That might not be true. Rain might stifle the scent, but it would be a wise precaution. So they rode the wet and unhappy horses farther away from the river and tethered them again. Then the two men hurried back along a trail that was rapidly becoming a stream in its own right.
Wallie removed his sword and laid it by his feet, then made Nnanji do the same—another precaution, against reflections. They stood shivering in the shadows and waited to see if sorcerers could fly across rivers. Could they sense watching swordsmen and send demons against them?
Nothing seemed to happen. Another span of the bridge had gone, and the third was awash. The light was so poor now that the forest on the opposite bank was a black wall, and the roar of the bright silver river drowned out everything except the thumping of Wallie’s heart and a faint chattering of teeth from Nnanji.
A whisper: “My lord brother?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think I would mind a
small
fire demon, right now.” Wallie chuckled softly.
“Get two.”
Then light blazed on the far side of the river, among the trees. Nnanji hissed.
Sorcery!
In a world of flint and steel, there was no way to make fire appear like that—no matches or cigarette lighters. It flickered between the trunks, and Wallie thought he caught a glimpse of cowled figures, a flash of orange that might mean a sorcerer of the Fourth. Then the glow faded away, and darkness returned. “A demon?”
“I don’t think so,” Wallie said. “I’m only guessing, but I think they were checking our tracks. They’ve seen the bridge. Now they know they’ve lost us. Unless they can fly.”
Another sorcerer ability—they could magic up fire at will. But why so brief? In a dark, wet forest, light would be useful. Why let it go out so soon? Was that a limit to their ability, even if not a very useful one to know?
There was no more fire. There were no more signs of the sorcerers among the trees. Time crawled like glaciers. Frozen to his soul, Wallie was about to give up when Nnanji muttered and pointed. Vague figures crossed the skyline again. This time they counted four of them and a pack horse, retreating. The sorcerers had departed, balked of their quarry, heading home on a long ride over the hills.
Whereas the two chilled swordsmen could now go in search of warmth and shelter only half a league away. They were coming off best this time.
“Let’s go,” Wallie said. “It’s been an instructive day, but don’t overlook that last lesson, my young friend!”
“What’s that, my lord brother?”
Wallie laughed. “Never trust a dancing girl.”
†
“So that’s what a mountain looks like!” said Nnanji, emerging from the ground at Wallie’s side.
Morning was dawning, clear and fresh and virginal, with not a cloud in sight. Light flashed on distant whorls of the River to the east. To the north the view was blocked by a great humped peak, snowcapped and majestic, while its brothers and sisters stretched out beyond the limits of sight to the south. The travelers stood on the flank of a long range of volcanoes, a saddle to the west showing where the crossing must lie.
Wallie had guessed about volcanoes from the black rock he had seen the night before. Garadooi’s cave was a lava tube, a portion of whose roof had fallen in, providing a rubbly access slope. Obviously it had been used by generations of hunters and traders, for a fair path had been cut in the debris, smooth enough for the horses to descend, and the interior was roughly fitted out as a stable in one direction and human quarters in the other. When the two swordsmen had arrived the previous night—guided by Katanji, who had been shivering to death on the trail, waiting for them—there had been a blazing fire and hot food and crumbly old boughs to sleep on.
“That’s a mountain,” Wallie agreed. “And a good big one to start with! The Goddess be with you, builder!”
Not formal enough—this was a new day. “I am Garadooi, builder of the third rank . . . ”
Salute and response completed, the lad stretched and looked around, then pushed fingers through tousled curls. “You will ask Apprentice Quili to lead us in prayer, my lord?”
He had called for prayers the previous night, also. Wallie could believe in gods now, but he was still not a great praying man, being mildly embarrassed by even the swordsmen’s dedication that he performed every morning with Nnanji. Garadooi was the first religious zealot he had met in the World. Honakura and Jja and Nnanji were all pious servants of the Goddess, but they did not flaunt their beliefs as the young builder did. After being told about Wallie’s mission and the sword, he had prayed loudly and publicly.
Still, Wallie had much to be grateful for. “I have no objection to prayers, provided they are brief. We must hurry, I fear. How long until that river is fordable?”
“About a day, I suppose?”
Perhaps not even that, Wallie thought. These rubbly volcanic rocks would absorb water quickly. He turned to study the slope ahead and the trail faintly visible on it. It would be a long climb to the pass, and there was no cover. Any watcher with good eyes would be able to keep them in sight, without using sorcery.
“The western side is more wooded, my lord,” Garadooi remarked, clearly thinking on the same lines.
“Then I shall be happy to reach it.”
They crested the pass around noon, hot and already tired by the climb. Ahead the sun beat down upon a flat, barren upland that showed more rock than grass, with a few pustular cinder cones here and there, and some widely separated cairns to mark the trail. Wallie turned in the saddle for a last glimpse of the distant River, then waited anxiously for the western slopes to come into view. Every bone ached, and he felt sure that he had blistered the blisters on his blisters.
He had passed time during the ascent by questioning Garadooi about sorcerers. Rather reluctantly, the lad had admitted that the citizens of Ov did not seem to be greatly oppressed by them, nor even very resentful of the new regime. Even more reluctantly, and in reply to direct queries, he had confessed that the late Reeve Zandorphino had been disliked. He had not kept his men under firm control. Swordsmen, as Wallie well knew, could be arrogant bullies.
The elderly king of Ov had been left in charge, the only change being that now sorcerers kept order for him, instead of swordsmen. He had imposed a tax to finance the building of a tower for the sorcerers and had demolished buildings to make room for it. That had been an unpopular measure and was believed to be the result of a spell cast upon the old man by the chief sorcerer, a Seventh. But Garathondi was the contractor and was waxing even richer than before. Then the discussion had naturally come around to slavery. The family fortune was fertilized by the sweat and blood of slaves, and young Garadooi’s conscience tortured him over that. There was the source of his rebellion, and of Wallie’s present salvation.
“So a slave is a slave, my lord! He is still a child of the Most High. It is no reason to treat a man as an animal, is it?”
Wallie had not previously met antislavery sentiment in the World to match his own and he agreed wholeheartedly.
Nnanji had listened with open disgust to the tales of sorcerers. Probably he had never concerned himself with the ethics of slavery before, but his hero disapproved of it, so he had been adjusting his views to match. Now he intervened to tell how Lord Shonsu had befriended a slave in the temple and had thereby been assisted to escape. Wallie would just as soon not have had the incident mentioned, but Garadooi heard it with great approval.
On another point he set Wallie’s mind at rest and enraged Nnanji. Soon after the massacre—or so he claimed—Garadooi himself had slipped away by ship to Gi, the next city downriver. He had personally informed the reeve about the destruction of the Ov swordsmen. He had not been the first to do so, and no action had followed, for Gi was a much smaller place, and the garrison was neither able nor willing to attack the sorcerers now entrenched at Ov. Wallie was relieved to hear that there had been no cover-up. If he ever returned to the Garathondi estate, he would not have to judge a concealment. Nnanji muttered angrily about cowardice in Gi.
Yet Nnanji and Garadooi, two highly dissimilar young men, were forging a very unlikely friendship, based upon their respective obsessions with honor and religion. And perhaps, Wallie decided, he was a charter member, also, if a somewhat more cynical one.
He had ridden forward and was chatting with Jja and Honakura, riding at ease in the cart, when the upland began to tilt westward and the trail descend. Southwest and northwest stood more snowy peaks, and straight ahead, far off and glinting . . .
“I told you it was everywhere!” Honakura remarked smugly. Of course Aus would lie on the River—all cities did.
“It flows northward at Ov,” Wallie said, “so here it must run south?”
That was geometry, not theology, and Honakura had to ponder the problem for some time before he agreed that such was probably the case. Even then he would not admit that it must necessarily be so—the Goddess could do anything She wanted.
The descent became steep, the trail a stony gash through thick brush mat soon prospered into hot, still forest. As Garadooi had said, the western slope was more lush than the eastern. The cover and the shade were welcome; the resident insects were not. Wallie saw trees very much like oaks and chestnuts and ash, with brambles and nettles and dogwood filling the spaces between. The trail wound to and fro and up and down, following old lava flows, scree slopes, riverbeds—any feature whose original vegetation had been sparse. As the land fell, small streams appeared in the hollows.
Now he organized his expedition on better military lines, with Katanji and Garadooi riding ahead as scouts. The procedure was primitive—the first man chose a point with as long a view as he could find, then waited for the second man to catch up to him before proceeding farther. The second waited for the cart and the rest of the party, then went ahead to find the first again. Their rear was unprotected, except for Wallie’s own presence behind the cart, but he lacked the manpower to cover that direction and he thought he should be safe from pursuit, for the rest of this day at least. Katanji was excited at being chosen, and also amused, flashing smug glances at his brother. Nnanji pretended not to notice, but in truth he was unable to control his horse well enough for such work—it would have refused to leave the others for him.
As afternoon wore on, Wallie noted more signs that the trail had recently been improved. He also saw traces of horses and wheels that had passed by not long since.
Then the cart caught up with Garadooi, who had sent Katanji ahead as first scout. “The mine road, my lord!”
Two identical trails ran off into the woods. Wallie studied the fork. “Again I am glad you are here to guide us, builder. One looks much like the other.”
“And they are both being used, my lord.”
No need for a Mohican on that problem—there happened to be horse dung visible on both trails. So the mine had been reopened; more sorcerer activity, or just coincidence?
“I should dearly love to know what is going on here,” Wallie said. “Is this the work of these cowled characters? If so, what do they mine? What gets transported to and fro on this road—and does the garrison in Aus know about it?”
He pondered for a moment. “How far to the mine?”
The youth shrugged. “I think it is a long way, my lord, but I don’t know.”
Wallie hesitated and then decided to risk it. “Take over, adept. Proceed with all deliberate speed. I’m going to explore up this other road a little way.”
Responsibility! Beaming, Nnanji thumped fist on heart in salute. Wallie turned his mount along the mine road and met rebellion at the first bend. Eventually he convinced the brute that a swordsman of the Seventh outranked a mere horse, no matter how stubborn, and then he managed to kick it into an excruciating trot. The road was just as narrow and winding as the one he had left, and he thought he had brought much more than his fair share of the flies.
Leaving Nnanji in charge was a risk. If he blundered into a caravan of sorcerers he might react in ways that Wallie would find irrational. Moreover, it was unlikely that this digression of Wallie’s would yield any useful information at all. At best he could only hope to find some evidence of what was being mined—a spillage from a tipped wagon, perhaps. But the change of pace and the solitude were a welcome break. He resolved to limit himself to a quarter of an hour and then turn back.
He found much more than he had bargained for. At first all he saw was more trees; road bending to the right followed by road bending to the left; a hill up and a slope down; bushes and outcrops and ruts. Just as he was beginning to feel that his time must be up, he reached the edge of a recent lava flow. The forest ended abruptly, giving a wide view across bare, black rock flooring a valley. The hill on the far side was bare also, probably burned off by an even later flow, and the road descending it was clearly visible . . . and in use.
Hastily Wallie applied brakes and then reverse, moving back under cover. He counted three wagons. He estimated that the work gang marching behind numbered about thirty—those would be slaves, of course—and the mounted band in front about a dozen. They were too far off to see if they wore cowls, but they were certainly dressed in robes and therefore could only be priests or old men . . . or sorcerers. Browns, mostly, but the one in front was either a Fourth or a Fifth, an orange or a red.
He turned his horse and kicked it savagely until it achieved a canter. Had he come along the road half an hour later, he would have blundered right into that procession. He cursed himself for a reckless idiot.
That was not the worst of it, though. If Garadooi’s geography was correct, the men were coming from the mine, so obviously it was being operated by the sorcerers. Two of the wagons had been drays carrying lumber, dressed tree trunks. The sorcerers were heading for the downed bridge, to replace it.
How did they know about
that
?