'Hurry to where?' Egil said, teeth gritted against nausea. 'The Wastes are two days in every direction. If these Vwynn are coming…'
'If they're coming, they'll catch us,' Nix said. 'This is a decent place to defend. I didn't see wings on those corpses, so they'll have to come at us on the ground. With these walls, they can approach from only two-'
'No,' Rakon said.
'We're vulnerable if we get caught in the open,' Egil said.
'There's a… refuge ahead, not far out of the cut. The Vwynn will not enter it. If we can reach it, we'll find safety there.'
'Safety for how long?' Egil asked.
'And how do you know about this refuge?' Nix asked. 'And that the Vwynn won't enter it? Why not mention it before?'
'I know many things about which you are ignorant, Nix Fall, and mentioning all of them to you would occupy all of my days.'
'Now he's a wit,' Nix said to Egil.
'Assist my men in breaking camp,' Rakon said. 'Then we'll see to the wounded. We leave as soon as it's done.'
Rakon returned to his carriage and soon provided Baras with several large pouches of herbal poultice. Baras mixed it with a small amount of beer, turning it into a lumpy yellow paste flecked with bits of leaves, and the men smeared it on their cuts. All except Egil.
'The only magic I trust comes from your gewgaws,' he said to Nix. 'And those only half the time.'
Scratches and a few oozing bites marred the priest's face, scalp, and arms. He daubed at them with bits of burlap cut from an unused sack. Of course, Nix had seen Egil endure far worse wounds without slowing and without complaint.
'You're sure?' Nix asked.
'Aye.'
For his part, Nix was too wounded to be particular about the source of relief. He spread the paste over the many wounds on his arms, his legs, his scalp and face. The paste went on cold but grew warm as it did its work.
After about a sixty count, it lost its warmth. When Nix scraped it off he found that the shallowest of his cuts had vanished, the deepest reduced to pink lines that would heal in a day or two.
'The man knows his craft, I concede,' Nix said to Egil.
'Don't get too fond of him,' the priest answered. 'It'll be awkward when we have to kill him.'
Mention of violence against Rakon caused the spellworm to twist up Egil's guts, which he endured with a grimace.
'Fair point,' Nix said, and his own violent thoughts triggered nausea and cramps that doubled him over.
There were several hours of night left, so the guards lit torches, Nix pulled forth his crystal eye, and the caravan got underway, traveling the high-walled cut under the lurid, nearly full eye of the Mages' Moon. The night sat heavy on them and they moved in near-silence, the only sound the low rumble of the carriage wheels on the road and the occasional whicker from the horses.
Only when dawn lightened the sky did they breathe easier. Yet still the cut — really a canyon, a long, deep gash in the earth — went on so long Nix feared it would never end, that it would just continue forever, condemning them all to a subterranean existence where sky and wind and sun were forever just out of reach. They watched the sky, the walls, fearing the return of the flying creatures, dreading the appearance of the Vwynn.
When the road at last began to rise, so too did their spirits. The walls of the canyon shrank around them and Nix could see the end of the cut ahead, the road gradually rising to elevate them out of the Hellish pit.
Several of the guards gasped when the group reached the top of the canyon and emerged into the unfiltered light of day. The leagues they'd traversed seemed to have transported them to another world.
Instead of boulders and scree and broken hills, they saw instead monumental ruins. Huge rectangular stone blocks jutted from the red landscape at odd angles. Faded script showed on some, the whorls and twists of the characters mostly lost to time and the weather. Looking too long at the script that had survived made Nix's eyes ache. Everyone stared about in awed silence. Baras made the protective sign of Orella.
'What do you make of them?' Egil asked, nodding at the blocks.
'I don't,' Nix said, shaking his head.
'Man-made,' Egil said, nodding at a huge stone sticking out of the earth, the bones of a lost civilization.
'Made,' Nix agreed. 'But I'm not sure it was by men. The size of them…'
In their day, the blocks must have been part of structures larger than anything in Dur Follin, larger than anything Nix had ever seen. He could not imagine the destructive force it must have taken to topple them. The mere passage of time seemed insufficient to the task.
'Norristru has a great interest, it seems,' Egil said, nodding at the carriage.
Rakon had opened the carriage's window and stared out at the blocks, his eyes gleaming, his thin lips set in a straight line.
All day they traversed the gigantic architecture, the residuum of a people who constructed wonders and died — shattered domes, megaliths the size of small buildings, and pyramidal blocks, the sharp points of which stabbed at the earth and sky.
'How many do you suppose have seen this?' Egil said.
'Few,' Nix said, and thumped the priest on the shoulder. 'And now us among them. This is why we do it, yeah?'
'Aye,' Egil said. 'Though I'd prefer to be doing it of my own accord.'
'Seconded.'
The carriage set a brisk pace and the ruins grew denser as they traveled. Towering shapes loomed on the horizon ahead. At first Nix mistook them for hills and rock formations, but as they drew closer, he saw they, too, were ruins, great heaps of stone.
'Gods,' Egil breathed.
All of the guards slowed in their steps, shared worried glances, and tightened their grips on sword hilts.
'It's all just ruins, men,' Baras said, his tone false.
Rakon called out from the carriage. 'We need to reach those ruins before nightfall, Baras.'
'Is that the refuge you spoke of?' Nix called, but Rakon ignored him.
'You heard him,' Baras said. 'Leg it.'
They picked up the pace, but the day wore on and still the high ruins seemed too distant.
'Faster,' Rakon urged them. 'We must go faster.'
'Easily said by the man riding in the carriage,' Nix said, jogging along with the rest. Sweat soaked his jack and shirt. Despite the pace they'd kept, they hadn't covered enough ground. The cloud-shrouded sun sank low in the west. Dread settled on the men. They watched the sky, the ruins around them.
'We press on until we reach the ruins,' Baras said.
When night outvied day for rule of the sky, the Vwynn showed themselves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nix caught motion in the dark crannies of the ruins that loomed around them.
'I saw something,' Nix said, pointing with his sword at a pile of rectangular blocks that formed a makeshift post and lintel. 'There.'
'Keep moving,' Rakon called. 'Do not stop.'
Nix spotted more movement, a lithe form dashing through the shadows.
'There!' he said.
'I saw it, too,' said Derg.
'Faster!' Rakon shouted. 'Everyone, faster!'
'Is it the Vwynn?' Baras asked. 'Is it?'
