She didn’t notice when Maja-now started loving him too.
Steadily the climate changed again as they journeyed on south. They were already resting out the heat of each noon. Soon there were different crops in the fields, with different trees by the roadside, different shrubs and weeds in the patches of wilderness. For a while a huge river ran beside the road, with crocodiles basking on its mud banks and buffalo wallowing in its shallows. Long-tailed monkeys begged or thieved for scraps in the coppices by the highway. Trained dogs kept them clear of the way stations.
And still Jex did not speak.
The moon had waxed to full, dwindled to a sliver and waxed almost to full again when the clerk at a way station glanced up from their way-leaves and said, “Journey’s end, friends. Tarshu road’s closed. Another half day to Samdan, and then you’re stuck.”
“How long for, do you know?” said Ribek.
“They’ve been evacuating folk out of Tarshu this last month,” the man said. “And there’s still a few dribbling through. But nothing’s happened yet, far as I’ve heard. When it does, mind, it’s going to be big. Good idea to be some place else.”
“We’ve got to get to Tarshu somehow or other,” said Saranja impatiently.
“Well, madam, you’re just going to have to enjoy the bright lights of Samdan for a while. Though it’ll be packed solid with Tarshu folk waiting to get back in.”
“How much further on to Tarshu after that?”
“Two days when the road’s clear, but it’s going to be jammed solid a good while after they start letting folk back, so you’d best allow three.”
Across country they took six. Strange hawks quartered the sky by day, so between dawn and dusk they lay up in evacuated farms, then traveled on by moonlight. Benayu pulled himself together now that they were so near, and the danger so real. He dared use very little magic. All he could risk was puttting a screen round himself each sunset and transforming himself into a pigeon, so as to scout out a route for that night’s journey.
At first he kept them as far as possible in or near shadow, but on the second night, as they were making their way along a shallow, part-wooded valley, Maja sensed a faint magical force approaching rapidly from some distance ahead. From the feel of it she recognized it as having something in common with the hawks that she had tracked all day. It seemed to be coming not directly toward them but as if to cross their path a little way ahead. She whispered her news to the others and they turned aside into the shade of a coppice to let it pass.
Soon Benayu could pick it up too, and they felt it cross the further ridge in a broad line and, still invisible despite the moonlight, sweep down into the valley. On it came in absolute silence until it was near enough for the others to make out, first as a few moving blobs of darkness, then as a whole line which in a few heartbeats more became about forty wild dogs of some kind, spaced several paces apart so as to cover a broad swath of grassland as they raced along, noses down, whimpering faintly with the excitement of the chase.
The near end of the line passed about a hundred paces from the coppice. One of them checked, raised its muzzle and sniffed the air. A couple of others joined it. Saranja seized Maja, ready to heave her into the saddle. It was no use, they both knew. Once they were spotted this near Tarshu the Watchers would be on them in an instant. And then, as suddenly as they’d halted, the dogs gave up and moved on. They began to breathe again.
“Not good,” said Ribek. “They could still cross our scent anywhere and be after us.”
“Either we’ve got to find somehow to hide our scent, or we’ve got to choose ways where they won’t be looking for us,” said Saranja.
“As well as keeping out of the open?” said Benayu. “It can’t be done. It’s difficult enough as it is.”
“I don’t think we need worry so much about that,” said Ribek. “Night hunters like owls fly low. However good your eyesight is, you can’t see far at night, even in bright moonlight, but if you want to watch any kind of area you’ve got to fly high. That’s why the Watchers are using dogs. Best they can do.”
“I’ll think,” said Benayu.
They moved on in silence, expecting any minute to hear the sound of baying coming from somewhere back on their trail, but the night stayed silent until the stars began to pale.
Next night Benayu led them on a slow and twisting course over broken foothills, though there was far better going on the plain below. At one point they waded for a while up a stream, until they came out on a wide upland dotted with abandoned sheep. Here he used Sponge to round up a dozen sleepy and bewildered beasts and for a couple of hours drive them behind the travelers, blotting out the human scent trail. Then it was broken ground again for a weary while. Once they heard distant baying and guessed that somewhere the dogs had found quarry. Almost at once Maja sensed something magical joining the pursuit. The feeling ended abruptly and the dogs fell silent. At last they reached an empty farmstead with food for the humans in the larder, mostly mildewed or stale, and fodder in the storage bins. And sleep.
The farmstead was on high ground looking east. Maja was standing in the doorway next evening, watching the movement of hawks as she waited for Benayu’s return. She’d seen only one, briefly, in an hour or more, where there’d been at least one constantly visible on the day they’d started. She was distracted by a sense of something unfamiliar ahead and to her left. Far off, she decided after a while, and therefore powerful for her to feel it at all. And muddled, as if there were several kinds of magic going on at the same time.
Moving into the greater darkness inside the door she found that several beads on her bracelet were glimmering erratically, to no pattern that she could make out. She showed Benayu when he returned. He in his turn stood in the doorway and concentrated.
“Yes,” he said after a while. “I can feel it, just. I wonder. Perhaps something’s started to happen at Tarshu. It can’t last forever. We’d better get on.”
“And there’ve been almost no hawks in the sky, either,” she said.
“Perhaps they can’t spare the magicians to control them and use their eyes,” said Ribek. “Now things have started they need them all at Tarshu. Let’s hope it’s the same with the dogs. It’s going to take for ever at the rate we’ve been going.”
So that night they started to take risks for the sake of speed, traveling on easier ground for a while until the chance came to lose their trail for a bit, and, weary as they were, carrying on into daylight until the first hawk appeared. Both they and the horses needed rest and food before that happened, and by then the storm of magic round Tarshu had so intensified that, even with Jex’s steady mild protection, it would have been more than Maja could have endured without her amulet. They continued on this pattern for three more nights and by the third morning they could smell the sea.
They were all now tired beyond belief, even the horses weary, but that evening they drove themselves on as before, until they crossed one of a series of low, long hills, like gigantic ocean waves, and around midnight looked down into a valley and saw that from over the hill beyond rose astonishing bursts of light accompanied by thunderous explosions that ran as violent tremors through the ground beneath their feet.
Desperately frightened, and with the horses on the verge of bolting, but at the same time buoyed up by the knowledge that they were almost there, they hurried down into the valley. Maja was wearing her amulet adjusted to the point where the main magical turmoil around Tarshu was as much as she could endure, with her sleeve pulled down over it because the almost continual brilliance of its beads might have drawn the attention of any there to see it.
There was a belt of trees at the bottom of the valley, with a river running through it, too wide to ford. As they waited while Ribek listened to the rustle of its flow, Maja became aware of something sweeping toward them, high in the air along the further slope.
They moved back into the shadow of the trees.
“Stand close,” said Benayu, and muttered an
d gestured. Maja felt his screen build itself round them.
“It’s coming,” whispered Maja.
They stared up at the patch of sky visible between the branches. Against another brilliant flare from beyond the hill they saw the thing go by, the reptile head held low, scanning the hillside as it passed, the taloned forelegs, the vast webbed wings, the stubby hind legs, the trailing serpent tail, all enormously too large for any bird. Dragon.
Ribek returned to the stream, listened again and came back.
“There’s only one of them,” he said. “I suppose that’s something. It just flies to and fro all night. There’s another one all day. And there’s a mill a mile and a half downstream. We should be able to cross there, if they haven’t got it watched.”
They worked their way along beneath the trees, halted to let Benayu build his screen again while the dragon swept south, and again while it returned. By this time they had reached the trees immediately above the mill.
They watched it pass, and pass again, noting that its return from the north took only half the time of its longer southern beat. Meanwhile with sinking hearts they studied the slope that faced them. Time and again the flare of the explosions from Tarshu lit the whole valley, making every rock and thornbush on the almost bare hillside stand stark, with its ink-black shadow beside it. They could all see that it would take far longer than the time of the dragon’s going and return for them to scurry between the scant scraps of cover.
“Looks as if the mill’s near as we can get,” said Benayu. “Should be enough. There’s magic and to spare, even down here.”
“Wait a moment,” said Ribek, pointing. “See there? That kind of a fold in the ground, running slantwise up the hill? This is a mill, remember—an old one by the look of it. There’ll have been carts coming and going hundreds of years. It was the same at home, and the lane there was feet into the solid rock in places. These hills are chalk—we used a sunk lane a couple of nights back, remember? I’ll lay you that one’d hide a loaded hay cart, and it’ll be shadow all along that far side. We can at least look.”
As soon as the dragon had gone by they crept down toward the shadowy pile of buildings. The mill-race thundered over the weir, glittering in the light of the explosions, which all but drowned the water’s deeper thunder. The windows of the mill were black slots. Someone or something could have been watching just inside any of them. Ribek headed for the upstream side of the building, where a railed walkway close against the mill wall spanned the current. They led Rocky and Levanter across, and Saranja coaxed and bullied Pogo to follow. The water raced beneath their feet, drawn taut like stretched silk toward the rush of the weir. In the yard beyond a scrawny hound scurried out to challenge them, but Sponge saw it off. They crossed the worn cobbles, went through the gate and almost at once entered the sunk lane.
It was just as Ribek had promised, a deep cleft running sidelong up the hill, wide enough for a heavy cart, its walls almost sheer, its chalk floor rutted by year after year of passing wheels into two great trenches, wide as a man’s body and knee deep or over. The glare from explosions at Tarshu, joined now by the steadier, more orange glow from the burning city, cast a narrow strip of dense shadow all along the right-hand wall.
Maja saw little of this, riding with her eyes half closed as she concentrated on reaching out through the chaos of magical impulses from beyond the hill so that she shouldn’t miss the far fainter signal of the dragon’s return from the north.
There! Was it? Yes.
“It’s coming,” she said.
They reined the horses in and lined them up to huddle along the chalk wall. The shadow here was barely wide enough to hide them. They held their breath as the dragon passed almost directly overhead. A fresh burst of light illuminated it so brilliantly as it passed that Maja felt she could see every separate scale on the sinuous body—beautiful, monstrous, deadly. The powerful, steady wingbeat did not falter, and it was gone. They relaxed and climbed on.
Twice more they paused and hid while the dragon went by, and then they were at the top.
They stood and stared.
Where the lane actually crossed the ridge it bit less deeply into the chalk, but a stand of warped trees grew beside it, blown almost horizontal by the sea winds, roofing them over from above but leaving a good, wide view out to sea. After the enclosed, shadowy hiddenness of the lane there was so much going on, so strange in such a blaze of light, and at such distances, that it was difficult to take in. The reek of burning floated up the hill, carried by a tangy, salty, fishy-smelling breeze.
Almost immediately at their feet, it seemed, lay Tarshu.
Maja had expected to find the whole city ablaze, but it was not. In two large patches the fires raged, golden and orange, with swirling masses of smoke pouring upward and then spreading into a dark, sagging layer tinged purple and orange with the light of the fires below. The columns of smoke rose through two great rents in an intricate network of glimmering violet lines that roofed the whole of the rest of the city. The edges of these rents writhed and reached inward, as if trying to reweave themselves over the holes. Even through the protection of her amulet, now worn only just above the wrist so that it almost totally screened her from the immediate effect, Maja still felt dazed by the huge outpouring of magical energy from a dozen separate sources as the Watchers in the city struggled to repair the damage. Above this extraordinary scene hovered an airboat.
It was enormous, unbelievable. The airboat they had encountered in the Valley would have seemed a toy beside it. A dozen arms on either side of the great bag bore the propellers that were moving the vast craft slowly over the city. Other projecting structures interrupted the smooth curves of the bag. Slung beneath it was the sleek gleaming gondola that carried the Sheep-face crew.
The airboat slowed, swung, and halted above the edge of the larger of the two rents. From the top of a mast above the bag shot a dozen gleaming metallic streamers which arced out and dangled down through the rent below and into the flames. Hatches opened below the gondola, releasing a stream of dark missiles which tumbled end over end a couple of times and then, as they gathered speed, were steadied by the fins at the rear end and plunged on down, some through the gap in the web and on into Tarshu, others onto the web itself. Wherever they struck a colossal explosion followed. The ones that landed on the city below sent shards of flaming debris hundreds of feet into the air, only to rain back down and start new fires where there was anything left to burn.
But that, Maja realized, was not their purpose. It was the ones that landed on the web that struck home. Somehow the web absorbed the shock. The violet network blazed around each explosion. For a moment the brightness spread like ripples in a pool, and then it was gone. But the patch of web through which the brightness had dissipated was in ruins. As patch joined to patch the rent extended while the shattered lines strove to rejoin and reroof the city.
Meanwhile the airboat itself was under attack. Around it, seeming tiny against its bulk, though in themselves monstrously larger than any normal bird or beast, circled a dozen dragons, flying in V-formation like migrating geese. Suddenly, as if at a word of command, they swung from their course, spread apart and hurtled toward the prow of the airboat. They were met by streaks of dotted brightness emerging from two slits in the front of the gondola, and two more from projections on the bag itself. The dragons wove from side to side, and ducked and climbed, trying to make themselves harder targets. They moved all at the same moment, as if joined by a single will. Sometimes a turn came at exactly the wrong moment for one of them, bringing it straight into one of the lines of light. The bright dots passed harmlessly through it and it raced on toward its target unperturbed.
They had almost reached it, and the first jets of flame were beginning to blast out of their mouths when it happened again. This time the dragon died almost instantly. Maja felt the jolt as its magical being blinked out of existence. Its wings crumpled and it plummeted down, tumbling over and over into the fires
below. The other dragons had already vanished.
“There was only one of them,” said Benayu, in an awe-hushed voice. “The others were simulacra, decoys, to give it more chance of reaching the airboat. Fantastic power it must take to do that with a dragon.”
Fantastic power, yes, Maja thought. And still it churned up out of the city. But in all the swirling chaos of magic Maja could detect no impulse of any answering magic from the Sheep-faces’ side. All their weapons—the astounding airboat, the missiles they poured down on the city, the stream of fiery projectiles with which they had destroyed the dragon—were devised out of the materials of the natural world, like Ribek’s mill, back in the Valley.
“Well, this is what we’ve come for, isn’t it?” said Ribek. “Let’s get on with it. And then we clear out, quick as we can. Back down the lane, through the mill and up into the woods. Right, Benayu?”
“I suppose so,” Benayu answered.
He sounded listless, dazed, suddenly overwhelmed now that he was confronted by the sheer unmasterable power of the thing that he had vowed to destroy. Maja could sense the upward surge of the returning terror that he had been struggling to suppress ever since the episode in the way station. She put her arm round his shoulders and tried to steady him as a fresh outpouring of magic gathered itself overhead
The cloud layer split. A shaft of lightning, wider and more intense than any natural bolt, lanced down. But it never reached the airboat. Somehow the mast above the bag attracted it and then passed it on down the glittering filaments to the ground below. They blazed for a moment, blinding bright, and then, though the thunder roll had barely begun, the lightning was gone and the airboat floated on undamaged. Again, Maja could sense no magical impulse in the Sheep-faces’ response. It was simply a device that they had invented, like the engines that drove the propellers.
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