Exile's Honor

be putting outriders all around?' he asked. 'I mean—'

'Peace; at ease be, protected we are by the priests themselves,' Alberich said, and exchanged a glance with Laika. She laughed.

'Karsites won't stir out of their doors after dark,' she said, with the air of one who knows. 'Their priests have a habit of sending some sort of creepy-howly thing out at night, to make sure nobody's out doing something they shouldn't.'

'Even the Sunsguard stirs not,' Alberich added, with sardonic amusement. 'So that now, should even a priest order them out, they will not go.'

'Caught in their own trap,' Laika said. 'And serve 'em right. So by the time sun's up, we'll be so close to our people that even if they catch on we're here, our folks can mount a big enough rescue to squeak us across without losing so much as a hair.'

Alberich considered how much the Tedrels had drained from the country, and sighed with pain. 'If they scout or Far-See us, we take—so far as they will know—useless mouths only. We leave—think, they will—the camp unplundered.' Privately, he doubted that even the Sunpriests would trouble themselves with FarSeeing this part of Karse; they would use their power to track down the Tedrels and Tedrel recruits, They must know that Sendar was dead, but they must also know that now was not the time to attack Valdemar themselves. Valdemar had just fought a terrible battle, and were exhausted, yes, but the Karsite Sunsguard was drained and weakened by the demands of the Tedrels. The current Son of the Sun—

He set bandits against Valdemar, then hired the Tedrels to do his work for him, Alberich thought somberly. And now, thanks to the drain that the Tedrels put on his resources, the Sunsguard must be even more depleted. He hasn't got the means to attack us.

No, the Sunsguard would be mopping up what was left, with the priests assisting, then they would all descend on the Tedrel base camp with an eye to getting back what had been drained from them.

'Believe me, there is no way the plunder in that camp can be exhausted, even by us and the Tedrels that were left,' Laika told them both. 'There'll be enough there to satisfy priestly greed even after our wagons come back. It isn't only the Karsite treasury they've been draining; they've got the accumulation of some twenty or thirty years' worth of loot from other campaigns they've fought, and they've been saving it all, waiting for the day when they'd have their own land again.' She scratched her head, thinking, and added, 'I'll give the bastards this much; they had discipline. Almost a quarter-century of honest pay, extortion, and booty, and they didn't spend a clipped copper coin more than they had to. Every fighter had his own store of loot, but beyond that, every true Tedrel war duke had a treasury tent, waiting for the day when he could finance the building of his own fortified keep in the heart of his own principality.'

Alberich was greatly pleased to hear that. If the wagons sent onward came back so well loaded, then perhaps the children's little hoards could be kept solely for their use when they were older.

If the ride out had been a mixed pleasure, the ride back was an unalloyed—if bittersweet—one. With all worry about encountering Sunsguard gone, under a glorious full moon and a sky full of stars, and buoyed on the energy of the successful rescue, there was nothing in the way of opening themselves up to pure aesthetic enjoyment of a tranquil ride through peaceful countryside. The teamsters, once the situation was explained to them, relaxed and sat easily on the seats of their wagons. Even the babies only whimpered a little, now and then. Timeless and dreamlike, they moved on across ground that seemed enchanted and drunk with peace. It was as if the One God was granting them all a reprieve from their grief, the sorrow that would confront them when they crossed back into Valdemar, giving their hearts a rest so that they could all bear it better when at last it came.

Just about the time when the moon was straight overhead, he heard the wagons coming up behind them, the sound of the wheels echoing a little among the hills. Since they were near to the spring they'd used on the way in, he called a halt there once the whole party was together again. The children didn't even wake up.

'More about these children, tell me,' he asked of Laika, when they were on the move again and a comfortable sort of fatigue began to set in. The moon, silvering the grass around hem, turned the landscape into a strange sculpture of ebony and argent; with hoofbeats muffled by the soft earth and grass, they seemed to be moving in a dream, and he asked the question more to hear a human voice than for the information itself.

'You'll find they're a funny lot,' she replied. 'You'd think, being mostly not taught anything, that they'd be wild. But—well, once they got out of babyhood, they pretty much had to teach themselves and take care of each other, and by the gods, that's what they do. Maybe it was because so many of 'em lost their whole families, but they've got a kind of motto—nobody left behind—and they stick to it. The older ones see that the little ones get fed and clothed, the little ones do what they can to help the older ones. I think they're the next thing to illiterate, but they'll drink up anything you teach them like thirsty ground. They all found out that the Tedrels themselves may not do anything for them, but if they made themselves useful, they got rewards beyond whatever the Tedrels dumped in their section of the camp, so that's another thing they learned to do, how to make themselves useful. Then when that Kantis child showed up, he really organized them. Of course—I didn't get to see much of that, since I was an adult.' She coughed. 'Very secret, that cult was. No grownups were to hear about it.'

'So—when into our camp we bring them, they will helpful be?' he hazarded.

'I would be greatly amazed if they didn't swarm the place, doing all sorts of little chores. Anybody expecting a bunch of terrified, wild little beasts is going to get a shock. Having 'em around is a lot like having a tribe of those little house sprites some old stories talk about; they can't do heavy labor, but by the gods, when they get determined to do something, it gets done. I had to fish more of 'em out of my wash tubs than I care to think about.' She chuckled a little, then sobered. 'Listen, you have the