A Man Rides Through

  Terisa felt a strong, if rather irrational, conviction that Queen Madin had a right to know what her husband was doing. Otherwise the Queen might go to her grave believing that King Joyse had lost his interest in life, his commitment to Mordant; his love for her.

  It was typical of Terisa’s mood – her soul shocked by Sternwall’s danger, her thoughts troubled by the ramifications of what Master Eremis was doing, and yet her heart full of Geraden – that she considered Queen Madin’s feelings at least as important as King Joyse’s need for help.

  So she wrestled her roan up the hillsides, rode it gingerly down the gullies, and trotted it inexpertly across the flats, not precisely without complaint, but without significant self-pity.

  The Care of Termigan, as Geraden explained, wasn’t heavily populated. And most of the towns and villages were spread out along the Broadwine River, away from the Pestil and Alend. After the second day, the two riders seemed alone in the stringent landscape.

  Terisa began to think that Termigan had already lost everything it had ever contained worth fighting for.

  For three days, dark clouds locked the sky, threatening rain. Water and mud would have perfected the pleasure of her journey; nevertheless she wished for rain. Orison could always use water. And mud would make the movements of armies more difficult.

  Despite the fierce way they glowered down at the earth, however, the clouds were only able to spit a few brief sprinkles before they blew away. The weather itself seemed to have Master Eremis’ best interests at heart.

  On the other hand, as the clouds drifted off, the terrain improved, as if sunlight had an ameliorating effect on the slopes and soil. Trees became more common: soon the errant and bedraggled copses of the rest of Termigan began to accumulate into long stands of elder and sycamore, ash and wattle. “We’re getting closer,” commented Geraden. “Fayle is known for its wood.

  “Actually, that’s one reason Alend traditionally attacks through Termigan or Armigite rather than Fayle. And it’s why the Fayle was King Joyse’s second ally, after the Tor. You could make yourself old trying to run a military campaign through the forests of Fayle. The Care has more history of resistance – or maybe I should say of successful resistance – than most of the rest of Mordant.

  “That probably explains,” he concluded humorously, “where the Fayle got his loyalty – and Queen Madin got her stubbornness.”

  Terisa felt that if she never saw another hillside covered with gorse and nettles again she could die happy. “How much farther?”

  He consulted the map. “Two days, if we’re lucky. It’s easy to get lost in woods and forests. And I’ve never been in Fayle before. Actually, Batten in Armigite is the closest I’ve ever been to Romish.

  “But the good news” – he looked around – “is that we ought to start seeing people again soon. According to the map, we’ll go right through several villages. Technically, some of them will still be Termigan. But for all practical purposes we’re coming into the Care of Fayle right now.”

  Simply because he said those words, she took a harder look ahead – and spotted what appeared to be a smudge against the horizon.

  Frowning, she tried to squint her vision into better focus.

  Geraden noticed the direction of her gaze. “What do you see?”

  “I don’t know. Smoke?”

  He squinted as well, then shook his head. “I can’t tell.” Terisa didn’t need to say anything; he had the same memories she did. After scanning the map again, he added, “That might actually be the first village. A place called Aperyte. Unless I’m wrong about where we are. If it has a smithy, the forge will smoke.”

  “Let’s find out,” she said under her breath.

  Self-consciously, he loosened his sword in its scabbard. Then he tightened his grip on the reins and urged his gray into a canter.

  Her gelding followed. She was getting better at telling it what to do.

  Between the trees, the ground was covered with clumps of dull grass and bracken. The first hint of evening was in the air, but she didn’t notice it; she was concentrating ahead, trying to see past a number of intervening wattle thickets. The wattle had bright yellow flowers that grew in sprays like mimosa blooms. The ground was rising: if she had turned in her saddle, she could have seen a panorama unrolled behind her. But she had watched Houseldon burn; she didn’t have any attention to spare for flowers and vistas.

  The distance was greater than she expected. She began to think that the smudge she had seen was a trick of the light.

  Then, abruptly, a knot of copses stood back from a clearing.

  A corral with a split-rail fence filled most of the clearing. It wasn’t as big as it first appeared; but it was plainly big enough for ten or fifteen horses. Terisa – who felt that she was becoming an expert on horse manure – was sure that the corral had been full of horses.

  Recently.

  But not now.

  Geraden stopped. He studied the clearing. “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “The gate’s closed.”

  He was right: the gate wasn’t just closed; it was tied shut.

  “Why?” he muttered softly. “Why take all your horses out and then tie the gate?”

  She lowered her voice. “Why not?”

  “Why bother?” he returned.

  Terisa had no idea.

  After a moment, he breathed, “Come on,” and slipped out of his saddle. “Let’s go see what we’re getting into.”

  When she had dismounted, he led the gray and her gelding away until they were hidden among the copses, out of sight of the clearing. There he tied the reins to a tree; but he didn’t uncinch the girths or drop the saddlebags.

  Taking Terisa’s hand, he moved quietly toward the village.

  Because she was trying so hard to look ahead, peer between the trees, she had trouble with her footing. Geraden, on the other hand, didn’t trip or stumble. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out how he knew where he was going. Then she realized that he was following worn lines in the dirt – marks made by people and animals that had reason to go in every conceivable direction from their homes.

  He brought her to the back of a daub-and-wattle shed. Actually, it was little more than a shelter intended to protect straw for the horses from the weather.

  Beyond it lay the village.

  At a glance, Terisa could see perhaps a dozen huts, all built of daub-and-wattle, all with roofs made from what appeared to be bundles of banana leaves. Among them stood an open-sided structure that might have served as a meeting hall. The size of the cleared space gave the impression that there were more houses and buildings out of sight behind the ones nearby.

  From somewhere among them rose a stream of thin, dirty smoke.

  The village was disturbingly quiet. No people shouting to each other. No people at all. No dogs. No chickens scratching the dirt. No children whimpering or playing in the distance. The breeze raised a little furl of dust along the hard ground between the huts, but it didn’t make any noise.

  “Oh, shit,” Geraden growled softly.

  “Maybe they’re all at work,” she murmured. “In the fields or something.”

  He shook his head. “A village like this is never empty. Not like this.”

  “Evacuation? Maybe the Fayle got them all away?”

  He thought for a moment. “I like that idea better.” Then he said, “As long as we’re whispering, let’s go see if they really are gone.”

  Together, they crept into the village.

  Its inhabitants really were gone.

  So were all its animals and fowl; beasts of burden; pets. Terisa had the impression that even the vermin had disappeared.

  Shadows lengthened across the bare ground. Dusk seemed to gather in the huts and peek out from their gaping doorways, their eyeless windows. The breeze brought the taste of something cold, a hint of something rotten.

  She was afraid to ask Geraden if he recognized it.

  The
village did in fact contain a smithy, but the forge was cold. The smoke came from somewhere else.

  Shortly, she and Geraden discovered its source. At the northern edge of the village, three huts in a cluster were on fire.

  They had been burning for some time – had nearly burned themselves out. Only their blackened frames still stood. Small flames licked in and out of the fallen remains of the roofs; the smoke drifting upward had a bitter smell.

  All three were full of corpses.

  Terisa gagged when she saw the stumps of charred arms and legs, the lumps of heads protruding from the ash. “Is that all of them?” she choked thickly. “All of them?”

  “No.” Geraden was having trouble breathing. “Probably just a few families. The whole village wouldn’t fit. These are the ones who didn’t get away.”

  Inspired by nausea – and by the strange scent on the breeze, which didn’t have anything to do with burned wattle and charred bodies – Terisa muttered, “Or they’re the ones who did.”

  He gave her a look like a whiplash.

  She heard a faint, rustling noise – bare feet scuttling across the dirt. She looked around; her peripheral vision seemed to catch a glimpse of something as it slipped into the evening shadows. Then it was gone. She couldn’t be sure that she had actually seen anything.

  Yet a chill went down her back as she remembered what Master Eremis had told the lords of the Cares. All Mordant is already assailed. Strange wolves have slaughtered the Tor’s son. Devouring lizards swarm the storehouses of the Demesne. Pits of fire appear in the ground of Termigan.

  But that wasn’t all. Now she remembered it precisely.

  Ghouls harry the villages of Fayle.

  “Geraden—” She was barely able to clear her throat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He was still staring at the huts; he hadn’t heard what she heard. But he nodded roughly.

  For no apparent reason, he pulled out his sword as he started back toward the horses.

  She hoped he didn’t have a reason. Nevertheless she was glad that he was armed – and that he was determined, if not skilled. She stayed close to his shoulder all the way through the village and past the corral.

  Their boots made too much noise on the hard ground: she wouldn’t have been able to hear any soft rustling sounds. But twice she thought she saw movement in the heart of a shadow, the depths of a hut, as if the dark were coming to life.

  She was irrationally relieved to find the horses where she and Geraden had left them – and to find them alive. They were both uneasy: the gray bobbed its head fretfully; the roan kept rolling its eyes. Maybe they smelled the same scent that made her so nervous. They were difficult to manage at first, until they realized that they were no longer tied to the tree.

  Respecting the uneasiness of the horses – and his own distress – Geraden led Terisa in a wide circuit beyond the empty village before returning to the route marked on the Termigan’s map.

  Until nightfall forced them to stop, they put as much distance as they could between themselves and Aperyte. She didn’t want to stop at all; but of course they couldn’t find their way safely in the dark. A flashlight would have come in handy. A big flashlight. Sure, she muttered to herself sourly. And while she was at it, why not an armored car to ride in? Or even an airplane to drop a few strategic bombs on Esmerel? On High King Festten’s army?

  All Geraden needed was a mirror.

  He could do it, if he could get to his glass – the one which had brought her here.

  Sure.

  When they made camp, she helped him build the biggest fire they could. She hunted as far as she dared, collecting firewood. Then, while they ate supper, she commented morosely, “I don’t know what made me say that.”

  Geraden looked at her across the stewpot out of which he was eating.

  “You said they were the ones who didn’t get away. I said they were the ones who did. I don’t know why I said that.”

  He tried without much success to smile. “Let’s hope you just have a morbid imagination.” The firelight on his face reminded her of the Termigan.

  She couldn’t smile, either. “Why is it,” she went on, trying to exorcise images which haunted her, “everything that comes here by translation is so destructive? Why is it so easy to find terrible things in mirrors? Is the universe really so malign?”

  “I certainly hope not.” In a transparent effort to reassure her, Geraden grimaced lugubriously. Then he set himself to give her an answer.

  “It’s probably true that every world has predators. But even if a world didn’t contain any violence at all, its creatures or powers might still be destructive if they were translated – if they were taken out of their natural place. There’s nothing immoral about a pit of fire – as long as you leave it where it belongs. What’s really destructive is the man who translates it somewhere else.

  “Would you call a fox destructive? After all, it hunts chickens. And people need those chickens. Even so, there’s nothing wrong with the fox.

  “For all we know, the firecat that burned Houseldon might be the same thing as a fox in its own world. It might be anything. It might even be an administer of charity.”

  An administer of charity. Just for a moment, she took the idea seriously. Someone who ran a mission, for example. Then, however, she was struck by the thought of Reverend Thatcher going around setting towns on fire. On his own terms, that would please him. But literally setting towns on fire—

  Involuntarily, she grinned. When Geraden rolled his eyes at her, she started laughing.

  She felt like a fool – like she was losing her mind. But she went on laughing, and after a while she felt better.

  Nevertheless she didn’t sleep very well that night. She kept expecting the horses to snort and shy – kept expecting to smell something cold and slightly rotten in the dark. And for some reason Geraden spent most of the night snoring like a bandsaw. When she nudged him awake in the early gray of dawn, so that they could be on their way, she felt cold herself and vaguely stupid, as if the matter inside her skull had begun to turn rancid.

  The day began well. The air was clear and crisp, and the horses moved easily along the increasingly traveled paths. And before noon she and Geraden came upon a village that had nothing wrong with it.

  Nothing, that is, except anxiety. When the people of the village heard what Terisa and Geraden had found in Aperyte, they muttered nervously and scanned the woods around their homes and began to talk about leaving.

  “Ghouls,” a woman pronounced, confirming Terisa’s guess. “Don’t know what else to call them. Never seen one – but the lord sent men to warn us. Attack at dusk or dawn. Little critters, almost like children. Green and smelly.

  “Eat every kind of flesh. Don’t even leave the grease and bones. That’s what the lord’s men said.”

  Geraden scowled as if he were in pain. “That’s why the gate was closed,” he muttered. “The horses never got out. They were eaten right there in the corral.”

  Terisa was thinking, They’re the ones who did. They escaped into their huts and somehow sealed the doors. And then they were incinerated in their own homes.

  Eremis.

  She was beginning to understand why King Joyse had fought for twenty years to strip Alend and Cadwal of Imagers and create the Congery. He wanted to prevent creatures like ghouls from being translated into the world.

  Through a haze of nausea and anger, she asked one of the villagers, “What’re you going to do?”

  “What the lord’s men told us,” came the reply. “If we heard any rumor of ghouls around here, saw any sign. Get to Romish as fast as we can.”

  “Good,” said Geraden fiercely.

  He and Terisa rode on.

  She still felt like the meat of her brain was going bad. Even though those villagers were safe, she couldn’t rid herself of the impression that the day was getting worse. How many ghouls had Eremis already translated into the Care of Fayle? How much of the Fayle’s streng
th had already been eaten away?

  How could he help King Joyse and defend his own people at the same time?

  She practiced saying Oh, shit to herself until it began to feel more natural.

  “Here’s some more good news,” Geraden remarked the next time he studied the map. “At the rate we’re going, we’re due to reach another village just about sunset. A place called Naybel.”

  Oh, shit.

  Grimly, she made an effort to think. “Maybe we should stay away from it. Maybe those things are following us.”

  He glared at her. “You do have a morbid imagination.” After a moment, he added, “If we’re being followed, we’ve got to warn the village. We can’t lead ghouls past Naybel and expect them to leave it alone.”

  The day was definitely going downhill.

  The afternoon wore on, as miserable and prolonged as a toothache. Eventually, Terisa concluded that there were after all worse things than spending so much of the day on horseback. She couldn’t get that smell out of her mind.

  Without making an explicit decision to hurry, she and Geraden began to urge their horses faster. They wanted to reach Naybel before dusk.

  Mishap continued to dog them. Because they were hurrying, they rode into the village precisely as the sun began to dip into the horizon. At a slower pace, they wouldn’t have arrived until full dark.

  The decision to ride straight into the village was also one which they hadn’t made explicitly: they did it simply because the need to warn Naybel’s people blanketed other considerations. As a result, they were already among the huts, on their way in toward the center of the village, when they realized that Naybel was as empty as Aperyte.

  Geraden slowed the gray’s canter. The beast’s head went up and down like a hammer, fighting the reins. Terisa’s gelding had its ears back. Where the sunlight came through the trees, the shadows of the huts were as sharp as blades.

  “Geraden,” she whispered, “we’re too late. Let’s get out of here.”

  Geraden hesitated, turned his head to fling a look around him – and lost control of his mount. The gray caught its bit between its teeth and bolted.

  Terisa couldn’t stop her roan from following.