‘Maybe,’ was all Lorin said.
And he led them out into the dry plain once more.
To follow the trail of a lone woman was not as easy as it had been to follow a hundred mounted slavers and fifty or more captives. They moved slowly. Lorin paused now and again to reassure himself that he had not lost the course.
It did not help that a hot wind was starting to stir the air. Out in the far distance, Brennan could even see occasional swirling little pillars of dust dancing across the flats. They fascinated him at first. He had never seen anything quite like them. Soon enough, his thoughts turned to worry instead. If gusts of wind took away too long a stretch of Marweh’s prints, even Lorin might be left impotent. She would be gone, vanished into this endless waste. Brennan would have more failure to stew over.
Perhaps pondering the same possibilities, Lorin picked up the pace a little. The air itself had now turned against them. Time had always been their enemy. They had known it anyway, but Yulan made it clear before they rode out from the camp: one sunset, one sunrise, and whether they had Marweh or not they turned about and rode for Hommetic lands. As fast as they liked. After that dawn, more than likely the Free were going to turn from hunters to hunted. These bleak lands might well be full of Orphanidons by then.
Yulan and the rest raced against the same foretold fate, but Brennan would not be there to see what became of their quest. He would not see the tyrant’s little army run down and destroyed, if that was what happened. He would not see the slaves saved, if that was what happened. He and Lorin and Manadar would not be a part of whatever grand victory the Free might win. So be it. If it was punishment, he would never have argued against it.
‘She knows where she’s going now,’ Lorin said abruptly.
Brennan and Manadar rode up to his side.
‘Look there.’ Lorin gestured at the ground. ‘She stopped, then turned suddenly. Heads off in a pretty straight line. You see it?’
‘No,’ Brennan said honestly. The bare earth was unreadable to him.
Lorin pointed at the horizon.
‘She spotted that,’ he said. ‘She’s making straight for it.’
Brennan frowned. The subtle breeze had lifted up a sand-haze, dulling and flattening everything more than a few hundred paces in any direction. He could just make out what Lorin meant though. Way out there in the distance-it was impossible to say how far-there was a shape. A bulging rise in the land. Some kind of wide, low hill rising and falling from the featureless expanse all around it.
‘She must have been told where to go to be reunited with her husband and child,’ Lorin mused. ‘Told what to look for.’
‘It’s probably a lie,’ said Manadar. ‘There’ll be nothing there waiting for her.’
‘Probably,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
They turned their horses towards that distant point and moved on.
VIII
The hill was much larger than it had appeared. It was also further away than Brennan would have guessed. It took them a good two hours to get close enough to make out any details of the terrain.
Those details were not unexpected. Bare, yellowish rock. A few frail shrubs rooted in crevices and crannies. There were gullies on the lower flanks of the hill, extending out into the flat ground beyond. They shallowed and shrank the further from the slopes they reached, until they disappeared altogether. There must be downpours here, Brennan supposed. Brief, sudden storms which sent water pouring off the hard heights, scouring out channels for itself down onto the plain. Where it flowed and spread and sank away, sucked up by the parched earth.
‘I don’t much like this,’ Lorin said as they drew closer to the great rocky mound.
‘No? You amaze me,’ said Manadar sarcastically.
‘This is not so far from where I told Yulan he might find his quarry. Unless they changed course, there could be a hundred slavers on the other side of this hill.’
‘What should we do?’ Brennan asked.
‘Well, if there’re eyes up on top, they might have seen us by now,’ Lorin said, ‘but they might be careless, or tired, or not there at all. Either way, it’d do no harm to make ourselves a little harder to see.’
He angled his horse a touch to the side and led them down into the tail end of one of the long, sprawling gullies. They worked their way along the bottom of it, its sides rising higher and higher until they passed their heads. There was some dry vegetation down there in the bed of what, perhaps for only a day or two a year, must be a fierce-flowing river. Browned seed-heads that said there had been flowers here, in times past. There were no flowers now.
Soon enough, the ground beneath their feet was starting to rise. They halted, looking up the deep notch cut into the side of the hill. Lorin swung himself down from his horse. Brennan and Manadar copied him.
‘We need to walk someone up there,’ Lorin said, hooking a thumb towards the top of the hill. ‘Make sure there’s no eyes there before we take the horses up.’
‘That’ll take time,’ Manadar murmured. ‘She’s walking away from us, step by step.’
‘Do you boys listen to anything I say? Told you before: never hurts to take every care. Can you not smell it?’
Brennan looked around, puzzled. He could smell nothing but his own dried sweat, filling clothes he had been wearing for days. Manadar, similarly confounded, shrugged.
‘Trouble,’ said Lorin emphatically. ‘Bloody, bad trouble. This place reeks of it. This whole contract reeks of it. You want to see the far side of the next day or two, you’d better learn to smell the way the wind’s blowing.’
‘I’ll go,’ Brennan said, gazing up towards the rocks above.
‘Not alone. Manadar, you keep the horses here until you get some sign from us.’
Manadar started to protest as Lorin pressed reins into his hands, but the older man was far beyond any patience for debates.
‘Brennan here’s the closest thing we’ve got to an archer. I’m more likely to need him up there than you and your sword. And some time soon I’ll need my horse more than either of you, so don’t lose it.’
Brennan followed closely on Lorin’s heels as they worked their way up the gully, and then out onto the slopes of the hill. He tried to put his feet where Lorin’s went, and to keep his back bent just the same and his head bowed just as low.
There was not much by way of shelter from curious eyes out there on the higher ground. What little there was, they found. The few bushes had more or less no leaves. There were boulders here and there, most smoothed and rounded by centuries of wind-blown sand. Cracks and crevices ran up and across the flatter expanses of exposed stone. Trying to remain unseen took a great effort. A keen concentration of mind and a control of body. Lorin had that, and Brennan sought to mimic it with every step.
There were loose pebbles, most resting in crannies but some just lying there on slabs of rock. Lorin disturbed none of them. His feet made no sound on the stone. The leather of his boots did not even creak. Brennan could not quite match that silence. He could hear his own footsteps, soft as he tried to make them. He could hear the arrows in the quiver at his waist shifting against one another.
He took some comfort from the fact that the higher they rose, the more noticeably the wind flowed over them. It was blowing across the face of the hill and out onto the plain. It might carry faint sounds away with it. Unfortunately, it did not carry off much in the way of heat. Even the moving air felt drying and hot. The harsh sun was beating back off the naked rocks. Brennan imagined himself to be a ball of dough, thrust into a baker’s oven.
He heard a buzzard’s cry above and stared up at the dark bird, circling and rising. Waiting for the bread to be thoroughly cooked, he thought.
Lorin pulled him into the lee of a big, round sandy-coloured rock. There was a pool of shadow that came as the most soothing relief. Brennan would have drunk that shadow down if he could, to hold its coolness within him. That was not why Lorin had chosen the spot though.