With the coming of the sun there also appeared birds, strange in color, fearless as they hopped about the travelers in their resting places among the columns.
Firdun awoke at a touch on his shoulder and looked up at Guret.
“The scouts have returned, Lord. Those who left did not try to hide their trail but have gone swiftly, as if to reach their goal was more important than to beware of followers.”
“Which may mean they feel they have no reason to fear us.” Firdun yawned away the rest of his desire for sleep. Or else, he thought more glumly, they expected such a welcome where they went as would effectively dispose of any trackers.
He saw Ibycus now, standing by the pool curbing. Gathered around the mage were a flock of mixed birds. There were tall, stilt-legged waders, certainly meant to spend their days walking through pools, contrasting in size with small puffs of feather well able to fit in the palm of his own hand.
For the most part their coloring was in shades of rose, but there were a few pure white. And he saw one a startling and vivid blue green. That one perched boldly on the peak of Ibycus’s cap as if in charge of the company. Oddly enough, under the sun the pavement, the curbing of the pool, and the columns beside where Firdun had bedded down seemed to emit a rosy haze, almost if a setting sun had altered the blue of the sky. He wondered at the use of this place even as he donned his mail. Though he was aware of a very faint whisper of Power here, he was sure nothing could summon it again. What had given it energy was long since gone.
Then he started and a moment later laughed at himself. That he had seen a pard loop away between columns was not strange. Kethan must have also awakened and assumed his were shape. But he was padding steadily away from the company, and not turning north as if about to verify the trail of those others; it was as if he had another goal in view.
Thus Firdun also looked southward. They had faced two of the strange places of the Waste. By report and rumor there were infinitely more. Was Kethan under orders from Ibycus or now drawn to some discovery on his own?
No one mentioned his going as they gathered for their meal and Firdun was oddly disinclined to ask. Aylinn awakened late and did not join them, still gathering her talent strength, though the coming of the night should restore her.
He knew generally of moon power, of course, though none of the four women of the Gryphon followed that path. It was one of the oldest of the talents, but it was growing thin—he had heard that fewer and fewer were born with that trait.
It was true though the Mantle holds were each settled by those of the Old Race and there were healers and wise women, and even female sages and mages to be found, such Powers were not avidly sought and those who held them became in time estranged from their clans and after a fashion kinless, living only for the Power.
Yet in this girl out of Reeth he had sensed none of that withdrawal and certainly her ties, from what he had heard during their journeying, were as tightly kin bound to those of the Green Tower as he was to the Gryphon.
Elysha was more his idea of one of the Greater Talent; still, in some ways she in turn was bonded with Ibycus, whether that mage wished it or not.
On impulse he picked up one of the big leaves they had put to basket use and which still held a good number of berries, carrying it over to Aylinn.
She looked up, seemed a little startled, and then smiled. “Greetings to you, my lord, and thanks for your thoughtfulness. It is true that one wakes always with hunger when the Power is evoked.”
“My name is Firdun.” Suddenly it was important to him that titles or honors be forgotten. After all, in this company they stood equal, each with his or her own duties.
Now she laughed, a giggle such as Hyana would give before accusing him of being pompous. She had crammed a goodly handful of berries into her mouth as if indeed her hunger had overridden all daintiness of manners. A small trickle of juice showed at the corner of her mouth and she licked that in.
“Firdun it shall be—even as with Aylinn. Are we all not kin in the Light?”
She made a small gesture and he squatted on his heels, Kioga style, to bring them closer together.
“I do not know your way of Power,” he began hesitatingly, not quite sure even yet why he had approached her so.
Again she laughed. “Strange would it be if you did. It is woman Power—like unto the teaching of Gunnora. Is not your sister Hyana one of the healing faith?”
“A healer, yes, but she learned much from the Lady Sylvya and she is—”
“Not of our blood or breed.” Aylinn nodded. “My mother heals and she is of witch blood from overseas. My father is were. Or so we believed for many years until Kethan came to us and we learned that evil had wrought at our united birthing—I being truly daughter to a hold lord and he son of those who had always fostered me. Now we are truly brother and sister. Still the talent arose in me when I was very young and my mother fostered it—sending me to Linard of the healers for learning. But their First Lady found that I was Moon-touched also and thus—” she had dropped the berry-stained leaf Elysha had shared with her and now made a small gesture, “I am what I am—and I am well content.”
Her eyes were full upon him, gray he had thought them in the daylight, yet with some of the moon glimmer in them. And they saw!
He wanted to twist away—not to face that weighing.
“You see yourself flawed.” She spoke plainly. “Flaws can be turned from ill to well if they are examined closely.”
He wanted to break that eye bondage, but he could not—and not because she held him in any ensorcellment as Elysha had done.
“I ward,” he said slowly, “because I threw away my chance to meld. There are those of the Gryphon and there is . . . me. Though I was but a child, I let in evil, and from that came great grief and my loss.”
“You are—” she was beginning, when suddenly her eyes went wide and no longer kept him captive. But her hand groped to catch his arm in a bruising hold. “Kethan!”
Though she spoke that name as hardly more than a whisper, it sounded like a shout. Firdun gained his feet, alert as he would have been to a Kioga battle horn, bringing her with him. For a moment or two she clung to him.
“Kethan!” she cried again.
If there had been some mind-send, Firdun had not caught it. But now Aylinn loosed her hold on him and, paying no attention to the gear scattered about, whistled. There came a clatter of hooves between the columns as the were mounts answered.
“What—” but he had no time to frame a question. Those about them were astir, but none close enough to catch her before she mounted the bare back of the mare and the beast whirled, the stallion keeping equal pace out and away to the south.
Ibycus pounded his staff on the pavement. “The young fool,” he snapped. “No, we cannot put that name to him, for what he follows is born of nature even if it be used by another.”
“Do we ride?” Guret could have been speaking either to Firdun or the mage. Behind him the camp was completely astir, packing with speed.
“There is no choice, even though it draws us farther from our trail,” was the mage’s answer.
But Firdun had already run to saddle his own mount. He took the time to arm himself, resenting each lost moment. Also he beckoned to Obred and ordered that the Kioga move out.
He had scouted enough with the tribesmen to be able to follow the trail which Aylinn had certainly made no attempt to conceal. Now already the columns were behind and he was watching those prints ground into the moss which were his guide.
That some danger had struck at the were, he had no doubt. He had no idea what talent the other could call upon in defense past his shapechanging. As a pard he could be prey for any hunter—even though this land seemed bare of any but the smallest game.
There was a copse of trees and then beyond, the open. Once more the odd reddish tint of the ground was changing until it ended abruptly in a band of the same baked clay over which they had earlier traveled. Save this was not ope
n ground but a maze of rocky outcrops, slimed by the droppings of a huge flock of black birds, their naked raw red heads outstretched to the full as they cried out in a rising din.
Riding back and forth before this broken barrier was Aylinn, Kethan’s stallion faithfully at Morna’s heels. It was as if the girl were trying to force her way past a wall. . . .
A warding!
Firdun’s mind-probe met a will-barrier so tight that the recoil actually caused him a small measure of pain. He had never struck against such before—though he had never really tried to pierce clear to the heart of Garth Howell’s defenses.
Now he rode to catch up with the girl, turning his mount so that she was forced to pull in her mare.
“There is a warding—”
“As if that is not plain!” She almost snarled at him as if some of the were blood was also hers. “Yet look—”
She pointed down to the yellow soil and Firdun caught plain sight of the tracks. Cat—pard—Kethan must have come this way.
The birds which had continued to circle and scream above the rocks now began to venture out toward them and the party which had ridden on their trail.
“Rus!” Elysha spat out. “This is their nesting place. But why?” She was leaning forward in the saddle and had caught sight of the pard tracks. Then under her guidance her horse sidled back a fraction, the rest of them withdrawing to give her room.
She dropped her reins and her mount stood statue-still. Raising both hands, with the gemmed wrists purple fire in the sun, she began to move them back and forth, gesturing as one might to draw a curtain.
There was a haze over those rock pinnacles now. The birds withdrew in frenzied flight, probably alighting somewhere beyond, since they were no longer on the wing.
Elysha’s groping gestures grew wider until with them her arms moved apart to their farthest extent. If she strove to sweep away that growing haze, her efforts worked in exactly the opposite fashion—it was thickening.
Before their eyes now there were no feces-stained rock spires, not even the yellow ground underneath. Elysha spoke a single word Firdun had never heard. They were looking at an entirely different stretch of country as if the sere desert land had never existed.
Here was the welcome green of newly growing grass, gem-studded with flowers of yellow and red wide open under the sun. And there was also a path of gravel as silver white as a moonbeam.
The path wove back and forth and around but eventually it reached not the forbidding walls of a keep, but rather the timber and plaster side of what might have been a Dales inn of the best sort. Around and over the door of the inn was an arch, vine-covered and boasting blood-red flowers.
All the while there seemed to flow toward them from that green and gracious land a welcome which grew stronger with every breath they drew until Firdun came alive to the danger.
“Glamorie!” Not a word—but a trap, even as Elysha’s castle had drawn him. Firdun wheeled his mount between that lure and his companions, even crowding against Aylinn’s mare to force the animal back.
Elysha let her arms fall. The fair country they looked upon was once more the filthy roosting place of the rus and those birds were rising again to circle and scream.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Hold of Sassfang, the Waste, South
T he pard lifted his head higher, brushing impatiently through the flowering bushes, petals clinging to his fur, since they seemed to be yet heavy with the dew of early morning. The scent was faint but not so faded that it did not hold true as he went. And this drew him as nothing had done before in his life. The man was buried deeper and deeper within him as he went, while the beast ruled on this trail.
It promised—he was not quite sure of what it did promise—but it was such a lure as he could not ignore. Then he came out of the moss-carpeted land and faced—
The pard blinked and blinked again, eyeing what lay before him. His astonishment was such that not even the scent which had pulled him here could hold. Man arose, beast disappeared, and Kethan stood at the beginning of a finely kept graveled path which led by a series of odd curves to such a building as certainly no one would expect to find in this stretch of country.
He had heard from traders that the Dales which attracted yearly fairs had such accommodation for those who traveled to them. Not holds in which any peaceful wayfarer could claim shelter for the night, but what they called inns, which were erected only for the comfort of travelers.
There were no walls here, no signs of any need for defense for those about. Even the wide door was open. Smoke curled up from chimneys at either end of the building and the breeze brought him a suggestion of freshly baked bread—the soft loaves of good living, not the hard journey cakes. Such as he had eaten at Reeth when Old Wife Zentha still ruled in the kitchen quarters there before she had left to take care of her motherless grandchildren.
But—there was Zentha! She stood in the doorway with her usual wide smile, even bearing the usual small smudge of flour on one apple-round cheek.
Deep in Kethan something strove to awaken, but when Zentha beckoned to him his man shape impatiently suppressed that prick.
“Zentha!” He might have returned to childhood—except that in his bleak childhood Zentha had played no role. Now he ran, following the odd curve of the path without any heed.
“Laws, now,” he heard her well-remembered voice. “Now, didn’t them as rides the breeze tell me as how I’d have a hungry man coming to put his legs under the table and hold out his hand for the nearest dish?”
Again that prick far inside, this time more insistent. But Kethan went on. Zentha was backing into the open door of the inn, still facing him.
He set his foot on the wide step, ready to follow. Her hand—no, no hand—rather a set of knife-sharp claws struck out. Before Kethan roused from the ensorcellment he had not known held him, those claws caught at the carved pard buckle of his belt as if they knew the exact trick of its fastening. The force with which it was torn from him sent him nearly whirling like a top.
Gone was the inn, Zentha—He reeled back against a befouled rock, fighting to protect his face and eyes from the rus screaming down in attack. All about him was the yellow of the outer Waste. In his flight from the birds, blood already streaming from his hands from a deep score on one cheek, he brought up bruisingly against a rocky pillar and rebounded to another.
The rus clustered and swooped, claws and beaks tearing at his clothing where they could not reach his flesh, though already they had wounded him well. Somehow he floundered into a kind of crevice between two of the pillars and did all he could think of in his confusion and bewilderment, cramming his body back into that hole.
At least he had defeated the birds for a breath or two. But he had no weapons and he had seen twice what such flying monsters could do at their will, picked bones and tatters of cloth left only to mark their feasting.
He heard a harsh crackle of laughter and peered out of his small shelter. There was no Zentha, of course. In the place of her wholesome self stood a creature he had heard described by Firdun: the bird-female which had been at Garth Howell, or at least one of the same species.
It seemed that she could not view him straight on, that her large eyes were set too far apart. Her beaked face kept turning from one side to the other. Now and again she loosed that evil cackling while the rus circled about her. And between her hands she flapped his belt back and forth as one displays a battle trophy.
Aylinn—no—his thoughts instantly forbade any contact with their party. He had been caught, he knew now, by glamorie. None of the rest must fall victim to this. For those practiced in that art were able to summon up any sort of scene which could reach the innermost thoughts of their prey and draw them.
He could see a little of his surroundings, though from within this crack his sight was limited. There stood a veritable forest of these huge rough monoliths of rock, streaked by generations of droppings, and the smell was enough to turn his stomach.
/> The birds, having driven him into this prison, were alighting on some of the outcrops. But the eyes in their raw red heads were turned in his direction. Their mistress swung the belt again. It hurtled out through the air and was gone, beyond his range of sight. Then she squatted down, put her clawed hands within another crevice, and jerked out a blood-clotted hunk of meat. Some of the nearer birds stirred and she pinched off bits which she flung up so that they caught them neatly, as if this were a trick they had done many times before.
Having pecked the few remaining shreds from a section of broken bone, she stuck forth a long, narrow purplish tongue and licked her claws. Then once more she cocked her head to view him out of her right eye.
“Noooo—runnnnns—noooo follow—” The words were so garbled he could hardly make them out. But somehow his thoughts leaped to what he thought she meant.
He had been the prey because as a were he would pick up once more the trail of those out of Garth Howell. How much did this creature and those she had companied with understand about his party, anyway?
Kethan made no attempt to answer. His wounds, shallow as they were, smarted, and he wondered briefly what sort of filth the claws might have left in his broken skin.
His captor leaned back against the nearest outcrop. Her lidded eyes closed, but Kethan had no hope that she slept. Or, if she did, her rus guard were always awake.
To remain here without a struggle was not of his nature. Nor could he hope for any rescue. Therefore, he dropped his own bloodied head on the arms he had folded across his up-pulled knees and set up mind wards. But first he dared a probe and discovered, of course, that this place was well warded. Firdun knew the keys to such, but that talent was not one the weres owned. He suddenly had a vision—there out of what appeared to be a haze rode Aylinn astride Morna, barebacked as if she had mounted in a hurry, Trussant trotting to match her. Behind moved other figures he did not doubt were the rest of the party. He cut contact instantly, before he even tried to reach his foster sister, for fear that whatever glamorie lay here could pick some hint from his own mind which would bring her within reach of this monster.