TEN

Bax and his riders pursued the fugitive teyn through the whole of the day.

Rain had washed the tracks of the teyn from the canyon that the Summer Concubine had described—as Oryn had thought he might, Bax identified it instantly from her description—but they found evidence of the band’s concealment nevertheless. Bax’s scouts were still casting about for the trail when the Summer Concubine’s messenger arrived with a description of her second vision in the water bowl. The commander recognized that place, too: She had seen a cave that was barely more than a longitudinal slit in the rocks, beneath a huge dust-colored overhang of stone above an open hillside. “Headed southeast, it sounds like. I wonder if they’re making for the Singing World?”

“They wouldn’t know about it, surely?” Oryn followed the commander back toward the horses, nonchalantly trying not to limp. It is one thing to be a competent rider—which Oryn was, mostly because as a fat child he had had a horror of looking silly on a horse. It is another to ride for almost six hours when one is not accustomed to doing so. Oryn was already debating whether he should spend one week or two in the hot room of the palace baths, drinking soothing tisanes and being massaged.

“You ever been there?”

Oryn shook his head. Few people had, of those who made their homes in the farmlands along the lakes. He’d heard about that vast, lumpy platform of twisted rock—twenty miles long by some five wide—like a tawny island above the gray gravel pavement of the desert beyond the Dead Hills. But he doubted even his father had gone there in the wars that had brought House Jothek to the rulership forty years ago. There was no reason to visit the place. Nothing grew in the Singing World, nothing could be mined there, no water had ever been detected in its bare, wind-smoothed ridges. Only the crooning wind, muttering with near-human groans around the rocks. Hermits had dwelled there once, devotees of Kush, god of the desert wind. What had become of them no one knew.

“It’s a perfect place to hide,” Bax said. “Once you get among those rocks you don’t leave a print, and your pursuers haven’t more than a few feet of vision in any direction.” The flicker of morning winds showed up the silver in the commander’s coarse, dark hair under the edge of his helmet. Though this red-walled canyon—Camel Rock Canyon, it was called, of course—was still in what was called the near ranges, meaning that paloverde grew among the rocks and in the open land stands of cactus and sagebrush occasionally broke the brown monotony of the earth, it was close enough to the outer limits of the king’s authority that there was danger from the bandits who haunted the nearer wastes and the nomads who had grown bolder with the desperation of thirst. All the guardsmen who waited for them at the canyon’s mouth wore full armor, back-and-breasts, greaves, helmets, mailed skins.

Head aching from the helmet’s weight and knees chafed from the greave straps, Oryn felt considerable sympathy for them. The mantlings that protected the back of his neck from the sun seemed determined to creep down his collar and whipped him in the eyes every time he turned his head, and the somewhat short-waisted cuirass gripped his bottom ribs like a torturer’s iron clamp. On those occasions when his father would insist that he ride out in armor on some training expedition designed to “make a man of him,” Oryn had regarded it as a point of honor to play the fool, wearing his gaudiest eye paint and covering himself in perfumed ointment. He recalled once constructing a crest of crimson wildflowers for his helmet and discoursing on aesthetics to his disgusted parent and half a regiment of baffled palace guards. No wonder Bax had looked surprised when he’d asked to come.

It had been quite polite of him, Oryn thought, not to look either alarmed or appalled as well.

But this was no longer matter for play. He wiped his dripping forehead and tried to loop back his hair out of his eyes. The lives of three children were at stake and, more than that, the lives of perhaps many more in the villages that relied on the labor of supposedly domesticated teyn. Bax had a job to do and the last thing he needed was an amateur getting in his way, particularly one he couldn’t just shove aside.

So Oryn’s voice was diffident as he said, “Yes, but according to my lady, these are village teyn. They wouldn’t know the Singing World, would they?”

“They’ve got to have wildings among ’em.” Bax rubbed his chin, where beard stubble lay like granite dust: Oryn was wishing he’d had Geb shave him too, but that had been out of the question in terms of time. “Though you’re right—I haven’t seen a handprint all through the canyon, and it’s the wildings that run bent and push off with their hands.” He shook his head and strode down to where the horses waited, remounts saddled while the men hunted for signs. “I’ll be curious what we find when we find ’em.”

Oryn gritted his teeth as discreetly as he possibly could, waved away a sergeant’s offer of aid, prayed very briefly for the dignity of success to Oan Echis the guardian god of the Jothek house and got his foot up into the stirrup. Oan Echis was in a good mood that morning and Oryn made it to the saddle unassisted. New robes for all your priests, first-quality silk . . . .

“Do they communicate?” he asked as the cavalcade rode out through the harsh midmorning light. The clouds were gone as if they had never been. Rain pocks made a thousand tiny craters in the thin desert dust, like the false promises of young lovers. The hooves obliterated this evidence of the wizards’ Song. Dust settled in their place. “You’ve ridden patrols for thirty years. We’ve taught the village teyn to understand us and even to speak a bit . . . . Have you ever heard a wilding teyn speak to another teyn? Do they have a language? Or make any noise once they’re past infancy?”

“We only see ’em when we’re hunting ’em,” pointed out Bax, his eyes always moving, always scanning each slight hollow of the land. “They may discourse natural philosophy back in their caves for all I know, my lord. Yes, I think they communicate somehow, from the way the bands will move to avoid patrols. But I’ve never seen or heard a thing, nor has anyone I’ve ever spoke to, not even the nomads.”

“Have you ever known them to steal children?”

Bax didn’t answer for a time. The gray-brown emptiness rose to chewed-looking ridges of stone, then fell away again. Even the cactus was sparse here, small and squat and farther and farther apart. Once Oryn saw a snake coiled in the black puddle of a rock’s shade. Once he saw a rabbit far away, bounding over the heat-paled dust. In all the world there seemed no other life.

There was poetry here, he thought, but it was a music he did not understand. Maybe the nomads did, who wandered the wastelands from oasis to oasis, living on the edge of the winds.

And there were limits beyond which even the nomads would not go.

“There’s always children that disappear from the rangeland villages, my lord,” the commander said at last. “Not often, but regularly. Not taken by jackals, I mean—you’ll usually see vultures and a body—but just disappear. The djinni get the blame for it, and it may be the djinni, though myself I’ve never figured what the Beautiful Ones would want with a squalling brat. They could have had all four of my brothers for the asking, I’ll tell you that.” He shaded his eyes against the white glare of the southern sky.

Oryn opened his mouth to ask what he sought, then thought about it and didn’t. So far only a single vulture could be descried, like a dust mote in the brilliant air.

“Curse it.” Bax froze, looking out to the southwest, then reined his horse and groped for the spyglass that hung at his belt. Oryn unfurled his own and trained it toward what the commander had seen first: a long, low whisper of dust on the southwestern horizon.

Good gods, how many of them are there? he thought in shock, putting the glass to his eye, and a moment later was glad he hadn’t said anything. “Nomads?”

There was a confused suggestion of movement all through the dust cloud, a bobbing that had to be beasts, and then the tall upright necks of camels.

“They’ll have to be Rai an-Ariban’s tribe.” Bax stood in the stirrups, sun flashing from the brass mountings of his telescope. “Best we be moving. An-Ariban would kill a dozen men, if he thought he could get away with it, to keep his advance on the lakes quiet until it was too late for us to marshal a force against him. Only reason he wouldn’t is if he thought we had a mage watching over us back in the city, as was done for years with patrols. And it may be the nomads know as well as we do that that isn’t done anymore. Kiner . . .”

The corporal spurred up to his commander’s side.

“Get back to the city, fast as you can go. Watch your back—the nomads will have patrols out ahead of them. Let Lord Barún know we’ve got nomads moving in our direction, start him marshaling a patrol. One thing that brother of yours knows how to do, it’s put together warriors,” added Bax as the guardsman caught up a couple of remounts from the cavvy and headed back toward the city in a very small cloud of saffron dust. “We’ve plenty of time. There should be no trouble.”

“No,” said Oryn quietly, troubled nevertheless by this first evidence that the nomads were starting to move in toward the arable land along the lakes. “No, he’s quite good at that. My father always said he’d make a better king than I. But then again, my father seemed to think that the average camel driver would make a better king than I.”

“If all we needed of a king was patrols along the rangelands and fathering more kings, I’d agree.”

“Oh, so would I,” said Oryn, quite earnestly. “Only my feelings in the matter are complicated by the fact that since I am the elder, sooner or later Barún would have to kill me . . . . It’s just what’s done, you know, in our social circles.”

And Bax laughed.

In the cave beneath the overhanging cliff they found where the teyn had clustered: scuffed concentric rings of knee and buttock marks, deepened at the sides where they’d swayed. Three little zigzag scrapes in the dry sand at the side of the cave showed where the captives had lain.

“The hoot knelt here in the middle of the rings.” Bax held low the torch that one of the men had kindled for him. Oryn came to his side, trying to disturb the tracks as little as possible. “You ever seen teyn cluster?”

“Oh, yes.” Oryn squatted to study the marks, wondering if he’d be able to straighten his knees again to rise and deciding to deal with that challenge when the time came. With the restless orange glow supplementing the wan daylight from the front of the cave he could pick out the crooked little toe prints, the heel marks and traces where fingers had stirred the silk-fine dust. “Village teyn, that is. I used to sneak away from the palace at night when I was a child and climb a tree near the compound wall. A lot of lords have their minders break them up when they cluster, but I never saw the harm of it. They just sit in those circles and sway together . . . . I’ve seen them carry on for most of the night, then return to the fields in the morning, without even benefit of coffee. Can’t imagine how they do that. Do the wildings cluster?”

Oryn stood up—without even crying out in pain, on which he congratulated himself.

“Again, you’ve got me.” Bax moved back, stooping lower and lower with the shelving of the roof, to hold the torch into that thin crack of ultimate darkness. Myriad furious rattling sounded in the crack, though the torchlight only showed more than a dozen tortoises—some of them the size of shields—plodding patiently away from the light.

By the tracks, as far as Oryn could see, none of the teyn had ventured anywhere near the crack. But again, how would they know? Most of them had never been away from their village and the Dry Hill diggings in their lives. Even if teyn did speak to one another, how would they have learned the language of the wildings to understand information about the desert?

“Soth have anything to say about it?” Bax asked.

Oryn remembered the reek of sherab, the stuffy dark of the study, the drawling, wretched voice of the man who had taught him to love the life of the mind even above the swooning delights of the senses. He felt the same grief he’d felt watching his father burn his books of poetry and tales. As if something beautiful were disappearing out of the world.

He still had a patch of red flesh on the side of his right hand where he’d tried to snatch The Song of the Moon Prince out of the blaze. Stupid, of course; it had earned him nothing but a whipping. He would gladly take another whipping—and the pain of the burn—if some god would show him what blaze it was that was consuming his friend’s soul.

But he only said, “Only that he’d never heard of teyn stealing children either. Surely they would have realized that taking children would guarantee pursuit?”

“Their escape has guaranteed pursuit.” Bax led the way out of the cave and thrust the torch into the thick sand at its mouth to kill the flame. Milk vetch and dandelion grew there. Oryn could see where the stalks and leaves had been freshly plucked, but nowhere in or around the cave had he seen the broken pieces. “And if they don’t know that, it’s a lesson all the others will have to learn.” He glanced down the hillside at the men regrouping by the horses near the trail of scuffs and scratches that marked the teyns’ retreat southeast again.

His blue eyes met the king’s, studying him. Knowing, Oryn thought unhappily, that he, Oryn, was a keeper of cats and finches, who had had a servant beaten for sticking halved walnut shells on Black Princess’s paws and setting her on a slick tile floor to watch her slither and slip. That he had a reputation for softheartedness, and poems about roses and moonlight. Gauging him.

Oryn sighed, understanding that he was right and hating it. Hating being king.

“I shall rely on your judgment,” he said, in an almost inaudible voice.

They saw the vultures circling above the Singing World shortly before the fall of the early winter darkness on the land.

The Singing World itself was astonishing enough on first sight, and Oryn would have laughed aloud with amazement at the delicate spires and domes, the layered swirls of color, the smooth curved holes, bridges, tunnels—if he hadn’t been seeing things now with the eyes of a tracker, a father, a king. He thought, Bax will never find the teyn. And now the light’s going.

His heart ached at what the buzzards told him they would find.

The dark birds wheeled around a rock promontory near the north end. As the riders approached across the featureless desert, Oryn could hear the birds’ cries. They left the horses where the rocks first rose in a wall the color of ripe peaches, scrambled up the wind-smoothed cliff and then among the maze of faults and crevices for perhaps another mile. When they finally climbed the eroded golden dome, the highest in the whole huge formation, Oryn saw where the rocks had been marked, circles and crosses daubed with mud, plant sap or blood.

As they neared the top there was a great deal of blood.

The rock knob where the children lay commanded the desert like a watchtower. Even as Oryn stood, panting and light-headed, over the three mangled little corpses someone shouted, “Down there! I saw ’em move!” and the men went scrambling in pursuit. Oryn signed to two of them to remain.

“Wrap them in blankets. Treat them gently. They’ll want to burn them decently in the village when we get back.”

“The girl too, sir?”

“The girl too.”

The buzzards screamed, flapped their dark wings and hopped off the rock, swooping and veering as the guardsmen gathered up those three small bodies. Though the children had been crudely butchered with knives taken from the raided village, Oryn noted how calm their faces were. As if they’d been deeply asleep when the cutting started and simply had not waked. He prayed this was the case.

Sprigs of milk vetch and dandelion had been scattered around and over them, and stuck in the cracks of the rocks. Wilted—they’d been carried for many miles from the cave where they’d grown. Circles and Xs were scratched on the rock, in rude approximation, he thought, of the marks wizards made around the villages to control the thoughts and fears of the teyn. The scratches looked fresh.

“Have you ever seen anything like that before.?”

The commander shook his head; his heavy-lipped mouth shut hard.

Men were calling out now that they could see the teyn fleeing. On this god walk above all the aisles and crevices of the Singing World, Oryn saw them clearly, like roaches darting along cracks in a wall. Saw the men pursuing them, through the rocks and over the twelve-foot golden wall, down to the gray desert floor.

He knew he couldn’t hope to keep up with either the pursuers or the quarry, so he took his tablets from the satchel Geb had packed for him and in the slanting mellow light meticulously copied everything he saw: the position of the bodies, every twig and stem of the plant sprigs and where they lay, each rude symbol and dribbled line of blood. Scarcely the activity a bold hero king would undertake, he supposed with a sigh. On the other hand, at least Bax wouldn’t have to worry about guarding him through all those caves and gullies.

Soth should know this, he thought.

He wouldn’t even articulate to himself that it might be useful to have notes of the first occurrence, should there be a second.

Wouldn’t let himself look at their faces. One boy was four, Illyth’s age when he’d died. Another looked about eight. The girl was probably five or six. He’d have to tell their parents. He couldn’t imagine handing the job to some palace official.

Two soldiers, bows in hand, remained beside him, and whatever they thought of what they saw they kept to themselves.

Some of the teyn reached open ground, began to run. Here they showed themselves for the novices they were, without skill at cover or experience in evading pursuit. The men rode them down, then dismounted to butcher them like sheep. The smell of the blood came to Oryn in his high place, from the open desert and from the rocks where the men massacred the cornered teyn in every crevice and hole.

“Weird.” Bax clambered up the rocks to him, sword in hand. “Did you have a look at the blood of those kids? At the bodies? Ants had got to them already; that blood was dried almost black. They were killed hours ago, midafternoon. Yet the teyn were still here.”

Oryn looked at the blood again. To him, blood was blood, something to be avoided if possible and washed out of linen with cold water before the stain set. Geb had told him that. He supposed his father, like Bax, would have been able to classify it in terms of wetness, stickiness, slickness, dryness. That was a warrior’s job, a warrior’s knowledge. “They had to know we were on their trail,” he said at last. “From up here they must have seen us miles away.”

At the fringe of the Singing World, a dark cluster of movement marked where men and horses were reassembling, preparing for the ride back to Dry Hill. Torches were lit, pale as fireflies in the final light. The dead teyn made shapeless dark blots on the sand. Blood spattered Bax’s boots and pantaloons as if he’d splashed through puddles of it.

“What were they waiting for?”

The commander shook his head. “Best we get out of here,” he said. “There’s light up here, but it’ll be full dark by the time we get to the horses and dark isn’t when you want to be down in the cracks of this land.” He was clearly still thinking about the nomads. Oryn had some concerns in that direction himself.

At Bax’s command, the men cut up the carcasses of the teyn and scattered the pieces. They were all village teyn: boars, jennies and pips. Oryn supposed that if they had been joined by wildings in their flight, the desert dwellers would have been the ones to escape. But somehow he didn’t think that had been the case.

Could they communicate with the wildings in the hills?

Was that what they were doing—somehow—when they “clustered”? When they sat in rings around one of their hoots, patted the earth, their thighs, one another’s hands, softly and rhythmically while they swayed! Soth—and other mages—had assured him repeatedly that there was no magic involved. And surely, Oryn thought, if the hoots—the cluster leaders— had been able to generate magic, they’d have used it to escape before this.

So what were they doing?

Why children?

Why remain beside the bodies while the pursuit drew near?

Come morning that little corner of the Singing World would be a horror of ants and flies and vultures. Already Oryn could hear the skitter of foxes in the rocks, the yik of jackals creeping close. The rocks flung back the day’s heat around him, a tall fat man in rumpled blue velvet and borrowed armor that was gouging him mercilessly in the ribs, watching the vultures gather in the dimming sky.

Far to the east, miles distant across the darkening infinities of sand, Oryn could see, as he had last night, a distant flicker of greenish flame.

If he rode out to the place, he wondered, would it be there still when he arrived?

And would that be a fortunate thing for him, or not?

He ached in every bone, and almost stumbled down the bare, yellow knob of rock to the horses, wondering what it meant—and what he or anyone would do if this happened again.