Wall of Shiuan

She let Siptah go; and the gelding matched pace with him, at an easy gait, toward the towers and the pass.

Smoke rose there steadily, as it had from many a point about the valleys, fire after fire passing the alarm.

But it was not, as the others had been, white brush-smoke; it spread darkly on the sky, and as they rode near enough to see the walls distinctly, they could see in that stain upon the heavens the wheeling flight of birds, that hovered above the hold.

The gates stood agape, battered from their bulges: they could see that clearly from the main road. A dead horse lay in the ravine beside the spur of road that diverged toward those gates; birds flapped up from it, disturbed in their feeding.

And curiously, across that empty gateway were cords, knotted with bits of white feather.

Morgaine reined in—suddenly turned off toward that gate; and Vanye protested, but no word did she speak, only rode warily, slowly toward that gateway, and he made haste to overtake her, falling in at her side the while she approached that strange barrier. The only sound was the ring of hooves on stone and the hollow echo off the walls—that, and the wind, that blew strongly at the cords.

Ruin lay inside. A cloud of black birds, startled, fluttered up from the stripped carcass of an ox that lay amid the court. On the steps of the keep sprawled a dead man; another lay in the shadow of the wall, prey to the birds. He had been qujal. His white hair proclaimed it.

And some three, hanged, twisted slowly on the fire-blackened tree that had grown in the center of the courtyard.

Morgaine reached for the lesser of her weapons, and fire parted the strands of the feathered cords. She urged Siptah slowly forward. The walls echoed to the sound of the horses and to the alarmed flutter of the carrion birds. Smoke still boiled up from the smouldering core of the central keep, from the wreckage of human shelters that had clustered about it.

Riders clattered up the stones outside. Morgaine wheeled Siptah about as Kithan’s party came within the gates and reined to a dazed halt.

Kithan looked slowly about him, his thin face set in horror; there was horror too in the face of Jhirun, who arrived last within the gateway, her mare stepping skittishly past the blowing strands of cords and feathers. Jhirun held tightly to the charms about her neck and stopped just inside the gates.

“Let us leave this place,” Vanye said; and Morgaine took up the reins, about to heed him.

But Kithan suddenly hailed the place, a loud cry that echoed in the emptiness; and again he called, and finally turned his horse full circle to survey all the ruined keep, the dead that hung from the tree and that lay within the yard, while the two men with him looked about them too, their faces white and drawn.

“Sotharrn,” Kithan exclaimed in anguish. “There were better than seven hundred of our folk here, besides the Shiua.” He gestured at the fluttering cords. “Shiua belief. Those are for fear of you.”

“Would Hetharu have gathered forces here,” Morgaine asked him, “or lost them? Was this riot, or was it war?”

“He follows Roh,” Kithan said. “And Roh has promised him his heart’s desires—as he doubtless would promise others, halfling and human.” He gazed about him at the shelters that had housed men, that were empty now, as—Vanye realized suddenly—the village in the night had lain silent, as the valleys and hills between had been vacant, with only the alarm fires to break the peace.

And of a sudden one of the guards reined about, and spurred through the gates. The other hesitated, his pale face a mask of anguish and indecision.

Then he too rode, whipping his tired horse in his frenzy, and vanished from sight, deserting his lord, seeking safety elsewhere.

“No!” cried Morgaine, checking Vanye’s impulse to pursue them; and when he reined back: “No. There are already the fires: they are enough to have warned our enemies. Let them go.” And to Kithan, who sat his horse staring after his departed men: “Do you wish to follow them?”

“Shiuan is finished,” Kithan said in a trembling voice, and looked back at her. “If Sotharrn has fallen, then no other hold will stand long against Hetharu, against Chya Roh, against the rabble that they have stirred to arms. What you will do—do. Or let me stay with you.”

There was no arrogance left him. His voice broke, and he bowed his head, leaning against the saddlebow. When he lifted his face again, the look of tears was in his eyes.

Morgaine regarded him long and narrowly.

Then without a word she rode past him, for the gate where the feathered cords fluttered uselessly in the wind. Vanye delayed, letting Jhirun turn, letting Kithan go before him. Constantly he felt a prickling between his own shoulders, a consciousness that there might well be watchers somewhere within the ruins—for someone had strung the cords and tried to seal the gate from harm, someone frightened, and human.

No attack came, nothing but the panic flight of birds, a whispering of wind through the rums. They passed the gate on the downward road, riding slowly, listening.

And Vanye watched the qujal–lord, who rode before him, pale head bowed, yielding to the motion of the horse. Without choices, Kithan—without skill to survive in the wilderness that Shiuan had become, helpless without his servants to attend him and his peasants to feed him... and now without refuge to shelter him.

Better the sword’s edge, Vanye thought, echoing something that Roh had said to him, and then dismayed to remember who had said it, and that it had been true.

At the road’s joining, Morgaine increased the pace. “Move!” Vanye shouted at the halfling, spurring forward, and struck Kithan’s horse with the flat of his blade, startling it into a brief burst of speed. They turned northward onto the main road, slowing again as they came beyond arrowflight of the walls.

On sudden impulse Vanye looked back, saw on the walls of Sotharrn a brown, bent figure, and another and another—ragged, furtive watchers that vanished the instant they realized they had been seen.

Old ones, deserted, while the young had been carried away with the tide that swept toward Abarais: the young, who looked to live, who would kill to live, like the horde that followed still behind them.

The land beyond Sotharrn bore more signs of violence, fields and land along the roadway churned to mire, as if the road itself could no longer contain what poured toward the north. Tracks of men and horses were sharply defined beside the road and in mud yet unwashed from the paving stones.

“They passed,” Vanye said to Morgaine, as they rode knee to knee behind Jhirun and Kithan, “since the rain stopped.”

He tried to lend her hope; she frowned over it, shook her head.

“Hetharu delayed here, perhaps,” she said in a low voice. “He would be enough to deal with Sotharrn. But were I Roh, I would not have delayed for such an untidy matter if there were a choice: I would have gone for Abarais. And once there, then no hold will stand. I would be glad to know where Hetharu’s force is; but I fear I know where Roh is.”

Vanye considered that; it was not good to think on. He turned his mind instead to forces that he understood. “Hetharu’s force,” he said, “looks to have gathered considerable number; perhaps two, three thousand by now.”

“There are also the outlying villages,” she said. “Kithan.”

The halfling reined back somewhat, and Jhirun’s mare, never one to take the lead, lagged too, coming alongside so that they were four abreast on the road. Kithan regarded them placidly, his eyes again vague and hazed.

“He is only half sensible,” Vanye said in disgust. “Perhaps he and that store of his were best parted.”

“No,” said Kithan at once, straightening in his saddle. He made effort to look at them directly, and his eyes were possessed of a distant, tearless sadness. “I have listened to your reckoning; I hear you well... Leave me my consolation, Man. I shall answer your questions.”

“Then say,” said Morgaine, “what we must expect. Will Hetharu gain the support of the other holds? Will they move to join him?”

“Hetharu—” Kithan’s mouth twisted in a grimace of contempt. “Sotharrn always feared him... that did he succeed to power in Ohtij-in, then attack would come. And they were right, of course. Some of our fields flooded this season; and more would have gone the next; and the next. It was inevitable that the more ambitious of us