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.
Still the man did not look up at them, but walked with eyes downcast, step by agonized step with the staff to support him. He was young, wearing hall-garments; he bore a knife at his belt, and the staff on which he leaned was the broken remnant of a pike. His white hair was tangled, his cheek cut and bruised, blood soaked the rough bandages on his leg. Vanye hailed him, and yet the youth kept walking; he cursed, and thrust his sheathed sword across the youth’s chest.
The qujal stopped, downcast eyes fixed on something other and elsewhere; but when Vanye let fall the sword, he began to walk again, struggling in his lameness.
“He is mad,” Jhirun said.
“No,” said Kithan. “He does not wish to see you.”
Their horses moved along with the youth, slowly, by halting paces; and softly Kithan began to question him, in his own tongue—received an anguished glance of him, and an answer, spoken on hard-drawn breaths, the while he walked. Names were named that touched keenly Vanye’s interest, but no other word of it could he grasp. The youth exhausted his supply of breath and fell silent, walked on, as he had been before.
Morgaine touched Siptah and moved on, Vanye at her side; and Jhirun with them. Kithan followed. Vanye looked back, at the youth who still doggedly, painfully, struggled behind them.
“What did he say?” Vanye asked of Morgaine. She shrugged, not in a mood to answer.
“He is Allyvy,” said Kithan in her silence. “He is of Sotharrn; and he has the same madness as took the villagers: he says that he is bound for Abarais, as all are going, believing this Chya Roh.”
Vanye looked at Morgaine, found her face grim and set; and she shrugged. “So we are too late,” she said, “as I feared.”