Wall of Shiuan

“Hetharu—” Kithan’s mouth twisted in a grimace of contempt. “Sotharrn always feared him... that did he succeed to power in Ohtij-in, then attack would come. And they were right, of course. Some of our fields flooded this season; and more would have gone the next; and the next. It was inevitable that the more ambitious of us would reach across the Suvoj.”

“Will the other holds follow him or fight him now?”

Kithan shrugged. “What difference to the Shiua; and to us—Even we bowed and kissed his hand in Ohtij-in. We who wanted nothing but to live undisturbed... have no power against whoever does not. Yes, most will be with him: to what purpose anything else? My guards have gone over to him: that is where they are going. There is no question of it. They saw my prospects, and they know defeat when they smell it. So they went to him. The lesser holds will flock to do the same.”

“You may go too if you like,” Morgaine said.

Kithan regarded her, disturbed.

“Be quite free to do so,” she said.

The horses walked along together some little distance; and Kithan looked at Morgaine with less and less assurance, as if she and the drug together confused him. He looked at Jhirun, whose regard of him was hard; and at Vanye, who stared back at him expressionless, giving him nothing, neither of hatred nor of comfort. Once more he glanced the circuit of them, and last of all at Vanye, as if he expected that some terrible game were being made of him.

For a moment Vanye thought that he would go; his body was tense in the saddle, his eyes, through their haze, distracted.

“No,” Kithan said then, and his shoulders fell. He rode beside them sunk in his own misery.

None spoke, Vanye rode content enough in Morgaine’s presence by him, a nearness of mind in which words were needless; he knew her, that had they been alone she would have had nothing to say. Her eyes scanned the trail as they rode, but her mind was elsewhere, desperately occupied.

At last she drew from her boot top a folded and age-yellowed bit of parchment a map cut from a book; and silently, leaning from the saddle, she indicated to him the road. It wound up from the Suvoj, that great rift clearly recognizable; but the lands of Ohtij-in were shown as wide, plotted fields, that no longer existed. There were fields mapped on this side also, along the road and within the hills; and holds besides that which seemed to be Sotharra, scattered here and there about the central mountains.

And amid those mountains, a circular mark, lay Abarais: Vanye could not read the runes, but her finger indicated it, and she named it aloud.

He lifted his eyes from the brown ink and yellowed page to the mountains that now loomed before them. Greenish-black evergreen covered their flanks. Their rounded peaks were bald and smooth and their slopes were a tumble of great stones, aged, weather-worn—a ruin of mountains in a dying land.

Above them passed the Broken Moon, in a clear sky; the weather held for them, warm as the sun reached its zenith; but when the sun declined toward afternoon, the hills seemed overlain with a foul haze.

It was not cloud; none wreathed these low hills. It was the smoke of fires, from some far place with in the mountains, where other holds had been marked on the map.

“I think that would be Domen,” said Kithan, when they questioned him on it. “That is next, after Sotharrn. On the far side of the mountains lie Marotn and Arisith; and Hetharu’s forces will have reached for those also.”

“Still increasing in number,” said Morgaine.

“Yes,” said Kithan. “The whole of Shiuan is within his hands—or will be, within days. He is burning the shelters, I would judge: that is the way to move the humanfolk, to draw them with him. And perhaps he burns the holds themselves. He may want no lords to rival him.”

Morgaine said nothing.

“It will do him no good,” Vanye said, to dispossess Kithan of any hopes he might still hold. “Hetharu may have Shiuan—but Roh has Hetharu, whether or not Hetharu has yet realized it.”

Stones rose beside the road, Standing Stones, that called to mind that cluster beside the road in Hiuaj, near the marsh; but these stood straight and powerful in the evening light.

And beyond those Stones moved a white-haired figure, leaning on a staff, who struggled to walk the road.

They gained upon that man rapidly; and surely by now the traveler must have heard them coming, and might have looked around; but he did not. He moved at the same steady pace, painfully awkward.

There was an eeriness about that deaf persistence; Vanye laid his sword across the saddlebow as they came alongside the man, fearing some plan concealed in this bizarre attitude—a ruse to put a man near Morgaine. He moved his horse between, reining back to match his pace.