“It must be over two hundred years since I last tried to read Solipsi,” she said. “And it was never an easy language at the best of times. But let’s start with the big piece of amber at the center, because it’s so different from the rest. At a guess it’s a summoning stone of some kind, but it would take more time and effort than I can spare to overcome the locks and find out what it summons. Something hugely powerful, but it would be extremely dangerous to try to use it without knowing its purposes.
“This one that puzzled Benayu is rather amusing. It’s an old demon-binder. You wake it in the ordinary way, and then it will tell the wearer how to use it.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” said Benayu. “It isn’t going to happen to us. There aren’t any demons to bind these days.”
Ribek laughed.
“In my recent experience anything can happen to us,” he said.
“There were demons in the story, weren’t there?” said Saranja. “When Tilja and the others were on their way home, all sorts of horrible monsters appeared, and even on the Imperial Highways people had to travel in convoys with a good magician to guard them.”
“Those were just petty demons,” said Chanad. “Mostly they were raised by inexpert magicians, ignorant of what they were dealing with, and their first act was to destroy those who had raised them. But there were worse than that. A few really powerful hidden magicians, like the one Tilja called Moonfist, refused to accept control and wanted all the power for themselves. But the Ropemaker and his helpers were too much for them, so as a last throw they deliberately summoned some of the great demons from deep under the earth and tried to use them against him. But demons are not like that. They cannot be used or controlled. They too destroyed their summoners and stalked the Empire, until the Ropemaker and his friends bound them one by one, and split the earth apart and cast them into its innermost fires and sealed them there.”
“That’s one of the reasons the Watchers gave for destroying my mother and father,” said Benayu. “They said they were planning to loose the demons again.”
“And if they catch me they will destroy me and say the same thing,” said Chanad calmly. “You too, Benayu. You are in revolt against their rule. They are clearly too powerful for you. When you see your cause is hopeless, why should you not attempt to loose the demons? That is their argument.
“But now I have work to do. I must make Maja’s amulet, and fetch your way-leaves and so on. It is better for me to do these things from the safety of my tower than for Benayu to continue to risk them on the open road. And you must rest, and in the morning I will set you on your way to Tarshu.”
CHAPTER
6
Gradually the nightmare of pursuit faded as the road flowed backward beneath the horses’ hooves, at first as a strange smooth path snaking through the wilderness that they had been crossing since they left the road, never visible for more than a few hundred paces ahead of them and behind them as the folds in the ground hid and revealed it. It was as if it existed only in the stretch they could see. Indeed, after a while, Maja began to realize that this was indeed the case.
Chanad had told her how to use the amulet she had given her as she left. She realized at once that it was going to be a wonderful help. She was growing erratically into the use of her extra sense as it increased. The amulet was a way of controlling that. It looked like a simple bracelet of colored glass beads and was mildly elastic, so that it would stay wherever she put it on her arm. The higher she wore it the less protection it gave, so that when she pushed it a little above her right wrist she became faintly aware of the presence of magic, while worn just above her elbow, which was as far as the thickness of her arm allowed it to go, the magical signal became almost as strong as it would have been if she had been wearing it on her left arm, where it had no effect at all.
Now as they traveled eastward through the deserted landscape she was able to adjust it until she could sense two steadily moving waves of magic laying and then removing the path before and behind them, leaving nothing to show that anyone might have passed that way. There was even a clean, dry cave with a stream beside it as the sun sank that first evening, which looked and felt as if it had been there for centuries, but for all they could tell hadn’t existed an hour ago and would vanish next day as soon as they had rolled up their bedding and gone. Inside, it felt disturbingly magical, but she moved the amulet down her arm and slept there untroubled.
Early the following afternoon they came out onto a public road and turned south. Then several days of farming country, increasingly rich and fertile, with quiet villages and busy little towns, and once the estate of some great lord. Here almost everyone wore the standard dress of the Empire that they had first seen on the road south of Mord and which Chanad had now supplied for her and the others. Soon she could tell from the various arrangements of patterns and beads where she stood in relation to the other travelers on the road.
It was as though nothing at all had changed in the twenty generations since Tilja’s time. Coming from the Valley, where nothing had changed either until the dreadful irruption of the wild horsemen from beyond the mountains, Maja didn’t find this strange.
They slept in farmers’ barns or inns. Night after night Maja waited for Jex to speak to her again in her dreams, though he had told her he was unlikely to. She woke each morning to find that her hand had crept under the pillow while she slept and was clasped around a little granite lizard, warm only with the warmth of her own bloodstream. And so it remained during each day, dangling from her neck beneath her blouse.
Everything seemed utterly peaceful and ordinary. Ribek relished every trivial happening or encounter along the way, and when nothing else took his attention was happy to talk about his mill, and didn’t think it at all strange that Maja should be so interested. Despite the urgency of their mission, it would have been easy to let their pace slacken, but for Saranja’s determination to drive them on. She seemed unafraid of what they were going to attempt at Tarshu. If anything, eager for it.
“You’ve been given a purpose, haven’t you?” Ribek told her one evening.
She shook her head.
“Not given,” she said. “It was there all along. I’ve found it.”
They heard no news from there, or any of the doings of the Watchers. Only twice, when they asked their way through the network of little roads that covered that whole tract, their informants hesitated and looked at them oddly before they answered.
“Is there a problem?” Ribek asked the second time.
The man shrugged and shook his head, as much in warning, Maja thought, as refusing to reply.
“It’s like that in the Empire,” said Benayu bitterly, as soon as they were out of earshot. “Fodaro had lived in it, remember. He used to say that however peaceful things seem, fear is never far below the surface. They’re content because they have to be, but that isn’t the same thing as being happy. These people have picked up somehow that the Watchers are active. They’ll whisper about it among themselves, but not to strangers.”
On the fifth day their road joined one of the great Imperial Highways that linked the major cities of the Empire together. It took them on in the same direction, a little east of south, but was very different from anything they’d used so far, two broad highways running in opposite directions, with way stations spaced along it where all travelers must stop for the night and pay the fees and bribes to have their way-leaves inspected and stamped.