The trickle of anger was building to a torrent of fury.
“Now,” said the mistress of novices, “are there any questions?”
“What about girls?” the insolent Woom asked. “Only one girl between four men?”
Thaile clenched her fists. One woman and four boys! She Felt Mist’s temper flare beside her.
Mearn took offense, also, and glared. “In time you may find a suitable partner, Novice, if you are worthy. We of the College pair off in the same way all respectable men and women do in Thume. We bear children, and of course many of them are Gifted. We expect monogamy and fidelity. Promiscuity is strongly discouraged. I trust you will all remember that in future.”
And again her ugly brown eyes rested on Thaile.
“There is one law that you must never break, however,” Mearn continued. “Sorcerers do not marry other sorcerers. You will find partners among the mundane population outside of the College. There is an excellent reason for that, which I shall not explain at this time. At the moment you are unable to leave the grounds, so you are expected to remain celibate. You are required to remain celibate, and if you break the rules you will be punished severely. Are there any further questions?”
“Yes,” Thaile said, her heart pounding. “Novice Thaile?”
“Where is Leeb?”
Mearn’s puny mouth shrank to invisibility. “Who?”
“I think you know who.”
“Indeed I do not.”
“Well, I do!” Thaile shouted, jumping to her feet. “I want—”
“Sit down!”
“No! I want Leeb, and I want back the years of my life you stole from me, and I am not going to do anything you say until I get them!”
“Novice!”
Thaile was too furious and too uncertain and too frightened to stay and argue. She could stand no more. She knew that the only alternative to anger was to burst into tears, and that would be disaster. “I want Leeb!” she screamed. “And I will never go near that awful Defile place!” She turned on her heel and ran out of the School, into the downpour.
She floundered across the flooded, slippery meadow, and in seconds she was soaked in icy water. She reached the Way and ran headlong, as fast as she could.
Two or three bends brought her to her cottage. She stumbled up the steps, burst through the door and slammed it. She leaned back against it to keep the rest of the world out.
Then, and only then, she let the tears flow, weeping for a lover she could not remember.
3
In her youth, Queen Inosolan of Krasnegar had made many strange journeys. She had crossed the continent of Zark on a camel. She had traveled from Hub to Kinvale in a single morning in an ensorceled carriage. She had ridden a mule over the Progiste Mountains into Thume, the Accursed Land, and miraculously survived to depart on a magic carpet. But nothing in her experience compared with her pursuit of the goblin king.
Although she had not visited the countryside around Kinvale in twenty years, she would have expected it to remain unchanged. For centuries, northwest Julgistro had been one of the Impire’s most prosperous provinces. It was famous for hillside orchards and vineyards, for picturesque little towns dozing under coverlets of elms in the valleys, for rich farmland and quaint old temples. Now it was a wasteland, a charnel land, smoking and dead. Even color had fled, leaving ashes and stones, gray branches against a blank white sky, black fields with white snow in the furrows. The only people to be seen were small patrols of goblins, and even those were rare.
Inos had read of war and the horrors of war. She had never visualized such devastation as this, and she thought the people who wrote the books never had, either. Buildings and haystacks and orchards had been torched, livestock slaughtered. Surely not everyone had perished? Surely there must be thousands of survivors hiding somewhere? Not for long, though—this was midwinter, they would be freezing to death. Moreover, fast as the goblins had come, the God of Famine would be treading on their heels.
The Imperial High Command had learned from bitter experience that it must hold Pondague Pass at all costs. Whenever raiding parties of goblins broke through, it was the Evil’s own job to corner them. Goblins traveled light, they traveled on foot, and they could outrun even light cavalry. Now the entire horde was moving over the landscape like a winter storm.
Fortunately, they appreciated that their captives could not run like that. Horses were provided, and for six days Inos hardly set foot to the ground between dawn and dusk. Only once in her life had she ever experienced such a mad whirlwind ride, when she and Azak had raced from IIrane to Hub to outrun a war. This time she was trying to join a war. She had been a lot younger in those days, too, and green men were worse than red. At least djinns treated horses with some respect. Goblins had no such scruples. They insisted that she and her children ride until their steeds fell beneath them. Then replacements would be produced and the awful chase would continue. Fortunately Kadie was a superb horsewoman. Gath preferred boats, but he managed.
Thus Inos viewed the ruins of Julgistro from within a troop of a dozen murderous savages, sweeping across the new desert like leaves in the wind. Hill followed valley followed hill. Life became a continuum of blowing snow, the thunder of hooves on the iron-hard ground; straining, foaming, dying horses, and acrid, ever-present smoke streaming eastward alongside.
The leader was a nightmarish chief named Eye Eater, whose mission was to return Death Bird’s son safely to his father’s loving arms. The three Krasnegarians were an insignificant addition. For them Blood Beak’s presence at Kinvale had been great good fortune, and Inos preferred not to speculate on what might have happened had circumstances been different.
The goblin horde had rolled over the landscape like a rock slide. Behind it nothing stood, almost nothing moved. Obviously it was meeting no resistance now. It had been only a few hours ahead when she set out with Eye Eater’s troop, and yet after six days she had not caught up with it. No army should ever be able to travel at such a speed! Eye Eater had wasted no time, except on three occasions when small bands of survivors were sighted. In each case, the imps were run down and overcome without the loss of one goblin. The fighting was over in minutes; it was the ensuing barbarities that caused delay.
She had known that goblins were as savage as any race in Pandemia, but she had not understood the joy they found in wanton cruelty. Burned and mutilated corpses lined the road.
Men and boys had been rounded up and tortured at leisure, even the wounded, even the youngest. Soon picket fences seemed incomplete if they were not decorated with impaled babies.
At first she worried about the effect these horrors would have on her children, but she soon realized that they were adapting better than she was.
“It’s the way they were brought up, Mama,” Kadie assured her. ”Papa explained it to me once. They don’t know any better.”
“And they have their own rules,” Gath added. “They don’t kill women.” This was true. Women and girls were mainly spared anything beyond rape, and punching if they resisted. Even when they resorted to weapons, they would be disarmed if at all possible, or else cleanly slain. In their way, goblins had standards.
Inos had suggested that Kadie should find some boys’ clothing. Kadie had retorted that she was much safer as a girl. “There would be no danger,” Gath suggested cheerfully. “They would take your clothes off before they did anything to you.”
“Maybe you should dress as a girl!” Kadie snapped. “Same problem!” Gath said, but he spoiled his worldly grin with a blush.
They were adapting. Inos was both relieved and proud. Even Kadie had picked up goblin dialect much faster than she had. Gath seemed to use his freak prescience to foresee what understanding would eventually be reached and then just leapfrog over the preliminary confusion. It was paradoxical, but it worked.
The evenings were the worst—bonfires and feasts and the inevitable torture sessions. However blighted the countryside seemed, the goblins always turned up a few male prisoners to brighten their evenings. Cruel and destructive, they were like children, the evil part of children. If the countryside was strange to Inos, it was even more strange to them. Often they would demand explanations from her—what a cobbler’s last was for, or a butter churn. When she had explained whatever it was, they would smash it.
Eye Eater was a monster, as was to be expected of a chief. His capacity for rape was incredible, his cruelty unsurpassed. Even his own men seemed to go in fear of him, and Inos certainly did. Once or twice he asked her meaningfully if all Krasnegarian women were as hard to tame as Kadie, but the memory of Quiet Stalker’s mysterious death protected mother and daughter both. They were not molested, and Inos did not need to use her occult royal glamour. She assumed that it would be needed again eventually; she hoped that it would always be effective.