Liar's Oath

Chapter Twenty-seven

After that, the real work began. The ambassador had maps, and could procure others. Luap tried not to show how fascinated he was by the maps, which used a marking system he had not seen before, dividing the land into squares. He saw at once how useful that could be, and noted the accuracy with which their mapmakers had drawn the cliffs he had seen, the delicate shading that made clear which slopes were steep and which gentle. Here was the technique he had needed so badly back in Fin Panir . . . the Council of Marshals would be glad to see this.

But the ambassador’s use of the maps impressed him in other ways as well. The Khartazh traded overland to great distances; they had heard of lands far east, across a vast desert, but regular caravans had ceased some dozen years before. The war, Luap thought. Gird’s war. They had been declining before that for several decades. The Fall of Aare, Luap thought, the hairs standing up on his arms. Could it be? The ambassador recognized the selon beans Luap had given him—yes, they had been part of that trade, and spice and amber had gone the other way. Now—the ambassador shrugged—now the caravans moved mostly north and south. The names he gave meant nothing to Luap—Xhim and Pitzhla and Teth—nor could Seri offer any hint of a translation. He asked again about the eastern trade: water was too scarce on the western end of the former route, the ambassador said, and profits too chancy. His shrewd amber eyes seemed to ask. What are you planning?

In one moment of vision, Luap saw exactly what he would do. Here he had water, and safe shelter. That upper valley the Rosemage had thought of as horse pasture, with its opening to the high plateau above the plain: that would be the place for caravans to come. They would have to build a trail up from the desert below, and another into the western canyons and out to the town, but with magery they could do it easily in a few hands of days. Someone—Seri, he thought, or the Rosemage—would have to find a good trail from the base of their cliffs to the old caravan route south of them.

And then the caravans would come, bringing horses, cattle, craftsmen, harpers, goods to trade and a market for the Khartazh’s spices and silks. Luap could imagine the whole stronghold full of busy, talented workers all enriched by the flow of commerce. He drew a long, happy breath. If only the Rosemage and Arranha would come back with good news of ores . . .

Instead, they returned too soon, for Arranha had collapsed on the journey, and the Rosemage had struggled to bring him to the stronghold alive.

“We had just reached the gray mountain’s foot when he clutched his chest and fell,” she said to Luap. Aris was busy with Arranha, whose shallow breaths hardly moved the covering upon him. “I knew the climb out of the canyon had been hard on him; he said he found it hard to breathe that night, and didn’t sleep well. But I thought he was better, or I’d have turned back.”

She seemed to want reassurance; Luap nodded. “Of course you would; you couldn’t know.”

“He’s so old. I didn’t realize; he’s always been so active, so lively of mind. And now—”

And now he was dying. From Aris’s expression, no healing would serve. Luap felt his own throat closing. “I should have let him go with you, and made Aris and Seri wait,” he said; he knew that had had nothing to do with it, but it was all he could think of. Now the Rosemage put her arm around him.

“You know that made no difference. Neither of us . . .” She stopped, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, then went on. “Neither of us can stop age when it comes; not even royal magery is proof against time.”

Luap felt something shift inside him—not quite protest, but uncertainty. Curiosity. Was that really true? Had anyone ever tried to hold back age with magery? With the royal magery? It might not work with the very old, like Arranha (though how had Arranha stayed so vigorous so long?) but perhaps it would work with someone much younger, still strong.

But the immediate problem swept that from his mind. The Rosemage needed care as well as Arranha; she had the hollow-eyed look he remembered seeing in survivors of daylong battles. Luap called for Garin, and someone to help the Rosemage to her chamber; when she protested, he overrode her. “We all love Arranha; Aris is with him, and I will be with him. But I don’t want to lose both of you. Bathe, rest, eat—let Garin ease what he can. You’ll be needed later.”

“But—someone said the ambassador had come early, had been here—” She was trying to keep herself awake, upright, and focused; she would not let herself escape duty for comfort, even now. Luap put his hand on her arm, and let a little of his power seep into it, and into his voice.

“It went well; everything’s going to be fine. Go and rest. I will tell you all about it when you wake.” In the influence of his power, she staggered a little, and Seri moved quickly to support her and lead her away. “Take care of her,” Luap said to Seri; unnecessary, since Seri would never do less, but it let others know he considered Seri in change.

Arranha sank quietly, without a word or change in his expression, all through that night. Before dawn, the Rosemage was back at his side; Luap was glad she had come while he was there. “What did Aris say?” she asked softly.

“That he was dying, that it was from old age, and that he could do nothing. I’m not sure that’s true, because Arranha seems so calm—perhaps Aris eased him some way when you arrived. . . .”

“He had been calm since the first day. Then, he seemed anxious. He said things—but I wasn’t sure he was aware of them.”

“Said what?”

She shrugged, and hugged her robe around her more tightly. “I—I don’t know if he meant it. Something about danger, about a darkness in the stone. But since he was dying, it could be that alone.”

“Mmm.” Luap thought about it. “When I climbed to the top of this mountain, I remember feeling that the light failed—but I thought it was being breathless from the climb.”

“Yes, I thought of that. Especially coming back with him, places I had to carry him—my sight went dark more than once. That’s why I didn’t tell everyone at once and give warning. Even Arranha, who so served the light, might lose it at death for a time. Yet if it was a true warning, what was it about?”

“That mountain, perhaps? The gray one? Perhaps it has the gold you hoped for, but it’s claimed by some rockfolk tribe; that would be danger, if we meddled with it.”

“I suppose.” She did not sound convinced, but neither was he. Most likely, Arranha’s approaching death had shadowed his mind, and his words meant nothing to those who were not dying. She stirred beside him. “So—tell me about the ambassador.”

He felt strange, sitting beside a dying man and talking of his own triumph—as he could not but see it—but it would pass the time. He kept his voice low, and began with the ambassador’s arrival, putting in all the details he could think of. The Rosemage listened attentively, clearly glad to have something to fix her mind besides Arranha. When he described the ambassador’s attempt to use the sword on himself, she gasped.

“And you caught the sword! What happened?”

Luap held out his hand. “I nearly lost fingers—you can’t see a scar at all, for Aris healed it at once, but from here to here—” He pointed, then allowed himself a wry grin. “It hurt a lot more than I would have thought.” Before she could ask more, he went on, explaining what the ambassador had thought, and what he himself had inferred from both the man’s actions and his gifts. “A powerful ancient kingdom,” he said. “More than a kingdom—more like the tales we had of Old Aare. They trade widely; I think they used to trade with Fintha in years past, perhaps before I was born. Powerful allies, if we are their friends, and dangerous enemies.”

She looked worried. “I expect they will see us as easy prey.”

“No.” His power bled into that, and she looked at him with dawning respect. “They fear us now; they will do us no harm. Wait until his next visit; you will see.”

She recovered her composure with an effort. “You are confident, suddenly.” The warning not to be overconfident came across clearly.

He shook his head. “I saw the man; I dealt with him. Aris’s healing power alone might have convinced them, or his use of the pattern to open the mageroad—surely you and Arranha realized that.”

“I suppose . . .” Her voice weakened; Luap felt a rush of sympathy.

“You’re still tired; let me fetch something to eat.”

“No—I’m all right. I suppose—Arranha and I both felt they were hiding something—the ones we met in that town. Perhaps they were trying not to show their fear of the magery.”

“That sounds reasonable. The ambassador seemed frightened even before we began, and if they have no magery of their own—if they cannot believe mortals have it—”

“You can’t pretend we’re elven!” She stared him in the face, shocked.

“Of course not!” Luap put a bite in his voice and she reddened. “We’re mortals, not elves, and I could not pretend otherwise. What I was going to say—” He looked at her, and she looked away, still flushed. “Was that if they have no experience of mortals using magery, they may give us more respect for that reason. I went out of my way to say we were not those who had built the stronghold. Still, if they are in awe of magery, our few numbers will not be a temptation to them.”

“Yes. I can see that.” A long breath. “Now that they know we’re here, whatever we can in honor do to convince them we’re too strong to attack—”

“Exactly,” said Luap. “If we must balance magery against numbers to avoid confrontation—”

“But we could not fight them,” the Rosemage said.

“Of course not.” Luap nodded. “The point is to avoid that—avoid it ever becoming an issue. They seem to think that because we are here, where their legends place demons or monsters, that we must have greater powers than we showed. Of course we must not masquerade as elves, or claim their allegiance. Not only would that be dishonest, it would place us at greater risk. But they found Aris’s healing power, and the mageroad, impressive enough. If they think of us as a small but powerful folk, who want only peace and trade, they will have no reason to test our strength.”

“I see,” the Rosemage said. She looked again at Arranha. Luap thought his death very near; he remembered that slow cessation, breath by breath, from Dorhaniya. “Do you think we should call Aris?”

“Both of them,” Luap said. “They will want to be here.” He rose and went to the door, where a boy dozed against the corridor wall, and sent the lad for Aris and Seri. Soon they came, sleepy-eyed and solemn. Aris nodded after he looked at Arranha.

“Yes—very soon. I could not heal him—” His shoulders sagged. Luap patted him as he would have a child.

“It’s not your fault, Aris; no one heals age.” The words felt familiar in his mouth, and he remembered that the Rosemage had said that first, many hours ago.

“I know, but we have no other priest. Who will perform the rites for him, and for the Sunlord?”

“I suppose I will,” Luap said slowly. “What he taught me, at least; I am not trained as a priest of Esea.”

“He was the last—” the Rosemage said, and then she was crying, her shoulders shaking. It echoed in Luap’s mind: the last. The last priest of Esea, the last of his father’s generation, the last link to the old world where his kind had ruled. With Arranha would die the knowledge that had comforted Dorhaniya—no one else was likely to know the rituals for making altar linens, or care. With Arranha would die memories of Gird shared by no one else—for neither Gird nor Arranha had told him all of the time they journeyed together to the gnomish lands. With Arranha would die quarrels among priests, theological disputes, conflicts of power, even such unimportant things as the questions he had asked Dorhaniya’s sister, that drove her to anger. Arranha had connected him to his own past, had known the boy he had been, had known his father, had known men whose grandfathers came over the southern mountains from Aarenis, had been one of an unbroken priesthood stretching back to Old Aare.

Luap felt acutely aware of that loss. Gird’s death had ended what he might learn from Gird, but there were still many peasants living in vills much like his, plowing fields, making tools, tending sheep and cattle. Arranha—what had been Arranha’s vision, that died here with him? What had he thought, as a young man, would shape his life? What had really shaped it?

He stared at Arranha’s quiet face, already as remote as a stone carving, and wished he could shake it to life and speech again. Now he knew the questions he should have asked—now, when it was too late. Now he knew what he did not know—would never know. Elders died, he thought. Elders died, and with them their personal visions died. If Gird had died at Greenfields, as he had said he should have, Gird’s vision would have died there too. It had lived on because Gird lived on, and when he died it began to fray. . . .

Luap shied away from that thought, forced his mind from the thought that different people—himself included—had striven to engrave their own visions on what was left of Gird’s. Instead, he thought of himself as an old man for the first time. He would be old soon, the elder on whom the others depended, as he had depended on Arranha. Here, in this stronghold and the land around it, lay his vision. When he died, what would happen to the stronghold? To his people?

I did not seek command, he cried in his heart. It is not my fault that it was thrust on me. In that familiar echoing space, a comfortable warmth rose. He might have come to it by accident, against advice, but he had nonetheless done well. His people prospered, and praised him. Perhaps he had not been fit for command in Gird’s day—he would admit that—but now? Who else could have done what he had done? He hugged that to him, comfort for his genuine grief, as they carried Arranha’s slight body to its resting place on the mountaintop, where the first sun each day could find it.

He must not die until it was safe, he thought on the way back down. He must shape it now, while he could, with all his strength, and be sure he did not die too soon. He felt the weight of responsibility settle onto him . . . his people had no one else to depend on, now.

He spoke of this concern to no one. He might have discussed it with Arranha, in the old days, but Arranha was dead; in the days after the funeral rites, Luap found himself worrying the problem of his own mortality whenever the pace of work allowed. He was not afraid of death itself—he had proven that, he thought, in the old days, on the battlefields of Gird’s war—but he wanted to accomplish something before he died. Gird would have approved, he thought. Gird, too, had dreamed of establishing a people in peace and prosperity—and that was all Luap wanted.

Always and ever, in the depths of his mind, the question tickled him: was it really not possible to hold back aging with magery? Could he not at least try? It couldn’t hurt, surely . . . not if he took care. Even the appearance of youth or agelessness might help impress the Khartazh, and the Rosemage had agreed that anything harmless which had that effect was good.

A few days after Arranha’s funeral, Luap called Seri and Aris into his office to look at the maps the ambassador had left him. Seri’s eyes lit up.

“Imagine the effect of these in Marshals’ training,” Luap said.

“Do they have any of the old caravan route?” she asked.

“You remember I asked the ambassador that, and he said he would find out. But I have another idea. If we could find a practicable route from the upper valley down to the plain, it might be shorter and safer for caravans to come through there—and then through our canyon to Dirgizh. Then we would have someone to trade with, and a way for those who won’t use the mageroad to visit.”

Seri frowned. “Do we need that? It’s a long way for anyone to come, and I doubt Girdsmen would . . .”

“I think they will,” Luap said. “That trade used to prosper; as Fintha recovers from the war, Finthans will have more to trade. You know yourself the spice merchants do well. We could be trading now, if the Marshal-General weren’t so opposed to frequent use of the mageroad . . . imagine how easily we could sell the gifts the ambassador brought. An overland route should be acceptable to the Marshal-General.”

“He’s right, Seri,” Aris said. “He’s not opposed to trade; he’s encouraged the trade south into Aarenis—” Luap had not known that; he wondered how Aris knew.

“And you want us to find a way through these canyons to the old eastern route?” Seri said.

“Yes . . . and I don’t know whether you should begin by finding it from outside—from Dirgizh—or from the upper valley. But you’re our most experienced explorers so far.”

“We’ll have to start now if we’re to be done by winter,” Aris pointed out.

“I hadn’t thought you’d start this season,” Luap said. “Until we have others who can speak the Khartazh language as well, I can’t spare you more than a few days at a time.”

“Then we’ll start there,” Seri said. “Aris can teach his prentices, and I’ll teach the militia—”

“And me,” Luap said, smiling. “I should learn Khartazh.”

“And you,” she said. “But you learn faster than most.”

Even so, Aris and Seri managed a short trip into the upper valley. Deciding just where to start the climb out of the main canyon was hard enough. Two approaches ended in sheer cliffs they could not climb. Finally Seri climbed partway up one of the north-running canyons across from what they thought should be the best way.

“We didn’t use our heads,” she said when she came back down.

“Again?” Aris grinned at the expression on her face.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “We don’t have much time and we’ve wasted too much. What we need to do is follow that game trail—” She pointed. “It disappears over that knob—”

“Which is too far to the right; the valley has to be right up over that fallen block.”

“And we can’t climb it. Think, Aris: the animals go everywhere. We follow the game trail and keep choosing the ones that go higher.”

The game trail angled sharply up the steep slope; Aris found himself grabbing for rocks and bushes to help himself climb. By the time they were above the trees, he could see far down the canyon, and back up the one Seri had come out of. Above him, Seri’s boots went steadily on, occasionally giving him a faceful of dirt.

“This is a lot worse than the trail to the mountain top,” he said, gasping, when they stopped for a rest.

“We have more to climb.” Seri tipped her head back to look. “Gird’s toes: look at that. We should be goats to get up there—and how could anyone bring a caravan down?”

Aris looked down and wished he hadn’t . . . the broken rock and loose soil below looked unclimbable. “We have to find another way out: I don’t want to break both legs going down this!”

On the next stretch, they came out on rock that looked, Seri said, like cake batter or custard that had stiffened in pouring. It did not look like honest rock, Aris thought, and wondered what had formed those loops and layers. At least it didn’t shift underfoot, and the angle of the corrugated surface made climbing easier. The slope eased; they could walk upright again, between odd little columns of the strange stone. Here Aris agreed—they looked exactly like the last bit of batter from a pan, dripping crookedly to one side or the other.

The game trails disappeared into a grassy meadow thick with late wildflowers—tall blue spikes and low red stars. Bees hummed past them busily. On their right, still higher cliffs rose; they seemed to be crossing a terrace that might, Seri thought, come out above the valley they sought. They could see a similar cliff face to their left; between, they assumed, lay the tumble of broken rock they’d been unable to climb.

From the meadow they passed into a pine-woods of trees smaller than those on the canyon floor, and came at last to a clear view of the upper valley. On either side, sheer cliffs rose from a level floor of green. A ribbon of silver wavered down the valley: a creek. They hurried down the slope before them, so much gentler than the one they’d climbed.

“It’s odd that the rocks don’t look the same on either side,” Aris said. On the west, the same rose-red solid stone, streaked dark with ages of weather, looked exactly like the stone found so far in the main canyon. But the eastern cliffs were subtly different—an oranger red, more mottled than streaked, conveying, he thought, some weakness in structure.

“I wouldn’t make my home in that,” Seri agreed, as usual, with the thought behind his words. “But that grass, and that stream—think of this for horses. It’s perfect.” She bounded down the last of the slope and ran out on the grass, only to fall on her face.

“Seri!” Aris ran after her, and tripped on the deep sand just as she had. She was up already, her expression rueful.

“Sand,” she said. “It’s not a terrace like ours at all.” Aris, face down on the sand, eyed the patch of green before him.

“And that’s not real grass, either. Sedge.”

“Oh, well, it’s got water.” Seri strode off toward the creek, and he followed her. When he caught up, she was laughing. “Water, I said! Look at this—it’s hardly a knuckle deep.”

“Soaking the sand,” Aris said. He looked all around, at the sheer walls, the almost-level floor of sand, the glisten of water that had looked like a real stream. “A very strange valley indeed.”

It was, he thought later, as they examined it in more detail, like a flattened miniature of the main canyon. Its sand floor was not as level as it had looked from above; it had miniature grassy terraces, small dunes of open sand, little sedgy bogs near quicksand, even a small cluster of trees whose triangular leaves sounded like gentle rain in the breeze. They spent the afternoon working their way up the valley; the stream deepened upstream, against their experience, and acquired a gravelly bed. To the east, a tributary valley opened, but they could see it was blocked at the upper end by a sheer cliff. The way out to the south lay, if anywhere, up a ravine garish with orange stone and odd black boulders. They pushed themselves into that climb, unwilling to spend the night in the valley, though neither could say why.

They looked back once, from a terrace about halfway up the ravine, to see the valley looking once more like a level swathe of grass. Just above the ravine, they found a sloping pine wood . . . and more sand.

“It’s softer than rocks to sleep on,” Aris offered, when Seri’s lip curled.

“And harder than rocks to walk on, and we do more walking than sleeping. It will take us longer to go where we need to go,” she said. But they made a pleasant camp that night anyway, enjoying the knowledge that no one—no one at all—knew exactly where they were. Their small fire crackled and spat with the fat pine-cones and resinous boughs; the water they’d brought up from the valley tasted sweet with their supper of hard bread and cheese.

The next day Aris led the way out of the pine grove onto an open upland; to their left, a curious conical hill of rough black rock looked like nothing either of them had ever seen. Far to the west, they could see the mountains beyond Dirgizh. Ahead, they knew, was the drop from their block of mountains—but which was the best way?

Seri pointed to the black peak. “If we climbed that we could see more.”

Aris shrugged. “It’s higher ground that way. We might find rock instead of this sand.” For the lower ground had small dunes of windblown sand, difficult to walk on.

They found the gentle slope toward the black hill much easier than the day before. Soon they were walking on rock again, rippled and curved like mudbanks in a stream. More and more of the land around them came into view. Looking back toward the upper valley and the main canyon, they could see only a jumble of red rock, cut with sharp blue shadows. The mountaintop above the stronghold stood out clearly, but not the canyons between. Southward, they began to see a lower plain beyond the mountains . . . and the high white cliffs of another mountain range to the east. Finally, as they walked among the jumbled black boulders of the black hill’s base, they could see an edge.

Seri cocked her head at the black hill now close above them. It looked as if it were made of a pile of loose black rocks, some room-sized and most smaller. “Do you think we can climb that, or will it be like climbing gravel?”

Aris looked south, at a distant blue shadow he thought might be more mountains very, far away. “Do we need to, now? I think we can find our way to the edge of this without it. I wonder how far that cloud or mountain is. . . .”

Seri looked. “More than a day’s travel. In this air, more than two.” She scrambled up the steepening slope of the black hill, dislodging a shower of rough black rocks, and slid down again. “Not worth it, you’re right. I wonder what the dwarves would call this kind of rock.” She picked one up, and hit another, experimentally. The one in her hand broke, and she yelped. “It makes sharp edges,” she said, holding out her gashed hand.

“And you want me to heal it for you,” Aris said, shaking his head. “Will you ever learn to wear gloves?” He laid his hand over the gash and let his power heal it.

“Peasants don’t wear gloves,” Seri said scowling, but her eyes twinkled. She shook her hand, looked at the rock, and shrugged. “Come on—we’d better get this done today. I’ve got to work on those junior yeomen—or whatever we decide to call them—when we get back.”

They came to the edge before midday, an edge even more impressive than the drop from the mountaintop into the western canyons. Swallows rode the updraft, the wind whistling faintly in their wings, and veered away as the two came to the edge and looked out. Aris thought he had never seen anything so beautiful; a vast gulf opened before them, with nothing to bind the sight until the line where earth met sky. He knelt to peer over the edge, cautiously. A sheer drop he could not estimate, then spiked towers, then steep slopes and finally rubble flattening gradually to the glitter of a fast-moving river. He looked along the river’s path, and saw that it disappeared into sand some distance downstream. Upstream—the breath caught in his throat. Upstream he could see what this cliff must look like—its match on the far side of the river rose from the sand, all shades of red, rose, and purple, and looking eastward he saw those walls converge. But above the red rock—where only blue sky arched in their canyons—were higher cliffs of gleaming white.

He looked at Seri, whose face he thought mirrored his own astonishment. “It’s—beyond words,” she said. “I can’t imagine why the dwarves don’t live here—why it’s not full of the rockfolk.”

He started to say perhaps they didn’t know, then remembered the dwarven symbol in the stronghold’s great hall. Of course they knew. And had they abandoned this—this vast beauty of stone so strong that it sang even to mortals? “Perhaps they loved it too well to tunnel into it,” he said. “As the horsefolk leave some herds free-running.”

“Perhaps.” Seri stared awhile longer, then shook her head sharply. “Well. We’re not going to build a trail straight down this. We’d better look for a place where we can. Maybe where the water comes down. . . .”

They worked their way east, staying close to the edge and looking over at intervals. This canyon narrowed rapidly at the bottom, while the upper levels were still far apart, and soon Aris spotted a sheer cliff with a waterfall. “That won’t work,” he said. “Even if it’s passable from above, imagine that in a storm—it would wash out any trail we built.”

They headed south and west again, crossing their own tracks, and found a place where a dry wash wrinkled the surface, deepening rapidly toward the edge. “It will be another cliff,” Seri predicted. But when they looked, some flaw in the rock had formed a great fissure. Broken chunks the size of buildings stepped down toward the desert below. Aris looked at it doubtfully.

“I supposed we could try—go down as far as we could—”

Seri snorted. “We shouldn’t be stupid twice in one year. We’ve already gotten into trouble—or what could have been trouble—when we used that robbers’ trail without thinking about it. We’re supposed to be Marshals—now think. If we go down, and can’t get back up—”

“I could use the mageroad,” Aris said, for the sake of argument. He enjoyed feeling more daring than Seri, rare as the chance was.

“If you slipped and cracked your head,” she said, “I couldn’t use it, and couldn’t heal you. No—let’s find some way to recognize this from below, and then figure out how to go around.”

“From Dirgizh?”

“Right. From the old caravan route they spoke of. Now let’s see. . . .” She lay flat, her head over the edge of the cliff, and looked toward the fissure, then the stream below. “It would be nice to have a grove of trees—”

“No trees.” Aris said. He sat, his legs dangling over enough space to stack five cities cellar to tower, and looked over at the facing cliffs. Their fissure seemed to line up with a skinny spire of rock, much thinner than the Thumb, on that side. He pointed it out to Seri; her eyes narrowed.

“Yes . . . but from down there the line will be different. Let’s see . . . we can see the stream, so if you stood on this side of it—”

“We should be mapping this,” Aris said suddenly, wondering why they hadn’t thought of that. Before she could remind him that they had brought nothing to map with, he said, “I know—we can’t. But if we draw it on the stone several times, we should be able to remember it.” He rolled back from the edge, and broke some brittle sticks from one of the stiff, spiny bushes that dotted the upper plateau. They drew what they saw, until both agreed on the proportions and shapes, and could reproduce it anew.

By then it was late afternoon; they would have trouble making it back to the pine wood by dark, let alone back to the stronghold.

“No one can see us use the mageroad here,” Aris said. “Let’s do it.” Seri nodded, and he found a sand-covered stretch, back from the edge, and graved the pattern carefully with his stick. The late-afternoon wind howled up the cliff, blowing sand into the pattern even as he drew it; he had to rework the pattern with deeper grooves, and then decided to mark it out with pebbles instead. Seri wandered about at a little distance, looking alternately at the great space below and beyond, and at the curious black hill behind them.

Suddenly she stiffened, and said, “Aris!” He looked over, to see her staring back at the confusing jumble of rock near the upper end of the little valley.

“What?”

“Something moved.” She backed toward him.

“Look out!” he said sharply; she had nearly stepped on the end of the pattern he had completed with pebbles. She looked down, moved aside.

“Sorry,” she said. Her dagger was out, he noticed with some astonishment. “Aris, something’s over there—”

“Too far to bother us, if you let me finish the pattern and get us on the mageroad.”

“I don’t like it,” Seri said. Aris placed the last three pebbles, stood, and took her hand.

“Then we’ll leave. Come on, Seri, it would be stupid to wait here for whatever it is; it’s getting late, the sun will be in our eyes—”

“Oh, well.” She relaxed suddenly, and stepped carefully where he pointed. “It’s probably only one of those wildcats—”

And they were back in the great hall, where their arrival brought bustle and excitement, and a summons from Luap to tell him what they had found.

“So this is what we think, sir,” Aris said, summarizing their long report. “We need to approach from the lower end, both to locate the old caravan route east, and to find out if that water we saw is good. Then we’ll need to consult with the best stone-carvers—you know I can’t do that—and it will take at least a season of work to cut a passable trail for pack animals, and make sure it doesn’t fall. If we can go now to the Khartazh, and find out about the caravan, perhaps next summer—after the fieldwork’s done—work could start on the trail down. And the trail from here to the upper valley, and the trail out to Dirgizh, which really should come first.”

“But what about the distance overland to Fintha?” Luap asked. “Won’t you need to go all the way to Fintha to be sure that’s where it comes out?”

“Well go to Fintha, surely,” Aris said. “But we think the horse nomads will tell us about the eastern end of the trail—and the merchants in Dirgizh and the next town south may well know about this end. Convincing someone to try it may be difficult . . . but I’ve noticed the merchants show an interest in renewing that old trade.”

“With your permission,” Seri put in, “we’d like to start by going to Dirgizh, as soon as possible, and follow the old caravan route east—then turn north and see if we can find our notch.”

“How long do you think that will take?” asked the Rosemage.

“Hands of days,” Seri said. “We don’t know until we’ve gone. But it must be done sometime—”

“And then we’d go to Fintha,” Aris said. “Take our horses, and go visit the horse nomads . . . they liked us well enough before.”

“What you’re telling me,” Luap said, “is that it will be more than a year before we have a way for a caravan to come here—let alone before one actually comes. Two years, more like, or even three. . . .”

The Rosemage shrugged. “When we started, remember, we didn’t know if anyone would ever discover an overland route; I think even three years sounds remarkably quick.”

“The question,” Aris said, “is whether this is worth all the effort. People will have to work on the trails instead of other things—”

“It’s worth it,” Luap and the Rosemage said together. Then she fell silent and Luap went on. “No land survives long without trade,” he said. “Especially one so limited in resources as this. If our people are to have a permanent place—for those who can’t, or don’t want to, return—then we must have trade.”

“And overland trade,” the Rosemage said, “will disturb the Finthans less than continued heavy use of the mageroad.”

“I wonder if Raheli would come?” Seri said suddenly. “I would like to see her again.” Aris noticed that Luap had stiffened, but before he could ask why, Luap relaxed.

“I doubt she’ll leave her grange for us,” he said. “But of course she would be welcome.”