A long, rocky slope led downward to the eastern roadway from Byssa, and they paralleled this road for several miles, scrambling over the rough land. At length they stopped to rest in a stony hollow above the road, and the bitch, Werem, whined as Mimo came trotting up to them, tongue hanging and teeth shining in the starlight. ‘He is trained to follow the stuff on the feet?’ asked Thewson.
Leona nodded. ‘But the dogs the priests have are not trained to follow it. They will only whine and be beaten. They will not follow us.’
‘Why would they follow us anyhow?’ demanded Jasmine. ‘They must be looking for someone else. We just got caught in the middle. Pm not even sure why we ran away.’
‘Because from that city, from those people, the only wise thing to do is run,’ said Me-lo sombrely. ‘No matter who, or what they are looking for.’
‘They spoke of a girl,’ said Leona. ‘With a pale man, oddly dressed …’ Jaer caught at these words. They were like something seen recently, something known. Knees trembling, Jaer sat down upon the rock, head between knees.
‘A girl,’ said Medlo. ‘There have been several strange things connected with girls … or with becoming a girl.’ He thrust the hood away from Jaer’s head and tilted her chin up toward the stars. ‘As you have done.’
The others drew close to see Jaer’s face, girlish and fair, framed by a tangle of golden hair. Even as Leona and Thewson stared, Jaer thought it odd that they did not seem incredulous as Medlo had been, not as curious as Jasmine. Instead, they simply glanced at one another, and Thewson rumbled, ‘Wa’osa, wa’os, wa’osu.’
‘You believe this?’ demanded Medlo. ‘Just like that?’
Leona stared at him, or through him, her nostrils flaring in some emotion he could not identify. ‘It is written,’ she said, ‘that the Northlord, Sud-Akwith, sought to rebuild Tharliezalor beside the far sea, and that demons came from beneath the city to his ruin. I cannot say it is so, yet it is written. It is written that the ruins of the City of the Mists lie beyond the Concealment, empty now, for the Lady’s priestesses have fled long ago in the Second Age. I have not seen it. Both of these things are riddles and mysteries. Shall I believe them and not this? Or this and not them? Am I credulous? Or do I merely wait to see what thing comes from dreams to threaten this person as the demons came from beneath Tharliezalor to threaten the Northking-dom?’
Thewson rumbled, ‘Fanuluzh lorn nunuluzh. As it is said among my people, “Of the gods, or of newness.” Both are strange.’
The two looked at one another, Leona ghost pale, Thewson night dark, as though they shared deep thoughts. Medlo could not imagine what they shared to ally them in this fashion.
Leona turned away at last. ‘It is at least a different thing from the little towns with their hating gates and the harsh cities with their forbidding walls, a different thing from little people all alike in their tiny differences.
‘Well, we have taken your coin in return for guarding you through the canyon of the Del.
‘The journey is before us. Let us go.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE RIVER DEL
Year 1168-Winter
The dawn showed them riven land heaped from the banks of the river, piled away on either side to the base of the shadowy cliffs, blue and hazy in the early light. As they went east the cliffs marched inward, ever darker and more ominous, until at last they became a looming wall broken only by the dark doorway of the canyon, scarcely wider than the River Del which rushed from it in an ebon flow. They slept that night in a scanty copse of starved-looking trees which held the last of the day’s light near the entrance to the canyon. During the day Jaer had felt the carefully incurious glances from Thewson and Leona, the blandly quiet stares, nothing offensive, nothing she could resent. And yet there was a pressure in those looks unlike the swift kin-longing, skin-longing looks from Medlo and Jasmine. Jaer felt it as a subtle disquiet and welcomed sleep as a relief from the tension of it.
In the night Jaer changed, this time without remembering a dream or searching voice. His form might almost have been a twin to the girl of yesterday, still fair and slender but with a stronger chin and more breadth across the shoulders. Leona examined him as they ate, eyes still bland but slightly puzzled, as though she discarded one thought and sought another.
Medlo was a little less forcedly jocular, again calling him ‘youngun.’ Jasmine merely looked at him and sighed.
They started early, plunging into the narrow way between rock walls echoing with the river’s murmur. At either side the walls stepped upward, pillar upon pillar, all peering down rocky noses under shaggy brows of juniper, frowning over the stony sockets of the cliff. Something watched them. Small slides of gravel whispered down the walls to speak of hidden movement high along the cliffs. Leona and Thewson studied every shadow, their faces grim, and the shaggy hounds quirked brindle foreheads to glare upward with watchful amber eyes. The road turned again and again, into the sun and out of it, down long halls of shade and into sunlit passages once more. Crooked side canyons clambered back into the broken land, narrowing as they went, winding behind spires of stone and low, black clumps of needled growth. Moisture sneaked down some of these side ways, oozing from stone to stone, leaving a fleeting smell of wet and moss. The wind snarled continuously, and the
