The young kzahhn emerged from his moment of tether. The host about him stirred, flicked ears. The birds above them were stationary. Again the discordant horn was blown, and the doll-like images were carried away to their cave in the natural fortress.
It was time to move forward.
Hrr-Brahl Yprt swung himself up into Rukk-Ggrl’s high saddle. The movement dislodged Zzhrrk, his white cowbird. It wheeled up into the air, and then settled again on Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s shoulder. Many of the host had their own cowbirds. The harsh croak of the cowbird was sweet to a phagor ear. The birds played a useful role in ridding the phagors of the ticks that infested their bodies.
This tick, an unconsidered creature, formed a vital link in the complex ecological structure of the world—and an undisclosed bond between deadly enemies.
While the young kzahhn was in tetherlike communication with his ancestors, livid clouds had drawn over the snowscape. Light was reflected back and forth between overcast and ground. In the diffused, nonpolarized illumination, where no shadows were cast and living things became spectres, human beings would have been lost. There was no horizon. Everything was pearly grey.
Whiteout meant little to the ancipital army, with its air-octaves to follow. Now that the communication ceremony was finished, foot servants led four kaidaw ponies forward through the whiteout. The single humps of the animals were scarcely fleshed out; their rough coats were still dapple. Astride each pony was one of the kzahhn’s four fillocks. Each fillock wore eagle feathers or pallid papilionaceous rock flowers woven into her head-hair. This quartet of young beauties had been selected by the component to keep the Kzahhn Hrr-Brahl Yprt company during the years of the crusade.
A cool breeze, forty degrees below zero, blew from the glacial heights to the east, to ruffle the delicate filaments of the coats of the ancipital damsels. Beneath those filaments lay the thickly matted phagor coat, almost impenetrable to cold except when soaked with water.
The breeze stirred the cloud cover. As though a shutter had been opened at a window, the shapes of the known world returned. The host of creatures was revealed, and the sheer walls of Hhryggt behind them, and the four fillocks, ghostly pale at first. The whiteout thinned. Ahead, bleak defiles became visible which would lead to a place of destiny twelve thousand metres nearer sea level.
The Hrastyprt standard was raised.
The young kzahhn raised a hand as signal, pointed forward.
He dug his horned toes into Rukk-Ggrl’s flank. The beast lifted its horned head and moved forward over the brittle firn. The host got slowly under way with its unnatural shambling movements. Slate grated, ice rang. Cowbirds floated high on updraughts. The crusade had begun.
Its consummation would come as the ancestral images predicted, when Freyr concealed itself behind Batalix for the third time. Then the kzahhn’s army would strike the Sons of Freyr who lived in that accursed town where Hrr-Brahl Yprt’s noble grandstallun had been killed. That great old kzahhn had been forced to jump from the top of a tower to his death below. Vengeance was on its way: the town would be obliterated.
Perhaps it was no wonder that the infant Laintal Ay cried at his mother’s knee.
Year by year, the crusade progressed. The inhabitants of Oldorando remained in ignorance of that distant nemesis. They laboured in the toils of their own history.
Dresyl was no longer as energetic a leader as he had been. He stayed more and more in town, fussing with details of organisations which had gone smoothly before he interfered. His sons hunted in his stead.
The scent of change made everyone restless. Young men in the makers corps wanted to leave and take up hunting and trapping. The young hunters themselves would not behave. Dresyl already had a hunter under his command who had a natural daughter by an older man’s wife. Such behaviour was becoming common, and fights with it.
“We behaved better than that when I was a lad,” Dresyl complained to Aoz Roon, forgetting the pranks of his own youth. “We’ll be murdering each other next, like the savages of the Quzint.”
Dresyl could not decide whether to try and crush Aoz Roon or make the man conform by praising him. He inclined to the latter, for Aoz Roon was becoming famed as a cunning hunter, but such moves angered Dresyl’s son Nahkri, who felt enmity for Aoz Roon, for the sort of reasons known only to the young.