I glanced involuntarily at the wild weather advancing toward us.
“And just what can that little cloud do?” I couldn’t help blurting out.
“Nothing.” Egrassa answered me instead of Tomcat.
“Then what are we planning to run away from?” asked milord Markauz, getting the question in ahead of me.
“From what that cloud is trying to hide,” Miralissa answered him in an extremely dismal voice.
“That will be an ordinary rain cloud, with ordinary thunder and lightning,” Tomcat said. “The worst it can do is soak us to the skin. And if the shamanism is really good, there’ll be a really wild storm. But not directly aimed. That is, it won’t try to destroy us especially. It will be an ordinary storm, just like hundreds of others. If anyone’s hurt, it will be by accident.”
“You ought to give lectures at the university in Ranneng. I didn’t understand a thing!” Deler complained. “What about the thing the clouds are trying to hide?”
“A bank of rain clouds with thunder and lightning always covers up any other magic,” Miralissa explained. “There isn’t a magician in Siala, even if he’s worth three of the Nameless One, who can see hostile magic inside a thundercloud until the sorcery is literally right there under his nose. Tomcat senses that the storm was created by shamanism, but he doesn’t know what it might be hiding. The shamans could have hidden something that they don’t want the magicians of the Order to see. Clouds make a magnificent screen.”
“The nearest magicians are tens of leagues away, they needn’t have worried,” Arnkh growled.
“Then they must be hiding something that can be seen for tens of leagues,” Kli-Kli disagreed.
There were more lightning flashes and rumbles of thunder, still in the distance, but much closer now.
“Enough idle talking! Tomcat, since you can sense the storm, you’re the one to get us out of this. Lead on!” said Markauz. He had no intention of waiting for the rain.
And our crazy game of tag with the weather began.
Tomcat took control with an assured hand and set the horses a pace no worse than when we were hightailing it out of Vishki. The rumble of the thunder kept getting closer and closer. The wind grew stronger, bending the tall grass right down to the ground. The music of the crickets and the songs of the birds fell silent. Every now and then one of us would look back to check how much farther we could gallop before the rain hit us.
But I just kept looking straight ahead. In the first place, at such a furious gallop, I was afraid of falling off Little Bee, and in the second place, the one time I did look round I got such a fright that I almost yelled out loud. The cloudy sky that was dogging our heels was black enough to darken a hundred worlds.
Even Eel had turned pale, and that was completely out of character for the coolheaded Garrakan.
“The wind’s changed!” Kli-Kli shouted. “To the east! The clouds are being carried off to the side!”
I forced myself to look round. Now, no matter how hard the storm tried, there was no way we could end up at the very heart of it. It had shifted far to the east of us. But our group would still be caught by the edge of the magical tempest, that much was certain. And though the downpour might be less powerful, the rain would still be pretty substantial—no one had the slightest doubt about that.
The menacing clouds blocked off the entire sky. A furious wind tossed up handfuls of sand aimed at my face and I had to pull the hood of my elfin drokr cloak up over my head.
Others suffered worse than I did. Deler screwed up his watering eyes and swore nonstop until the sand got into his mouth. The wind flapped Hallas’s beard and the horses’ manes. Mumr’s hat was torn off his head, but he didn’t stop to try to take the wind’s new plaything away from it.
A whirlwind of a thousand demons howled in our ears and the solid wall of clouds advanced on us like a herd of cattle on the rampage. Again and again the festoons of diamond-bright lightning flashes fused together into broad sheets running across the entire horizon and lighting up the wasteland, which looked even more desolate in the dark. The wind was like an insane cowherd, driving his rain-swollen clouds straight at us. The rain hadn’t actually started yet, but soon, very soon, behind the rumbling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning, streams of water would come cascading down onto the ground that was frozen in impatient anticipation.
There was a flash, and we heard an angry rumble on the wind.
Another flash.
“Now there’ll be a real bang!” shouted the jester.
There was a right royal bang. The skies were split apart by the roaring of the gods, and the horses whinnied in fright.
“Forward!” Tomcat shouted from somewhere up ahead, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the wind.
An intense peal of thunder reverberated across the sky, hurtling past us like a wild stallion and blocking my ears for a moment. The thunderclap was loudest right above our heads.
I barely managed to keep my seat on Little Bee, and Loudmouth’s horse reared up, almost throwing its rider. Deler was unlucky: He went flopping down onto the ground and if not for Marmot, who adroitly grabbed the dwarf’s horse by the ear, the startled animal would have bolted. Deler showered the “stupid beast, unworthy to carry a dwarf on its thrice-cursed hump” with fearsome abuse and scrambled back into the saddle. We all had to make an incredible effort to calm our frightened horses.
“Forward!” Tomcat had no intention of stopping, and he set his horse to a gallop.
The group strung out into a line and followed the tracker.
The rain covered us with its wet wings, and the isolated drops were replaced by a roaring cataract cascading down from the sky. In the blink of an eye, everyone who wasn’t wearing an elfin cloak was soaked to the skin.
