“About a thirty. At least it’s out of the dust.”
They were in the Cave, a labyrinth under a mountain of rock slabs. Orlad had lived in there while helping to build the bridge at Fist’s Leap, a short distance along the trail.
Fabia yawned. They all yawned a lot now. “How far to the Edge from here? In real distance.”
“Less than a menzil.”
“And that will take us five days?”
Orlad rolled up his blankets. “Heth always allows five days. It takes as long as you need. No more shelters. The Cave will seem like a palace.”
“Wait until you get to the Edge!” Waels said. “There’s a great marble gate with stone lions. And hot baths. The wine shop-”
“You talk too much. Heroes should be strong and silent.”
“My lord is kind.” Waels did not sound very repentant. “And this is the day we have been waiting for. Click! The trap is sprung.”
“No!” Pathfinder Hermesk tried to yell and managed only a feeble wheeze. “You mustn’t! Mass murder. Travelers do not do such things to one another.”
At first the Celebre team had traveled by forced marches, bypassing some shelters to gain ground on Saltaja. The Pathfinder had started strong, but slowed as they grew closer to the Edge, his aging lungs laboring and wheezing. The dust of the last two days had been especially hard on him. Fabia could not have kept up any better with the two Heroes if she had worn a brass collar herself. Dantio, the weakest of the five, had done well until he sprained an ankle just before Mountain of Skulls. The team had waited there, giving him as long as possible to heal and keeping watch for pursuit, but since then they had barely managed to stay ahead of the Vigaelians. Most mornings they saw flames from the burning shelter they had left the previous day.
“We warned you what we were going to do when we began,” Orlad said impatiently. “And now we have no choice. The wolves will catch us if we don’t stop them.”
“I agree that Saltaja must die,” the Pathfinder whispered. “But how can you be certain she is there?”
“She is there!” Fabia took over the argument. “Who else would be burning the shelters? Werists wouldn’t. They hope to go home one day.”
“But all those innocent men with her?”
“We decided this back at First Ice, when we could still think straight.”
Orlad could barely make out his sister’s face in the gloom of the Cave, but her voice carried absolute conviction. It was she who had persuaded them that to try blocking the trail back then would be futile. The construction at First Ice would be too easily repaired and to interfere with it would just bring a troop of warbeasts after them. Fist’s Leap, as Orlad had admitted when she cross-examined him, could be made completely impassable, and by then Saltaja would have closed off her own retreat. Fabia’s arguments had carried the day then and she repeated them now.
“Saltaja and her foul brood have been a blight on the world for almost thirty years. This is the first real chance anyone has ever had to remove her. How many sixty-sixty more people will she slay in future? Will you have their deaths on your conscience?”
Orlad had hung back at Mountain of Skulls to watch the pursuit arriving, and his opinion was that it included the whole of Caravan Six. That meant four sixty men would die with the Queen of Shadows. More fool them for supporting the bloodlord. He finished lacing his pack and shivered. “Time to go,” he said. “Don’t be late.”
He squeezed through the gap into the vestibule, past the high pile of bales of pemmican, and so out of the Cave. Into the wind. The sun was behind him, shining on the cone of Mount Varakats straight ahead, above a featureless gray landscape. Five days to the Edge, and then he would no longer have to stare at that mountain. That was the first sign that you had reached the other face, they said-Varakats disappeared. And the Veils of Anziel danced above you almost close enough to touch.
The Cave itself offered nothing flammable, not a joist or beam, but the cache there was the last food on the Face. Here travelers must load up with all they could carry and make a dash for the Edge. This supply was critical. As soon as all his companions were out of the Cave, Orlad spilled oil on the pemmican mountain and added a glowing ember. The wind caught the flames; he backed away quickly. Pemmican was dried meat and lard. Even here it burned. Oh, yes, it burned!
“Warmth at last!” Fabia said. “Where is the bathtub?”
Orlad hoisted his pack. He was bent almost double by it, for today it included a jar of oil as well as his bedroll and two sixdays’ food. “Don’t linger. When they see the smoke, they’ll be after us like hungry catbears.”
Hermesk was still grumbling that breaking bridges was an offense against holy Hrada, but the real trap was this bonfire. Without that food the caravan would have no hope of reaching the shelters on the Florengian side. If all went well, the Celebres would find those that had been provisioned from Veritano. First they must close the Leap and escape before the doomed men behind them arrived and took their revenge. No one had mentioned cannibalism yet, but that was part of the Stralg legend.
“Fabia, bring up the rear,” Orlad said. That meant, Look after Dantio. “Waels and I will go and get started.”
As the two Werists plodded off along the trail, Waels said, “Where does all this dust come from?”
“No idea.”
Dust lay everywhere near the Edge, a curse and a torment. It burned the eyes and throat, it seeped into everything, stuck to everything. Whatever ice or snow there was lay hidden under dust. The landscape was a monotone gray, like a vast ash bed. Heaps and hollows hinted at boulders beneath, but the bedrock had been rounded and smoothed by the creep of infinite time. The sun was barely above the horizon, deadly bright in a sky whose blue was almost black, speckled with stars. Always the wind blew over this desert. It swirled dust along the ground, it lifted dust in choking clouds, and it even seemed to power the Dust River. In time it would bury the road too, but at the moment there was no need for signposts-the passage of many hordes had trampled a wide track through the maze.
“Tell me again,” Waels told his feet, because he was doubled over as much as Orlad was, “why closing the trail here is better than at Mountain of Skulls.”
Orlad paused to catch his breath. He could have carried a load like this all day at Nardalborg. Here he could manage only a few steps at a time. It was like walking in snow with only half a lung.
No need to waste breath repeating the story of the Leap for Waels. It was part of the legend of the first crossing. Stralg’s horde had arrived at the Dust River and tried to wade it, only to discover that the Dust River was quicksand. The dust was as slippery as oil. Men fell, and then it filled their clothes and nostrils and pulled them down.
So the horde had searched out the narrowest place and tried to jump it-in battleform, of course. Three men in succession had fallen short, plunging to their deaths. Then Stralg himself had tried and done it. His men had thrown him a rock on a string. He had pulled a bundle of clothes over before he froze to death, then a rope. They had built a rope bridge. It had lasted many years, until constant gnawing by wind and dust rendered it unsafe. Last summer Heth had sent a construction gang up to replace it. When Satrap Therek refused to let Probationer Orlad try for promotion to novice, Heth had assigned him to the team. He had carried more than his share of the new bridge all the way from First Ice, and had stayed to help build it. Now he was going to destroy it.
“Stralg had ropes,” he said. “They won’t. No rope, no bridge.”
“But if he could leap it, why can’t other men? They’ll come after us!”
“I’ll show you.” Orlad began to move again. “When we get there.”
If they got there… He knew every up and down on that short trek, but he had never tried it with a mammoth on his back. Last year he had grown better acclimatized as time went on. Now he was still fresh up from Nardalborg. Black spots danced in front of his eyes and he paused until they went aw ay.