fighting tail the Fox had recruited along the way, and a few volunteers from Ricolf's holding. They were twenty-two in all, with four three-man and five two-man chariots.
Priscos clucked to the horses. The little army started to move. The gatekeepers lowered the drawbridge. One of them caught Gerin's eye as he passed. 'What are you running off with this time, my lord?' he asked.
'Nothing you don't see, Vukov,' the Fox answered, pleased he remembered the fellow's name. He doubted the gatekeeper had had a happy time the morning after Elise left. He turned for a last glimpse of her, but the cramped confines of the gatehouse already blocked his view.
Priscos was a man of few words, most of them about horses. 'You don't see many Shanda beasts hereabouts,' he remarked. 'Where did you come by this one?'
'What's the name of that town in the mountains, Gerin?' Van asked.
'Cassat.'
'Aye. That's where I picked him up. Cheap, too-the clod of a horse-trader didn't know what he had. He's been a rare worker.'
'They're ornery, I hear,' Priscos said. He went on, more to himself than Gerin or Van, 'Reckon I can handle that, though.' Gerin was sure he could. Priscos had an air of quiet competence he liked.
As the sun sank, they camped by what had been the border station between Ricolf's land and Bevon's. Now the square wooden building which had housed Ricolf's guardsmen was only charred ruins. One more debt to pay, the baron thought, among so many.
The ghosts were strange that night. Their keenings and wailings were more intense, and also more nearly understandable, than the Fox had ever heard. One in particular flitted round him as if drawn like moth to flame. For all its efforts, he could neither make sense of what it would tell him nor recognize its pallid form in the flickering firelight.
'That is an uncanny thing,' Rihwin said, watching the wraith's frantic but vain efforts to communicate.
'Likely it's like a Shanda spirit, seeking to lure you away from the light so it can drink your blood,' Van said.
Gerin shook his head. 'I feel no harm in it, even if I can't understand what it would say. Besides, Van, every ghost in the north country must have had a glut of blood by now.'
To that the outlander had no reply but a grave nod.
Remembering the fraternal strife tearing Bevon's barony even before the Trokmoi invaded, Gerin wanted to cross it in a single day if he could. He did not want to camp inside it: if he could expect night marauders anywhere, Bevon's tortured land would be the place.
And tortured it was. The Fox's band passed two battlefields before the sun was high in the southeast. The woodsrunners had plundered both fields, but all the bloated, naked corpses seemed to be Elabonians. Here brother had fought brother, and fought with a hate greater than they turned against the Trokmoi.
As he surveyed the second meadow filled with bodies, Gerin's face was stony and full of bitterness. 'Poor fools,' he said. He wondered if his words were not an epitaph for all the northland.
Whichever brother had won the war, he had not enjoyed victory long. A lot of the keeps still standing were held by small bands of Trokmoi. They hooted in derision as they saw Gerin's force go by, but did not move against it. 'They think us beneath contempt,' the Fox said to Van, 'and perhaps we are.'
'Honh! The next time I care what a woodsrunner thinks will be the first.'
A bit more than halfway through Bevon's barony, they passed a roadside holding destroyed in a way Gerin had never imagined before. The timbers of one whole wall of the palisade lay like jackstraws in the bailey, as if kicked in by a monster boot. The stone keep itself was a pile of broken rubble.
Something white stuck out from under one limestone slab. As the baron drew closer, he saw it was the skeleton of a human hand and arm, picked clean of flesh by scavengers. No one, Elabonian or Trokme, garrisoned this keep.
'This is the work of your Balamung?' Rihwin asked.
'He's not mine. I wish with all my heart I'd never heard of him,' Gerin said, but he had to nod as he spoke. His warriors eyed the shattered keep with awe, fear, and wonder. Hand-to-hand fighting against the Trokmoi was all very well, but how could they hope to hold against sorcery like this? Even Nordric was grim and quiet.
'I wonder why such powerful wizardry has not been used further south,' Rihwin said. 'Few castles could stand against it, yet here, so close to the Niffet, is the first sign we've had of anything more than a simple barbarian invasion.'
'What difference does it make?' Gerin said bleakly, staring once more at the blasted holding.
'Maybe none, maybe a great deal. One explanation I can think of is that your northern mage may have so much trouble trying to lay low one particular keep-I name no names, mind you-that he has had little leisure to help his men elsewhere.'
Gerin gave him a grateful look. The line of hope the southerner had cast him was thin, but he was all but drowning in despair. Anything that buoyed his spirits was welcome.
His renewed optimism and his hope of crossing Bevon's lands in one day both collapsed not long after noon. His band came to the top of a low rise. There they stopped in horror and dismay. For the next three or four miles, the Elabon Way and most of the surrounding landscape had been brutally wiped out of existence. All that was left was a ruined expanse of raw-edged muddy craters, some a hundred feet across and twenty deep. They overlapped one another in the mangled earth, as if the same giant who had pulverized the keep had then amused himself by pelting the ground with thousands of huge boulders. But there were no boulders, no visible explanation of how the devastation had been committed.
Chariots were not built to cross such terrain. Twice Gerin and his band had to stop to mend wheels battered by half-buried fragments of roadbed and treetrunk, and once more to fix the axle of Nordric's car when it broke.
Van repaired it with bronze nails, leather lashings, and a large measure of hope. He said, 'It may hold, and then again it may not. All we need now is for a horse to break a leg in this mess.'
Gerin's fingers moved in a protective sign. 'May the ears of the gods be closed to you.'
They barely managed to escape the ruined land before the sun set. All four moons were low in the east, slow-moving Nothos being most nearly full and Tiwaz still closest to first quarter.
That night the ghosts were louder and more insistent than Gerin had over known them. Again, one in particular tried to deliver some message to him; again, he did not understand. Although he failed, something in him responded to the ghost, as if it was the shade of someone he had once known well. Irked by the riddle he could not solve, he pored over Rihwin's grimoires until sleep overtook him.
He and his men came on another band of desolation not far into the lands of Palin the Eagle. This was worse than the one before: the ravaged area held several streams and ponds. Their water made the trek a nightmare of slimy, clinging mud.
In some places, chariots sank axle-deep in the muck. The warriors had to get out and slog through it on foot to lighten the load enough to let the horses move the cars at all. Men and beasts alike were filthy and exhausted when at last they reached flat, solid ground. To his disgust, Gerin found several fat leeches clinging to his legs.
Though some daylight was still left, the Fox decided to camp when he came to an unfouled creek in which to wash. Most of his men, spent by the day's exertions, collapsed into slumber almost at once.
Only Rihwin kept any semblance of good cheer. That surprised Gerin. He had expected the southern dandy to be dismayed at his present unkempt state.
'Oh, I am, my fellow Fox, I am,' he said with a grin when Gerin asked, 'but what, pray, can I do about my plight save laugh? Moreover, I truly begin to think Balamung has wreaked all this havoc for no other purpose than sealing aid away from your lands. Did you not tell me a mage was warding your keep?'
'Aye, or so I hope, at any rate: Siglorel Shelofas' son. He's southern-trained, true, but I don't know how long he can stand against one such as Balamung. For one thing, he drinks too much.'
'By your reckoning, so do I, yet did it keep you from bringing me along on this mad jaunt? Also, never forget that while crisis makes cravens of some, in others it burns away the dross and leaves only their best.'
'From your mouth to Dyaus' ear,' Gerin said, touched again by Rihwin's efforts to reassure him. What the southerner was saying held just enough sense to keep him thoughtful, too: maybe Balamung did have some unknown reason to fear him. And maybe, he told himself, I'll do as Van says and flap my arms and fly to Fomor.
