Yet even so, he presented no danger to her compared to Camhóinhann.
Too often, her eyes were drawn to the tall, charismatic figure of the High Priest, to his face, white as bleached bone, gaunt, yet alive with power. He was a constant threat to her peace of mind, for it was impossible to recognize what he had become without being reminded of what he must once have been.
Marred by whatever terrific experiences had transformed him, he remained the embodiment of sufficient tragic grandeur to stir her blood.
She knew—she had always known—that he had the ability to bind her to him. Such was the force of his personality that he might have willed her to love, obedience, adoration—to anything. That he did not do so argued an admirable restraint—yet there was a subtle seduction in that very restraint. An uneasy suspicion would sometimes intrude, stifle it as she might, that Camhóinhann was, even in his ruin, some kind of vindication for Ouriána’s new religion.
Yet with that thought came another, equally confusing: What kind of woman, what kind of goddess, could Ouriána possibly be, if she could command—and accept—the devotion of men so utterly different as Camhóinhann and Goezenou?
At last Winloki saw hills and highlands rising up in the distance. There was something troubling and forbidding in their very outlines massed against the sky. She could not have explained it even to herself, but she dreaded approaching them.
Several days passed, days of watching those hills grow taller and craggier, before she finally recognized them for mountains and was able to make out the real hills, bare, brown, and unmistakably desolate, huddled at their feet. By that time, she and her Pharaxion captors had the road to themselves again.
Whether it was the fading year, with its threat of bitter weather in the high passes, or simply the nature of the mountains themselves, something up ahead discouraged ordinary travellers.
She was in the hills before she quite knew it, the land rising so slowly that only when she looked back and saw the fields lying faint and misty below did she realize that the road had been climbing all that day.
Fragments of stone wall began to appear at intervals on either side of the track. There were weird outcrops of rock, and ledges that had been honed by the wind until they looked sharp as daggers.
Her dreams that night were disturbed. More than once she started awake, convinced that someone had been leaning over her as she slept: a face as seamed and folded as the hills themselves, staring down into hers with dry, lidless eyes. Sometime before dawn she woke, trembling, ghost ridden, and clammy with sweat, to hear a patter of rain on the roof of her tent.
By the time everyone had breakfasted and mounted up, it was still raining: a sad, slow, continuous drizzle.
The road, which until now had had few windings, divided into many crooked paths, continually running back on themselves until it became difficult to tell whether they were making any progress. When a track took them to the summit of a hill higher than any of the rest, Winloki saw that all the countryside around was scarred with ruins.
Between the stones grew a coarse, dry grass. Burned brown by the summer just past, it was disintegrating in the rain. Animals there were none, and she sensed no birds but hawks and carrion crows. Yet men had lived in those hills, as the ruins bore witness. There was something there, ancient and malign; it went so deep that it permeated the very earth, the very stones. She had a dim perception that perhaps it was of the earth itself.
Twilight came early under that heavy grey sky, and the Furiádhin lit spinning globes of werelight to illuminate the way; in their unearthly glow, the faces of all the men became corpselike and terrible.
Meanwhile, the rain never let up, and the wind blew colder and colder. Her teeth chattering, Winloki locked her arms across her chest under the brocade cloak and allowed the mare to set her own pace.
That night, lying under canvas sagging with the weight of water, she feared to sleep, but for all her resistance slumber came in on dark, smothering waves and swept her away. Then her dreams were far more terrifying than the night before. She heard the music of flutes and tabors as processions of maidens went to be wed and buried in the same day. Men she saw with the eyes of beasts, and beasts with the souls of women. It seemed to her on waking that an entire history of the race that once inhabited that country had played out in her tired brain.
These ruins spread out across the hills were remnants of their cities. All their buildings they made low to the ground; even their mansions and palaces sprawled with rooms and corridors added on at random, for the people had worshipped the earth in its darker aspects and their eyes were always turned down.
Refusing to look to the sky for portents, they made bonfires of bones and read omens in the flames, listened to the feverish mutterings of dying men, read auspices in the entrails of slaughtered beasts; so the stars were nothing to them, and the rites of death and the tomb came to be everything. In time, they made a cult and a fetish of death itself.
Even by day, she could not entirely erase the frightening images from her mind: ritual suicides and poisoned cups, wolf-headed priestesses in bloody garments, jewel-skinned vipers worn as living ornaments. Lost souls shrieked and gibbered on the wind; they fluttered around her like bats, or birds with broken wings; they swarmed like flies and stinging insects. Then, indeed, she wished for less magic instead of more, wished she might move among those ancient things as an ordinary girl, ignorant and untroubled.
But on the third night, her dreams changed abruptly from foul to fair, and she slept through until daybreak without waking even once. When she left her tent and went out in the damp blue dawn, the first thing she saw was a line of faint, silvery figures etched on the ground outside.
“Your guards told me they heard you cry out in your sleep,” said Camhóinhann, appearing beside her as she stood, clammy-haired and shivering, scowling down at the marks in the dirt. “And this land is known to breed nightmares. Therefore, I put a ward around your tent to keep them out. You need not frown—the symbols are quite harmless. They are Wizards’ Runes, the same ones your mother learned as a young healer on Leal.”
Intrigued but still suspicious, she studied the figures more carefully. The runes, if that was what they truly were, did seem benign. Even so, it would be foolish to make too much of this, she admonished herself.
With all the power at his command, that he should know one innocent charm among so many spells that are wicked and destructive, it means very little.
An hour later, when the tents were folded and the horses saddled, when everyone mounted up and continued on, a vague and formless oppression settled over her—a depression perhaps born as much of physical discomfort as the psychic attack on her senses. The wind blew back the hood of her cloak and threw gusts of rain in her face. Her fingers on the reins were turning blue. Sodden, chilled, dejected, fearful, despite her earlier resolve she found herself looking more and more to the High Priest, finding something in his tall, broadshouldered figure that offered reassurance in a world that seemed shrunken and cold.
The voice that warned her against doing so was growing very faint.
There came a time when all the sky was filled with mountains, jagged peaks crowned with grey vapors.
The clouds had thinned, but the air remained heavy with water. The road began to climb at a steep angle, and a sharp blast of wind came skirling down from the heights.
With hooves slipping in the mud, the horses struggled up the slope. Winloki saw Goezenou dig in his spurs, though his sturdy bay was doing the best that it could. “We are almost there,” she heard Rivanon say to another acolyte, and she wondered what he could possibly mean. But for a scattering of beeches and pines, a few hardy shrubs rooted in the scree, the mountain was as barren as the hills below. She found it difficult to imagine any destination this empty country might offer. By nightfall the road had narrowed to a trail.