At the end of the twelfth circuit Saranja halted.
“Up!” she said, and led the way back to the ridge, paying out the cord as she climbed. She turned to face the pit.
“Haddu!” she called again. She twitched the cord.
Immediately it streamed toward her, and hand over hand as it came she fed it back into the jewel she had drawn it from. The process seemed effortless, but the force was enough to twist the monster’s stem, faster and faster, through all twelve windings, until its released tentacles flailed helplessly out around it. By the time the end of the cord had disappeared into the fiery gem the creature had twisted itself free of its base, and, still spinning, still on fire, was rising into the air, higher and higher, until its howls started to fade into the sky.
Saranja raised her arms above her head.
“Haddu!” she cried for the third time, and brought them down in an imperious gesture of ending.
Flame like a lightning strike plunged down, carrying the monster with it. In the bottom of the pit a vast, sulfur-reeking hole opened to receive it. Still howling, the monster vanished into the earth and the hole closed over it. The edges of the pit began to tumble down to seal it over and they backed away.
“How did you know to do all that?” said Ribek in an awed voice. “You don’t even like magic.”
“Not me,” said Saranja in her own voice. “Him.”
She gestured at Zald.
They crowded round to look. For a moment they saw, grinning out from the depths of the jewel, a little scarlet imp face. Its thin tongue licked its lips in remembered relish, and then there was nothing but the glow of the jewel.
“Back to the road, I suppose,” said Ribek. “If nothing else as nasty as that happens to us on this journey I shan’t be sorry. Bless you, Maja, for remembering the water.”
He was doing his best to speak lightly, but Maja could hear the deep shudder in his voice. It had been the kind of nightmare it’s no use waking up from—you only lie in the dark, remembering it, still too afraid to move a muscle. Benayu was staggering as if still half drowning in the dream. Ribek put an arm round him to help him along. In silence they began to trudge back toward the Highway. Before they had gone far Sponge came racing out of the dark to greet Benayu with puppyish ecstasy—a bit of the real world, a tiny step toward making everything sane again. It was going to take a long, long time.
“Let’s hope the horses are all right,” said Saranja. She must be feeling the same, Maja realized, in spite of what she’d done.
“Yes, they’ve loosed the demons,” said Benayu in a low, shuddering voice. “We haven’t yet seen the worst of them. The Watchers must be mad.”
They walked on in silence. The rocks threw heavy moon-shadows, so black that they seemed solid. In that distorting light many of them had demon shapes. A man appeared, walking toward them, leading a mule. This was an ordinary trick of the moonlight, Maja knew, this sudden appearance—or would have been, back at Woodbourne. Not here. He halted and waited for them to reach him.
“Let go, Jex, for a moment.”
No. Nothing unusual for miles around, except the residual throb of the buried pit behind them. And not even a glimmer from the black bead on her amulet.
“I think he’s all right,” she whispered.
Still, they stopped several paces from him. He stayed where he was, leaning on his staff.
“Good evening,” he said in a mild, precise voice. “I take it you are returning from that extraordinary and dismaying event. Are you the last to leave?”
“You’re not going back!” said Saranja.
“Indeed, that was my intention. I would have stayed to watch, only my legs would not let me. But now I have mastered them, and found my mule….”
“There’s nothing to see except desert,” said Ribek. “The thing vanished into the ground and the pit closed up over it.”
“I can still take measurements and readings, perhaps.”
He was mad, Maja decided. He mightn’t be any kind of magic worker, but perhaps there was something a little bit odd about his own individual magic. She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t think about anything. Now that they’d stopped walking she was swaying with exhaustion and hunger. Benayu looked even worse than she felt. He’d been walking all day when he shouldn’t have walked at all.
“Please don’t go,” said Saranja.
“I appreciate your concern, madam, but…One moment…forgive me…Yes. I remember being picked up by that thing and hurled through the air. It was difficult in the circumstances to pay close attention to my surroundings, but for an instant I saw—I am almost certain I saw, and that it was you I saw, for you hold yourself in exactly that manner—saw you striding across the slope with a line of fire trailing behind you. Forgive my impertinence, but is that the case?”
Saranja’s mouth was open to answer but no voice emerged. She was not good at lying, leave alone inventing a lie on the spur of the moment. Ribek moved easily into the gap.
“I’m afraid my sister is not at liberty to talk about it.”
“I fully understand,” said the stranger. “It is dangerous to admit to the possession of any such powers, even when the authorities are fully occupied with events around Tarshu. But perhaps, since we are alone in this place, I may be permitted to assume that what I thought I saw was indeed the case, and that I and my fellow travelers have you to thank for rescuing us all from that terrible predicament. I do so from the very bottom of my heart.”
“Oh…er…thank you…,” said Saranja.
“And if there is anything I can do in return…”
“You don’t have any food in those saddlebags, I suppose,” said Ribek quickly.
“Indeed, I do. I’ll be only too delighted….”
Prattling on, the man moved to the side of his mule and with deft fingers unbuckled a saddlebag. Maja sat down to wait with her back against a rock. An unknown time later she was lying curled on a rug on some kind of swaying platform with a smell of horse and harness in her nostrils and fragments of salt fish and soft bread in her mouth. She had no memory of how they got there but they tasted as if they’d been very good indeed.
CHAPTER
12
Then it was day. Maja was lying on the ground now, and in her own bedroll, by the feel of it. Low voices were talking close by—Ribek’s and…Oh, yes, the stranger they had met last night. Something to do with water mills. The stranger seemed to know a lot about water mills. She groaned and tried to sit up, but every joint and muscle complained, and she let herself collapse and groaned again. Instantly Ribek was at her side, his arm under her shoulders.
“Don’t move,” he said. “We’re staying here. Saranja says the horses have got to have a full day’s rest. Here, try this. It’s something Striclan brewed up. It’s good for aches and pains, he says.”
Gently he eased her up enough for her to sip from the mug he was holding to her lips. The blood-warm liquid had a heavenly, rich, autumnal smell, and was both sweet and bitter in the mouth. A tingling glow flowed through her as she sipped, and she lay back down with a sigh.
“My sister’s only twelve,” he explained to someone, “and we must have done getting on two days’ march yesterday. She’s been doing too much anyway. She was a plump little thing when we set out, but look at her now.”
“Of course she must rest. And your brother too,” said the stranger’s soft voice. Striclan must be his name. Something funny about him. Not now. Later.
“A little gentle exercise this afternoon,” the man went on. “And I will give Miss Saranja an unguent with which to massage her. I would do it myself, but I imagine that as her guardian you would prefer…”