He rambled peacefully on about his far-off, impossible-seeming future until the flesh had closed completely over Ribek’s wound and the skin grown smooth and clean. Maja rose and stretched. She could feel that something had gone out of her, leaving a sort of satisfied tiredness, as if after enjoyable exercise.
CHAPTER
4
Three mornings later they halted and looked down on Mord. So far the road had wound its way south across rolling upland, mostly wooded but mottled with blotches of sheep pasture and here and there a village ringed with smallholdings beside a roaring stream. Now it plummeted, zigzagging down an escarpment at the foot of which lay a neat walled town with beyond it a wide and level farmland plain with a river winding across. Far south, at the limit of vision, rose another range of hills.
All that time Saranja had slept as though she would never wake again, by night wherever the rest of them were sleeping—drover’s hut or farmer’s barn—by day in a cunning horse-litter Ribek had adapted from a broken cot in one of the ruined huts. There was just room for Maja to perch sideways in front of it, but it couldn’t have been very comfortable for Rocky so she’d walked as much as she could. She’d been doing that when they’d reached the crest of the slope.
“Mord,” said Benayu dully, and then stood gazing down at the scene below. He had scarcely spoken an unnecessary word in the last two days, and had marched as though he hated every footstep of the way. They had left him alone, knowing there was no comfort they could offer. Season after season he must have made this journey with Fodaro, cheerful and confident, to sell and buy sheep at the market, and finished standing where they now stood, looking down at their journey’s end. This must have been the bitterest moment of all. At last he gave a deep sigh, squared his shoulders and spoke in a level, toneless voice.
“All right. If the Watchers are going to put an Eye on the road, this is where they’ll be doing it. You three should be all right. I’ve put Zald-im-Zald completely to sleep, and Maja isn’t picking anything up from Jex or the roc feathers. There’s an old ward on the gate, anyway, because the City Fathers like to know what kind of trouble they’re letting in. You should be able to spot that as we go through, Maja. It’s built into the stonework. Then there’ll be all sorts of petty hedge magic going on inside the walls. The Watchers’ Eye will be different. I’ll know as soon as it picks me out, but that will be too late. If you can tell me before…”
There had been a woman in the Valley who had been blind since birth, until one day she tripped on the stairs and hit her head against a newel post and passed out. When she came round she found that she could now see. At first she could just tell light from dark, then colors, then vague shapes which only gradually became clearer. But even then she couldn’t always tell what they were. She had needed to pick up a cup and handle it, as she had done all her life, in order to be sure of what it was.
Maja was just beginning to do this with her newfound ability to sense the presence of magic. First only the awareness of that presence and its strength, then a vague sense of the nature of the magical impulse and its direction, and now, for the first time, its rough form. As they approached the walls of Mord she picked out a heavy, dark vibration, straight ahead. It felt very old and was vaguely arch-shaped, and there was death in it somewhere. She told Benayu.
“That will be the gate ward,” he said. “They’ll have sacrificed a criminal and mixed his blood into the mortar when they built the gate. Strong magic. Nothing else?”
“A lot of little twitterings—I expect that’s the hedge magic.”
“Mord’s full of it.”
That was true. As they made their way through the narrow, jostling streets to the inn where Benayu and Fodaro had usually stayed, it seemed to be beaming out at Maja from all around. She tried to pick out separate pieces of it, but it was like trying to listen to one particular song in a cage full of songbirds. Only once, when they were passing a strange little house, so squashed between its larger neighbors that it was barely wider than its own front door, she felt something different, not a twittering, but a slow, quiet stirring, that seemed to be coming from much further away than the house itself. No, it was reaching her through something—a screen, perhaps, like the one Benayu had put round the drove huts when he was working on Zald-im-Zald. The magic itself was much stronger than it felt this side of the screen.
She told Benayu. He stopped for a moment and looked at the house. There was a faint liveliness in his tone when he answered.
“That’s a ward, not a screen. A pretty good one. It wouldn’t bother the Watchers, mind you, but I’d really need to work at it if I wanted to look at anything beyond it. Nothing to do with us, anyway. There are still a few Free Magicians around. I’m tempted to try and get in touch, but we’d better not risk it.”
“Screens. Wards. What’s the difference?” said Ribek.
“Wards are permanent and all-purpose. They stop anyone seeing what the magician’s up to, and keep out other people’s magic. A good one takes a lot of work to build. But they’ve been around a long time, and the Watchers can use a Seeing Tower in Talagh to look straight through wards as if they weren’t there. Screens are something Jex and Fodaro thought up. I mean they saw that it was theoretically possible, but they needed me to find out how to do it. You have to build into the screen a reverse mirror image of whatever magic you’re trying to hide, so that they cancel each other out when they meet. They won’t keep magic out unless you know roughly what’s coming, but Jex used to be able to do that for us. And they do have the great advantage that you can put a small one around you, so that it stays with you wherever you go. We didn’t think the Watchers had found out about them because they’d need Fodaro’s equations. In fact I’m probably the only person in the Empire who knows how to do them.”
It was strange to hear that astonishing boast in a voice so dull and hopeless.
The inn was in a quiet street near the western gate. Maja stayed with Saranja and Rocky in the inn yard while Ribek and Benayu hired a room for them, and then went with a friendly old ostler to see that Rocky was comfortably stabled while the other two carried Saranja up the narrow, dark stair. It was midafternoon by the time they’d eaten and settled in, and Ribek and Benayu were ready to set out and try to sell some of their jewels.
“You come too, Maja,” said Benayu. “You’ll be useful. We’ll leave Sponge to look after Saranja. He won’t let in anyone he doesn’t know till I come back.”
The trinket sellers occupied only a small section of a busy country market that filled a fair-sized square and spilled into the neighboring streets. For some reason it was not as crowded as the other sections of the market, less rowdy but with subtler and stranger reeks and odors, and lacking the otherwise ubiquitous petty magicians busking their wonders for coppers. But to Maja the area made up for that by the ceaseless murmuration from charms and amulets on many of the stalls.