Hammerfall (40 page)

His grip after that embraced Norit, and kept her across the saddle like a water sack while he reached forward for the rein. It was a feat of skill no villager would match, and it freed them all to run all-out.

No one had bled, no one had died, no blood had encouraged the vermin: distance widened between them and the mob, and when Marak looked back he saw clear sand between them.

He slowed. Far enough in the lead to know they had room, they all slackened to a staying pace, but kept moving. He held Lelie. He had Hati and Norit as safe as any of them.

Norit's besha meanwhile was long over the horizon, headed breakneck toward the caravan to join the herd it knew. Unrewarded, behind them, the vermin had straggled out, and most would go back to the water. A few might follow the track they inevitably left—less dominant outrunners, more desperately seeking moisture or carrion, or living prey.

They were not out of danger, but they had gotten away from the heart of the mob.

Marak finally became aware of Lelie's struggles in his arm. He had kept her still, carefully managed his grip to let her breathe, and now he soothed her frightened, wounded sobs and sheltered her in his coat as he had on the ride that brought her.

He thanked the god he doubted that he had had the instinct to doubt his judgment and investigate before bringing the slow caravan with all its weak and helpless all the way to Pori.

But there was no water.

“Hati,” Marak said. “Go. Take the women with you. Warn lord Aigyan. We've no choice but to turn toward the rim. Have them turn, don't camp, and we'll catch up on your new track.”

“I'll see you there,” Hati agreed, and called out to the two women and laid on the quirt. She was gone over the roll of the next hill, vanishing in the dust they left.

“I warned you,” Norit said in a brittle voice. The tribesman had gotten her upright.

“That you did,” Marak allowed. He had no wish to take up a quarrel with Luz. He doubted even Luz had known the danger there was at Pori, or Norit could have warned them in far clearer words. The truth was that Luz had not known, had had no idea until now about the mob there. But:
East, east, east!
the voices urged, as if they had always been right.

He said, he hoped sanely so, and calmly: “Well, we can't water at Pori; that's clear. Norit
was
right: we can't camp and rest. We need to get all this mass of people as far east as we can. If we're out of water, we're out. We'll do what we can.”

East.
Surrender to Luz settled him into a familiar track. He knew the way down the cliffs to the east of Pori, and he knew that the gathering of vermin had just doomed a good number of the caravan to a struggle they might not have the strength to make without rest and water.

But if the continual footfall on the earth of the last caravan in the world drew attention from Pori, if the smell of them wafted on the chance wind, if the vermin still following the column met those feeding on Pori's ruin . . . if any one of those three things happened, the unthinkable became a certainty.

He led. They veered just slightly off the track they had taken getting to Pori, and for the better part of an hour they moved over trackless sand.

Then as they crossed a shallow pan they saw, as Marak had hoped, a distant haze of dust below the line of a far ridge. That hazy disturbance in the sameness of the Lakht marked the caravan's passage, and it had, indeed, turned eastward.

Hati had reached them safely. Aigyan had heard the warning.

The sun stood at noon, and the caravan pressed eastward, not camping, not resting.

Marak kept his pace, not pushing his own party. The beshti under them were tired, worn down by days of travel and now coming within sight of water and hazard at distant Pori—only to turn away.

But the beshti had not called out after the water at Pori: they had seen for themselves a hazard and smelled a smell that ruffled the ridge of hairs down their backs—Marak recalled that fine line of fear on the nape of Osan's neck, just before he had known there was trouble. Tails had gone half-up, and stayed bristled, even now. The beshti left the promise of water and traveled back to their own caravan without a sound, thirst and self-preservation at war in their keen instincts. Only once in the next hour the beshti stopped, braced their feet, snuffed the air. The earth trembled slightly. But as it proved no worse, they resumed their progress toward the distant caravan.

Lelie, drained of tears, had seized hold of Marak's coat at that instability and held on after that for dear life, not releasing her hold. She was bruised and scraped from the fall, but the makers were surely attending to that. It was the wound to her soul, her mother's casual forgetfulness, that the makers could not cure: Norit had never asked to have her back, and as he rode, Marak stroked her hair gently, told her in a low voice that all was well, that they would go down to a safe place . . . half lies, all, making it sound easy, making it sound like tomorrow, when the next instant was Lelie's tomorrow, in her young perception, and her mother rode dazed, lost in Luz's visions.

Soon, tomorrow, very soon now.

How many fathers must be making that desperate promise today, short of water, themselves short of strength . . . and how many fathers must be giving up their ration to their children today, not knowing themselves where the end of this was, not knowing whether it was wiser to consume the water themselves, to keep their strength, or how much privation a child could bear?

“Luz,” he said aloud, to the presence behind Norit's glazed steadiness. “Can you bring water to us at the bottom of the climb? We need your help. Too many of these people will die. Can you send Ian? Can you lead us to water closer to the cliffs?”

He begged for help. He bargained with their fate. Pride was nowhere in his reckoning. He prayed to a second goddess-on-earth for a miracle their Ila could not provide, and all the while the skin between his shoulders was uneasy, as if they had not shaken all the vermin off their track. He felt calamity organizing around them, and the people for whom he held all responsibility were in greater and greater disarray.

Marak, Marak, Marak,
was all his own voices said in reply. He saw the sphere and the rock and the rings, twice repeated. That was the help Luz gave. She
had
done better. She
had
reached him before, and now found nothing to say to him but that:
go, go blindly,
giving him no reasons.

He suspected the fault lay in himself, that he was most-times deaf, and unreceptive . . .

Like his father. Like Tain, deaf to things he needed most in the world to hear.

But unlike Tain, he broke his silence. “Norit,” he said, pleaded. “Does Luz say anything about water? Does she offer us any help?”

“There's nothing,” Norit said, sitting in the embrace of the tribesman who had saved her. “Nothing I can do.”

Norit never yet asked how her daughter fared after that fall.
Luz
had never asked. Luz involved herself not at all in the welfare of individuals, cared nothing for the workings of Norit's heart. Later Norit would shed tears, but Luz did not let her shed them now.

“It's coming,” Norit said further. “It's on its way. We have two days. Just two days. You won't reach the tower in two days.”

That was the plain truth, and it offered them no water, no help. It occurred to him to ask Luz if there was any point in trying, but it occurred to him, too, that he had no interest in hearing the answer one way or the other: it would not change what he would do. He could not sit down in paradise. He could not sit down in hell, either. He was going to try to reach the tower . . . he was going to try to get all his people down off the Lakht and into the lowlands before the hammer fell. He was going to get them as far toward safety as he could get them. They had him for a leader: that was what they bargained for.

“Why didn't you tell me this
before
we went to Pori?” He did ask that question.

“You weren't listening. Now you are. Get below the cliffs. Get behind rock. Get the stakes down. I don't know what may happen. I'm trying to know where the hammer will come down. It's not good for where it falls. It's not good for the other side of the world either, and that's what we have to worry about. The earth will crack at both places and melt the rocks in its forge.”

Luz made the visions. Norit said them as best she knew how, out of things she had seen: what more could she do? Sometimes they were things no one alive had ever seen, and Norit tried to describe them, out of a village wife's meager experience.

“The prophet,” the tribesmen said to each other in muted tones, and meant Norit. The tribes regarded no priests, but the Keran had learned that this one spoke for the power that led them, and they were in awe at this strange conversation, this matter-of-fact consultation of their oracle.

And there was no comfort in anything Norit could say.

They traveled toward that haze of dust that marked the passage of the caravan across the land at the same steady pace.

And uneasy as he was about the land behind them, Marak became aware, in that sight, that he knew where Hati was. He knew it as well as he knew Norit's location beside him, as steady, as reliable as the pole stars in the general fall of the heavens. She was there in the heart of the column. The constellations might be shaken, but he could not
get
lost in the world that contained the other parts of himself.

The caravan had no need of another dreamer, another guide as mad as Norit.

It needed a plain, headblind madman to say only:
I've been there before. I can lead you. I know a way down. Don't hesitate, don't camp.

It needed Tain's son, too: it needed him to say:
Don't have pity on the dying. Don't hesitate. When the line goes, go.

He rode toward the column, and on the edge of joining it, on the very moment of crossing toward safety in among the plodding beshti, he realized their party had been one member short on the retreat. He was so used to the au'it following him and Hati and Norit that he had failed to notice that this time she had not followed them out from the caravan.

Surely she had not come out with them.

“No au'it followed us,” he said to the Keran, half a question. “You saw no au'it tracking us at any time.”

“No,
omi
.”

At least they had not lost her. He thought they had not.

He rode in among the Ila's servants, and near the Ila, and up to Hati's side.

“I advised Aigyan,” Hati said first. “He knows all the situation. He's going to keep the line moving. We're going over the rim.”

Hati looked aside. The Keran had let Norit down off his besha, and Tofi had gotten down. Norit's besha was, not surprisingly, walking with the rest, riderless, and Tofi called out to Bosginde to catch the beast and bring it. The caravan, meanwhile, never stopped. Such small exchanges dropped behind temporarily, and caught up again, beshti tending to seek their own herd.

But if anyone was as likely as the Ila's priests and servants to be alive with the Ila's own makers, if there was anyone in the Ila's service who could be as aware of the Ila's whims as he was aware of Luz's moods and desires, it was the aui'it.

Her priests, her servants knew the Ila's wishes and obeyed her.

The au'it had reported, that was what.

Looking back, he saw Norit had gained the saddle again, in the weary, moving throng. There was no eagerness in the crowd around them. A kind of glazed desperation had replaced fervor and mirth and anger and all the rest of motives that kept men moving toward the unknown, away from calamity.

“Let me take the baby,” Patya said, riding close to him. “I'll hold her.”

Marak passed her over, glad to surrender the responsibility. “Norit can carry her on the descent,” he said, and added, because with his own experience, he pitied Norit: “Her mother doesn't know. She's gone where she goes.”

“Will she come back to be—?” Patya asked, and to her mad brother, tried to find words.

“Sane again? Will she be sane? I hope so.” But he saw no sign of it, not now, not for time to come. “If she doesn't, we'll take care of her, Hati and I. And you.” He saw how Patya took to the waif. “We'll take care of you, too. We're family.”

He had to promise that to Patya. But he foreknew her relation to him might soon become a hazard to Patya's well-being, to her very life. He suspected their au'it had been making an extensive, perhaps not favorable, report, that her whole account had gone to the Ila now, and he had to know, before he set out on this risky descent, before people began coming to the Ila, mad for water and in terror of the star-fall, what the Ila meant to do about that report.

He rode beside Hati, not reporting to Memnanan, or to the Ila.

He waited for the Ila, riding within sight of him, to send for him.

He waited for Memnanan to ask him what he had seen out there, or why they had ridden back in disarray. Even if Memnanan had gotten a full report from Aigyan of what Hati had told him—it was good sense to ask the firsthand witness, at least, what he had seen, and why he had changed his mind about Pori.

No query came from either. The au'it—an au'it—rode near them, rode veiled, as she often had, appearing out of the dust.

Why she had left them remained a mystery, one with, he was sure, the Ila at the heart of it, and Memnanan's ignoring him as the wrapping on the affair.

“The Ila asked you no questions?” he asked Hati.

“Not a one. I only talked to Aigyan.”

“Don't look back,” he said in a low voice. “The au'it's back there. Did you see the au'it immediately when you got back?”

“No.” Hati sounded startled. “I don't think she went with us. Or did we lose her?”

“One is with us now,” he said. “Something's happened. I don't know what, I don't know why, but something's happened.”