And she shivered, a quick and strange gesture, full of weariness, and set Siptah to a quicker pace, to leave the village behind them.
The pass closed about them, a place where rock had rumbled to the very edge of the road, boulders man-large. Vanye gazed up at the dark heights, and with a shiver of his own, used the spurs. They came through the throat of that place at a pace that set the echoes flying, and there was no fall of stones, no stir of life from the cliffs.
But when, halfway across the next small valley, he turned and looked back, he saw a red glow of fire atop those cliffs.
“Liyo,” he said.
Morgaine looked, and said nothing. The Baien gray had struck that pace that, on level ground, he could hold for some space; and the gelding could match him stride for stride, but not forever.
The alarm was given: henceforth there was no stopping. What Roh had not known was spread now throughout the countryside.
Soon enough there was another, answering fire among the hills to their left.
The towers appeared unexpectedly in the morning light, half-hidden in forested crags: walls in any turreted and more regular than those of Ohtij-in, but surely as old. They dominated the widest of the valleys that they had seen; and cultivated fields lay round about.
Morgaine reined back briefly, scanning that hold, that guarded the pass before them.
And far behind them, horses unable to stay their pace, rode the three qujal, and last of all, Jhirun.
Vanye unhooked his sword and secured the sheath, marking the smoke that hung above those walls. He laid the naked blade across the saddlebow. Morgaine took Changeling from its place beneath her knee, and laid it, still sheathed, across her own.
“Liyo,” Vanye said softly. “When you will.”
“Carefully,” she said.
She let Siptah go; and the gelding matched pace with him, at an easy gait, toward the towers and the pass.
Smoke rose there steadily, as it had from many a point about the valleys, fire after fire passing the alarm.
But it was not, as the others had been, white brush-smoke; it spread darkly on the sky, and as they rode near enough to see the walls distinctly, they could see in that stain upon the heavens the wheeling flight of birds, that hovered above the hold.
The gates stood agape, battered from their bulges: they could see that clearly from the main road. A dead horse lay in the ravine beside the spur of road that diverged toward those gates; birds flapped up from it, disturbed in their feeding.
And curiously, across that empty gateway were cords, knotted with bits of white feather.
Morgaine reined in—suddenly turned off toward that gate; and Vanye protested, but no word did she speak, only rode warily, slowly toward that gateway, and he made haste to overtake her, falling in at her side the while she approached that strange barrier. The only sound was the ring of hooves on stone and the hollow echo off the walls—that, and the wind, that blew strongly at the cords.
Ruin lay inside. A cloud of black birds, startled, fluttered up from the stripped carcass of an ox that lay amid the court. On the steps of the keep sprawled a dead man; another lay in the shadow of the wall, prey to the birds. He had been qujal. His white hair proclaimed it.
And some three, hanged, twisted slowly on the fire-blackened tree that had grown in the center of the courtyard.
Morgaine reached for the lesser of her weapons, and fire parted the strands of the feathered cords. She urged Siptah slowly forward. The walls echoed to the sound of the horses and to the alarmed flutter of the carrion birds. Smoke still boiled up from the smouldering core of the central keep, from the wreckage of human shelters that had clustered about it.
Riders clattered up the stones outside. Morgaine wheeled Siptah about as Kithan’s party came within the gates and reined to a dazed halt.
Kithan looked slowly about him, his thin face set in horror; there was horror too in the face of Jhirun, who arrived last within the gateway, her mare stepping skittishly past the blowing strands of cords and feathers. Jhirun held tightly to the charms about her neck and stopped just inside the gates.