"Parley in Common!" yelled Amberion.
The figure rode forward ten yards or so. "Why we halt?" he called. "Yer on our pasture, city folk. On the sea of grass, only the strong survive. Can ye stop us taking all you have, and feeding ye to the grass?" His speech was thickly accented, a mixture of several dialects.
"Aye, easily enough." The Wagonmaster sounded confident.
"Ha! Five against fifty? Are ye demons, then, like that black one that walks north?"
"We are servants of Gird and the High Lord," said Amberion. The Wagonmaster shot him a glance, but said nothing.
"Well met here, servant of whoever. Go tell yer master that those who travel our lands must pay our tolls—unless ye'd rather fight."
Amberion turned to the Wagonmaster, brows raised. The Wagon-master nodded. "Oh, these aren't bad. These are Stormwinds—that's old Carga out there; he don't torture prisoners at all. Keeps slaves, of course, they all do, but if there's a good horse nomad, it's Carga. He'll take our tribute and leave us alone. You notice he changed his demand, that second time?"
The Wagonmaster had assembled a bale of striped cloth, a small keg of Marrakai red wine, several skeins of red and blue yarn, a sack of river-clam shells, and a bundle of mixed wooden staves of a length for arrowshafts. Now he waved, and some of the drovers carried the goods toward them.
The nomad leader rode forward slowly, alone, close enough that Paks could see the curl of hoof on its thong around his neck, the spirals tattooed on his cheeks, the clear gray eyes under dark brows. He rode without stirrups, in knee-high boots whose embroidered soles had surely never been used for walking, clear as the colors were.
"Ye ride with strange powers, cityborn trader," he said. "Yer men I know, but him—" He pointed at Amberion. "Wizard, is it?"
"A paladin of Gird," said Amberion. The nomad shrugged and spat.
"Never heerd of him, nor paladins neither. But ye stink of power." He watched closely as the goods were displayed before him, and finally nodded. "Go yer way, scarfeet riders—" It took Paks awhile to understand this reference to their stirrups, and the marks those left on boots.
She hardly had time to enjoy the memory of the nomads before High Marshal Connaught had her hard at work again. Spring passed quickly into summer, the hot windy summer of the grasslands. At times it seemed they rode in the center of a bowl of grass, and Paks wondered if the world might be turning under them, so that they would never be free. Then the green turned grayer; the grass hardly reached their horses' knees. The dry air rasped in her nose, chapped her lips. Paks could see the ground's color showing through, as if the grass were a threadbare rug over the land, and then the grass failed. The trail went on, a deep-bitten groove of dust and stone.
They moved from water to water. Paks learned to ride with a cloth over her face, and keep her mouth closed against the dryness. The horses lost flesh, despite their care. The caravaners showed the Girdsmen how to turn over every rock before sitting down: Paks loathed the many-legged creatures that lurked in that cool shade, and carried poison in their tails.
It took days to cross the first deep canyon: first to ease the wagons down that steep trail without losing control of any of them, then to warp them across the roaring river, red with ground rock, then to drag them back up, foot by foot. And when they came out on top again, Paks could see little of where they had been. After another such canyon, the caravaners pointed out a line of purple against the northern sky. Mountains, they said. Elves, they said also, with sidelong looks at Ardhiel.
Paks asked him, and Ardhiel answered that those mountains were home to elves, but not of his family. He seemed troubled by something, but Paks knew better than to ask. Balkon, looking north, muttered eagerly about stone. He had confided to Paks that his family, the Goldenaxe clan, was looking for more daskgeft, more stonemass for the increase of the family. He hoped to find some; the descriptions Luap had written of the land made him think the stone there might be "dross," or suitable. Paks wondered again how dross could have so many meanings in dwarvish: courage, wit, strength—almost anything good, it seemed to her, was dross.
Day by day the mountains seemed to march nearer their flank. Ahead was only the rolling level of the desert, broken by watercourses. Paks began to feel a pressure from those mountains; she understood why the caravaners would go around rather than through them, for that alone. Then one morning an edge of red rock showed ahead. As they marched toward it, it rose higher and higher. By the next afternoon, they could see the lighter rock below, great sweeping curves of white and yellow—the same color, Paks thought, as the walls of Cortes Andres. And two days later, marching under those great stone ramparts, the Girdsmen turned aside.
Here a river emptied itself from those stone walls into the sand and rubble outside. The caravaners muttered and made gestures, but finally moved on, while High Marshal Connaught examined the map again. When the caravan was gone, he mounted his bay horse and led them up the watercourse, the horses lunging through the dry sand. Ahead, Paks could see towering white walls closing in. She wondered how they could ride in such a narrow space if the water came up.
"Bad place for an ambush," said Amberion beside her.
"Yes, sir."
"By the map, we'll be leaving this soon, and climbing into another stream's valley. I hope the route can be climbed by horses."
Paks had not thought of that, but looking at the sheer walls of stone, she realized what they might face. "If they can't—"
"Then we'll leave them. Build a stout camp, leave the novice yeomen and most of the men-at-arms."
Before the canyon walls closed completely, High Marshal Connaught turned left away from the river, leading them onto a rough slope of broken rock. He seemed to find a trail; Paks, far back in the group, could not see anything ahead to guide them. Socks heaved upward, stride by stride. They stopped often to rest the animals; the warhorses were curded with sweat. Amberion's horse, alone of all the animals, never showed the marks of hard riding, always slick-coated and fresh. Paks had noticed that about all the paladin's mounts in Fin Panir. Far back she could see the mules, head down, picking their way delicately and almost without effort over the rocks. Below, the canyon they had come from disappeared into a jumble of shadow and light. Now she could see far to the right, more swooping curves of stone, patterned by dark cracks. Far up on the heights, she thought she saw trees.
By late afternoon, she could see a strange shape against the sky: a dark cone with a scoop out of the point. Amberion pointed to it.
"That's marked on the map. Blackash cone, it said: we must bear left of it." As they came nearer, always climbing, the rock changed abruptly from white to red. The trail led through a break in that vertical red wall. Suddenly the black cone was close; it looked like a loose pile of dark rock sitting on the red stone around it. Paks stared. Had someone—some giant, surely—built a cairn? Long shadows streaked the land, making weird shapes of the wind-blown rocks around them. Now they could see that the canyon they had climbed from was only a small section of something much larger that extended far to the east, ending at last in a higher rampart of white topped with forest. South, the land dropped abruptly into that hole. It was hard to believe they had climbed anything so sudden. Westward the land dipped to a rumpled plain of sand, and that again dropped sharply: Paks could just see against the setting sun distant mountains beyond that drop. Northward, their view was blocked by the black cone and the higher land behind it. Red cliffs, these, with fortress-size blocks lying at their feet. Paks wondered if the others felt as small as she did.
That night they camped on the sandy plain just southwest of the black cone. A cold wind brushed the camp; stars blazed brighter than Paks had ever seen them. She woke several times to hear Ardhiel singing. Dawn came early on that high place. Paks saw the white stone below begin to glow even before she was aware of light in the sky. Then the high wall to the east stood clear against a green dawn. First light turned the red peaks north of them to fiery orange; then th
e light crept down to meet them, throwing blue shadows below.
They had some trouble to find the trail from there. Just to the left of the black cone, layers of stone like those that peel from a boiled egg curved downward, but the horses skidded and slipped. High Marshal Connaught sent Thelon ahead; he reported that the stony way ended in a drop four or five men high. Then they searched for a way around. Paks decided that walking in deep dry sand was harder than any marching she had ever done. The wind rose, blowing sand into their eyes. The horses flattened ears against it. The first three trails they tried led to sheer cliffs, and it was early afternoon before the scout found a safe route.
It began in a narrow grove of pines, where broad low boles rose from drifted sand, old trees bent by strong winds into a tangled thatch of branches. Below the trees, the trail followed a twisting ravine, its bed choked with boulders of garish red and black on a bed of sand; they radiated heat like coals. Across the ravine, as they went down, they could see outcrops of red rock. Suddenly the cleft they traveled angled back to the left, then crooked right again. They stood on a narrow platform above a small valley that led straight away toward a tangle of cliffs and canyons. On either side, sheer cliffs rose hundreds of feet, rose-red and orange, striped with black. To the right, an arm of the valley angled back away from them. Down the valley a stream reflected the sky; it looked wider than Paks had expected.
As they rode down into the valley, Paks heard conflicting opinions.
"What a farm that'd make," she heard from one of the yeomen with the mules. "Wind-shelter from those cliffs—water—must be good soil with all that grass."
"A long way to market," said another. "Unless you founded a grange out here, Tamar."
"Marry me, and we might," said the woman, laughing.
"Marry—I'd have married you in Fin Panir, but you wouldn't have it."
"And miss this? Come on, Dort, you weren't any more ready to settle down than I was. But couldn't we make a farm here?"
"I'll tell you that when I find the nearest market." Paks heard them laughing for some moments after.
"It is not good," muttered Balkon, who had turned his pony aside from the others to look closely at the rock wall nearest them. "See—" He poked at it with his axe-haft and a chunk came away; sand sifted after it. "It is soft here. Good rock there—" he pointed at the east wall of the valley, and at great cliffs beyond it. "But something is wrong here. With those cliffs, it must be deeper."
"Strange," murmured Ardhiel as Paks rode by. "It has an odd feel—very strange."
But most of the company liked its looks—green grass and water, walls far enough apart to allow maneuvering, yet close enough for protection. Then they rode out of the last rock-strewn mouth of the ravine, and found themselves once more in deep sand—this time damp.
"Ah," said the dwarf, eyes gleaming. "It is that this valley is choked with sand—something blocks it there—" he pointed at the far end. "The side rock goes down, very far below this; I feel it meet under our feet."
"Find us firm ground," said High Marshal Connaught to the scout. "These horses can't handle boggy—" He threw himself off as his horse sank hock-deep by one leg. They all dismounted. Close up the valley was smaller than they had thought; its hills were low dunes rising above the level, its stream only a trickle across the sand surface. "But plenty if we dig," the High Marshal assured the others. "It's like those waterholes in the low desert."
While the scout and several men-at-arms searched for a firm path to the north end of the valley, the Marshals and knights looked at the angled canyon that wound away to the right. That way the ground seemed firmer, and the little stream, though narrower, gurgled ankle deep over fine gravel.
"It's too bad we aren't going this way," said High Marshal Fallis. "I suppose it's blocked at the far end by another cliff."
"Let's look at it," said Marek, one of the knights, and the only member of the Order of Gird. "We ought to learn the shape of the land, in case of trouble."
"In case of trouble," said Joris dryly, "nothing in this land offers comfort. We should have been born with wings."
"I agree with Marek, though," said Connaught. "We should know, and mark the map."
They set off on foot, the High Marshals, Amberion and Paks, the knights, and Ardfiel and Balkon. In a few minutes an angle of rock cut them off from sight of the others. On either hand the cliffs rose straight out of the sand, as if carved by a knife. Paks noticed a great arch set into the northeast wall. Under it a dark shadowed space looked large enough for a building. She looked from cliff to cliff, uneasy. In several places the stone seemed to have broken away leaving an overhanging arch, some much smaller than others. She nudged Balkon.
"Why does the rock do that? Is it natural? Did something shape it?"
"What—oh, it is the arch you mean? That is stone itself. I have not seen before, but I have heard. It is good stone that can take an arch; the arch is the drossen shape—" He saw her puzzled look, sighed, and tried in Common. "The shape that stone holds when it is sound—strong—healthy. Not nedross, like that stone that we came by, where the wall broke to let us in. Look in the High Lord's Hall—you see that even human masons know the right shape, the good shape, for stone holding stone. The longer the arch, the better the stone."
"Oh." Paks shivered. She did not like this valley; it was hard to judge how high the cliffs were, how far they had come from their friends. She looked back, to see someone leading a horse across the stream, heading down the valley. She could not see the other men-at-arms or horses at all; cliffs cut off her view of the main valley. She craned her neck to look at the large arch again. Surely the whole party could shelter there—if you could get horses up the cliff. She started to laugh at that idea, and suddenly stopped. Something had moved in its shadow. For an instant she could not speak, but then she called to Amberion.
"What is it?" he asked, turning. Before Paks could answer, Ardhiel cried out in elven, swinging his bow from his shoulder and snatching arrows. Paks pointed upward, then staggered as an arrow slammed into her helmet.
"Keep your faces down!" bellowed High Marshal Fallis. "Eyes—" But Paks knew that, and had already dashed for a leaning rock. Pir and Adan huddled there too. More arrows clattered on the rocks around them. She heard a high-pitched cry from above, and then the terrible smack of a body on rocks. Another scream from across the canyon. Then silence.
"That won't be all," said High Marshal Fallis. Paks looked around. Ardhiel was close to the cliff on the far side; she saw Fallis near him. Connaught, Amberion, and Joris had taken shelter behind another rock near her, and Marek and Balkon behind yet another. She risked a quick glance upward, but could see nothing for the overhang.
"Beware!" Ardhiel's voice rose again, and he yelled something in elven. Paks saw a swarm of black-clad figures leap from cracks in the rock, turned just in time to meet more of them attacking on her side. She and the two knights leaped to their feet.
At first it seemed they might be cut down in their separate groups. The attackers were skilled with their narrow blades, and had numbers and height on their side. Adan staggered; a blade had gone deep in his leg. Paks covered his side; together she and Pir managed to fight their way back to High Marshal Connaught, half-carrying Adan between them. Fallis and Ardhiel dashed across to join them, and the group locked into a unit, back to back with Adan in the center. From her position, Paks could not see if any of the others, far back down the valley, had noticed any disturbance. She was fighting too hard to have breath to yell. She did not even recognize what she was fighting until the tip of Pir's sword flicked back one of the hoods.
"Elves!" she cried; the fine-boned face, the long graceful body now seeming the same as Ardhiel's. But the elf called to them.
"No—not elves. Iynisin—unsingers—once of our blood—"
"And we are still the true heirs," called one of the enemy, in elven. Paks could just follow the words. The voice held the same music as Ardhiel's, but was colder. "We have not
changed; you have fallen, cousin, making alliance with mortals and rockfolk, to the insult of your blood."
"Daskdusky scum," muttered Balkon, swinging his axe wide from his corner position.
Though outnumbered, the little group was able to shift slowly back toward the main valley. High Marshal Fallis, facing that way, told them he saw the men-at-arms coming. Paks, Pir, and Amberion, holding the rear, stepped back cautiously, keeping the enemy blades at bay. Then Marek called a warning. Paks glanced up at the nearest cliff. There, moving swiftly on the sheer wall as if it were level, a great many-legged thing dropped down on them. At the overhanging ledge it stepped into the air and fell, swinging on a shining line behind it, leaping from its first touch on the ground to arc high above their heads. Pir swung and missed; Paks twisted, trying to strike behind her; her sword clashed on Fallis's, and the thing leaped out to whirl and attack again.
While they were still shaken by this creature, from high overhead a loud voice cried a single word. Paks stopped short, hardly able to breathe. She felt as if she'd been dipped in ice. Her eyes roved, following the great monster. Now she could see it had almost the form of a spider, many legs around a bulbous body. She felt her hand loosening on her sword.
But with a ringing tone like that of a great bell, white light glowed around them. Paks could move again; she felt her heart beating wildly, but her hand clenched on the sword. As the monster leaped, she hacked at its head. Her sword skidded off the hard surface, but Pir's severed a leg. Paks thrust again, for the eyes. It reared back, aiming small tubes along its belly at her. Amberion shoved her aside. A gout of grayish fluid missed her; she heard Adan cry out behind. But by then Amberion's sword had severed the head, and the thing lay twitching on the ground.
"Stay close," said Amberion. "It is a spell of fear laid on us." Paks felt no fear, now, and fought on.
In the space of the monster's attack, more enemy fighters had come from the cliffs to cut them off from the rest of the party. These were bowmen, close enough that their arrows could wound even through armor. Between them and the bowmen were two ranks of swords. Paks took a deep breath. She had not expected to have such a short career as paladin—not even paladin yet, she reminded herself—but she thought she would as soon die in this company as any other. She saw Balkon bend to kiss his axe. High Marshal Fallis had done something for Adan; he was standing more steadily. Connaught frowned at the enemy, lips folded. Amberion touched Paks on the arm.
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