‘But that will not stop you, will it? If he carries the Emperor’s Sword…’ He did not reply. He didn’t need to. They set out at a canter. Northward.
The wind cut across from the west, sun-warmed and dry. The few clouds scudding past overhead were thin and shredded. Ravens or hawks circled, wheeling specks, and Samar Dev thought of flies buzzing the corpse of the earth.
She spat to clear away the taste of woodsmoke.
A short time later they came upon a small camp. Three men, two pregnant women. The fear in their eyes warred with abject resignation as Samar Dev and Traveller came up and reined in. The men had not sought to flee, proof of the rarest kind of courage-the women were too burdened to run, so the men had stayed and if that meant death, then so be it. Details like these ever humbled Samar Dev. ‘You are following the Toblakai,’ Traveller said, dismounting. They stared, say-lug nothing. Traveller half turned and gestured for Samar Dev. Curious, she slipped down,
‘Can you see to the health of the women?’ he asked her in a low voice.
‘All right,’ she said, then watched as the Dal Honese warrior led the three men off to one side. Bemused, Samar Dev approached the women. Both, she saw, were far along in their pregnancies, and then she noted that both seemed… not quite human. Furtive eyes the hue of tawny grasses, a kind of animal wariness along with the resignation she had noted earlier, but now she understood it as the fatalism of the victim, the hunted, the prey. Yes, she could imagine seeing such eyes in the antelope with the leopard’s jaws closed on its throat. The image left her feeling rattled.
‘I am a witch,’ she said. ‘Shoulder Woman.’
Both remained sitting. They stared in silence.
She edged closer and crouched down opposite them. They bore features both human and animal, as if they represented some alternative version of human beings. Dark-skinned, slope-browed, with broad mouths full-lipped and probably-when not taut with anxiety-unusually expressive. Both looked well fed, essentially healthy. Both emanated that strange completeness that only pregnant women possessed. When everything outward faced inward. In a less generous moment she might call it smugness but this was not such a moment. Besides, there was in those auras something animal that made it all seem proper, natural, as if this was exclusively and precisely what women were for.
Now that notion irritated her.
She straightened and walked over to where Traveller stood with the men. ‘They are fine,’ she said.
His brows rose at her tone, but he said nothing.
‘So,’ she asked, ‘what secrets have they revealed?’
“The sword he carries was made of flint, or obsidian. Stone.’
‘Then he rejected the Crippled God. No, I’m not surprised. He won’t do what’s expected. Ever. It’s part of his damned religion, I suspect. What now, Traveller?’
He sighed. ‘We will catch up with him anyway.’ A brief smile. ‘With less trepidation now.’
‘There’s still the risk,’ she said, ‘of an… argument.’
They returned to their horses.
‘The Skathandi king was dying,’ Traveller explained as they both rode out from the camp. ‘He bequeathed his kingdom to your friend. Who then dissolved it, freeing all the slaves, warning off the soldiers. Taking nothing for himself. Nothing at all.’
She grunted.
Traveller was silent for a moment and then he said, ‘A man like that… well, I am curious. I would like to meet him.’
‘Don’t expect hugs and kisses,’ she said. ‘He will not be pleased to see you?’
‘I have no idea, although I am bringing him his horse, which should count for something.’
‘Does he know how you feel about him?’
She shot him a look, and then snorted. ‘He may think he does but the truth is I don’t know how I feel about him, so whatever he’s thinking it’s bound to be wrong. Now that we’re closing in, I’m the one getting more nervous. It’s ridiculous, I know.’
‘It seems your examination of those two women has soured your mood. Why?’
‘I don’t know what you wanted me to do about them. They were pregnant, not in labour. They looked hale enough, better than I expected in fact. They didn’t need me poking and prodding. The babies will be born and they will live or they will die. Same for the mothers. It’s just how things are.’
‘My apologies, Samar Dev. I should not have so ordered you about. Were I in your place, I too would have been offended by the presumption.’
Was that what had annoyed her? Possibly. Equally likely, her mute acquiescence, the doe-eyed ease with which she had fallen into that subservient role. As when I was with Karsa Orlong. Oh, I think I now step on to the thinnest cmst of sand above some bottomless pit. Samar Dev discovers her very own secret weaknesses. Was she foul of mood earlier? See her now.
A talent, a sensitivity-something-clearly told Traveller to say nothing more.
They rode on, the horses’ hoofs thumping the taut drum of the earth. The warm wind slid dry as sand. In a low, broad depression on their left stood six pronghorn antelope, watching them pass. Rust-red slabs of flat rock tilted up through the thin ground along the spines of hills. Long-billed birds of some kind perched on them, their plumage the same mix of hues. ‘It is all the same,’ she murmured.
‘Samar Dev? Did you speak?’
She shrugged. ‘The way so many animals are made to match their surroundings. I wonder, if all this grass suddenly grew blood red, how long before the markings on those antelope shift into patterns of red? You’d think it could never be the other way round, but you would be wrong. See those flowers-the bright colours to attract the right insects. If the right insects don’t come to collect the pollen the flower dies. So, brighter is better. Plants and animals, it goes back and forth, the whole thing inseparable and dependent. Despite this, nothing stays the same.’
‘True, nothing ever stays the same.’
‘Those women back there…’
‘Gandaru. Kin to the Kindaru and Sinbarl-so the men explained.’
‘Not true humans.’
‘No.’
‘Yet true to themselves none the less.’
‘I imagine so, Samar Dev.’
‘They broke my heart, Traveller. Against us, they don’t stand a chance.’ He glanced across at her. ‘That is quite a presumption.’
‘It is?’
‘We are riding towards a Tartheno Toblakai, belonging to a remnant tribe isolated somewhere in northern Genabackis. You tell me that Karsa Orlong intend todeliver destruction to all the “children” of the world-to us, in other words. When you speak ol this, I see fear in your eyes. A conviction that he will succeed. So now, tell me, against one such as Karsa Orlong and his kind, do we stand a chance?’
‘Of course we do, because we can fight back. What can these gentle Gandaru manage? Nothing. They can hide, and when that fails they are killed, or enslaved. Those two women were probably raped. Used. Vessels for human seed.’
‘Barring the rape, every animal we hunt for food possesses the same few choices. Hide or flee.’
‘Until there is no place left to hide.’
‘And when the animals go, so too will we.’
She barked a laugh. ‘You might believe so, Traveller. No, we won’t go that way. We’ll just fill the empty lands with cattle, with sheep and goats. Or break up the ground and plant corn. There is no stopping us.’
‘Except, perhaps, for Karsa Orlong.’
And there,, then, was the truth of all this. Karsa Orlong pronounced a future of destruction, extinction. And she wished him well.
‘There,’ Traveller said in a different voice, and he rose in his stirrups. ‘He didn’t travel too far after all-’
From Havok’s saddle, Samar Dev could now see him. He had halted and was facing them, a thousand paces
