Before Maja had time to look at what he’d given her he had turned and was whistling to the dog.
It was a small amulet of some pale mottled stone, remarkably heavy for its size, carved to the shape of a squat lizard. There was a ring on its spine with a chain through it, allowing her to hang it round her neck.
“I’ll help Saranja saddle Rocky,” said Ribek. “See what you can find by way of food, Maja.”
She hurried back toward the cedar, where she found Fodaro stooped over Saranja’s drawing of the airboat with a twig in his hand, apparently scratching what looked like magical symbols above it.
“Is it all right if I take the basket?” she said. “Aren’t you coming with us?”
“No. Join you when I can. Tell your friends to look after the boy. He matters, not only to me. Don’t let them hang around. I want you well along the drove road before anything happens.”
“We’re just going. Thanks for the food, and good luck.”
Fodaro grunted, but didn’t look up.
Saranja was helping Ribek up into the saddle by the time she reached them.
“Well done,” she said. “Pack it into that saddlebag…. Right. Up you go, too.”
Maja grabbed hold of Rocky’s mane as Saranja took the bridle and started down the slope at a steady jog-trot.
Half way to the trees they passed Benayu and the dog, herding their flock in front of them. The clank of the bellwether’s bell seemed extraordinarily loud in the oppressive silence. Benayu’s face was expressionless. He gave no sign that he’d seen them go by.
CHAPTER
3
It was cool beneath the bridge. Reflections from the late afternoon sunlight rippled across the masonry of the arch above them. The river was low after a long summer. Rocky stood midstream, swishing his tail at flies. The three humans rested on boulders that winter floods had piled against the buttress, Saranja brooding, Ribek listlessly trailing his fingers in the current, and Maja quietly watching them. There was magic coming from both of them, she realized. Ribek was just listening to the water again, but Saranja was different. It was the same thing she’d noticed earlier on—not something she was doing, something that was being done to her. Perhaps it was the same thing Fodaro had started to ask about, a bit of magic she’d found among the warlords. But she hadn’t told them anything about it. That wasn’t like her.
“There’s a strange hawk over the woods,” said Ribek suddenly. “It wasn’t there this morning.”
“Nor were we,” said Saranja. “How…? Oh, the river told…”
Maja didn’t hear the rest of it. Something was happening to her, a sudden intense unease of the spirit, like nausea in the body, not slowly infecting her but suddenly there, a distortion of her place and balance in the world. She had to clutch at the stonework of the bridge or she’d have toppled sideways.
Saranja’s voice.
“Maja! What’s up? That was the sheep-bell. Come along. Are you all right?”
“I think the Watchers have come. Back at the pasture. I didn’t feel them coming. They were just there.”
“Right. Let’s get on with it.”
Maja steadied herself and rose.
The small flock streamed by, bewildered by the speed they were being forced to go, with the dog urging the bellwether along in front and Benayu following at the rear, occasionally whacking a rump with his staff. Saranja stepped out of the trees just as the last rank reached her. Maja followed. Benayu whistled and the dog brought the flock to a halt. He looked no less grim than before, but more in control of himself.
“Maja thinks the Watchers have reached the pasture,” she said.
“I know,” said Benayu tonelessly. “Two of them. If he gets it wrong we’ve got about ten minutes—maybe a bit more.”
“Ribek says there’s a strange hawk over the hillside. The river told him.”
“Wasn’t there before I got under the trees, but from now on…One of them will be looking through its eyes. So you can’t take the horse through the village—stand out like a sore thumb. I should look all right, with the sheep, this time of year. You’re going to have to work your way round under the trees. Up the river till you get to the old ford. Not far. Then…”
His face worked. He waited, eyes closed, until he had mastered himself, and turned to Maja.
“You know when Saranja took the wings off your horse, what you felt then? There’ll be something like that. Stronger, probably. It’ll mean Fodaro’s trying to tackle the Watchers back at our pasturage. The hawk will be looking at that. You should be able to slip across the river then. After that, there’s a track down from the ford to the top of the drove pasture. I’ll know you’re there and come and find you.”
“All right. And good luck, Benayu.”
“Not me who needs it.”
He turned away and whistled to the dog to move on.
The moment came in two waves, the first like a silent thunderclap, electric with horror and power, flinging Maja to the ground. She heard Rocky’s squeal of panic, but it had hardly begun before the second wave drowned it, an immense booming bellow, far louder than any thunder, a shuddering of the physical earth…And then the wind. She was already flat on her face but that was no shelter at all. It tore at her clothing, yanked at her hair, was about to pick her up and blast her away like a blown leaf when Ribek tumbled across her and pinned her down.
And then it was gone. Silence. No, not silence, because even in silence your ears are awake, listening for sound. There was a blankness, a deadness, where that sense of listening should have been.
She hadn’t heard the wind.
By the time she understood what had happened to her Ribek had rolled himself off her and was helping her up. His lips moved. Nothing.
“I’ve gone deaf,” she said, and pointed to her ears. He nodded and tapped his chest.
Me too.
Saranja was gone, and Rocky, but Saranja’s shoulder pack was lying on the ground. Maya pointed at it.
“Where is she?” she mouthed.
Ribek pointed across the stream.
“Roc-ky bol-ted,” he said, mouthing it the same way, so that she could read his lips.
He picked up the pack but she took it from him and in that awful non-sound helped him across the ford. Beyond that they followed a well-marked track, picking their way past fallen trees. He was leaning heavily on her shoulder by the time Saranja met them, leading Rocky, foam-flecked and heaving, though she herself was barely panting.
She pointed to her ears and Maja and Ribek made the me-too gesture. She nodded and said something, gesturing at Rocky, pointing at a gash in a foreleg, then showing them a ring on his harness, slipping it over her thumb and pointing at the wreckage of branches past which they’d just been scrambling. Rocky had snagged the ring on a broken branch and got stuck till she’d come up. She spoke again, finishing with a nod and a shrug. Could be worse. He’ll be all right. Grimly they moved on together.
Benayu came up the track to meet them with Sponge at his heels. His face was gray and haggard as an old man’s. He had clearly been weeping. Ribek moved to put an arm round his shoulders, but he shrugged himself free and started to say something.
“We can’t hear you,” said Maja, automatically.
No doubt they’d all spoken together, but Benayu held up a hand, wait, then moved along the line, pausing briefly in front of each of them to reach forward, touch both ears and murmur something with scarcely moving lips. Saranja. Rocky. Ribek. Maja. Swiftly but gently hearing returned, the crash of a falling tree, shouts and screams from the village below. Acrid smoke reeked in the wind—something down there must have caught fire.
“Won’t the Watchers have felt that?” said Saranja.
“They’re gone,” said Benayu in a choking voice. “Give me your right hands.”
He placed their three hands together and closed his own round them, above and below. His voice steadied, becoming harsh and slow.
“I will help you to find
the Ropemaker,” he said. “I promise you this, because I promised Fodaro, but not for his reasons, not for yours. I will do it so that I can take vengeance on the Watchers. I will destroy them, every man and woman of them, because they destroyed him. That is the only thing that matters. If I have to destroy the whole Empire, or give it over to the Pirates, if magic vanishes from the world, let it happen, so long as the Watchers are destroyed and vanish too.”
“I understand,” said Ribek, not simply humoring or comforting, but instantly accepting the impossible vow as sane and serious. Saranja only grunted sympathetically. She knew what it was like to hate. Maja felt differently again. Until now Benayu had been for her and the other two little more than a chance-met stranger, friendly and helpful, whom she expected to thank and say good-bye to soon, and never to see again. Now she and Ribek and Saranja and Benayu were linked together, and were going to have to learn to live and endure with each other in friendship and trust for as long as their task demanded.
“We’ll help you if we can,” said Saranja.
They stood together for a while in silence, with the smashed woods all around them, as if allowing their oath to root itself steadfastly into the soil of their purpose, until Ribek seemed to grow restless and began to limp to and fro, studying the sky between the remaining branches.
“I think the hawk’s pushed off,” he said. “Or been done for along with the Watchers.”
Benayu hauled himself out of the dream of vengeance.
“That makes things easier,” he said, in a quiet, toneless voice. “Well, we’ve got a choice. The obvious thing is to get as far away from here as we can before the Watchers…No, forget it. They won’t send more Watchers, not at once, in case the same thing happens to them. They’ll try and find out from a distance. Or they’ll send someone they can afford to lose. So we’ve got a bit of time….”
“Ribek’s got to rest his leg,” said Saranja. “He isn’t up to anything more today.”
“All right,” said Benayu. “I left the sheep with Sponge down at the drove pasture. They’ll give us a reason for being there. We’d be more conspicuous sleeping out in the open, anyway, and some of the huts haven’t been smashed up. No one else is using it.
“And we’ve got to have something to eat. The village was pretty smashed up too when I came through, but there’s a farmer just below it who’s a bit further from the blast, so he should be all right. I’ll go straight down and see him and get him to come up and look at the sheep in the morning. If I let him have a couple for himself he’ll look after the rest while I’m away. With luck he’ll sell me something for supper.”
“Any chance of some decent fodder for Rocky?” said Saranja. “He’ll want more than hay. I’ll bring him with you so that he can carry it back.”
“I’ll ask the farmer. I don’t want to do any more magic than I have to. It’s a nuisance screening things and then getting rid of the traces.”
Two of the five drove huts had been blasted flat. The pasture sloped away below them, with the village on their left and its fields spreading on down the hill. Some of the houses had lost roofs and chimneys. Beyond the fields more woods, much less shattered, reached into the distance, and further off still the snow-topped peaks through which Rocky had carried his riders that morning now glistened untroubled under the setting sun. He nosed and snuffled contentedly into the feed that Benayu had bought from the farmer, while the humans sat, or in Ribek’s case lay, round the small fire Saranja had built. She and Maja were roasting gobbets of liver on pointed sticks and Ribek, flat on his back but looking a bit better now, chewed happily on his, but Benayu remained silent and hunched, gazing into the fire while he nibbled abstractedly at a morsel Saranja had bullied him into accepting.
At last he shook himself into the here and now, stuffed what was left of the liver into his mouth, chewed purposefully at it until he could swallow it, drank a mouthful of water and spoke in a low, anxious voice.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “There’s a colossal explosion of magic, two of the Watchers get wiped out, and they still haven’t sent anyone to find out what happened.”
“Would we know?” said Saranja.
“I would if it was more Watchers,” said Maja. “I didn’t feel them coming. They were suddenly there, just before the explosion. They were horrible.”
“I didn’t either,” said Benayu. “We had a system—it worked back up on the hillside, when we first realized they were coming. They must have picked that up and canceled it somehow. Perhaps that’s what took them so long…. Anyway, it’s going to be dark soon. We’d better get the fire out.”
“I’ll do that,” said Maja, and began carefully to rake it apart.
“What did happen?” said Saranja, but Benayu shook his head.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” he said wearily. “I’m not trying to be all mysterious about it because I’m a magician, but a lot of it’s stuff it’s dangerous to know. Really dangerous. Not just dangerous to you, dangerous to everybody—everybody in the Empire, anyway. If the Watchers get hold of you they won’t just kill you. They’ll take you apart, find out everything about you, all you’ve ever done, all you know. And if they find out some of the stuff Fodaro discovered they’ll become even more powerful than they are now—far more—and there’ll be nothing they can’t do, and nothing to stop them doing it.
“That’s why Fodaro died. He didn’t do it for our sake. He took two of the Watchers with him for our sake, to help us get away. But he died for the whole world’s sake so that they couldn’t find out what he knew.
“But I’ll tell you as much as I can because…well, I suppose because I’ve got to talk to you about Fodaro. He was a very good man—too good to be a good magician, really. He was only an ordinary third-level magician, but he was a pretty good scholar. He knew a lot more than he could do, he used to say. And on top of that he was a genius.
“Mathematics was his thing. And astronomy, I suppose. I built that pool up there for him. He told me what he wanted but he couldn’t do it himself, so I did it. It was his way of looking at the stars.
“But for him the astronomy was only part of the mathematics. He said that if you want to find the how and why of anything you have to measure everything you can about it so that you can put it into numbers, and then you work out how the numbers fit and put that into an equation, and then you can use them to understand the real world and do things in it. You can get an equation that’s almost right, and it’ll work well enough until you run into something that doesn’t fit. Then you either have to change your equation or start all over again.
“Magic is stuff that oughtn’t to fit in the real world….”
“I’ve always said it was nonsense,” said Saranja.
“Yes, but somehow it works,” said Benayu. “Fodaro wanted to find the equations that would tell him why. I’ve gone to bed leaving him sitting by the fire, thinking stuff out, and woken up and seen him still there, with his eyes open and the firelight glinting off them, and he’s still been there in the morning, wide awake but almost too stiff to move.
“In the end he came up with three equations for the how and why of magic. I know them by heart and I can use them, but I don’t really understand them. I can’t make a picture in my head of what they’re doing when they’re working. And I certainly don’t understand how he came up with them. I don’t think anyone else could have done it, not even by magic. That’s why it’s safe to tell you about him.
“But I can’t tell you much more about Jex. If the Watchers ever found out that he and his kind exist it’d be a disaster for them, but you already know that he’s there so it can’t be helped. I suppose you’d better know that he feeds on magic. That’s why he was useful to us. He could help mop up the overflow of whatever we were doing and stop it getting out to the Watchers. And he can protect Maja a bit now by mopping up some of the heavy stuff before it reaches her. But a sudden overdose of magic knocks him sideways, so he’s developed a sort of
warning mechanism that can tell him when something like that is coming his way so that he can be ready for it. That’s useful too.”
“You were scared when we came,” said Maja. “Not just you. The whole hillside. Everything.”
“A winged horse is big magic, far bigger than anything we’d been doing. That’s scary in itself. But Jex had sensed you coming and was ready for it and managed to absorb it somehow. What he wasn’t ready for was Saranja suddenly saying the Ropemaker’s name. That took him completely by surprise and knocked him out. I think he might have died if Fodaro hadn’t thought of getting Saranja to do that stuff with the feathers.
“Now he’s in a sort of coma. He’s still absorbing a little of whatever magic is going on around him. He can’t help it, any more than you can help breathing, so he’s giving Maja a bit of protection, but he can’t do anything extra to shield us or warn us.
“That’s why we were worried sick, Fodaro and me. Jex might have absorbed some of the signal before he passed out, but he couldn’t possibly have coped with all of it. And Rocky was still there, completely unshielded, far more than I could possibly screen, let alone in a hurry. But when Saranja took Rocky’s wings off the signal dropped almost to zero, and nothing happened and nothing happened, and we thought we’d got away with it.
“And then, suddenly, the Watchers were coming after all. We’d always known it might happen, so we’d set up a system, nothing to do with Jex, a sort of maze with a separate warning system, to slow them down and give us a bit of time. It wasn’t so we could run or hide—that doesn’t work with them. They’ll find you in the end. The only hope was to use the equations to take them by surprise with something they hadn’t got any defenses against. And that fitted in with something else that mattered even more than we did, something about that particular bit of hillside—can’t tell you what, but it was all to do with Fodaro’s equations too—and it would be a disaster if the Watchers found out about it. So the only thing to do was to destroy it. Of course we didn’t want to, not if we could possibly help it, but it wasn’t something you could arrange at the last minute, so we’d got it all ready to go, just in case.
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