Lugh sobbed, an abrupt, harsh sound. “They betrayed us,” he said. “They lied.”
“About the talisman? Yes.”
“They lied!” A pause. Their feet rang on the paving stones. “But that wasn’t the worst. They were fools, Stark. Idiots!”
“Fools are plentiful everywhere. A man has to learn to think for himself.”
“They’re dead,” said Lugh vindictively. “They were paid for their folly.”
“Fools generally are. Did they die well?”
“Most of them. Even Old Sowbelly. But what good is courage at the last minute, when you’ve already thrown everything away?”
“Every man has to answer that question for himself,” Stark said, looking back. People were pouring through the gate now, and over the low wall. Over their heads he saw mounted men, forging their way in a tight group through the refugees. There were eight or nine of them and they looked as though they were hunting for something. “You were satisfied well enough with your leaders yesterday, so it might be said that you deserved them. Now let’s drop the subject and think about staying alive.” He shoved Lugh bodily aside into a transverse street. “Which way to the Quarter of the Blessed?”
Lugh opened his mouth, shut it again hard, and then made a wry gesture. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “This way.” He started to walk.
“Faster,” said Stark. “Ciaran’s riders are on the hunt.”
They ran, looking frequently over their shoulders.
“She won’t forgive you,” Lugh said, and swore. “What a shame to us, to be defeated by a woman!”
Stark said, “Kushat has been taken by a warrior, and never forget it.”
The street had curved and twisted, shutting off the view of the main avenue, but Stark’s quick ears caught the sound of riders coming, the feet of the beasts making a soft heavy thudding as they ran. He caught Lugh and pulled him into an alley that led between the buildings, no more than three feet wide. They fled along it and into a mews behind the crumbling rear premises of the street, and Stark realized that most of these buildings had been abandoned long ago. The windows gaped and walls had spilled their carefully-cut blocks into the mews, where they were drifted over with dust and the wind-blown sloughings of a city. The sounds of war and death seemed suddenly very far away.
“How much farther?” Stark asked.
“I don’t know… not much farther, I think.”
They floundered, slipping and scrambling over the debris, their flanks heaving. And then the mews ended in a blank wall some eight feet high, and Lugh said, “There. On the other side.”
X
Stark hauled himself up onto the wall and sat there, breathing hard and looking at the Quarter of the Blessed.
It was not a happy prospect. Kushat was a very old city, and a great deal of dying had been done in it. The area of this quarter was greater than any of those housing the living, and it had grown vertically as well as horizontally. Above ground the squat stone tombs had fallen and been leveled and rebuilt on their own debris until most of them now stood on humped mounds higher than the wall. Beside each one stood a tall stela, carved with innumerable names, most of them long obliterated, and these stelae sagged and leaned in every direction, bowed down with their weight of time, a dark sad forest with the cold wind blowing through it and the winter sun making long erratic patterns of shadow. Below ground, Balin had said, the rock was riddled with the even older shaft graves. Except for the wind, the silence was absolute.
High overhead, the somber cliffs brooded, notched with the gateway of the pass.
Stark sniffed the cold and quiet air, and the aborigine in him recoiled, shivering. He hunched around on the wall, looking back toward the increasing sounds of war and rapine. Columns of smoke were rising now, here and there, and the screaming of women had become incessant. The barbarian tide was rolling rapidly inward toward the King City. On the high tower of the king’s hall, the crimson banner had come down.
Lugh had clambered up on the wall beside him. He watched Stark curiously. “What is it?”
“I’m thinking that I’d rather go back where the fighting is hot, than in there where it’s far too peaceful.”
“Then why go?”
“Because Balin told me of a way used by the tomb-robbers.”
Lugh nodded, looking at Stark and smiling a crooked smile. “But you’re afraid.”
Stark shrugged, a nervous twitch of his shoulders. Lugh said, “I was hating you, Stark, because you’re too damned much of a man and you make me feel like a child. But you’re only a child yourself under all that muscle.” He jumped down off the wall. “Come on, I’ll keep you safe against the dust and the dry bones.”
Stark stared at him. Then he laughed and followed him, but still reluctantly. They went between the tombs and the leaning stelae, mindful of Ciaran’s riders and darting like animals between the covering mounds. Then Lugh stopped and stood facing Stark and said, “When you told me, ‘Another thing has been found’ what did you mean?”
“The talisman.”
The wind rocked Lugh back and forth where he stood, and his eyes were wild and bright, looking into Stark’s.
“How do you know that, outlander?”
“Because I brought it here myself, having taken it from the hands of Camar, who was my friend and who did not live to return it.”
“I see.” Lugh nodded. “I see. Then that morning at Ban Cruach’s shrine…”
“I knew you were lying. Yes.”
“No matter. Where is it, Stark? I want to see…”
“It’s in safe hands, and long out of the city.” He hoped that he was right. “Men are rallying to it, at the Festival Stones.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
“Yes.”
“Good enough,” Lugh said. “Good enough. Where is the door to this rat-run?”
Stark pointed toward the arched ceremonial gate that pierced the wall at the end of the street they had left. “I must count from that. Keep an eye out for Ciaran’s men.”
There was no sign of them. It was possible they had turned back. It was also possible that they had come ahead of Stark and Lugh into the Quarter of the Blessed and were now hidden from sight among the tumuli. He picked up his guide mark as quickly as he could and counted the stelae as Balin had told him, going past one that was cracked in half, and one that was fallen, and one that had carved on its top a woman’s face. “Here,” he said, and stopped below a tomb with a great slab of rock in its side, no different from any other in appearance. He began to climb up the tall mound, flinching from the icy touch of the stone and rubble that seemed somehow colder than other stones, and Lugh came scrambling up like a dog on all fours behind him.
“Stark,” he said abruptly, “what happens if you have counted wrong?”
“We go back and start over again.”
“I think not.”
Stark turned his head, startled. Lugh was looking off to his left. There was movement there among the tumuli. Stark saw the gleam of a bare red head in the sunlight, and then at a distance another as two riders came into view in the twisting lanes between the mounds. From those two he could extrapolate the whole company of riders. They had come ahead to the burying ground, while Stark and Lugh were struggling on foot along the mews. Now they were fanned out in a long line and working their way back toward the gate, hoping to flush out their quarry.