on the forge, and the heat of it will go up like a furnace, like water cast onto hot iron!”

It was the fountain he saw. He had thought it was cloud in the sky.

“The hammer will fall!” Norit shouted at the heavens, at those behind them, at anyone near her who would listen. “The earth will ring like an anvil! The wind will come, stronger than any wind before!”

Marak turned, staggering in the giving sand. “When?” he shouted back at Norit. “How much time, woman? Will it blow the sand over us? Are we too close to the cliffs?”

But Norit was not sane enough for that reckoning, and continued to shout about cracks in the earth and pools of fire in a voice that broke, ragged with thirst.

He turned back. He walked. They walked, almost at the tents, and when they looked back, the line of those still coming toward them went on back into the dark, in the starlight, as far as the cliffs of the Lakht, on that trail where the tribes still descended and where the villagers—the foremost of the villagers—had yet even to reach the cliffs.

The weak almost certainly could not do it. There would be falls. Fatalities.

There remained nothing—nothing at all Marak found to do for them, once he reached their own tent.

“Death comes down on us!” Norit shouted in his distant hearing, distracted, gone wandering, disturbing other hearers, and Marak moved to stop her, but Hati held his arm and tugged at him.

“Let her go. She’ll know when to go to cover, more than the rest of us, she’ll know. Luz won’t let her die. She moves everyone to work. We all have to do something when we hear that.”

“We can’t have panic. We’re going to need every hand in camp. Every clear wit.” Osan pulled at the reins, wanted his freedom, and his just reward, and Marak had not the strength left in him to unsaddle and care for him. He staggered to a stop.

Tofi took the rein from his hand without a word, and Patya took Hati’s, as Tofi called Bosginde and Mogar to tend the beshti and get them unsaddled.

“I’ll need another besha,” Marak said hoarsely, “one that hasn’t trekked to Pori and back. I’m too tired to walk, and I’ve got to talk to Aigyan. To Memnanan and Menditak.“

“Then I need one, too,” Hati said, exhausted as she was, and Marak said not a word to stop her, knowing he might need her to reason with Aigyan. The hush about the camp, the near-stifling stillness of the wind, warred with the chaos in his vision and the racket in his ears, warning, continually warning him, if he knew how to hear it, how short the time was… but only Norit had that burden, to take the message straight in and not to shut it out.

And Norit ran mad among the tents.

Sensible men around him, however… sensible men around them did sensible jobs, the only sort of thing they knew how to do. In astonishingly short order there were beshti saddled and even more precious water offered, and it took as much strength to refuse that as it needed for him to get into the saddle again.

Tofi got under him and, in undignified fashion, shoved, not asking if he needed help. Hati made it up mostly on her own, at the last with Mogar’s help, and Marak reined off into the dark, threading through the little space there was, past the resting beshti, in among the Keran tents—Aigyan first, Aigyan, whose lead the tribes might follow.

And Menditak, the ca

And somewhere amid it all, he searched for the Ila’s captain.

Chapter Twenty-Four

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Any tent, when the storm comes.

—Kerani proverb

M arak, the voices di

Deep-stakes went down; and over all the commotion ranged the hoarse voices of tribesmen shouting orders, and arranging a storm camp, tents placed for best protection in the likelihood of a wind from the west… west had become the source of danger: Marak was sure of it in his own heart. West for danger, east for salvation.

Beshti complained in the lack of water and food. Children cried in the tents, weary and hungry and thirsty, but the very little little water there was, the tribes guarded closely and would not give up.

The Ila’s tent was up and secure, staked deep in the stony sand. Lights shone inside it, making the canvas glow… because the Ila had lamp oil, carried along where water would have been far more useful.

There were instead, Marak recalled, all those books, the weight of which would have supplied the whole camp—

For what? For a day, on short rations? What was one day?

For those caught above the cliff, it was everything. It was the difference, for thousands, between getting off the Lakht to shelter—or not: but water could not give them time. Only the skies could give them that. Only his decisions, to camp, to move on, all the decisions during all the trek, could have given them that time—and those were his, balanced against this necessity and that and the strength of the villagers to keep moving. Those were his. He did not know whether they were the wisest decisions—the best economy of lives.

And when he thought how very many must still be up there on the cliffs, still making the perilous descent, still trapped between thirst and vermin, he could scarcely wrap his mind about the enormity of what he had told Luz he would do and what consequence every decision of his might have had.