and were having no trouble getting around the imperial authorities. For all his desperation he took two days off to rest. It was an investment of time he was sure would pay dividends down the road.
When he left Lords he did so with a horse and pack mule selected for stamina and durability, not for speed and beauty. The long far leg of the next stage would take him through the Windy Country, a land with a bad reputation. He did not want to linger there.
As he passed through ever smaller, meaner, and more widely separated hamlets, approaching the Windy Country, he learned that he was gaining ground rapidly-if closing the gap by four days in as many weeks could be called rapid.
He entered the uninhabited land with little optimism for a quick success. There were no regular, fixed tracks through the Windy Country, which even the empire shunned as worthless. He would have to slow down and use his talent to find the trail.
Or would he? He knew where they were headed. Why worry about where they were now? Why not forget that and just head for the place where they would leave the Windy Country? If he kept pushing he might get there before they did.
He was three-quarters of the way across the desolation, into the worst badlands, a maze of barren and wildly eroded stone. He had made his camp and had fed himself and had lain back to watch the stars come out. Usually it took him only moments to fall asleep, but tonight something kept nagging at the edge of his consciousness. It took him a while to figure out what it was.
For the first time since entering the Windy Country he was not alone within that circle of awareness open to the unconscious scrutiny of his mystic sensibilities. There was a party somewhere about a mile east of him.
And something else was moving in the night, something huge and dangerous and alien that cruised the upper airs, hunting.
He extended his probing mind eastward, cautiously.
Them! The quarry! And alert, troubled, as he was. Certain something was about to happen.
He withdrew immediately, began breaking camp. He muttered all the while, cursing the aches and infirmities that were with him always. He kept probing the night for that hunting presence.
It came and went, slowly, still searching. Good. There might be time.
Night travel was more trouble here than he expected. And there was the thing above, which seemed able to spot him at times, despite his best efforts to make himself one with the land of stone. It kept his animals in a continuous state of terror. The going was painfully slow.
Dawn threatened when he topped a knife-edge ridge and spotted his quarry’s camp down the canyon on the other side. He began the descent, feeling that even his hair hurt. The animals grew more difficult by the minute.
A great shadow rolled over him, and kept on rolling. He looked up. A thing a thousand feet long was dropping toward the camp of those he sought. The still stone echoed his shouted, “Wait!”
He anticipated the lethal prickle of steel arrowheads with every step. He anticipated the crushing, stinging embrace of windwhale tentacles. But neither dread overtook him.
A lean, dark man stepped into his path. He had eyes as hard and dark as chunks of obsidian. From somewhere nearby, behind him, another man said, “I’ll be damned! It’s that sorcerer Bomanz, that was supposed to have got et by the Barrowland dragon.”
XVIII
A serpent of fire slithered southward, devouring castles and cities and towns, growing larger even as pieces of it fell away. Only fire black and bloody red lay behind it.
Toadkiller Dog and the wicker man were the serpent’s deadly fangs.
Even the wicker man had physical limits. And periods of lucidity. At Roses, after the city’s punishment, in a moment of rationality, he decided that neither he nor his soldiers could survive the present pace. Indeed, losses among his followers came more often from hardship than from enemy action.
He camped below the ruined city several days, recuperating, till wholesale desertions by plunder-laden troopers informed him that his soldiers were sufficiently rested.
Five thousand men followed him in his march toward Charm.
The Tower was sealed. They recognized him in there. They did not want him inside. They named him rebel, traitor, madman, scum, and worse. They mocked him. She was absent, but her lackeys remained faithful and defiant and insufficiently afraid.
They set worms of power snaking over stone already adamantine with spells set during the Tower’s construction: writhing maggots of pastel green, pink, blue, that scurried to any point of attack to absorb the sorcerous energy applied from without. The wizards within the Tower were not as great as their attacker, but they had the advantage of being able to work from behind defenses erected by one who had been greater than he.
The wicker man spewed his fury till exhaustion overcame him. And the best of his efforts only left scars little more than stains on the face of the Tower.
They taunted and mocked him, those fools in there, but after a few days they tired of the game. Irked by his persistence, they began throwing things back at him. Things that burned.
He got back out of range.
His troops no longer believed him when he claimed that the Lady had lost her power. If she had, why were her captains so stubborn?
It must be true that she was not in the Tower. If she was not, then she might return anytime, summoned to its aid. In that instance it would not be smart to be found in the wicker man’s camp.
His army began to evaporate. Whole companies vanished. Fewer than two thousand remained when the wicker man’s sorceries finally breeched the Tower gate. They went inside without enthusiasm and found their pessimism justified. Most died in the Tower’s traps before their master could stamp in behind them.
He fared little better.
He plunged back outside, rolled on the ground to extinguish the flames gnawing his body. Stones rained from the battlements, threatened to crush him. But he escaped, and quickly enough to prevent the defection of his few hundred remaining men.
Toadkiller Dog did not participate. And he did not hang around after that humiliation. Cursing every step, the wicker man followed him.
The Tower’s defenders used their sorcery to keep their laughter hanging around him for days.
The cities between Charm and the sea paid, and Opal doubly. The wicker man’s vengeance was so thorough he had to wait in the ruins six days before an incautious sea captain put in to investigate the disaster.
The wicker man’s rage fed upon his frustration. The very fates seemed to conspire to thwart his revenge. For all his frenzied and indefatigable effort he was gaining no ground-except in the realm of madness, and that he did not recognize.
In Beryl he encountered wizardry almost the equal of that he had faced at the Tower. The city’s defenders put up a ferocious fight rather than bend the knee to him.
His fury, his insanity, then, cowed even Toadkiller Dog.
XIX
Tully sat on a log and scratched and stared in the general direction of the tree. Smeds didn’t think he was seeing anything. He was feeling sorry for himself again. Or still. “Shit,” he muttered. And, “The hell with it.”
“What?”
“I said the hell with it. I’ve had it. We’re going home.”
“Listen to this. What happened to the fancy houses and fancy horses and fancy women and being set for life?”
