It was almost impossible, in this place, to really believe in the desert, or in griffins, or in the Wall that had so briefly held fire from the country of earth and that was now so near failure.
Kairaithin had taken on human form again, perhaps because he had brought them to a place of men. He stood now with his head bowed and his eyes closed, as though he had used up the last of his strength in bringing them here. Perhaps he had, for when he took a step, he swayed. Catching his arm to steady him, Jos looked at Bertaud in alarm.
The Feierabianden lord was not looking at him, nor even at Kairaithin. He was staring down at Niambe Lake and at the city, his expression closed and forbidding, his mouth set hard. He said abruptly, “We will go down to the king’s house.”
Jos only nodded.
“Unless you have another suggestion to offer? Or to force upon us?” Bertaud said to Kairaithin, with a coldness that astonished Jos.
But the griffin mage did not respond in kind. He did not seem offended, or even surprised. He only nodded in weary acquiescence and gestured for Bertaud to lead the way down from the shoulder of the mountain to Niambe Lake, and thence to the king’s house in Tihannad.
CHAPTER 10
The road through the mountains from Minas Ford in Feierabiand to the town of Ehre in Casmantium was the greatest road in the world. Mienthe had not seen every road in the world, but she was certain none could rival the one through the pass above Minas Ford. The very best Casmantian makers and builders and engineers—Mienthe was not quite certain of the proper bounds of any of those terms, in Casmantian usage—had been years in the building of this road, which even now was not quite completed.
In some places, Casmantian builders had cut the road back into the sides of the mountains; in others, they had swung it right out over wild precipices, supporting the great stones with ironwork and vaunting buttresses, rather as though they were building a massive palace. Sometimes bridges seemed to have been flung across from one high place to another just out of the builders’ exuberance. The longest gaps had been spanned by tremendous iron arches from which were suspended the most amazing bridges, hung on iron chains. All her life, Mienthe had heard of the splendid skill of Casmantian makers and builders. Now she decided that she had never heard even half the truth.
With this new road, it was possible to ride straight through the pass without ever picking one’s way far down a mountainside into a steep valley and then laboriously climbing back up the other side, as the old road had required. It was even possible for a long train of heavy wagons to cross straight through the pass, with never a perilous turn around the narrow shoulder of some mountain where a cross-footed mule might drag an entire unfortunate team off some terrible cliff. It was not, unfortunately, always possible for a few travelers mounted on swift horses to swing wide around such a heavy train of wagons.
Mienthe stood up in her stirrups, trying to peer ahead over the long train of wagons making their slow, cautious descent around a long curving angle of a mountain. She was quite certain her horse could have taken that same descent at three times the speed and been up around this mountain and up the next rise as well, and across the bridge dimly visible far ahead, all before these wagons would reach the lowest turn of the road and begin the next ascent.
“There will be room at the bottom to get around them,” Tan said, his expressive mouth crooking with amusement.
Mienthe thought his unfailing good humor about the minor discomforts and irritations of their journey might eventually become unbearably provoking. There was some irony in that, since Tan was the one who had argued against making this particular journey at all. After alert guardsmen had reported possible Linularinan agents in Kames, asking questions about the house and grounds, Tan had wanted to go straight north as fast as he could ride, drawing the most persistent and dangerous Linularinan agents away with him. But Mienthe had worried that his enemies might also have already got ahead of him, waiting for him to run north and right into their hands.
With a quite terrifying quirk of humor, Tan had been very much inclined to oblige them. “The day I can’t outwit and outrun an ordinary shaved-penny spy or two, Linularinan or otherwise, I’ll retire from the game and take up turnip farming,” he had said, with altogether too much complacency for his own good, in Mienthe’s opinion.
Mienthe had wondered aloud just how many of those shaved-penny spies might actually be Linularinan mages. That had blunted the edge of Tan’s amusement. Then she had asked him how many times he meant to put her to the trouble of rescuing him, and that had done for the rest.
“You should be glad to see me go north,” he had said. “I can get past anyone Istierinan has in my way, Mie, and then let him try the skill of his mages against the mages of Tihannad. I know you’re longing to get back to Tiefenauer. You should let me go.”
Mienthe hadn’t been convinced that any such flight would succeed. But she was afraid for Tan to stay in her father’s house in Kames, doubly afraid now that they were both certain Istierinan knew where he was. At the same time, she knew exactly which unexpected direction they could take that would lead them straight to safe shelter.
“The Arobern is on good terms with my cousin,” she had pointed out. “And however bold your Istierinan is here, he won’t lightly try his hand in Casmantium, do you think? You can take shelter with the Arobern, I’m sure he’ll have no objection, and then once you’re out of Linularinum’s reach, surely Istierinan will pull his people back. Kohorrian will probably even apologize to Iaor for any misunderstandings.”
Tan had stared at her. “There are times, Mie,” he had said at last, “when your utterances blossom out with a most peculiar complexity, as the flowers of some wondrous country. Some might consider a confidential agent who delivers himself over to a foreign king not merely foolish, but actually treasonous, you know.”
“The Arobern won’t do anything like that!” Mienthe had protested, shocked.
“Anyway, isn’t the information you carry nearly all about Linularinum? What does it matter if Casmantium has it, too?”
Tan had had to admit that this was a point.
Mienthe had argued, “We don’t know I can protect you from Linularinan mages, but we know I have. I’m afraid to ask you to stay here and afraid to see you go north alone. But I think if we can get through the pass into Casmantium, we’ll both be safe.”
“We?” said Tan, sounding both startled and for once quite serious. “Out of the question, Mie—”
“I’m not leaving you for Istierinan!” Mienthe had insisted, thoroughly exasperated. “Nor staying here to wait for him myself. You could even be right about being in danger from a foreign king! But I’m Bertaud’s cousin and the Arobern’s friend, and that changes everything. I’m going.”
“Well,” Tan had said after a moment, “I know how stubborn you are, and—” He had paused and then added, his manner suddenly almost serious, “I admit, Mie, I would find your company a welcome reassurance, under the circumstances. But your cousin is probably going to kill me for putting you in such danger.”
The thought occurred to Mienthe that, though plenty of people might find her company welcome, no one, not even her cousin, had ever said he found her company reassuring. She did not know what to say to that. But in the end, she and Tan, and a handful of guardsmen, and the maid from Kames whom her steward had demanded she take with her for propriety’s sake, had all headed east and not north.
Mienthe had not even known she’d had a steward, though she supposed she’d have guessed if she’d ever thought about it. She had never wanted to hear about anything to do with her father’s house or her inheritance. But, after all, someone had to look after her father’s house and see that it remained in good repair, and keep an eye on the land to prevent too much clandestine woodcutting or poaching or grazing. She supposed Bertaud had approved the man; at least he seemed competent and reliable. A little too forceful, perhaps, when insisting that Mienthe have a female companion.
Not
that the maid was with her now, which Mienthe actually did regret. But they had lost two of the guardsmen finding out just how swiftly the Linularinan agents had moved to surround Kames. After that, Tan had given up any idea of heading north, and Mienthe had insisted that the maid be left in a little village along their way, with the other guardsman to keep the woman safe and eventually see her back to the house at Kames. Propriety and appearances were all very well, but the maid had been rather too old for a fast journey, and frightened by the close pursuit they’d encountered.
After that, by common accord, Mienthe and Tan had skirted any larger village or small town they’d passed and slipped right by the rebuilt Minas Ford in the fading light of evening, camping in one of the recently deserted engineer’s camps right in the pass itself. And now they were here, entirely out of Feierabiand, in these mountains that belonged to no country at all. And they did not even have any clear certainty about whether they were truly riding toward shelter in Casmantium, far less whether they were riding toward allies.
But, though Mienthe did not know how likely they were to find friends in Ehre, she knew that if they turned back, they would find enemies behind them. And she was certain that the King of Casmantium, once he knew she was Bertaud’s cousin and Erich’s friend, would be very polite. She was certain he would offer the hospitality of his court and that he would not harass Tan at all, even if he learned that Tan had been one of King Iaor’s important confidential agents, which she supposed they would have to tell him. At least, they would have to explain their presence somehow.
No, she was confident of the Arobern’s courtesy and hopeful of his goodwill. She even wondered whether he might lend her a few men… say, a company… to see them safe back through the pass and north to Tihannad. Even this did not seem unlikely.
But how far was it, from the mouth of the pass at Ehre to the Casmantian capital city?
Tan did not know the answer to this when she asked him. “I can tell you every distance in Linularinum, from Dessam in the far north right down to Desamion,” he said, and shrugged. “But I never expected to visit Casmantium. I don’t even speak Prechen. I don’t suppose…?”
Mienthe didn’t, either, aside from a few laborious words. She could say Please and Thank you, and she thought she could manage My cousin is Bertaud son of Boudan, Lord of the Delta, which might be very much to the point. But she did not know how to say anything as complicated as Linularinum has invaded the Delta and their agents are trailing us, or at least Tan, because he accidentally stole some powerful legist-magic out of a special book, so we need to see the Arobern right away.
She wondered whether Linularinan agents had actually dared come after them into the pass. She glanced uneasily over her shoulder. But the road behind them was clear all the way up the long sweeping curve of the mountain they had just descended, and beyond that she could not see.
“We’re well ahead, I’m quite certain, even if Istierinan has the nerve and resolve to send a man of his right to the very doorstep of Brechen Arobern himself,” Tan said.
He meant this to be comforting. It would have been more so, except he’d said something very like it before. That had been just prior to the loss of the two guardsmen. But Mienthe did not comment. She merely nodded and wondered whether, once they got past the wagons, they might possibly be able to beg or bribe the men driving the mule teams to slow to an even more deliberate pace and block anyone coming behind them.
As it happened, once they reached the wide gap at the bottom of the slope, the muleteers drew politely to one side to allow swifter travelers past. When Mienthe—very tentatively—put her request to the drivers, they seemed oddly eager to assure her they would be very slow on any upward stretch, and assuredly did not care to have any overbold travelers startle their mules by coming up alongside when there clearly wasn’t room.
It dawned on Mienthe, rather too slowly, that the muleteers thought she was with Tan in a very specific sense. They thought that she must have slipped away from her father, or maybe from her proper husband. Mienthe, horrified and offended, wanted to correct them. Before she could, Tan caught her eye and her hand and proceeded to encourage the muleteers’ assumption by putting on an understated air of nervous, half-embarrassed smugness that would have got the idea across to men far less romantically inclined. The muleteers grew even more amused and accommodating. Mienthe smiled until her face hurt.
She was too angry to speak to Tan when they at last left the wagons behind and rode up the next neatly angled slope of the road.
“It’s very convenient for them to assume—” Tan began once they were well away.
“I know,” Mienthe said through her teeth.
“It’s only practical—”
“I know!” said Mienthe, and put her hood up to make it clear she did not want to be mollified.
They did not speak again until they reached the middle of the pass, with its welcoming public house and stables and twelve lamps glowing along the road on either side to lead weary travelers in out of the cold.
The public house was set up on a low place where mountains climbed away in serried ranks in all directions. The mountains, glittering with ice, were rose-pink and gold where the late sunlight slanted down across them; the shadows between and behind them were violet, and the road running away toward the east seemed picked out in gold where it twisted up across the face of the nearest. Where the road flung itself across a chasm, high above, the iron bridge looked like a stark black thread.
The public house had a stable behind and two long wings, one angling in from the east and the other from the west. These met in the middle in a handsome square-cornered three-story building of dressed stone with carved wooden doors and real glass in the windows, blazing gold in the light. The whole was substantially larger than her father’s house, much more elegant than the great house in Tiefenauer, and a great deal more elaborate than anything Mienthe had expected to find in the middle of what was still, despite the fine new road, a rugged mountain pass.
Mienthe, wordless, gazed down and up and around in amazement.
Tan said in a low voice, “Would we might rise on eagle’s wings, mount above the heights where the rising sun strikes music from the stone, and fall again through the silence that is song.”
“Oh,” said Mienthe softly. And after a moment, “If there’s a poem that catches an echo of this”—Mienthe opened her hands to the surrounding mountains—“then someday you really must teach it to me.”
Tan nodded. But he also said, “We might be wiser not to stay at that inn.”
Still stunned by beauty, Mienthe hardly understood him for a moment. Then she did, and, unreasonably, resented it. She said grimly, “Of course,” and nudged her horse forward again. She wondered if Tan thought they could get all the way through to Ehre without stopping. She knew she couldn’t.
“There must be good places along the road for a cold camp,” Tan said, not quite looking at her. “I’m sure travelers used to have to camp three or four nights from one side to the other, or many more than that for slow wagons such as those we passed. I should think the builders will have let their road encompass some of those old campsites.”
“Yes,” said Mienthe.
“I’m sorry—”
Mienthe snapped, “For what? Of course we can’t stop there. You’re perfectly right.”
“For being right,” Tan said gently. “It hasn’t happened often of late, Mienthe; do grant me my one moment of reasonable competence in these days of striking idiocy. I do think we oughtn’t stay there, but I hope we may stop for supper.”
“Oh,” said Mienthe, in a much smaller voice. She felt she ought to apologize as well, but wasn’t sure for what, or how. She said merely, “All right.”
The public house offered hot spiced wine and roasted kid, soft flatbreads, a compote of dried apples and raisins, and little cakes dripping with honey, “Which my wife makes them special,” said the host, a big man from Feierabiand, with a generous belly and a
booming laugh. “With honey from her sister’s bees, down near Talend. The bees there, they make a special honey from the trees that flower at midsummer, dark as molasses. Good to keep off illness, they say it is, and good especially to sweeten a dark heart, not that that matters to you, esteemed lady, eh?”
He winked down at Mienthe, clearly assuming, just as the muleteers had, that she was with Tan. At least Tan did not suggest to him that they were running away together. Not where Mienthe could hear him, anyway. She tried not to wonder what he told the host to explain why they were not staying the night at the house.
But at least the host also told them of a cold campsite a little more than an hour’s ride up the east side of the pass.
Even so, Mienthe was certain for some little while that the lowering dusk would catch them still abroad on the road. Certainly the host’s estimate seemed a little overoptimistic, or else he’d been thinking of riders with fresh horses, or at least riders coming down from heights rather than trudging upward.
They had lanterns. The road was, after all, good. She tried not to be frightened by the mere idea of riding up the twisting length of any mountain road, no matter how fine the road or how bright the lanterns.
But at last they came up a rise that had been, by the worn and rugged look of it, part of the old road, simply incorporated into the new. Then they crossed one of those improbable iron bridges and came onto a section of the road where the stones were so new and fresh they looked all but polished, and beyond that the new road ran again into a section of the old. “Yes,” Tan said, gesturing away down the rugged slope that fell away from the road, “you can see where the old road plunged way down into that valley and then crawled slowly back up to this height.”
Mienthe nodded obediently, although she was far too cold and tired to appreciate how much effort the new road had saved them, just so long as it had. But then they turned along a long switchback and came out at last, with the last of the slanting light, onto a broad flat place that had plainly been used as a campsite for many years. A cliff reared out a tight little nook, just right to keep off the weather, and circles of firestones were laid ready before the cliff. There was even a neat stack of firewood against the cliff, which someone must have gathered with considerable labor, because even the small twisted trees of the heights were rare so high.
Law of the Broken Earth: The Griffin Mage Trilogy: Book Three Page 23