beneath a city.' There was little color this early. He looked mostly gray, shaded dark and light. 'We'll ride fast. Expect attack but do not provoke it. They may ignore us.'
The Chapalii waited, patient, unafraid. As they mounted, Garii hung back as if his horse was balking and hissed softly between his teeth as Tess went by.
'Lady Terese, I beg pardon for my presumption,' he said quickly, not even looking up to see if she was slowing her horse to hear him-which she was-'but I implore you to have a care for the gift which you were so magnanimous as to accept from me.' Glancing down, she saw he had a hand on his knife.
'Garii?' Ahead, Ishii had turned and was staring back at them.
'Yuri,' Tess said, riding on as if no exchange had taken place, 'how long until we enter the mountains?' She kept going, not even waiting to hear Yuri's reply.
At noon the scouts, hardly more than a shout away, came back from all sides. The mountains loomed before them, huge and impenetrable. But there, like a scar, a great valley slashed through the wall. Where the valley opened onto the plateau, a city rose, hard against the eastern heights of the mountain. A fortress, heavy with stone; high, castellated walls weighted it to the earth. Fields and hovels sprawled out from it like so much debris. A narrow river pushed past, curving east. The valley opened before them and then they rode up between the high sides of the mountains.
They galloped past the town, Bakhtiian leading them as far against the western heights as he could. Small figures gestured atop the stone walls, but they were too far away to attack. The jahar rode on, up the broad valley, and soon enough they left the fortress behind. The last traces of fields merged into the wild scrub of the narrowing gorge. Bakhtiian signaled a halt, and everyone dismounted, walking their horses to cool them.
It was a brief halt. They mounted again and went on. Tess stared at the sheer dark cliff faces, veined with white, that rose like an iron stockade to her left, at the rocky defiles that climbed up and up to her right. Ahead, the gorge ascended toward the white-topped peaks in a gentle but narrowing incline, colored in greens and grays and dry golds. Tess urged Myshla up to ride next to Bakhtiian. He had a slight smile on his face that disturbed her.
'What if they do pursue us?' she asked.
He laughed. 'They can't catch us, not on foot. Certainly not on horses. Khaja don't know how to ride.'
Tess began to make a comment about how she was a khaja, and then thought better of it. 'But Ilya, even if they don't catch us, we're going to run into the peaks eventually. And then we'll have to ride out this way again. They can simply wait for us.'
'They can wait,' he agreed. He did not glance back. 'But I have heard there is another path out of this gorge, a rough trail, but better, I think, than returning the way we came.'
Tess chuckled. 'Yes. Nature is so much safer than men are.'
'Is she?' A cold wind stirred her sleeves, chilling her fingers. 'I wonder.'
'How far to the ruins?'
'Two days.'
'But look how close the mountains are. We'll run into them before then.'
His mount shied. A small rodent ran chittering off the trail to disappear under rock and moss. He pulled the black in, undisturbed. 'The mountains have as many twists and turns as a devious man.'
'As many as you, Bakhtiian?'
'Oh, far more.'
She smiled, and then sobered, glancing back. 'But what if they follow us? What happens then? I don't think these khaja like the jaran.'
'Neither do I.' He did not answer her question.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
'I thought in a dream that I was dead.'
Yuri told her that it was autumn, by their reckoning, and she looked for signs of the change of season. It was bitter cold at night, but that could have been the altitude. Streams spilling down from the heights fed the gorge, feeding green to the thickets and the meadows of thin grass. Smaller plants that neither she nor any of the jaran had a name for grew abundantly. Colors she never saw on the plains, crimson and olive and mustard, dappled the rocks, growing sparser the higher they rode. And yet the eye quickly grew accustomed to the variety. How monotonous the plains were in comparison.
The first night they rode until the moon set, changing mounts as the horses tired, slept in shifts, tentless, fireless. Not even the Chapalii demurred. Even the thermals in her Earth clothing barely kept Tess warm. The gorge angled right, a narrow scar that cut up into the mountains as though some long-dead giant had left this furrow in the wake of his planting. It was cool and damp between the high walls of stone, moss and orange-gray lichens everywhere. They did not see the sun until mid-morning. A stream rushed down one side of the defile, more white than water. It was shockingly cold to the touch.
They followed a road littered with rocks, but a road for all that. Paving stones showed here and there under lichens; tufts of grass sprouted in lines too straight to be natural. The gorge narrowed until they could ride only three abreast, then two, then single file. The hooves of the horses echoed strangely in the enclosed spaces. Just when Tess knew they could not possibly ride any farther, the gorge opened out abruptly into a secret glen. They had reached the ruins.
'That was never a temple.' Tess moved her mount up beside Bakhtiian as she gazed out and up at the little valley, a large, open area of grass and ruins, sprinkled through with a profusion of tiny white flowers. 'That was a fortress.'
'That's what I'm counting on,' said Bakhtiian.
Except for the defile through which they had ridden, they were surrounded on all sides by the mountains. An avalanche had obliterated the leftmost portion of the ruins. The back of the vale ended in a sheer cliff face that rose cleanly into the mountains for about twenty meters before beginning to climb in stair steps to the huge, snow- capped peak towering behind.
The glen itself rose in three broad stair steps to the cliff face: directly in front of them, a bluff-not quite the height of two men-ran the entire length of the shallow meadow that the neck of the gorge emptied into. A stone wall rose flush from its edge, so that from where Tess and Bakhtiian sat below, they could see only the suggestion of another wall, above and beyond, that marked a higher level. Here and there the bluff had eroded away and a stone tumbled down into the meadow. The remains of the road continued along the base of the bluff to its lowest point, where it snaked up through a stone gate that had once, perhaps, borne a lintel over the two pillars that flanked it.
They guided their horses around stray rocks, along the road to the gate, but in the end they had to lead their horses up the bluff where the last slice of road, badly fallen away, gave access to the next level.
Here, in front and to the left, the ground was littered with the remains of old buildings. To the right the land rose again in an escarpment, ending in that other wall: the second line of defense. Behind it the ground seemed level and empty for a space, and behind that Tess saw the line of escape: a trail twisting upward into the heights, disappearing behind a huge outcropping of veined rock.
Dusk came sooner here, hedged in as they were by rock. Bakhtiian sent them all up to the level area behind the second wall, and put four men on watch below. He even allowed fires. The Chapalii stood huddled beyond the horses, conversing earnestly among themselves. Tess walked to the wall and stared down at the ruins below, and the long line of wall that edged the bluff below them.
Had men or nature destroyed these? On the one side, certainly, the avalanche had been the culprit. But as she studied the ground below, she could not imagine how any army could take this ground; if the defenders had enough people and missile weapons, their position would be virtually unassailable. Surely no human attack could have ruined these buildings-or was it just one huge rambling building? — so thoroughly. Only time, working with
