Nor was it like what she might have felt for the father she had never known. She could only guess, but she knew that it must be different. It was strange for her to be even thinking about her father. Almost before any time that she could remember she had learned not to ask about him. Her mother would only weep when she did, and her aunt would punish her if she found out, or asked anyone else. It was safer never even to wonder about him, to bury all thoughts of him beneath the stories she used to tell herself of wonderful, impossible adventures among monsters and warriors and mighty sorcerers.
But now everything had changed. Her aunt was gone, along with the fears and miseries of her childhood, and the adventure was real and wonderful, and though there was plenty to be afraid of in it she felt she could face those fears, and wonder about her father if she chose. But it wasn’t very satisfying. She knew, or guessed, that the reason she hadn’t been allowed to ask about him was that he had done something too horrible for her to be told, so she found it hard to form a picture of him as the kind of father anyone would want to have. In the end she gave up and simply decided that, whatever he was like, any love she might have felt for him would have been different from what she felt about Ribek. The great thing about Ribek was that from the first he had treated her as an equal. Nobody had ever done that before, and her father would always have been her father, never her equal. She needed somebody to love, not as a fantasy, not as a game, but for real, and Ribek was well worth loving.
And even if she hadn’t had those feelings, Maja would have chosen Ribek to walk or ride with anyway. She admired Saranja enormously. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. Anybody could have seen she was a heroine—such fire and challenge in her glance, such unconscious pride in stance and movement, even in sleep. Maja was simply in awe of her, and would still have been if these qualities hadn’t resonated from her in the world of magic and vibrated through Maja like continuous trumpet music. But that very fire and fineness made it difficult to be fully comfortable with her all day long, in the way she was with Ribek.
The same was even more true of Benayu. Again, how could it not be? He was a magician. To Maja he crackled all the time, like a fresh-lit bonfire, with his own magical power. The reason they mostly traveled pair and pair, with some distance between them, was to spare Maja the continual mild abrasion of his powers. ( Jex could have absorbed these, but told Maja he preferred a more varied diet. There’d been something about the way he’d said it that made her think that was only an excuse, and actually he was squeamish about feeding off the emanations from a personal friend.) His magic set him apart from ordinary people, and always would do. Poor Benayu.
Late on the twelfth afternoon the landscape changed. For the past two days the lane they had been following had grown in size as other lanes had joined it, all apparently aiming for some point beyond the line of hills to the north. By the time they had finished climbing that final long slope it was a well-traveled road, and when they at last wearily crossed the ridge they discovered in front of them an utterly different world from the placid farming country they’d been traveling through.
“Now that’s something!” said Ribek, reining Levanter to a halt. “Should be quite a bit going on down there, Maja. Nothing by way of Watchers, I hope.”
Maja peered over his shoulder and saw a level plain stretching north, almost a desert from the look of it, burnt brown by the sun even at this lush season of the year. As a sort of boundary between the two worlds, green hills and brown plain, a big river flowed from the west with an Imperial Highway running beside its further bank. The road they were on descended the hill to meet it at a large town. Part of the river had been diverted to form a moat round the gated walls, but the main channel ran through the middle of the town, with docks on either bank, and then became the outer harbor, and beyond that flowed into the sea between a rocky headland on its southern shore and a vast stretch of marsh to the north, through which another Highway dwindled into the distance.
This must be a major port. In the center of the city masts of seagoing craft showed above red-tiled roofs. A faint haze, the dust and smoke of human bustle, lay over it all. And yes, there should be a lot going on down there in the invisible world of magic.
She sensed nothing.
Even at this distance it should be like Mord, twenty times over. Except that at Mord she’d only just come into her newfound sense, hadn’t really been aware that that was what it was. She hadn’t understood what the sense revealed to her, any more than a newborn baby understands the blur of shapes and sounds and smells that reach it lying in its cradle.
Now, though, she had learned to look at a town from a distance and read it with her extra sense in much the same way that she could read its larger buildings with her eyes, its turreted walls, its public monuments, its marketplaces and warehouses and so on. Above the buzz of petty magics—made magics, the work of hedge magicians, but still quite different from the natural magics that flowed from tree and stream, companion and stranger—she would be able to sense stronger emanations, or at least the sudden patches of emptiness that showed where some serious magician had put a ward round whatever he or she was doing.
Not here.
Surely, at least, there should have been an Eye on each of the main gates. All large towns had them, often dating from long before the time of Watchers, but no. From all this city, nothing came back. She took Jex out of the pocket of her blouse and put him in her pouch. Now the natural magics of everything around and behind her came crowding in on her, but she still sensed nothing from down the hill. Nothing at all.
Saranja and Benayu hadn’t stopped when Ribek had and were already a little distance down the slope. Maja felt a brief jolt of magic as, without warning, Rocky skittered sideways and back, something so unexpected from him that Saranja lost a stirrup and was almost thrown. Of course Pogo, a couple of paces behind, shied because Rocky had. He would have had Benayu off if Saranja hadn’t managed to grab his bridle, and then dismount. She waited for Benayu to do the same, handed him Pogo’s reins, and started to lead Rocky on down the road.
Maja felt another, more violent, jolt. Rocky shied, and in the same instant Saranja was flung back up the slope, yelling with the shock of the blow and landing flat on her back. Ribek leaped down and ran to help her. By the time Maja had slid herself to the ground and led Levanter down to join them Saranja was getting shakily to her feet and feeling herself for bruises.
“It wasn’t me,” she muttered. “It was Zald it didn’t like. And Rocky. It didn’t like him at all.”
“And me,” said Benayu in a low, puzzled voice.
He was standing with his back to the rest of them, as he’d been doing since he’d dismounted, turning his head slowly from left to right and back, apparently oblivious to what had been happening to Saranja.
“I can’t feel it. I don’t know what it is. You don’t get wards that big, far as I know, and if it’s some kind of screen it’s nothing like mine and way beyond anything I could manage. It’s telling me if I go any further I’ll die. It isn’t lying.”
“Let’s see what it thinks about me, then,” said Ribek. “You too, old fellow.”