Land of the Burning Sands (28 page)

The brigands did not fall. They were dead where they stood. Frost sparkled on their faces and hair; their eyes were wide open and unblinking. Their skin was white as ice; their clothing stiff and glittering. The cold shattered their clubs and bows; the wood broke with clean, crisp snaps. The dangling bowstrings cast back the light as though they had been made of silver wire.

Gereint sat very still. Beguchren still gripped his arm; he did not want to find out what would happen to him or to his horse if the mage let go. The pale light was ebbing at last, washing slowly down out of the air like fog, sinking into the earth and water. It left frost behind, spangling the ground like a fine diamond net. The cold eased as the world remembered summer warmth; the natural moonlight, now alone, seemed pallid and weak.

Beguchren drew a deep, slow breath and let go of Gereint’s arm.

Gereint immediately backed his mare half a dozen steps. He was shuddering, not entirely with the lingering cold.

Beguchren blinked, shook his head, breathed sharply, and straightened his shoulders. Then he gave Gereint a sharp look, seeming for the first time to realize Gereint’s horror. “What I did was swifter and kinder than hanging.”

Gereint took a breath, but stopped without speaking. Took another breath and let it out again, still without saying a word. He looked around at the eight dead brigands. As he stared, the first one fell at last—stiffly, as a rigid board might fall, not limply like a shot deer. Then the second. Gereint tried not to flinch at the heavy thudding sounds as first one man and then the other hit the ground. The horses pricked their ears forward in nervous curiosity at this strange human behavior. When they shifted and stepped, their hooves left dark prints in the frost.

Gereint made himself meet the mage’s eyes once more. He said at last, “You’re one of the king’s agents. So you had the right.”

Beguchren inclined his head. “Anyone has both the right and the duty to clear the road of brigandage if he can. But, yes, the Arobern specifically asked me to assist local efforts as I found the chance.” He paused. Then he said gently, “I think we can get to Raichboden yet this evening. I don’t think we would be comfortable camping along the river in the dark.”

“No,” Gereint agreed grimly, and put his horse into a trot, slightly too fast a pace for the dim light, but it seemed as glad as he to leave the icy brigands to thaw behind them. He did not even want to think about the dreams he might have this night—if he dreamed; he doubted he would sleep at all and probably that was just as well. He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder as a third brigand fell, with a ringing, crystalline crash, behind them.

They found the inn at the Raichboden ferry no more than a mile farther north. The ferry was not at the landing but tied up at the dock on the town side of the river. Or not actually
at
the dock; the water level was so low that the ferry had simply been run up on exposed mud flats near the dock and tied up there. Fortunately, the inn on their side of the river was a good one, and well accustomed to late-arriving travelers. It had a small but decent private room, with two clean beds and, best of all, a bath basin already filled with steaming water. Beguchren provided the soap. The soap was smooth textured and rose scented, exactly the sort of soap Gereint would have expected the mage to carry if he’d thought about it. He almost wanted to laugh. He would have laughed if he’d been trying to use this fine soap to scrub grease off pots, rather than the memory of death off his body. He was glad to use the bath first, while the king’s mage arranged for men to go back down the road in the morning to collect the bodies for a proper, if symbolic, hanging. Beguchren also arranged for broth and bread, neither of which Gereint thought he could stomach.

“A little broth, at least,” Beguchren said quietly. “You need something.”

Gereint accepted a mug, though he merely turned it around in his hands rather than sipping. He couldn’t decide whether the rich, meaty smell was appetizing or nauseating.

Beguchren said softly, “It’s not precisely honorable, I know—”

“It’s not a sport,” Gereint said grimly. “Or a hunt. Do you think I don’t know that?”

“Of course you do.”

“I’m surprised you couldn’t just whistle for them to come crouching trustingly to your feet like dogs, and then freeze them solid with your magelight—”

“Gereint!” Beguchren set down his own mug so sharply the broth spilled onto the table. “Please don’t mistake brigands like that for men like yourself. There’s not one of them, gifted or not, who hadn’t turned his back on
any
kind of trust. You know that is true.”

Gereint made no answer.

The mage went on more gently, “Nothing could have saved them, even any among them who might somehow have retained some trace of decent human sensibility. If taken by men-at-arms, they would all have been held for hanging. Would that have been kinder?”

Gereint bowed his head a little.

“Can you eat something? Will you let me—” Beguchren paused. Then he went on, but with an odd note of constraint in his light, smooth voice: “Will you permit me to ease your rest tonight? If you wish, I can ensure that you do not dream. Will you take my word that I would do nothing but give you dreamless sleep?”

Gereint looked over at the mage. He could see that Beguchren expected him to refuse and guessed as well that, surprisingly, he might be hurt by the refusal. He said finally, “I’d take your word. But I think even men such as those are worth one or two bad dreams.”

Beguchren gazed at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “So long as you can rest a little. It will be a long day tomorrow; almost as long as today. I’d like to get at least to Tashen tomorrow, if we can. Past Tashen, if possible.”

“Past Tashen” was very likely to mean right into Amnachudran’s lands, if Beguchren insisted on going upriver on the east side of the Teschanken. One more worry to run through Gereint’s dreams. He didn’t let his expression change, but merely nodded and said, “And then the day after, the desert.” He didn’t say,
And then you can end all this mystery and tell me at last what you mean to do in the griffin’s country.
But he didn’t need to. Beguchren bowed his head in agreement.

Gereint stood up and glanced inquiringly from one small narrow bed to the other.

“Whichever you like,” said Beguchren.

Gereint nodded. He didn’t, under the circumstances, wish the mage a pleasant night.

I
mmediately outside Breidechboden, the road that led west toward the ornate and wealthy city of Abreichan widened enough for four carriages to travel abreast. Indeed, for the entire distance between Breidechboden and Abreichan, the road was that wide. And for that whole distance, it was paved with great flat stones quarried from the local hills and lined with tall plinths topped with grim-faced stone soldiers chiseled roughly out of granite. This road was always guarded, those carved soldiers proclaimed. Travelers journeyed under the protection of the Arobern kings. Brigandage might from time to time be a concern in the wilder north, but here in the broad, rich lands of the south, that protection was constant and powerful. Only after a traveler passed west of Abreichan and pressed on toward the little mountain towns of the far west did that protection become less reliable. After the Arobern completed the planned improvements to the mountain road, that might well change: the king would not want brigandage to soil his new road.

Tehre wished they were actually traveling west. She had never even been so far as Weierachboden, far less Abreichan, which everyone knew rivaled Breidechboden in splendor and ostentation. But even more than she wished to see the cities of the western plains, she longed to go all the way to Ehre and watch the builders and engineers of Casmantium go about the business of flinging their great road through the mountain passes to Feierabiand. The engineers would be carving their new road out of the sides of the mountains, bracing narrow paths that overhung desperate precipices, building buttresses to make a level road where nothing level had ever existed, bridging steep-sided chasms with arches and architraves and, possibly, hanging bridges with wrought-iron chains… Tehre had not even realized, until she turned her face to the west and put Breidechboden at her back, how much she would have loved to take this road
all
the way.

But they were only taking the western road to encourage casual observers to think that Lord Bertaud was heading back to Ehre; he might not ask the Arobern for leave to come and go, but then neither was he inclined to throw open defiance in the king’s face. Nor, once she thought about it, was Tehre.

Lord Bertaud had brought a small entourage, as Tehre ought to have guessed he would. A foreign lord was hardly likely to travel anywhere in Casmantium alone. He’d brought a couple of men-at-arms and a driver and a servant. They were his own people, Feierabianden. Not one of them had more than a word or two of Prechen; no wonder Lord Bertaud had wanted Tehre’s company for this journey.

Nor, of course, could Tehre travel alone amid strangers. She hadn’t initially thought of this, a failure of sensibility about which Fareine had found a great deal to say. Fareine herself had not come; someone needed to supervise the household, and she was too frail in these years to travel quickly or easily, and after all this was not
really
a leisurely journey home. Or at least, in the event, it might prove to be something other than a leisurely journey home.

So Meierin had come. The girl had never been out of Breidechboden and was eager to travel, and Tehre liked her—and, more important, Fareine approved of her.

“She is a responsible child, and she has some sense,” Fareine had told Tehre. “And she’s young enough to think long days of travel are an
adventure
.” The old woman had shaken her head in wistful regret for her own past youth, when she, too, had longed for travel and perhaps even for adventure.

Lord Bertaud’s carriage was a good one, well built, but plain… He probably had a fancy one to show off his consequence. This one was much better for quiet travel. And comfortable. The seats were broad and well cushioned, and leather cushioned the windowsills below sheer curtains that let in light while keeping out dust. There was enough room on both the front and rear benches to allow three people to sit together—even four, if they were slender or friendly. Certainly there was ample room for Tehre and Meierin to sit facing forward, Lord Bertaud having courteously taken the backward-facing bench. Tehre gazed out to the west. The early sun struck the distant stones of the road to gold; it unrolled, gleaming, through all that gentle country toward Weierachboden, and she wished again they were going west.

Meierin touched Tehre’s sleeve, and she became aware that Lord Bertaud had said something to her. She blushed with embarrassment, having no idea what he had said. Meierin could only shrug helplessly; the girl did not speak Terheien, of course, and probably also had some difficulty understanding the foreigner’s accented Prechen.

“I beg your pardon?” Tehre said—then realized she’d spoken in Prechen and paused, searching for a similar phrase in Terheien.

But, “No,” said Lord Bertaud, and borrowed her own phrase: “I beg your pardon, Lady Tehre; I did not mean to, ah.” Looking frustrated, he said something in Terheien, then added in Prechen, “You were thinking. I did not mean to bother.”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” Tehre answered quickly, then groped for the proper phrase in Terheien. But Lord Bertaud was nodding politely, so apparently he had understood. Tehre wondered how to explain that she was always drifting into abstraction and that if Lord Bertaud worried about interrupting her thoughts he would never be able to speak to her at all. Though she had to concentrate, to speak Terheien. If one took language as a
made
thing, words and syntax and the thought behind both, then did that imply that makers ought to be able to work with language somehow? Well, Linularinan legists did, in a way, though as a tool rather than as a product.

Gereint would have been the perfect person with whom to discuss this idea: He’d know if one or another of the great philosophers had already considered it. In fact, he’d probably know if a minor, obscure philosopher had. Or a poet. Maybe especially a poet… She wondered where he was at this moment, and whether he might be discussing some peculiar philosophical idea with Beguchren Teshrichten. She blinked and sighed, gazing out the window through the sheer curtain, finding that they were passing now through the villages and sprawling farms that lined the western road. Soon they would find some little country road that would lead them around to the north…