They found a few animals still remaining, two nursing sows in their pens and a couple dozen half-feral goats and chickens; the former too large and too protective of their young to move from their styes with any speed, the latter too stubborn and wild to catch. The warriors made fine sport with what they found, slaughtering the pigs to take back to the camp, rounding up the goats, decorating themselves with the strange garments and utensils. One young warrior flung a bright quilt about his shoulders like a motley cape; another topped his helm with a foolish-looking cap, and a third traded his helm for some kind of metal basin. Jegrai sat his horse, aloof from it all, checking for signs of which way the land-folk had fled—until his sharp eyes caught an unmistakable sign on the soft ground of one of the empty pastures.
The print of horse-hooves!
He whooped to get the raiders' attention; they abandoned their foolishness and joined him in following the tracks all the way to the western fence.
One panel of the fence was down; had been taken down. "What do you make of this?" he asked Abodai, the best tracker of the lot of them.
Abodai pursed his lips, which made his moustache squirm on his upper lip as if it had a life of its own. "I would say that this was a true herd, mares, foals, and a stallion. I think perhaps the fear of the land-folk spoke to the herd, made them spooky and impossible to catch. This may be what delayed these folk so as to abandon so much. So. It may well be that the herdsman felt that to let the horses free would keep them out of our hands, no? Or it may well be that the herdsman is with them, mounted, driving them before him. And he thinks we cannot catch them."
Jegrai grinned. "Foolish herdsman!" The shiny copper, brass, and silver trinkets, the other booty they had picked out of what had been abandoned, was now cast away. The goats were left in the care of the youngest, least experienced member of the raiding party to be driven back to the Clan. He would lead a foraging party back for the pig carcasses and the rest.
But the remaining members of the raiding party would be going after the booty that truly mattered: the horses. Gold and silver were fine for ornamentation, brass and tin useful, but horses were life itself. So far they had captured only two old mares, both too old to breed, and one half-broken gelding. The young gelding had called up a fire of lust in the heart of every person of the Vredai that had seen him; nearly four hands higher than the sturdy little steppes horses, he was cleanlimbed and strong and swift. Jegrai badly wanted a stallion of his kind to breed into his herd, and mares to breed to his stallions. With such tall, swift horses, they might hold even against the Talchai.
"Hai-ya!" he cried, giving his gelding his head and urging him with his legs into a gallop. "Let us ride!"
They pounded after the vanished herd, the excitement of the chase building as the trail grew fresher and fresher; they urged their mounts over pastures of lush grass of a thickness and luxuriance that no one of the Clans had seen since before the drought. And their building excitement was such that they hardly noted the rich pasturage except as something to cross. They raced through orchards of tall trees covered in white and pink blossom without a backward glance. All that mattered was the trail, and the quarry at the end of it.
Jegrai was the first to actually see them, so far in the distance and high up on a mountain road that they were little more than moving dots beneath a cloud of dust. He gave a whoop of victory, and the others looked up almost as one to see what he had spotted. Their fierce warcries must have been loud enough to carry up the side of the peak, for the little group of dots sped up a moment later—sure proof that they were being herded.
It was only when they were halfway up on that trail themselves that Jegrai realized with a shock of dismay just where that unseen herdsman was taking his horses.
This is the wizards' mountain! he thought with a chill, and fought down the urge to rein in his gelding there and then. Wind Lords—he's heading right for the wizards' pass! If they see us—oh, Wind Lords—what if those are the wizards' horses?
He wanted, with a desperation the like of which he had not felt except when faced with Yuchai's illness, to turn the party back around and give up the chase. But one look at the faces of the others told him that he dared do no such thing. He would lose face before them—and they would go on without him.
And when they all returned to the camp, there might well be a challenge for his rank of Khene. Probably from his half-brother, Iridai.
So he whipped his horse up to the front, and prayed to the Wind Lords that the raiders would be able to overtake the herd before they passed into the wizards' protection.
The Wind Lords were not listening.
The track turned into a trail cut into the very face of the cliff. Their quarry had vanished somewhere up ahead, but the dust of the herd's passing still hung in the air, and the nearness of their goal heated their blood still more. They pounded around a bend in the trail in a cloud of dust and sweat. . . .
Only to pull up in startlement at the sight of what lay across the place where the main road joined the trail they had been following.
They had scarcely a moment to take in the incredible size of the structure before them—larger than anything any of them had ever seen before, even Jegrai, who had been to the Suno Lords' city once as a child. They had just enough time for their hearts to stop dead and start again with the astonishment of it.
There was an eerie whistling that seemed to come from somewhere above—
And Jegrai had a fleeting impression of something large and boulderlike thudding down into the trail before them—
Then the wizards called lightning down upon them out of the clear and cloudless blue sky.
Thunder roared in their ears, flames and dirt sprang up before them; the trail itself was torn and flung into the air in front of their panicked horses, and scarcely ten horse-lengths away.
The horses screamed and fought their bits—but not for long. As one man the raiders let them have their heads, and turned tail and ran for the shelter of the cliff face they'd just come around. There they did rein their panicked, sweat-sodden beasts in, before they could break legs in their headlong flight. Afraid to move lest the lightning find them, the Vredai cowered under the cliff and looked to Jegrai to get them safely out—
—Jegrai, who had no more notion of what to do than the rest of them did.
"Felaras!"
Teo burst into the Master's study, white-faced and breathless. Kasha dropped the mug of chava she'd been drinking, and the pottery cup shattered unnoticed on the floor.
"Fe—Fe—laras—" Teo panted, clinging to the door frame. "Zetren's—on the—wall. With the—gunners—"
"Damn!" Felaras spat, "that mad dog will ruin everything!" She leapt out of her chair and vaulted over the desk, but Kasha beat her to the door. Kasha sprinted down the dark staircase as fast as she dared, with Felaras right behind.
Gods above—Kasha thought angrily.—we go to all this trouble of setting this trap, risk young Eldon and the horse-herd—if Zetren ruins it for us—
She hit the entrance to the hallway with enough momentum to have bowled over a dozen tall men, had there been anyone blocking her way. The stone floor was slippery; she skidded, bounced off the wall opposite the staircase, and kept going. Behind her she could hear Felaras making the transition from stairwell to hall with a little more control.
At the end of the hall was the wooden door to the outer yard that lay between the Fortress building and the wall. She hit the door at a dead run, and it slammed against the stone. The sun nearly blinded her, but she didn't stop to give her eyes time to adjust, just ran, scrubbing at her watering eyes, and trusted to memory and habit to put her feet where they should go.