Angel Isle

CHAPTER

6

Gradually the nightmare of pursuit faded as the road flowed backward beneath the horses’ hooves, at first as a strange smooth path snaking through the wilderness that they had been crossing since they left the road, never visible for more than a few hundred paces ahead of them and behind them as the folds in the ground hid and revealed it. It was as if it existed only in the stretch they could see. Indeed, after a while, Maja began to realize that this was indeed the case.

Chanad had told her how to use the amulet she had given her as she left. She realized at once that it was going to be a wonderful help. She was growing erratically into the use of her extra sense as it increased. The amulet was a way of controlling that. It looked like a simple bracelet of colored glass beads and was mildly elastic, so that it would stay wherever she put it on her arm. The higher she wore it the less protection it gave, so that when she pushed it a little above her right wrist she became faintly aware of the presence of magic, while worn just above her elbow, which was as far as the thickness of her arm allowed it to go, the magical signal became almost as strong as it would have been if she had been wearing it on her left arm, where it had no effect at all.

Now as they traveled eastward through the deserted landscape she was able to adjust it until she could sense two steadily moving waves of magic laying and then removing the path before and behind them, leaving nothing to show that anyone might have passed that way. There was even a clean, dry cave with a stream beside it as the sun sank that first evening, which looked and felt as if it had been there for centuries, but for all they could tell hadn’t existed an hour ago and would vanish next day as soon as they had rolled up their bedding and gone. Inside, it felt disturbingly magical, but she moved the amulet down her arm and slept there untroubled.

Early the following afternoon they came out onto a public road and turned south. Then several days of farming country, increasingly rich and fertile, with quiet villages and busy little towns, and once the estate of some great lord. Here almost everyone wore the standard dress of the Empire that they had first seen on the road south of Mord and which Chanad had now supplied for her and the others. Soon she could tell from the various arrangements of patterns and beads where she stood in relation to the other travelers on the road.

It was as though nothing at all had changed in the twenty generations since Tilja’s time. Coming from the Valley, where nothing had changed either until the dreadful irruption of the wild horsemen from beyond the mountains, Maja didn’t find this strange.

They slept in farmers’ barns or inns. Night after night Maja waited for Jex to speak to her again in her dreams, though he had told her he was unlikely to. She woke each morning to find that her hand had crept under the pillow while she slept and was clasped around a little granite lizard, warm only with the warmth of her own bloodstream. And so it remained during each day, dangling from her neck beneath her blouse.

Everything seemed utterly peaceful and ordinary. Ribek relished every trivial happening or encounter along the way, and when nothing else took his attention was happy to talk about his mill, and didn’t think it at all strange that Maja should be so interested. Despite the urgency of their mission, it would have been easy to let their pace slacken, but for Saranja’s determination to drive them on. She seemed unafraid of what they were going to attempt at Tarshu. If anything, eager for it.

“You’ve been given a purpose, haven’t you?” Ribek told her one evening.

She shook her head.

“Not given,” she said. “It was there all along. I’ve found it.”

They heard no news from there, or any of the doings of the Watchers. Only twice, when they asked their way through the network of little roads that covered that whole tract, their informants hesitated and looked at them oddly before they answered.

“Is there a problem?” Ribek asked the second time.

The man shrugged and shook his head, as much in warning, Maja thought, as refusing to reply.

“It’s like that in the Empire,” said Benayu bitterly, as soon as they were out of earshot. “Fodaro had lived in it, remember. He used to say that however peaceful things seem, fear is never far below the surface. They’re content because they have to be, but that isn’t the same thing as being happy. These people have picked up somehow that the Watchers are active. They’ll whisper about it among themselves, but not to strangers.”

On the fifth day their road joined one of the great Imperial Highways that linked the major cities of the Empire together. It took them on in the same direction, a little east of south, but was very different from anything they’d used so far, two broad highways running in opposite directions, with way stations spaced along it where all travelers must stop for the night and pay the fees and bribes to have their way-leaves inspected and stamped.

Now, and more and more as they journeyed, they became aware of the immense and complex thing that surrounded them and called itself the Empire. To Maja it seemed half creature, half machine. Every one of the travelers Ribek talked to at the way stations—and he talked to scores of them because he was like that—was a separate cell in that creature, a tiny piece of that immense mechanism. Every one of them had the Emperor’s permission to be there, coming from one specified place, going to another, their passes stamped, their movements recorded, their regulated bribes taken by the way station clerks, who were themselves also just cells or cogs in the creature-machine’s labyrinthine intestines.

From their long acquaintance with the old story the three from the Valley were more familiar with all this than Benayu was, though he had lived all his life in the Empire. This was just as well, for now that he had no magic to perform or deal with he became an even more difficult companion, sitting listless and silent for hours on end, surly at any attempt to comfort or distract him, barely muttering his thanks when Saranja groomed Pogo for him, or Maja brought him the meal that Ribek had bought and prepared. His only relationship seemed to be with Sponge, who would lie with his head in his master’s lap when he brooded by the fire in the evenings, mourning with and for him.

Day followed day, and the journey became a routine. The clerks tried to cheat them in various ways, which Ribek dealt with wearily, as if he’d been traveling Imperial Highways for half his life. Levanter and Pogo seemed to be thriving on the journey, happy to canter mile after mile, and flagging no more than Rocky did in the heat of noon.

They regularly covered the distances between three and even four way stations in a single day. The air became warmer, the orchards grew peaches and pomegranates rather than apples and cherries. The individual farms gave way to vast estates, with gangs of serfs working fields that reached as far as the eye could see, where the sluggish rivers were lined with water hoists worked by patient oxen to feed the irrigation channels. The road doubled its width and still was busy, wagons or mule trains laden with merchandise, slave masters marching their men to some fresh task, a whole circus on the move, nobles and their trains cantering through along the special lanes kept clear for them, all the fizz and buzz of a contented and prosperous people. It was difficult to remember the bedrock of fear lurking below the surface.

Each evening, as they settled down in their plot at the way station, Maja would practice using her amulet to check around among their neighbors for any possible magical activity. There was almost always some minor hedge magic going on somewhere near by, causing one of the beads on her amulet to glow faintly, and then more strongly as she rotated it on her wrist, until the glowing bead was pointing toward the source of the signal. Different beads would glow according to the type of magic in use, and perhaps glimmer or pulse to some rhythm inherent in it. No doubt Benayu, if he had chosen, could have picked up the same signals, but with a conscious effort. He needed, so to speak, to open the door of his attention. For Maja, they were simply there, like birdsong.

Ten days or so into their journey they reached a small town where two Imperial Highways joined and continued south together, and here there was a larger than usual way station. All way stations had the same layout, a courtyard, roughly square, with a colonnaded arcade running round all four sides. Richer travelers could rent one of the spaces beneath the arches; the poorer or meaner ones slept in the open. A row of food stalls ran either side of the entrance. Unless it was raining, which it had done only once so far, Maja and the others slept in the open with the horses tethered beside them.

This evening they were close to the back wall of the way station, almost opposite the entrance. As the dusk thickened and Saranja nursed the fire she had just lit, Maja felt, like a sudden rap on the door of her mind, a quick pulse of magic from somewhere close to the entrance. A pause, and then another. And another. Each time a bead blinked brightly on her wrist, showing the source was moving steadily along parallel to the front wall. It reached the side wall and started back. She told Benayu and he roused himself from his torpor. Together they rose and looked.

Lamps were being lit under the arcade, and silhouetted against these she could see a single man working his way steadily across the courtyard, pausing before each group of travelers, emitting his pulse, and moving on. Halfway back he paused longer. One of the travelers rose and handed him what looked like a document. He glanced at it briefly, handed it back and moved on.

“Random check on magic-users at way stations,” said Benayu. “Jex told you they were doing it, remember?”

“Will you be all right?” said Saranja.

“Should be. If the Watchers didn’t spot me up at Mord…It doesn’t look the kind of job they’d waste anyone above second level on. There’ll be someone more powerful he can call on if he runs into trouble.”

Now he sounded completely confident, like Saranja, almost eager. This was his first real test against his enemy, and he was going to pass it. There was even a hint of the cocky young know-it-all he had seemed when they had first met him back at the sheep pasture.

It never came to the trial. Maja continued to watch, readying herself for the quick pulse of magic every time the man paused. He was only a couple of rows from them and was checking a license when there was a sudden, intense flare of power from immediately behind him. A bead on the amulet blazed bright enough to cast shadows. Ribek caught Maja as she fell sprawling. By the time she recovered the man had disappeared and there was a clamor of panic from where he had been, fading to a mutter of rumor that spread through the courtyard and died away. The silence was as dense as a marsh mist, dense with shock and fear.

“What on earth…?” whispered Saranja.

They looked at Benayu. He shook his head, perhaps in warning, perhaps in disbelief. He didn’t answer, but instead turned to Maja and muttered to her to protect herself. She slid her amulet down her arm. Even in those few words she had heard the strain in his voice. His lips began to move steadily, and his fingers danced through a pattern of small, precise gestures.

They waited, it seemed, for ever. On the other side of the courtyard somebody began to scream and couldn’t be stilled, but only one or two stars had pricked through the darkening sky when the Watcher came, and the nightmare was real.

Maja found herself locked into place. She couldn’t have moved a finger if she’d chosen. But she’d been looking directly toward where the magical explosion had occurred, so she saw him appear out of nowhere—a tall figure wearing a pale unornamented cloak and an ivory mask with only two round eyeholes and a dark slot for a mouth. Shuddering now with the nauseous impact of a Watcher, she slid the amulet up her arm as far as she could bear. It was important to know, to understand.

The space around him shimmered and became a sphere of light. He raised both hands head high with fingers spread and spoke five ringing syllables. The sphere rose and grew until it was large enough for everyone in the courtyard to see the scene it held, an upland pasture with a brown hare loping across it.

The viewpoint withdrew, enlarging the scene to show a stretch of sky from which a lion-headed thing, winged and taloned, came hurtling down. A bolt of lightning lanced up at it from where the hare had been. The winged creature absorbed it, plunged and struck, apparently at nothing, and then rose with the naked body of a man writhing in its clutch.

A voice spoke coldly in Maja’s head.

“This man chose to use unlicensed powers to take vengeance on a servant of the Emperor, and then to attempt to hide from the Emperor’s justice. He will now die slowly over very many days. Continue your journeys in peace, and let one of each party tell all you meet what you have seen. It will not go unnoticed if you fail to do so. Farewell.”

As he spoke the Watcher turned slowly on his heel. His empty eyes raked the courtyard. When he had completed the full circle he vanished.

There was a long, soft sigh as the air was released from several hundred lungs. Mutters and whispers followed. The screaming began again on the far side of the courtyard.

“Never thought I’d be seeing one of them,” said a voice nearby.

“Don’t mind if I never do again,” said another.

“You all right, young Ben?” said Ribek.

Benayu gave a shuddering sigh.

“They’re looking for me too, remember,” he muttered. “I never imagined power like that…and the horror…I never imagined it.”

Maja dragged herself out of her own nightmare, instinctively trying to join him in his, to tell him he was not alone. She reached to grasp his hand, clay-cold and clammy with sweat. He didn’t respond to her touch, nor come with her when she slowly surfaced into the here and now. He ate not a mouthful of his supper and seemed not to hear their voices, but sat all evening shivering and staring into the fire. In the end Ribek went to one of the food stalls and bought a phial of sleeping draft and forced it between his lips. Then he took off Benayu’s boots and with Saranja’s help straightened his body out—he seemed powerless to do even that for himself—and slid him into his bedroll. Sponge settled beside him and quietly licked his hand.

He was little better next morning. Ribek needed to support him to the latrines, and as soon as he returned he curled up again in his bedding and lay motionless until it was time to move. Pogo, aware through some weird horse sense that something was amiss with his usual rider, was in a skittish mood, so they heaved Benayu into Levanter’s saddle, where he sat hunched and listless all morning. Saranja led him, with Maja on the pillion, while Pogo took it out on Ribek by shying at trifles by the wayside.

Benayu sat with them silent at their midday rest, ate a few mouthfuls and slept in the shade, but when they moved on began to show signs of life, mutters and sighs and shakings of the head. But he ate steadily that evening, emptied his plate and set it aside, then spoke in a quiet, deliberate voice.

“It’s got to be done. It’s got to be done.”

He couldn’t hide the fear underlying the words.

It remained with them as the days went by, an unseen companion on their journey, as if the ghost of the Watcher walked beside them, invisible to all of them but Benayu. Mysteriously this made Maja’s own private nightmare easier for her to deal with. Compared to the almost solid reality of Benayu’s fear, hers seemed little more than a childish terror of the dark. He was the Watcher’s enemy, the one they were pursuing. Their prey. They probably didn’t even know of her existence. Without noticing, she found that she had started being afraid for him, not herself.

“Can’t we do anything to help?” she said one morning while Benayu was at the latrines.

“It’s hard on you,” said Ribek.

“It’s hard on all of us. It’s like being back at Woodbourne.”

Saranja glanced at her and nodded. She knew what Woodbourne had been like.

“We’ve got to bear with it, I’m afraid,” she said. “For one thing, we gave him our word, and for another we aren’t going to get anywhere without him. But we don’t all have to put up with it. Pogo will behave himself best alongside Rocky, so I’ll go ahead with Benayu and we’ll fix a seat for Maja behind Ribek.”

“We could take turns,” said Ribek.

“Let’s see how I get on,” said Saranja.

She got on very well, it turned out, simply by being herself. She didn’t try to cheer Benayu up, as Ribek might have done, or sympathize with him, as Maja would, but snapped at him if she felt like it, made his decisions for him, ordered him about. This seemed to suit him. Not that he became any less withdrawn, but less morose, more settled.

“Just what he needed,” Ribek told Maja. “He was pretty well on the edge of madness, I was beginning to think. His world had fallen to bits, and she’s put a little bit of it together again for him, a hut in a storm.

“Her too, I suppose,” he added after a pause. “She needs somebody outside herself. Not just a purpose, a person.”

Maja knew what he was talking about. It was one of the reasons the change suited her too. Maja wasn’t exactly afraid of her cousin, but she always felt on her best behavior with her. Saranja was so strong and direct and unafraid. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be timid and unsure, as Maja felt herself to be. Or perhaps that was just a mask. No, more than a mask, armor. An armored knight with a fiery sword, the sword of her anger. How could you know what she was like inside?

Ribek was different, not timid either, but open and easy. And he liked to talk. He was, simply, more companionable. So Maja perched happily on a folded bedroll behind him, with her arms around his waist to steady herself, and listened to his account of life at Northbeck. He still didn’t seem to find it at all strange that she was so interested.

Looking back much later on their adventure, she decided that it was because of this closeness that the nature of her fantasy life began to change. So far it had all been about building up a picture of a place where she could belong in the same way he did, Northbeck mill, imagining the people who lived there, and her dealings with them, and the animals and neighbors and customers who brought their grain to be ground. Being married to Ribek had so far simply been a way of making this happen. He was there, of course. He set the broken wing of the owlet she found in the woods (it never learned to fly and rode around on Maja’s shoulder instead). He helped her rescue a child from the millstream. (Whose child? Theirs, of course, but she didn’t think about how they’d come by it. Like Ribek, it was simply there for the fantasy, but less real than him, or the millstream, or the yellow cat.)

Now though, the balance started to shift as the picture solidified. She found herself more and more reluctant to fiddle around with details once she’d decided on them. In real life, once something’s happened it doesn’t unhappen. There was no magic in her imagined world, apart from Ribek’s ability to hear what the millstream was saying, so no absurdities. Following this logic she found herself in a double bind. She couldn’t go on being the in-between sort of Maja-now/Maja-grown-up she had hitherto been. Maja-now had no place in her imagined Northbeck, where Maja-grown-up belonged. How grown-up? She decided she’d married Ribek when she was sixteen—he wouldn’t want her before that. She remembered the jewel seller at Mord, but he also liked farmers to send their prettiest daughters with the grain, though of course he only flirted with them. Or did he?…Anyway, they now had two children, the toddler who’d fallen in the millstream and the older boy she’d already arranged for because he could hear what the millstream was saying, so she’d be about twenty-two and Ribek a bit over fifty, but just as lively as he was now—having a much younger wife was really good for him—and they were still deeply…

Her imagination refused to make it happen. It wasn’t interested. No, more than that. She really didn’t want to think about falling in love, and kissing and cuddling and lying together naked and their children growing inside her body and so on. All that must have happened for her picture of living at Northbeck to become as real as she’d made it, but she couldn’t make it happen. It was as though some magician had deliberately put a ward round it, to prevent her seeing inside. In the end she gave up. Ribek was a lovely man, so of course Maja-grown-up loved him. That would have to do.

She didn’t notice when Maja-now started loving him too.

Steadily the climate changed again as they journeyed on south. They were already resting out the heat of each noon. Soon there were different crops in the fields, with different trees by the roadside, different shrubs and weeds in the patches of wilderness. For a while a huge river ran beside the road, with crocodiles basking on its mud banks and buffalo wallowing in its shallows. Long-tailed monkeys begged or thieved for scraps in the coppices by the highway. Trained dogs kept them clear of the way stations.

And still Jex did not speak.

The moon had waxed to full, dwindled to a sliver and waxed almost to full again when the clerk at a way station glanced up from their way-leaves and said, “Journey’s end, friends. Tarshu road’s closed. Another half day to Samdan, and then you’re stuck.”

“How long for, do you know?” said Ribek.

“They’ve been evacuating folk out of Tarshu this last month,” the man said. “And there’s still a few dribbling through. But nothing’s happened yet, far as I’ve heard. When it does, mind, it’s going to be big. Good idea to be some place else.”

“We’ve got to get to Tarshu somehow or other,” said Saranja impatiently.

“Well, madam, you’re just going to have to enjoy the bright lights of Samdan for a while. Though it’ll be packed solid with Tarshu folk waiting to get back in.”

“How much further on to Tarshu after that?”

“Two days when the road’s clear, but it’s going to be jammed solid a good while after they start letting folk back, so you’d best allow three.”

Across country they took six. Strange hawks quartered the sky by day, so between dawn and dusk they lay up in evacuated farms, then traveled on by moonlight. Benayu pulled himself together now that they were so near, and the danger so real. He dared use very little magic. All he could risk was puttting a screen round himself each sunset and transforming himself into a pigeon, so as to scout out a route for that night’s journey.

At first he kept them as far as possible in or near shadow, but on the second night, as they were making their way along a shallow, part-wooded valley, Maja sensed a faint magical force approaching rapidly from some distance ahead. From the feel of it she recognized it as having something in common with the hawks that she had tracked all day. It seemed to be coming not directly toward them but as if to cross their path a little way ahead. She whispered her news to the others and they turned aside into the shade of a coppice to let it pass.

Soon Benayu could pick it up too, and they felt it cross the further ridge in a broad line and, still invisible despite the moonlight, sweep down into the valley. On it came in absolute silence until it was near enough for the others to make out, first as a few moving blobs of darkness, then as a whole line which in a few heartbeats more became about forty wild dogs of some kind, spaced several paces apart so as to cover a broad swath of grassland as they raced along, noses down, whimpering faintly with the excitement of the chase.

The near end of the line passed about a hundred paces from the coppice. One of them checked, raised its muzzle and sniffed the air. A couple of others joined it. Saranja seized Maja, ready to heave her into the saddle. It was no use, they both knew. Once they were spotted this near Tarshu the Watchers would be on them in an instant. And then, as suddenly as they’d halted, the dogs gave up and moved on. They began to breathe again.

“Not good,” said Ribek. “They could still cross our scent anywhere and be after us.”

“Either we’ve got to find somehow to hide our scent, or we’ve got to choose ways where they won’t be looking for us,” said Saranja.

“As well as keeping out of the open?” said Benayu. “It can’t be done. It’s difficult enough as it is.”

“I don’t think we need worry so much about that,” said Ribek. “Night hunters like owls fly low. However good your eyesight is, you can’t see far at night, even in bright moonlight, but if you want to watch any kind of area you’ve got to fly high. That’s why the Watchers are using dogs. Best they can do.”

“I’ll think,” said Benayu.

They moved on in silence, expecting any minute to hear the sound of baying coming from somewhere back on their trail, but the night stayed silent until the stars began to pale.

Next night Benayu led them on a slow and twisting course over broken foothills, though there was far better going on the plain below. At one point they waded for a while up a stream, until they came out on a wide upland dotted with abandoned sheep. Here he used Sponge to round up a dozen sleepy and bewildered beasts and for a couple of hours drive them behind the travelers, blotting out the human scent trail. Then it was broken ground again for a weary while. Once they heard distant baying and guessed that somewhere the dogs had found quarry. Almost at once Maja sensed something magical joining the pursuit. The feeling ended abruptly and the dogs fell silent. At last they reached an empty farmstead with food for the humans in the larder, mostly mildewed or stale, and fodder in the storage bins. And sleep.

The farmstead was on high ground looking east. Maja was standing in the doorway next evening, watching the movement of hawks as she waited for Benayu’s return. She’d seen only one, briefly, in an hour or more, where there’d been at least one constantly visible on the day they’d started. She was distracted by a sense of something unfamiliar ahead and to her left. Far off, she decided after a while, and therefore powerful for her to feel it at all. And muddled, as if there were several kinds of magic going on at the same time.

Moving into the greater darkness inside the door she found that several beads on her bracelet were glimmering erratically, to no pattern that she could make out. She showed Benayu when he returned. He in his turn stood in the doorway and concentrated.

“Yes,” he said after a while. “I can feel it, just. I wonder. Perhaps something’s started to happen at Tarshu. It can’t last forever. We’d better get on.”

“And there’ve been almost no hawks in the sky, either,” she said.

“Perhaps they can’t spare the magicians to control them and use their eyes,” said Ribek. “Now things have started they need them all at Tarshu. Let’s hope it’s the same with the dogs. It’s going to take for ever at the rate we’ve been going.”

So that night they started to take risks for the sake of speed, traveling on easier ground for a while until the chance came to lose their trail for a bit, and, weary as they were, carrying on into daylight until the first hawk appeared. Both they and the horses needed rest and food before that happened, and by then the storm of magic round Tarshu had so intensified that, even with Jex’s steady mild protection, it would have been more than Maja could have endured without her amulet. They continued on this pattern for three more nights and by the third morning they could smell the sea.

They were all now tired beyond belief, even the horses weary, but that evening they drove themselves on as before, until they crossed one of a series of low, long hills, like gigantic ocean waves, and around midnight looked down into a valley and saw that from over the hill beyond rose astonishing bursts of light accompanied by thunderous explosions that ran as violent tremors through the ground beneath their feet.

Desperately frightened, and with the horses on the verge of bolting, but at the same time buoyed up by the knowledge that they were almost there, they hurried down into the valley. Maja was wearing her amulet adjusted to the point where the main magical turmoil around Tarshu was as much as she could endure, with her sleeve pulled down over it because the almost continual brilliance of its beads might have drawn the attention of any there to see it.

There was a belt of trees at the bottom of the valley, with a river running through it, too wide to ford. As they waited while Ribek listened to the rustle of its flow, Maja became aware of something sweeping toward them, high in the air along the further slope.

They moved back into the shadow of the trees.

“Stand close,” said Benayu, and muttered and gestured. Maja felt his screen build itself round them.

“It’s coming,” whispered Maja.

They stared up at the patch of sky visible between the branches. Against another brilliant flare from beyond the hill they saw the thing go by, the reptile head held low, scanning the hillside as it passed, the taloned forelegs, the vast webbed wings, the stubby hind legs, the trailing serpent tail, all enormously too large for any bird. Dragon.

Ribek returned to the stream, listened again and came back.

“There’s only one of them,” he said. “I suppose that’s something. It just flies to and fro all night. There’s another one all day. And there’s a mill a mile and a half downstream. We should be able to cross there, if they haven’t got it watched.”

They worked their way along beneath the trees, halted to let Benayu build his screen again while the dragon swept south, and again while it returned. By this time they had reached the trees immediately above the mill.

They watched it pass, and pass again, noting that its return from the north took only half the time of its longer southern beat. Meanwhile with sinking hearts they studied the slope that faced them. Time and again the flare of the explosions from Tarshu lit the whole valley, making every rock and thornbush on the almost bare hillside stand stark, with its ink-black shadow beside it. They could all see that it would take far longer than the time of the dragon’s going and return for them to scurry between the scant scraps of cover.

“Looks as if the mill’s near as we can get,” said Benayu. “Should be enough. There’s magic and to spare, even down here.”

“Wait a moment,” said Ribek, pointing. “See there? That kind of a fold in the ground, running slantwise up the hill? This is a mill, remember—an old one by the look of it. There’ll have been carts coming and going hundreds of years. It was the same at home, and the lane there was feet into the solid rock in places. These hills are chalk—we used a sunk lane a couple of nights back, remember? I’ll lay you that one’d hide a loaded hay cart, and it’ll be shadow all along that far side. We can at least look.”

As soon as the dragon had gone by they crept down toward the shadowy pile of buildings. The mill-race thundered over the weir, glittering in the light of the explosions, which all but drowned the water’s deeper thunder. The windows of the mill were black slots. Someone or something could have been watching just inside any of them. Ribek headed for the upstream side of the building, where a railed walkway close against the mill wall spanned the current. They led Rocky and Levanter across, and Saranja coaxed and bullied Pogo to follow. The water raced beneath their feet, drawn taut like stretched silk toward the rush of the weir. In the yard beyond a scrawny hound scurried out to challenge them, but Sponge saw it off. They crossed the worn cobbles, went through the gate and almost at once entered the sunk lane.

It was just as Ribek had promised, a deep cleft running sidelong up the hill, wide enough for a heavy cart, its walls almost sheer, its chalk floor rutted by year after year of passing wheels into two great trenches, wide as a man’s body and knee deep or over. The glare from explosions at Tarshu, joined now by the steadier, more orange glow from the burning city, cast a narrow strip of dense shadow all along the right-hand wall.

Maja saw little of this, riding with her eyes half closed as she concentrated on reaching out through the chaos of magical impulses from beyond the hill so that she shouldn’t miss the far fainter signal of the dragon’s return from the north.

There! Was it? Yes.

“It’s coming,” she said.

They reined the horses in and lined them up to huddle along the chalk wall. The shadow here was barely wide enough to hide them. They held their breath as the dragon passed almost directly overhead. A fresh burst of light illuminated it so brilliantly as it passed that Maja felt she could see every separate scale on the sinuous body—beautiful, monstrous, deadly. The powerful, steady wingbeat did not falter, and it was gone. They relaxed and climbed on.

Twice more they paused and hid while the dragon went by, and then they were at the top.

They stood and stared.

Where the lane actually crossed the ridge it bit less deeply into the chalk, but a stand of warped trees grew beside it, blown almost horizontal by the sea winds, roofing them over from above but leaving a good, wide view out to sea. After the enclosed, shadowy hiddenness of the lane there was so much going on, so strange in such a blaze of light, and at such distances, that it was difficult to take in. The reek of burning floated up the hill, carried by a tangy, salty, fishy-smelling breeze.

Almost immediately at their feet, it seemed, lay Tarshu.

Maja had expected to find the whole city ablaze, but it was not. In two large patches the fires raged, golden and orange, with swirling masses of smoke pouring upward and then spreading into a dark, sagging layer tinged purple and orange with the light of the fires below. The columns of smoke rose through two great rents in an intricate network of glimmering violet lines that roofed the whole of the rest of the city. The edges of these rents writhed and reached inward, as if trying to reweave themselves over the holes. Even through the protection of her amulet, now worn only just above the wrist so that it almost totally screened her from the immediate effect, Maja still felt dazed by the huge outpouring of magical energy from a dozen separate sources as the Watchers in the city struggled to repair the damage. Above this extraordinary scene hovered an airboat.

It was enormous, unbelievable. The airboat they had encountered in the Valley would have seemed a toy beside it. A dozen arms on either side of the great bag bore the propellers that were moving the vast craft slowly over the city. Other projecting structures interrupted the smooth curves of the bag. Slung beneath it was the sleek gleaming gondola that carried the Sheep-face crew.

The airboat slowed, swung, and halted above the edge of the larger of the two rents. From the top of a mast above the bag shot a dozen gleaming metallic streamers which arced out and dangled down through the rent below and into the flames. Hatches opened below the gondola, releasing a stream of dark missiles which tumbled end over end a couple of times and then, as they gathered speed, were steadied by the fins at the rear end and plunged on down, some through the gap in the web and on into Tarshu, others onto the web itself. Wherever they struck a colossal explosion followed. The ones that landed on the city below sent shards of flaming debris hundreds of feet into the air, only to rain back down and start new fires where there was anything left to burn.

But that, Maja realized, was not their purpose. It was the ones that landed on the web that struck home. Somehow the web absorbed the shock. The violet network blazed around each explosion. For a moment the brightness spread like ripples in a pool, and then it was gone. But the patch of web through which the brightness had dissipated was in ruins. As patch joined to patch the rent extended while the shattered lines strove to rejoin and reroof the city.

Meanwhile the airboat itself was under attack. Around it, seeming tiny against its bulk, though in themselves monstrously larger than any normal bird or beast, circled a dozen dragons, flying in V-formation like migrating geese. Suddenly, as if at a word of command, they swung from their course, spread apart and hurtled toward the prow of the airboat. They were met by streaks of dotted brightness emerging from two slits in the front of the gondola, and two more from projections on the bag itself. The dragons wove from side to side, and ducked and climbed, trying to make themselves harder targets. They moved all at the same moment, as if joined by a single will. Sometimes a turn came at exactly the wrong moment for one of them, bringing it straight into one of the lines of light. The bright dots passed harmlessly through it and it raced on toward its target unperturbed.

They had almost reached it, and the first jets of flame were beginning to blast out of their mouths when it happened again. This time the dragon died almost instantly. Maja felt the jolt as its magical being blinked out of existence. Its wings crumpled and it plummeted down, tumbling over and over into the fires below. The other dragons had already vanished.

“There was only one of them,” said Benayu, in an awe-hushed voice. “The others were simulacra, decoys, to give it more chance of reaching the airboat. Fantastic power it must take to do that with a dragon.”

Fantastic power, yes, Maja thought. And still it churned up out of the city. But in all the swirling chaos of magic Maja could detect no impulse of any answering magic from the Sheep-faces’ side. All their weapons—the astounding airboat, the missiles they poured down on the city, the stream of fiery projectiles with which they had destroyed the dragon—were devised out of the materials of the natural world, like Ribek’s mill, back in the Valley.

“Well, this is what we’ve come for, isn’t it?” said Ribek. “Let’s get on with it. And then we clear out, quick as we can. Back down the lane, through the mill and up into the woods. Right, Benayu?”

“I suppose so,” Benayu answered.

He sounded listless, dazed, suddenly overwhelmed now that he was confronted by the sheer unmasterable power of the thing that he had vowed to destroy. Maja could sense the upward surge of the returning terror that he had been struggling to suppress ever since the episode in the way station. She put her arm round his shoulders and tried to steady him as a fresh outpouring of magic gathered itself overhead

The cloud layer split. A shaft of lightning, wider and more intense than any natural bolt, lanced down. But it never reached the airboat. Somehow the mast above the bag attracted it and then passed it on down the glittering filaments to the ground below. They blazed for a moment, blinding bright, and then, though the thunder roll had barely begun, the lightning was gone and the airboat floated on undamaged. Again, Maja could sense no magical impulse in the Sheep-faces’ response. It was simply a device that they had invented, like the engines that drove the propellers.

She felt the lightning-magic gather anew, but there was something odd about it this time, almost as if its heart wasn’t in it, as if whoever was doing it wasn’t really concentrating, was thinking about something else. But the bolt flashed down undiminished, and the mast caught it and sped it on its way to earth.

And yet again.

But now Maja picked up something different, something really huge, gathering itself not in the cloud layer above, but ahead of her, out to sea. She sensed a mighty stirring, a vast whirling mass drawing steadily nearer, growing in power as it came.

“Get ready,” she said. “Something’s happening. It’s bigger than the lightning or the dragons. I think the Watchers are just keeping the Sheep-faces too busy to notice till it’s too late. What do you want us to do, Benayu?”

“Do?” he muttered in a dazed voice. “Anything…anything.”

They looked at each other. Saranja took charge.

“All right,” she said. “Ribek, you manage the horses. Better take them a bit back down the lane. Maja, hold Jex and when the time comes—you’ll have to tell me when—put your hand in mine, with him between us, like we did with the fear stone…. I think I’m beginning to hear it—sounds like the father and mother of storms…Cedars and snows! Look at that!”

For an instant another bolt from the clouds lit the whole scene, far out to sea. By its momentary glare they saw the coming monster, a dark, whirling, tubular cloud-shape reaching up from sea to sky and rushing toward the shore, shrieking and roaring as it came, and sucking the water around its base into a foaming tumble of mountainous waves. The sky overhead was black as pitch. Huge drops of salt-tasting rain poured suddenly down. The Sheep-faces on the airboat must have seen the danger, but too late, for even as the great bag, now dwarfed by the onrushing tower of storm, swung itself round and began to rise, the whirling giant engulfed it and tore it apart.

“Now!” cried Maja.

She waited a moment for Saranja to unwind the Ropemaker’s hair from the quills of the roc feathers, then grasped her hand, with the stone lizard nestling in between their two palms.

With her free hand Saranja raised the feathers high above her head.

“Ramdatta!” she cried above the clamor of the storm.

Before the world went black Maja felt the granite pendant she held stir and become live flesh.

A stone voice spoke in the darkness.

“We must go at once. The dragon guarding the valley is aware of us.”

Still she couldn’t stir, but someone else must have heard that voice, for now as she swam up into consciousness Maja felt herself to be lying face down and half bent over something that jolted unsteadily into her stomach, and with something that held her fast when she tried to stir…. Yes, lashed onto a saddle—they were already hurrying away….

“Awake?” said Ribek’s voice. “Hold it a moment—we’re in a hurry. Jex…”

“I heard him too.”

The lashings eased. Ribek steadied her as she sat up. They were already well into the sunk lane. The others were a little way ahead.

“Great you’ve come to,” said Ribek, panting as they hurried to catch up. “We’re going to need you to tell us where the brute’s got to. Something’s happened to Benayu. He’s pretty well passed out on his feet.”

Maja managed to pull herself together. The magic-storm over Tarshu seemed to have lessened with the destruction of the airboat. She felt for her amulet.

It had changed. The cord was there, but strung through only four or five beads, and those chipped and sharp-cornered. Dimly she remembered a series of snaps and crackles close above her wrist as the amulet had fought to withstand the immense impulse of Jex’s return. She pushed what was left up her arm. Nothing happened. It wasn’t working. But, but…

“I am shielding you. Is it enough?”

“Less! Less!…There!”

Laid open now to more and more of the tangled magical flow around, reaching out through it with all her soul-energy, she picked out the single strand that came from the guardian dragon.

It was still some distance to the south, but racing toward them. There was a change in it. When they’d watched it from the woods above the mill its power had seemed somehow diffuse, because its attention had been spread over the whole valley. Now it was concentrated, aimed at a single target…

“Hurry!” she yelled. “It’s coming! It knows where we are!”

They stumbled on down the track. It was dangerous going, trenched as it was by the axle-deep ruts. Saranja was dragging Benayu by the elbow. The only hope Maja could see was the shelter of the thick stone walls of the mill, but they weren’t going to make it, nothing like. Pogo had vanished. Rocky was on the verge of bolting, just as he’d been at Woodbourne when he’d seen the airboat. Maja slid herself down just in time, and he was away, with Levanter behind.

The dragon…

“Get against the wall!” she yelled. “It’s almost here!”

They huddled against the chalk wall and stared up. The pelting rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The fringes of the whirling storm that had destroyed the airboat were screaming overhead, shredding the cloud-layer into racing tatters, suddenly hidden behind a glare of blazing orange, lighting the whole lane. Desperately Maja flung herself down into the great rut at her feet and huddled there as the dragon’s blazing breath blasted against the far chalk wall. She felt her hair beginning to frizzle in the roasting air, and then it was over.

Shakily she climbed to her feet. Everything was pitch dark after the glare, but the others must have hidden in the rut, as she had, because now she heard Ribek’s voice asking if she was all right, and a moment later Saranja’s furious yell.

“Benayu! Benayu! Wake up! Pull yourself together! Do something! You’re our only hope!”

And then the double crack of flesh on flesh as she slapped him twice on the cheek, and Benayu’s dazed voice.

“What…? Where…?”

“The dragon! It’ll get us next time! Do something! You’re our only hope, you and your stupid magic!”

“Oh…Sorry…Right.”

“Where’s the dragon, Maja?”

That was Ribek. She tried to concentrate.

“It’s starting to turn…It’s not coming back! Yes, it is, only it’s circling so it can come down the lane next time.”

And it would be no use hiding in the rut again when it did. The flaming breath would scour the floor of the lane and they’d all four of them be ashes where they lay.

“Right,” said Benayu’s voice, firmer now. “I think…yes…Tell me what it’s up to, Maja.”

She felt his magic beginning to gather itself, and further off the dragon nearing and nearing, fighting all the while to hold its course through the screaming wind. Steady-voiced, she called out the news of its approach. It was at the top of the lane, plunging down the slope…any moment now…

She reeled as Benayu’s magic intensified, but Jex’s shield caught her, steadied her. The magic built to a single intense, directed pressure, not against the dragon, but…

The wind fell suddenly still, as if the whole world held its breath for the encounter…

And now they could all four see the monster against the glare from Tarshu, hear the booming bell-beat of its wing strokes, watch as it lowered its head for the blast that would roast them alive…

Benayu withdrew his powers and at once the tempest they had been holding back for those short moments screamed in again, its fury doubled, tripled in intensity by being so pent. It snatched the dragon from its course and whirled it away like a blown leaf. Maja felt its powers flare up and vanish as it was smashed into something unseen.

Jex’s shield enveloped her in a bubble of calm.

Dazed by the sudden come-and-go of those immense forces, she needed a moment to gather her wits. Benayu lay in a huddle on the floor of the lane, with Ribek stooping over him. Now he knelt, expertly hoisted Benayu across his shoulders as if his inert form had been one of the heavy grain sacks in his mill, and rose.

Shakily they hurried on down the lane while the tempest roared inland. When they reached the mill they found that half its roof had been ripped clean off, and beams had fallen across the walkway by which they had come. As they worked to clear them, the horses came nervously into the mill yard, their panic-flight halted by the river. Levanter must have stayed with Rocky, as usual, and Pogo then found and joined them. Now, stumbling upon their human friends, and being offered a feed of grain from the store bins, they seemed to decide that sanity had been restored to the world. While they ate, Ribek and Maja rifled the larder for still-edible food. Ribek heaved Benayu across Levanter’s back, and then, weary beyond belief, they crossed the river, worked their way back along beside the splintered woods until they came to a stretch which the tempest had left comparatively undamaged, and there slept dreamless under the trees.