vows and King Yulmar prove to be neither as honorable nor courageous as they had promised. And so we drove ourselves and our horses over the rocky, rising ground with as much speed as we could summon.
Soon we worked our way up to a high pass between rows of ice-capped peaks gleaming in the starlight to either side of us. The air fell cooler and shimmered with the brilliance of the stars. Which one, I wondered, might point our way to the Maitreya? Was he sleeping somewhere down in the land beyond the mountains? Or did he stand awake on some hilltop or in a window gazing up at the same bright stellar vista as did I?
Time is strange, Atara had said to me. That night, on our push into Hesperu, the hours seemed to draw out almost endlessly long as if the world itself hung perfectly balanced in black space and could never move. And yet taken as a whole, the night fairly flew by, and I could no more hold onto the fleeting moments than I could a streaking arrow. I felt myself rushing toward my fate. Whatever star called
At last we found ourselves braving the narrows of the pass called the Khal Arrak. Here, in a cut through the earth scarcely a quarter mile wide, walls of rock rose up to our left and right. Long ago Senta and Hesperu had agreed that this place should mark the frontier between their two kingdoms. I thought it curious that neither had built any sort of fortress here to guard their, side of the pass. But then I had grown to manhood in Mesh, where twenty-two kel keeps guarded the passes into Ishka, Waas and the plains of the Wendrush where the warriors of the Urtuk and Mansurii tribes cast hateful and envious eyes upon my homeland. Enemies surrounded Mesh on all sides, but for thousands of years Senta and Hesperu had dwelt with each other in peace. Although King Arsu might have thrown in with the Red Dragon and made noises of war that disturbed the Sentans, it seemed that both he and King Yulmar wanted to believe the fiction that Senta had nothing to fear from Hesperu, or the reverse. Or perhaps it was a point of pride. In either case, it worked to our advantage that no soldiers stopped us to question us and make sure that we weren't revolutionists sent to subvert King Arsu's realm.
'It's too quiet,' Maram said to me in a low voice as we moved along the narrow road. The sharp tattoo of our horses' hooves striking stone edhoed off the rocky walls around us. 'I can hear my belly grumbling — I missed dinner, you know. Ah, I can hear
I thought of the stormy pass high in the White Mountains where Ymiru and the 'Frost Giants' had sprung up our of banks of snow and had nearly clubbed us to death with their fearsome borkors. I remembered, too, the great while ghul of a bear sent by Morjin to slay us beneath the slopes of Mount Korukel, and of course the first droghul who had come upon us in the cleft of ground between the Asses Ears. And later, Jezi Yaga. Most of all, I couldn't shake loose from my mind the images of Atara nearly dying from a dreadful arrow wound in the Kul Moroth. where Morjin's soldiers under Count Ulanu
'It will be all right,' I murmured to Maram, The wind whooshing through the Khal Arrak carried scents of wildflowers and wet rock, 'Nothing will happen to us here.'
I was filled with great hope. The glimmer off the glaciers above us cast a faint light upon Maram's face. It was a magnificent thing that he had done, journeying across hundreds of miles of Ea's wilds by himself.
'Maram, have I thanked you for saving my life., again?'
'Ah, I
'I can't think that we escaped them,' I said, looking at the rocks pressing in upon us, 'only to be trapped here. Surely our fate lies farther on.'
'Surely it does,' he said. 'But how
'Kane won't fail,' I told him. 'And if he does, once we're out of this gorge, we'll hide far from the road.'
For another mile, however, I listened to every hoofbeat and breath as we wound our way through the pass's narrows. Then, in terrain that must have been claimed by Hesperu, the narrows gave out into a gap several miles wide. A razor-backed ridge marbled with snow rose up to our left while humps of broken ground gleamed in the starlight to our right. I espied many large boulders, behind which we might hide at need. Bui the earth remained quiet, and so we followed the road as it twisted sharply right and left on its descent into Hesperu.
Dawn's light revealed that we were passing through a valley full of trees lower down and ragged snowfields higher along steel-gray slopes. To the sides of the road, the slanting fields glowed orange with the lichens growing on rocks, and showed the greens, purples and whites of mosses, sky pilots and saxifrage. With every mile that we rode further into this new realm, we lost elevation and the snow quickly gave way to swaths of emerald forest. The valley broke up into a hilly country that opened out to the east, west and south. Behind us, limned against a blue sky, the white peaks of the Crescent Mountains guarded the tiny kingdom of Senta. And then the road led us into a thick forest of dogwoods and oak, and the sky vanished from sight.
Two hours later, as we were rounding a bend in the road, I stopped suddenly and drew my sword. My eyes fixed on a large oak, covered with moss and hung with vines. And then a familiar voice called out to us, 'It's good I'm no Red Priest with a gang of Crucifiers at my call, for I heard you coming a half mile away.' And Kane stepped from behind the tree's cover.
He gave no welcoming smile as he began pacing toward us with a heavy step. Over his back he slung his heavy leather saddle.
'Where is your horse?' I asked him, looking for the Hell Witch.
'Dead,' he sighed out. 'I had to ride her into the ground trying to catch up with that damned traitor.'
'And did you?'
We all waited for the answer to this question.
'Yes,' he finally said. Although speech seemed to distress him, he added, 'We needn't worry about the Kallimun being warned of us, at least not here and not yet. Now, why don't we take a little breakfast? There's a stream down the road not far from here.'
When we came to the stream, we moved off into the woods, and Liljana cooked us a breakfast of ham, fried eggs and toasted wheat bread. I had never seen Kane eat with so little appetite. He sat on a downed tree poking at a piece of ham with his dagger, and then staring at the blade's shiny steel. Even the news that we hoped to find the Maitreya in a place called Jhamrul failed to enliven him.
After that we took a few hours of rest while Kane stood guard over us. Before I drifted off, I saw Kane staring at his hand as if he had to will himself to keep his eyes open. But I sensed a terrible and ancient torment that ate at his heart and kept him from joining us in sleep.
When it came lime to set out, Kane threw his saddle on top of one of the remounts. If riding this big gelding in place of the Hell Witch vexed Kane, he gave no sign of it. In truth, he did not speak at all, and he hardly moved his dark eyes, not even to scan the woods for enemies.
Later that day, we came down into a flatter country of low, wooded hills and rolling farmland. The air grew sweltering, and seemed to soak the earth like boiling water. We all sweated beneath our thin robes, and swatted at the tiny gnats that came to bite us. The road led us over streams on rotting wooden bridges, and then over a much larger stone construction joining the muddy banks of one of the Haraland's numerous rivers. Not far from it we encountered a woodcutter who had bound some faggots of oak across the back of his dog, a giant mastiff. The flesh of the dog's hindquarters had been ripped open: it looked as if the woodcutter had whipped him. I wanted to give this cruel-looking man a wide berth, but Master Juwain insisted that we should ask him for directions.
'Jhamrul?' the man said to us, scratching at his greasy beard. 'I never heard of it. Why would pilgrims such as yourselves want to go there?'
'We seek the Weil of Restoration,' Master Juwain told him, 'said to lie near there.'
'The Well of Restoration? I never heard of that, either. And I don't want to.'
The gaze of his bleary eyes took in Daj and Estrella sitting on their horses and finally came to rest on Kane. Something tightened inside the woodcutter then, and he gripped his axe and said, 'You pilgrims should keep to this road, and not go wandering about where you don't belong. Now, let me be on my way — I've work to do.'