Sobechel punched Likel’s arm. “Snerp, how’d Scholar know what you mean?” He turned serious gray-brown eyes on Aslan. “That’s what we say when there’s a quake. Anyway, the ship it rolled into the Bakuhl Sea, right where there’s a big deep hole. Some folks say the hole go all the way through the world, it that deep.”
“And K k keteng they never seen anything b big like that, or people like that. And they were scared and run away. Then some of ‘em get mad ‘cause they figure these folk were messing up their • fishing p places. And they g go to tell them go ‘way.”
“And the Angermans they start acting just like the bad folk that chase them out of their old home and start doing things to Ketengs when they catch them.”
“And it was a bad bad time.”
“And it went on for a hundred and a hundred years.”
“P people k killing p people.”
“Till Ard Bracoпn and Eolt Lekall sang the first Chorale of Peace. And the Angermans took the name
Fior because they were freed of the angers of the past.”
3
The nausea she woke with stayed with Shadith as they left Olterau, nothing serious, just an awareness of her stomach anytime she got near Danor and caught a whiff of the drug whatever it was. She thought about talking with Maorgan about him, but it really wasn’t her business. Besides, she had a feeling he wouldn’t like a mesuch interfering between two Ard. He was pleasant enough, she could feel that he liked her, but she was an outsider.
She glanced at him, suppressed a grin. Anyone talking to Maorgan right now would get a short answer and a sharp one.
Danor was following them this time, taking his turn at leading the packers and the spare mounts.
About an hour after they left the Dumel, the road turned suddenly, angling north and west, the grade increasing to the point that the caцpas started getting balky. And nervous.
Wind out of the northwest was picking up, damp gusts slapping dead leaves and other debris at their feet and flanks, blowing dry weeds past their bobbing noses, making them shy and toss their heads.
“Maorgan!”
The Ard’s shoulders twitched as he came out of the half doze he’d been in all morning and he turned his head, a pained look on his face. “What is it?” He winced, screwed his eyes shut as he waited while she fought to control her caцpa and get him to walk the short distance between them. When she reached him, he glanced at the sweaty beast, then at her. “He giving you trouble? You want to change mounts?”
“No.” She flicked a thumb at the black clouds gathering overhead. “You know this land. When’s that going to hit?”
He tilted his head to inspect the clouds, eased it back down, a muscle twitching beside one eye, stared along the road ahead as it snaked over the hills and finally vanished into trees at the fringe of the great forest that clotted the higher slopes of the mountains. “About when we hit the trees.”
“And the nearest shelter?”
“Inn. About a day’s ride into the forest. We’ll camp rough tonight.”
“And the Eolt?”
“Waiting up ahead. They don’t like to linger over Dumels up here. Some folk don’t appreciate having Eolts around and can get nasty about it. And you do realize they’ll have to get out of the storm’s way? Mmm. Do you have offworld weapons with you?”
“A stunner. It’ll put someone out, but won’t kill them except by accident. Chorek?”
“Back in Olterau they fed me a lot of horrors about a band that’s working the road. I discounted most of it, figured they wanted to hang onto us a while.”
Shadith bit back a grin he wouldn’t have appreciated. “So what do we do?”
“I’ll call Melech to come back while xe can and take a look round, see if xe can spot anyone.” When she looked skeptical, he shook his head. “Their looks are deceptive, Shadowsong. The stings on those tentacles can knock off a dammalt. You haven’t seen those yet, shaggy things the size of a house.”
Danor stopped his caцpa beside them. “Dammalt? Why you wasting time talking about them?”
“Never mind. We’re talking about camping rough and watching out for chorek. What’re you carrying?”
“Airgun. Darts. Minik on the points. Chorek come at us, serves them right what they get.”
Maorgan grimaced. To Shadith he said, “Nerve poison. Fast and nasty. “Well, we better get moving again.” He turned his caцpa, set him to moving at a quick walk.
Shadith rode beside him. “Nerve poison? That something the chorek will have?”
“Probably not. Amikta is a fungus that grows above the glacier line and distilling it is a nervous thing. Only a few can do it without killing themselves and everyone around.”
“Mm. Remember what we talked about at the first lay-by? The mesuchs on Melitoлh could be arming them and sending them against us. No telling what we’ll be facing.”
He grimaced, winced, rubbed at his temple. “Complications. I wish all you mesuchs had never found us.”
By mid-afternoon as the storm still held off, the caцpas had gotten used to the fluttering debris and had lost most of their skittishness though they were still nervous. At their rest break, they munched on the grain and browsed placidly enough on the new growth on the patches of brush at the edge of the small dry meadow. Shortly after Danor started a fire to brew up some cha, the Eolt appeared overhead, staying in place with some difficulty because of the turbulence in the air streams.
Eolt Melech dipped low, uncoiled xe’s speaking tentacle and draped it around Maorgan’s neck with a proprietary affection that made the Mer-Eolt Lebesair go pursy with disapproval. Xe was also pale and rippling with resentment at being brought back this close to the storm.
For the first time Shadith was aware of the personality differences between the two Eolt. She’d been seduced by their golden beauty, their music, and their untouchable quality into thinking of them as a peculiar combination of god and beast. To see one of them as irritable and petty startled her into realizing she was doing to them what others had done to the Weavers of Shayalin. God or Demon. It seemed every living creature could make one or the other of any species exotic enough in their eyes.
Melech withdrew xe’s tentacle and worked xe’s way upward through the turbulence to join the other Eolt in a quieter air layer.
Shadith walked over to Maorgan. “Well, what did xe say?”
“Melech saw a man riding parallel with us when xe got close enough to see us. Fior, not Keteng. Means we’ve got to watch nights as well. He’d stop on woody hills and use a glass on us, move on to catch up with us and do the same again. Right after the Eolt got back to us, he took off, riding north. Melech tried following for a while, but the currents were wrong and anyway the man disappeared into the forest and xe couldn’t see him any longer.”
The clouds thickened, the wind picked up, and the turbulence up where the Eolt swam grew _so intense they struggled up to their maximum altitude and were blown out of sight.
A raindrop hit Shadith’s nose, another landed in her eye. Her hair was short and close to her head, but she could still feel the wind tugging at it. A flurry of huge drops pounded her back, then no more fell for over an hour.
The caцpas turned fractious again as the road moved from open brushland into the edges of the forest. Sokli started sidling and cow kicking, trying to get his head down, trying to sink his teeth in any part of Shadith available. She hunched her shoulders, booted his nose away from her leg for the tenth time and let her mindtouch bleed into the twilight under the canopy, feeling about for the heatpoints that meant men watching.
The trees whipped about, leaves noisy and agitated, limbs groaning, creaking, occasionally snapping free to go juddering along the ground until they jammed up against a trunk.
Thunder crashed.
The darkness went white, and a tree not far from the road exploded.
Sokli squealed, planted his feet, put his head down, and wouldn’t budge. Behind her she could hear the pack string snorting and squealing.