Farther on, the wall crossed the road, or had. It had been breached there centuries earlier, in building the highway. There were no soldiers manning it.
Two days later they saw what Baver took to be a high imperial official, a horseman richly dressed, escorted by a troop of heavy cavalry. The troopers looked formidable in chain mail, helmets and breastplates. They were some two hundred meters away when they rode into sight. Baver felt instant unease, and told Hans they’d best get off the road. Hans didn’t argue. They pushed their horses up a slope and into the forest, where they watched from among the trees as the party passed a hundred meters below.
They spent that night among the poplars beside a brawling mountain stream. When Hans awakened Baver, it was still dark.
“Get up,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard above the water. “I had a dream. I want to leave this place.”
They saddled and bridled their animals, loaded the pckhorse and left, eating breakfast as they rode. The ist of their airag was gone—it was all they’d had, cross-
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ing the desert—and they were back to a diet of marmot again.
The sky began to pale shortly after they set out. “What was your dream?” Baver asked.
Hans didn’t answer at once. Finally he said, “It was more real than any other dream I’ve had. It seemed I’d wakened, and it was daylight. So I walked in the forest, up the slope, to see what I could shoot. I had shot a grouse, ana was pulling the skin off it, when I heard men at our camp, shouting. I went back down and saw them riding away. They had our horses, and you were their captive.
‘Then I woke up. You don’t know how relieved I was to find it still night, and you still there.”
They rode on a few score meters before he spoke again. “The next side ravine that comes down to the stream, we’ll leave the road and turn up it. And lie in wait. We’ll see if armed men come.”
They rode on in silence for a few minutes. “What kind of men were they?” Baver asked at last.
“They were warriors, or at least they were armed. Though not armored like those we saw yesterday. And their clothes were all alike, red and yellow.”
Soldiers, Baver thought, probably light cavalry, if they’d worn no armor. Hans’s dream felt suddenly more real. It was unlikely that Hans had seen uniforms before, except armor, and presumably he had no concept of them.
Daylight grew. The road took them downhill now, through heavy forest. Near the foot of the slope, they rode into the open. A dozen meters below them, the road crossed a small side stream and turned, and—
Riding out of the forest on the other side of the stream was a troop of horsemen, light cavalry uniformed in red and yellow. Their commander saw the two travelers, and shouted an order. The troop spurred their mounts to a gallop.
Hans said nothing. He kicked his own horse into a dead run and left the road, galloping down the last brief
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slope and up the side ravine, the spares and packhorse pounding behind. They splashed through shallows and into the woods, Baver following. The first three cleared a windfall, then Baver’s jumped, caught a hoof on a branch and landed falling. Baver catapulted from the saddle, crashed into a tree and lay stunned. Before he could regain his wits, soldiers had ridden up and were dismounting. One of them jumped on him.
Baver struggled. The soldier was small but tough. Baver, on the other hand, was considerably larger, and tougher than he realized. He rolled the man off him and had him down, striking at his face to free himself from the man’s tenacious grip. Then others jumped in, and he was buried beneath them.
THIRTY-TWO
Tenzin Geshe sat in a lotus posture, his open eyes unseeing. What he saw, he saw psychically, in his trance realm.
Meanwhile, around him the Circle of Power knew nothing, directly, of what he sensed or what he did. He’d briefed them beforehand, but in their power trance they wouldn’t remember that. With a little effort, they could review the session later, but just now their sole function was to blindly channel power through their leader, and stabilize his psyche against possible assault.
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