Kasha shaded her eyes from the brilliant afternoon sun with one hand while she clung to the polished wood of the Fortress flagpole with the other, and strained up on her toes as high as she dared.
"I wish you wouldn't do that," Teo complained from the window below her, his uneasiness plain in his voice. "It makes me dizzy."
She grinned down at him, perfectly comfortable on her tower-top perch. He squinted up at her; from here his blocky face and wide shoulders made him look a little like a granite statue that had never been completely finished. Hladyr bless, she thought impatiently, I've got both feet planted on the pole-socket. What's to be nervous about?
"Why should it make you dizzy?" she asked mockingly. "It's not you that's up here!"
He shivered visibly and looked away. "I can't help thinking about how Benno fell from up there."
"Benno was a thirteen-year-old fool who didn't live to see fourteen because he was a fool," she retorted, reveling in the brisk east wind that was playing with the short strands of her hair. "He climbed up right after a storm when the slates were slippery, and he didn't have a rope on him. I do, because I'm not a fool."
"We know you aren't a fool, Kasha," Zorsha replied. "You keep forgetting Teo saw him fall."
So did I, and so did you, she thought, but didn't say. People die; it happens. You learn from it, but you try not to let it live in you forever.
"Now that you're up there," Teo said, carefully not looking at her, "can you see them?" He tugged at his neat little beard with his right hand; an unconscious gesture that showed how nervous he was.
She squinted at the eastern end of the Vale. "Maybe . . . I can see a big dust-cloud, anyway. That'll be their horse-herd." She groped for the far-glasses looped around her neck, and put them to her eyes. It wasn't easy adjusting them with only one hand, but unlike Benno, she wasn't out to prove what a great daredevil she was. The blurs of green, white, and brown finally leapt into clarity.
"Well, I sort of see them," she called down. "Too far away to make out people, but there's a bunch of white things that are probably tents. And if there's as many people as there are tents, we've been undercounting."
She swung the lenses slightly right, to see if she could make out anything under the dust-cloud. "Hladyr bless—" she said in awe, the words trailing off.
"What?" Teo asked anxiously. "Something—something wrong?"
"No, nothing like that. It's just—I've never seen so many horses before in my entire life." Even with the far-glasses they were just tiny dots—but so many of them!
"There must be hundreds—thousands. No wonder they move them every day; they'd eat the grass down to the ground if they stayed put for long." She let the glasses fall, and felt for her footing on the slates of the peaked roof. "I've seen enough; I'm coming down."
The window in Halun's study stood wide open to the balmy breeze, and it faced westward, down the side of the Pass opposite the Vale. It was seductively easy to believe that the danger posed by the nomads simply didn't exist. Even the sight of the novices beyond the walls (cutting back all brush that could conceal anything bigger than a rabbit) didn't break the illusion of safety.
Halun was swiftly coming to the conclusion that he had been as much a prey to that illusion as anyone else. Young Zorsha's report of the afternoon's observations had been unsettling, to say the least.
"That many?" he asked again, still surprised. "Truly that many of them?"
"That many," Zorsha replied grimly, pushing his hair out of his grey-brown eyes. "Felaras was not exaggerating the danger, I can tell you that. We haven't heard from the Watchers she sent out to try and get a closer view, but from the size of the encampment these nomads are traveling with a population the equal of a small city."
"I never said she was exaggerating, lad," Halun answered, crossing his arms on the table between them and leaning his weight on them. "I just thought she might have been misinformed, or have miscalculated. She was right; I was wrong, and I should have known better than to challenge a Master in her own specialty." He produced a rueful chuckle. "Serves me right, too. Pride begins, a stumble follows."
Zorsha half-smiled, but his deep-set eyes were still shadowed with unvoiced worry. "Kasha thinks we're in even deeper trouble than Felaras has let on. It could be; of the three of us, she talks more openly to Kasha than to Teo or me, but even I can see she hasn't been sleeping much or eating regularly."
"I don't suppose you have any notion of what her plans are, do you?"
He was faintly disappointed when his former novice shook his head. "She's still collecting opinions," Zorsha told him.
There was silence for a moment. Sunlight was beginning to shine in through the window, and it made a square of bright gold on the satiny brown wood of the floor. Halun watched dust-motes dance in the sunbeam until Zorsha spoke again.
"I can tell you about those. Since they seem to fall into categories, she's been having me tally them. About a third of the ones we've gotten so far are variations on the theme of running and hiding. About a third want us to stay where we are and pretend we're invisible. Another third are variations on negotiating with them—"
"Do we have any notion of what we're dealing with?"
"Well, Teo says they're definitely the Clan called 'Running Horse'; that's Vredai in their tongue." Zorsha managed the strange name with an ease Halun found enviable. He'd never been much good at speaking languages, although he'd mastered the written version of several. "He says this is a real Clan and not some outlaws, and something he uncovered in the Archives has Felaras a little more hopeful. But whether it's to give us an edge in frightening them off or in talking to them, I don't know."
"My personal choice would be to remove ourselves to one of the two sister-houses," Halun replied, "but I can see the difficulties. The only conceivable way we could get by with it would be to slip in a few at a time; otherwise the Prince of Parda or the Duke of Albirn would forbid any more of us within their borders. Failing that, we could pack ourselves up wholesale and try somewhere else, I suppose."
Zorsha sighed and shook his head, and his straw-gold hair tumbled back into his eyes. "I told that to Kasha," he said, raking it out of the way again. "She pointed out that more than half of our members are over forty; a third are over fifty. Can you see yourself making a trek across the mountains, when you've never been outside the Vale since you were a novice?"
Halun was forced to admit young Kasha had a point. "I suppose not. It is altogether galling, but I am afraid I must admit I couldn't make an unassisted trek to the caves, these days. And even with the help of you younger folk—Hladyr bless, but we'd have to devote four of them just to keep Diermud from following a portentous cloud-shape or mist-wisp right off the side of the mountain."
"And he's not the only one," Zorsha agreed. "Halun, at this point leaving is right out of the question. Kasha has been out of the Fortress this past month, out on the peaks, and she told me what a trip would be like if we tried to make it—"
"She's been out on the mountains? Why on earth would a woman—"
"She told me it's one of the duties of all the Watchers to take a kind of long-range patrol in rotation even when nothing's threatening us. She's gone out at least twice a moon since she was promoted from novice."
Halun was briefly annoyed at himself for forgetting something so basic; if he intended to take the Master's seat away from Felaras, he should at least keep in mind that the women of the Watchers were not the sheltered creatures his mother and sisters had been! It would behoove him to keep that factor ever in mind when dealing with his rival.
Zorsha was continuing. "Anyway, the point is that while it's pleasant enough here in Fortress Pass, she says that those thunderstorms we see over the mountains can literally be killers even for the young and fit. For the old, the sickly—it would be suicide."
"It would be folly to think we could hide from these nomads," Halun mused, drumming his fingers on the wood of the table. "If we know about them, they most assuredly have learned of us. And while some of my less worldly colleagues may have forgotten the fact, we are hardly self-sufficient. While our Vale land-folk are hiding in the caves, they are not out planting crops. And if they are not planting, there will be nothing to harvest. I have seldom seen foodstuffs coming to us from the west side of the Pass. . . ."
Zorsha nodded tiredly. "Exactly. That's exactly what Kasha said."
"A bright young woman, is Kasha," Halun said absently, then saw a tiny twinge, almost too insignificant to be called a reaction, pass across Zorsha's thin, bony face at the sound of her name.
Hm? Something odd there, Halun thought. I think perhaps a change of subject is in order.
"Zorsha, I hesitate to interfere in your personal life—but I was your Master when you were a novice, and I feel a certain—ah—proprietary interest in your life. Is there some trouble between you and Kasha?"
Zorsha flinched a little. "No . . . well, not precisely trouble . . ."
"Something troubling you, then?" Zorsha had been Halun's favorite among all the dozen or so novices he'd trained. The cheerful young orphan passed up from the sister-house in Albirn had quite won his solitary heart, and was the nearest he had to a son. "Would you care to talk about it?"
Zorsha sighed. "You know how long we've been friends, Halun; practically since the first moment I arrived here."
Halun nodded. "The Unholy Trinity, we called you—Zorsha, Kasha, and Teo. We never saw one of you without the other two somewhere about." He shook his head with a reminiscent chuckle. "You children!"
"We aren't children anymore," Zorsha said glumly. "And—I would like to have more from Kasha than to just be a friend. And she's not interested."
"Why?" Halun replied in amazement. "Hladyr bless, I thought every young woman wanted—well—" He coughed. "Well, a marriage and a family, anyway."
"Not Kasha, at least not from me—and the worst part of it is, I have to agree with her reasons." Zorsha looked as forlorn as a lost spaniel puppy. "She says that if she—favored me that way, Teo would be hurt. And if she favored Teo, I'd be hurt. And no matter which of us she favored, we'd never be the same kind of friends again, afterward. So she isn't going to favor either of us."
Halun was totally dumbfounded. "Hladyr bless. I didn't think there was a young person in the world capable of thinking past his cr—ahem. Past his primal urges. She could be right, you know. At least for now."
"Oh, she is." Zorsha's thin face grew longer. "That doesn't mean I have to like it. I know very well that if I knew she and Teo were lovers, I'd—I'd—well, I'd be angry, and pretty hurt. And it would take an awfully long time to get over that hurt. And even if I could, well—they'd always be two, and I'd be on the outside. We'd never be three again. And the same would be true if the positions were reversed for me and Teo, only worse, because Teo would be terribly hurt and try not to show it. He'd probably just sink into his books like Master Diermud and we'd never see him again except at meals. But—" He colored. "—sometimes I can't help but wish he'd fall in love with somebody else, or—have a religious conversion or—or—something—"
Halun nodded sympathetically, and put one paternal hand on the boy's—or rather, young man's—shoulder. So my Ancas imp is grown up enough to think beyond the moment. I shall have to cease thinking of him as a boy. "Well, never having been afflicted with your problem, I can't very well advise you. I fear I never was that attracted to anyone, inside or outside the Order. But you have my sympathy, if nothing else."
"Thank you." Zorsha smiled wanly. "At least if you'll let me wear your ears down about it, now and again—?"
"Of course."
"Well, that'll help."
"But the cost to you, young man—" Halun wagged an admonishing finger at him "—is that you are going to have to keep me informed. While I can understand Felaras not wanting every bird-brained flitter-head in the Order to go flying off on tangents because of a little bad news, I rather resent that she feels she needn't tell those of us who are levelheaded until she's ready for us to hear things."
Zorsha grinned. "Well, I kind of tend to agree with you there. No fear, Master Halun. What I know, you'll know. But right now, I'm afraid I've got brush-cutting detail, so I'd better get to it."
Halun stood up with a scraping of chair legs across the wooden floor to let him out, and thought with some little satisfaction that Felaras hardly reckoned on his having an ear in her camp.
Yes indeed, my dear rival, he thought, shutting the door behind his former pupil, I know very well you've been getting information on the Seekers from Zorsha. But this time you have forgotten something. A window like Zorsha can let you see out into the -Seekers—but he can also let me see in—to your plans. And I just may be able to turn those plans to uses you never imagined.
Young Vredai riders showed off their horsemanship and high spirits, yipping and catcalling each other as they milled in an eddy of barely controlled chaos with Jegrai in the center. The raiders were all of them Jegrai's age and younger, but tough, and far from inexperienced.
The pity of it was that there weren't any inexperienced fighters over the age of fifteen in the Vredai. Not anymore.
Jegrai raised his fist high over his head, and the riders reined their mounts in with instantaneous obedience. Quiet hung in the air like the dust they'd stirred up. Now there were only the camp-sounds, the clink of harness, the occasional stamping of an impatient hoof.
Then, when he thought he'd held them long enough—
"Hai ya!" Jegrai shouted, bringing his fist down, and digging his heels into his own mount's sides.
The entire party swirled out of the encampment in a tangle of tails and legs and dust, with Jegrai in the lead on his tough little roan gelding.
Jegrai had taken charge of this raiding party himself with two purposes in mind. The first—well, his people required frequent reminders that their Khene was also a warrior. His father had led raiding parties—
—yai-ah, and it was a raiding party that killed him—
But that was a thought Jegrai would not dwell on for long. There had been other reasons for the failure of that raid, and none of them applied here and now. This was a different set of circumstances, and a different sort of raid.
The fact was that the Khene of Vredai had best be prepared to prove himself on a regular basis, and it had again come time for Jegrai to do just that.
The other reason for leading this raid was more personal. Jegrai was hoping, in his deepest heart, that in the excitement of the raid he might forget the spectre of Yuchai moaning in pain and delirium in the Shaman's tent. At least for a time.
But at first there was little to distract him. There was no one and nothing at the first few farms they came upon, only the fields and deserted buildings. It was a good land they rode across, and Jegrai felt a twinge of guilt at driving the land-folk from it. Rich black soil, well watered, but now going to grass and weeds; windbreaks of strange, tall evergreen trees with pungent needles. And all of it deserted, forlorn in the morning sun.
Still, that was hardly surprising; the scouts had been reporting for days that the land-folk were packing up and fleeing—westward somewhere. Some—few—had gone over that far pass guarded by the wizards.
Ah, but the rest had just disappeared, as if the ground of the western mountains ate them, their goods, their livestock. They simply vanished, leaving neither trace nor track. It was a mystery. It was one Jegrai did not care to have solved, particularly. He would just as soon not slaughter defenseless farmers; such a slaughter had no honor in it, and bought Vredai nothing but the possibly dangerous ill will of the land-folk that remained.
And it felt too much like the time the Talchai had ridden through the camp, slaying combatants and noncombatants indiscriminately. Riding down children. No, Jegrai wanted no such stain on his hands.
He shook off the dark thoughts and listened instead to the jokes and jibes of his followers. They rode in sun-gilded high spirits for most of the morning, without seeing a single thing worth stopping for. As morning turned toward noon, they penetrated deeper into the valley—much deeper than any Vredai party had ever passed before. And as they topped a rise, they found themselves riding into the yard of a dwelling-place that bore the unmistakable signs of having been abandoned mere hours ago.
Possessions had been dropped on the roadway, strewn as if kicked out of the way, and discarded by those in too much haste to bend to retrieve them; a thin tendril of smoke still curled up from the chimney of the house.
With the wariness of long habit, the raiders scattered and took cover. But when there were no sounds of life, they crept from shelter and began prowling the abandoned buildings.
They found a few animals still remaining, two nursing sows in their pens and a couple dozen half-feral goats and chickens; the former too large and too protective of their young to move from their styes with any speed, the latter too stubborn and wild to catch. The warriors made fine sport with what they found, slaughtering the pigs to take back to the camp, rounding up the goats, decorating themselves with the strange garments and utensils. One young warrior flung a bright quilt about his shoulders like a motley cape; another topped his helm with a foolish-looking cap, and a third traded his helm for some kind of metal basin. Jegrai sat his horse, aloof from it all, checking for signs of which way the land-folk had fled—until his sharp eyes caught an unmistakable sign on the soft ground of one of the empty pastures.
The print of horse-hooves!
He whooped to get the raiders' attention; they abandoned their foolishness and joined him in following the tracks all the way to the western fence.
One panel of the fence was down; had been taken down. "What do you make of this?" he asked Abodai, the best tracker of the lot of them.
Abodai pursed his lips, which made his moustache squirm on his upper lip as if it had a life of its own. "I would say that this was a true herd, mares, foals, and a stallion. I think perhaps the fear of the land-folk spoke to the herd, made them spooky and impossible to catch. This may be what delayed these folk so as to abandon so much. So. It may well be that the herdsman felt that to let the horses free would keep them out of our hands, no? Or it may well be that the herdsman is with them, mounted, driving them before him. And he thinks we cannot catch them."
Jegrai grinned. "Foolish herdsman!" The shiny copper, brass, and silver trinkets, the other booty they had picked out of what had been abandoned, was now cast away. The goats were left in the care of the youngest, least experienced member of the raiding party to be driven back to the Clan. He would lead a foraging party back for the pig carcasses and the rest.
But the remaining members of the raiding party would be going after the booty that truly mattered: the horses. Gold and silver were fine for ornamentation, brass and tin useful, but horses were life itself. So far they had captured only two old mares, both too old to breed, and one half-broken gelding. The young gelding had called up a fire of lust in the heart of every person of the Vredai that had seen him; nearly four hands higher than the sturdy little steppes horses, he was cleanlimbed and strong and swift. Jegrai badly wanted a stallion of his kind to breed into his herd, and mares to breed to his stallions. With such tall, swift horses, they might hold even against the Talchai.
"Hai-ya!" he cried, giving his gelding his head and urging him with his legs into a gallop. "Let us ride!"
They pounded after the vanished herd, the excitement of the chase building as the trail grew fresher and fresher; they urged their mounts over pastures of lush grass of a thickness and luxuriance that no one of the Clans had seen since before the drought. And their building excitement was such that they hardly noted the rich pasturage except as something to cross. They raced through orchards of tall trees covered in white and pink blossom without a backward glance. All that mattered was the trail, and the quarry at the end of it.
Jegrai was the first to actually see them, so far in the distance and high up on a mountain road that they were little more than moving dots beneath a cloud of dust. He gave a whoop of victory, and the others looked up almost as one to see what he had spotted. Their fierce warcries must have been loud enough to carry up the side of the peak, for the little group of dots sped up a moment later—sure proof that they were being herded.
It was only when they were halfway up on that trail themselves that Jegrai realized with a shock of dismay just where that unseen herdsman was taking his horses.
This is the wizards' mountain! he thought with a chill, and fought down the urge to rein in his gelding there and then. Wind Lords—he's heading right for the wizards' pass! If they see us—oh, Wind Lords—what if those are the wizards' horses?
He wanted, with a desperation the like of which he had not felt except when faced with Yuchai's illness, to turn the party back around and give up the chase. But one look at the faces of the others told him that he dared do no such thing. He would lose face before them—and they would go on without him.
And when they all returned to the camp, there might well be a challenge for his rank of Khene. Probably from his half-brother, Iridai.
So he whipped his horse up to the front, and prayed to the Wind Lords that the raiders would be able to overtake the herd before they passed into the wizards' protection.
The Wind Lords were not listening.
The track turned into a trail cut into the very face of the cliff. Their quarry had vanished somewhere up ahead, but the dust of the herd's passing still hung in the air, and the nearness of their goal heated their blood still more. They pounded around a bend in the trail in a cloud of dust and sweat. . . .
Only to pull up in startlement at the sight of what lay across the place where the main road joined the trail they had been following.
They had scarcely a moment to take in the incredible size of the structure before them—larger than anything any of them had ever seen before, even Jegrai, who had been to the Suno Lords' city once as a child. They had just enough time for their hearts to stop dead and start again with the astonishment of it.
There was an eerie whistling that seemed to come from somewhere above—
And Jegrai had a fleeting impression of something large and boulderlike thudding down into the trail before them—
Then the wizards called lightning down upon them out of the clear and cloudless blue sky.
Thunder roared in their ears, flames and dirt sprang up before them; the trail itself was torn and flung into the air in front of their panicked horses, and scarcely ten horse-lengths away.
The horses screamed and fought their bits—but not for long. As one man the raiders let them have their heads, and turned tail and ran for the shelter of the cliff face they'd just come around. There they did rein their panicked, sweat-sodden beasts in, before they could break legs in their headlong flight. Afraid to move lest the lightning find them, the Vredai cowered under the cliff and looked to Jegrai to get them safely out—
—Jegrai, who had no more notion of what to do than the rest of them did.
"Felaras!"
Teo burst into the Master's study, white-faced and breathless. Kasha dropped the mug of chava she'd been drinking, and the pottery cup shattered unnoticed on the floor.
"Fe—Fe—laras—" Teo panted, clinging to the door frame. "Zetren's—on the—wall. With the—gunners—"
"Damn!" Felaras spat, "that mad dog will ruin everything!" She leapt out of her chair and vaulted over the desk, but Kasha beat her to the door. Kasha sprinted down the dark staircase as fast as she dared, with Felaras right behind.
Gods above—Kasha thought angrily.—we go to all this trouble of setting this trap, risk young Eldon and the horse-herd—if Zetren ruins it for us—
She hit the entrance to the hallway with enough momentum to have bowled over a dozen tall men, had there been anyone blocking her way. The stone floor was slippery; she skidded, bounced off the wall opposite the staircase, and kept going. Behind her she could hear Felaras making the transition from stairwell to hall with a little more control.
At the end of the hall was the wooden door to the outer yard that lay between the Fortress building and the wall. She hit the door at a dead run, and it slammed against the stone. The sun nearly blinded her, but she didn't stop to give her eyes time to adjust, just ran, scrubbing at her watering eyes, and trusted to memory and habit to put her feet where they should go.
She ran up the stairs to the top of the Fortress wall still half-blinded, just a little ahead of Felaras, hoping Teo's breathless warning hadn't come too late. At the top of the flight of stone steps were three of the six permanent mortars, their -Watchers—and Zetren.
As she ran through the gap in the waist-high barrier on their side of the wall, she could see Zetren talking to the gunners. He was facing her, a wall in human form, and his dark eyes glittered like a half-mad bears. He ignored Kasha's presence entirely. The bloodthirsty glee in his voice could not be concealed, and the Watchers manning the mortars on the wall did not look to Kasha's eyes to be comfortable hearing it. "When they reach the first mark," he said, "touch off the—"
"What in hell is going on here?"
Felaras climbed the last of the stairs two at a time, her eyes cold with anger. The Watchers had been uneasy at what lay in Zetren's eyes; they shrank desperately away from the look the Master was wearing. She hadn't worn that look often in her tenure as Master, but out of the half-dozen times she had, twice she'd killed a man with her bare hands. For good reason, admittedly; and she only hastened the sentence that would have been delivered anyway—but none of them had ever forgotten the incidents. Felaras in full wrath was not something any of them faced willingly.
Except Zetren, who feared nothing. He drew himself up to his considerable height and stared down at her.
She ignored him, going straight to the mortars. "What in hell have you got these set for?" she asked, with icy calm.
"Last notch, Master," said old Amberd, the most senior.
"Which plants our little eggs right at the mouth of the trail." She wasn't asking; she knew exactly what that setting meant, as did Kasha. "You know what my instructions were. Reset them the way I ordered."
Zetren gave an inarticulate, angry little growl.
Felaras turned and gave him a long, measuring look—
Then shrugged, and turned her back on him, plainly dismissing him as something of no importance.
Whatever he'd been expecting her to do, it wasn't that. He was left staring impotently at her back as she ordered the mortars reset by two notches so that the explosive shells would land considerably ahead of the mouth of the trail. He went red, then white; clenched his fists as if he would like to strike her. . . .
Then did the unforgivable; made one step toward Felaras's undefended back with his hands coming up.
That was why Kasha was there.
Sweating with fear—for this was the first time she'd ever done this outside of lessoning—she ill-wished with all her strength. And got ready to move in case it didn't work, or Zetren was protected.
Her vision narrowed, as if she was looking down a long tube, and things seemed far away and ill-defined, like in a dream. Well, that was fine; that meant she was directing the power correctly. And there was a sharp pain between her eyebrows which meant she was focusing right. . . .
She put every bit of her concentration into it; her entire universe narrowed to one thing. Zetren.
Zetren made another step.
His foot came squarely down on a piece of round shot from the loading of the mortars that shouldn't have been there. His foot skidded, flew up and into the air, right out from under him. He flailed, both his arms windmilling wildly for a moment, wearing an expression of such amazement that Kasha almost laughed and broke her concentration.
Then he landed on his back, hitting his head on the stone of the wall and knocking himself unconscious.
Kasha cut off her wish.
Sight went back to normal, although she was as tired as if she'd just gone a full ten rounds of hand-to-hand with one of the senior Watchers.
She daren't show it, though; she took a deep breath, steadied her legs, and went to Zetren's side. She studied him for a moment, then knelt and pried open one eyelid.
Perfect. Out like a snuffed candle.
"He tripped over something," she said with feigned innocence, looking over her shoulder at Felaras. "I think he must have hit his head."
Felaras sighed, as if she believed her aid. "Amberd, I think the sun must have gotten to him. Get him on his feet and back to his quarters, will you?"
Amberd snorted, but obeyed. The others sighed with relief and went back to resetting the mortars.
No one seemed to have an inkling as to what had really happened at that moment—which was precisely as both Kasha and Felaras wanted it.
They got the mortars reset just in time; for a few moments later Eldon pounded up the trail driving the weary herd of horses belonging to the Order before him. They poured in through the Market Gate with a sound like distant thunder, streaming sweat that ran in muddy runnels through the dust covering their flanks, and Watchers on the gate slammed and locked it behind them. Now . . . it shouldn't be more than a few moments . . .
Kasha strained her ears and eyes both, but it wasn't until the Watchers below got the weary horses safely away into their stabling for a deserved rest that she heard it—the drumming of more hoofbeats on the herd-trail coming up the mountain.
It seemed to take forever; her heart was pounding in her ears, she clenched her hands on the stone of the parapet before her, and her breath came harsh and panting. Would they turn back? Would they sense the trap?
Then, suddenly, there they were—hauling up short at the sight of the enormous structure that guarded the Pass.
"Fire!" Felaras ordered—and the mortars spoke as one.
The trail between the Fortress and the nomads erupted with thunder and flying debris. It was much too far away to do them any harm, but it was virtually guaranteed to make the most hardheaded of horse-nomads believe in wizards with sky-fire magic.
When the dust cleared the nomads were nowhere to be seen.
The horses stood, spent, heads down, exhausted. Sweat collected on their flanks, the sweat of fear as much as of exertion; they slobbered around their bits, and their eyes still showed white around the lids. His raiders said nothing, but there was that same stark fear in their eyes, and pleading. You are Khene, said those eyes, white-rimmed in their sun-darkened faces. Think of some way to get us down off this mountain alive!
Once his heart stopped racing with fear, Tegrai felt oddly calm. He dismounted, handed his reins to Abodai (whose face was drained nearly bloodless), and walked cautiously up the trail to peer around the side of the escarpment protecting them.
There were three truly enormous holes in the trail.
Whatever these wizards had, it wasn't lightning; it was worse than lightning. Lightning didn't leave huge, smoking holes in the earth. Lightning didn't reduce boulders to a pile of fragments and pebbles.
He considered the Fortress, the trail, and the craters in it with a strange calm and detachment. They could have killed us easily, he decided after a moment. They probably could kill us now. If they can do that—there's no reason why they couldn't reach all the way to the camp if they wanted to—
His heart began racing at that, and he sternly told it to calm itself.
It wasn't listening. It was convinced that if the wizards cared to, they could keep them from ever getting off this damned mountain.
And the worst of it was, Jegrai's head agreed with it.
That had him in a panic, until he turned the thought around and looked at it from the other side. They could have killed us, and probably still could. So why didn't they?
That thought seemed to ease the tightness in his chest, the panic that squeezed the breath from his lungs.
Maybe they are like the Holy One, he thought in a burst of inspiration. Maybe that was a warning? Maybe—maybe this is the chance to speak with them—
He waited for a moment more, to see if lightning was going to strike him down, either from the wizards or the Wind Lords, at the audacious thought.
Nothing happened.
Taking that as a sign, he turned to call the others to him.
"Where in Hladyr's name is Teo?" Felaras growled under her breath, watching the spot where the nomads had hidden with far-seeing glasses. "If these flea-bitten nomads make a move, I need to know what it bloody well means!"
The Fortress sat in a kind of shallow depression split by the Pass; it was screened on the east by rocky outcroppings that rose about half as high as the Fortress walls themselves. The main road ran straight through those outcroppings, but the wilder trail the nomads had followed ran beneath them before joining the road at the point where it crossed the rocks. She could see the barest edge of a head peeking around the side of the boulder-face from time to time, then pulling back quickly. It looked like the same head each time, provided those nomads weren't all wearing identical fur hats.
So they aren't running away—gods, I would give five years off my life to know what they're thinking! Are they staying put because they're afraid I'll blow them to Yazkirn if they move? That's got to be at least part of it, but that wouldn't account for that head that keeps poking around the rocks.
The watcher was getting bolder; he put his head above the rock almost to the chin and kept it there.
"Master?" asked one of the gunners, nervously.
"Stay quiet," she warned. "Let's not startle them."
"But, Master—what if they charge?"
She took the glasses away from her eyes and turned to stare at him incredulously. "Reder, there are maybe two dozen of them. They have bows. No siege engines, no armies. And we just brought magic lightning down on their heads. Would you mind telling me just what you're worried about?"
The Watcher looked sheepish; Felaras remembered now that this man had been one of the few Watchers who had been truly spooked by the presence of the nomads in the Vale below. Well, he'd better get over his fear of barbarians, and fast, she thought to herself. Because if this works he's going to see a lot of them.
"Sorry, Master," he mumbled, shamefaced. "I guess I just wasn't thinking."
Felaras snorted, and put the glasses back up to her eyes. "The gods gave you a head, Reder, and they didn't intend it only for ornamental use. You might try using it now and again."
His fellow gunners chuckled; evidently they were a little tired of Reder's nerves. "Yes, Master Felaras," Reder said unhappily.
"Kasha, would you see what's keeping—"
"He's coming up the stairs," Kasha interrupted.
"And just in time," she growled, trying to fine-focus the lenses of the far-seeing glasses. "I think we're getting something happening over there. Teo—"
"Wait a minute, Master Felaras." She glanced over her shoulder to see that Teo had somehow pried the only other really good far-seer in the Fortress out of the hands of Diermud; this one was a single tube rather than the linked pair of tubes Felaras was using. "All right, I can see him."
The man was making his way out of the cover of the rocks; he was a bright splash of dull scarlet paint against the dun of the boulders.
"He's got—yes—he's wearing the right sort of hat to be a leader, Felaras!" Teo said excitedly. "I think he's either the Clan Chief or the warleader!"
The lonely figure just stood there in the middle of the road for a long moment, and even this far away Felaras thought she could read a bowstring-tight tension in his stance.
You do have courage, stranger, she thought wryly. I hope you have sense as well.
"Is he waiting to see if we take another shot at him, do you think?" she asked the young Archivist at her right elbow.
"I'd say yes—wait a moment—they're handing him something from behind the rocks—"
That "something" was long and thin, like a spear or lance, but Felaras's glasses weren't good enough to make out any details.
But Teo's tube was.
Felaras looked to him for enlightenment, dropping the glasses to hang around her neck.
"Well?" she asked, tightly.
And as the figure raised the stick over his head, and began walking slowly and cautiously—but with evident determination—toward the Fortress, the young man let out a long sigh and took the far-seer glass away from his eye.
"Master Felaras," he said, grinning at her so hard she thought his smile was going to meet at the back of his head. "I think you just got your wish. That's a peace-staff he's carrying. They want to talk."