The other Benayu was a brooding presence, riding or walking or staring into the fire of an evening in day-long silence. Over the long weeks of their journey the anguished, passionate lad who had sworn his oath with them to destroy the Watchers and avenge Fodaro’s death, the terrified boy who had cringed before the Watcher in the way station, had recovered his poise and purpose. Saranja no longer nannied him and ordered him about. They all respected these silences and withdrawals as part of that purpose, strengthening exercises, as he continued to absorb into himself and come to terms with the enormous powers he had inherited from Zara on the hill above Larg.
Ribek and Saranja also knew this was what was happening because Zara had told them it would. But Maja, through her extra sense, could feel it to be so, and realize that it was more than that. For her, sometimes, they had a stranger sitting with them in the evenings, breathing the air they breathed, eating the meal that Striclan had prepared, but only partly human. This was the third Benayu. It was something she had first sensed soon after they had left the desert north of Larg. It had been half dormant then, waiting until he was ready to receive it, but it was now fully active in him, wholly absorbed, as much a necessary part of his spiritual self as his liver or his spine were parts of his body. She couldn’t observe or examine it because it was warded within and without, like Chanad’s tower. If it hadn’t been, she couldn’t have lived long in its presence. All that she could tell for sure was that it was there, and it hadn’t been before. Dimly, also, she could sense, as she had when she’d first been aware of its presence, that it wasn’t an inert thing, like an heirloom passed from Zara to Benayu on her deathbed. It was a living entity that had of its own will chosen to make the transfer, like an Imperial messenger leaving an exhausted horse at a way station and taking a fresh mount for the next stage of his journey.
Ribek, of course, hadn’t changed at all. Maja couldn’t imagine him doing so. He was what he was and always would be. It was one of the things she loved him for. And Saranja was still very much herself only more so, her patience shorter, her temper trickier. She tended to pick on Striclan in particular, explosively condemning something he’d told them about the Pirates and having no patience with his explanations of the complex web of facts and motives that had brought it about. For her, anything the Pirates did was a thoroughly bad business, and that was that.
“They simply don’t think the same way,” Ribek said. “She’s got a black-or-white, all-or-nothing way of seeing things. He’s more of a shades-of-gray in-betweener. Me too.”
“I’m a don’t-knower, I suppose.”
“Problem. If you are, you can’t know you are.”
“Then I can’t know I can’t know.”
“You win.”
And Jex? How could you know whether he had changed, apart from growing steadily stronger? After they had eaten their midday meal Striclan would disappear to write up his report, so on fine days this allowed Jex to return to the form in which they had first seen him and bask, blinking in the sun, like any normal lizard. But he was reluctant to speak in their minds because doing so sent out a signal he was unable to reabsorb. It was very faint, but even so sufficiently different from other minor magics to attract the attention of anyone able to pick it up, supposing the Watchers were now actively hunting for creatures of his kind.
The way stations were full of whispered rumors about the Watchers. They had withdrawn from Tarshu and were preparing to defend Talagh with mighty feats of magic while the Pirates flooded inland. No, it was the Pirates who’d run away with their collective tail between their legs, while the Watchers were reestablishing their control over the Empire—why, hadn’t two of them appeared in the nick of time to deal with a gigantic hog-demon who was uprooting whole hillsides of the Stodz forest, first binding the creature in a lattice of woven lightning and then hurling it down into the innermost fires? In a west wind, the speaker said, you could still smell, as far off as Gast, the reek of roast crackling as it seeped through crevasses in the rock where the hills had closed back over the pit. No, said others, the Pirates had merely withdrawn and were regrouping out at sea beyond the reach of the Watchers’ magic, while the Watchers attempted to make contact with the mysterious powers of the ocean in the hope of forming an alliance. And so on.
Some of the rumors about demons Maja knew to be true, because she had several times sensed their curiously sickening magic somewhere in the distance. It was strange that none had manifested themselves nearer than a full day’s march. She wondered if they were somehow aware of what Saranja had done to the demon in the desert north of Larg, and were staying well away from her and Zald.
Not that the journey was without more ordinary dangers. Brigands abounded, mostly more sophisticated than the ones they had fought earlier. These set up roadblocks and claimed to be acting on the authority of the councilors in some nearby town. They demanded astounding levels of tax to pay for repairs and maintenance of order on the Highways, which they said was now the responsibility of the town in question. Highway users responded by openly carrying weapons and traveling in groups large enough to overwhelm any such gang, but this meant moving at the pace of the slowest. So Maja’s party pressed on, with Jex keeping Maja barely shielded, and her senses feeling ahead for the presence of ambush.
Twice that happened, and twice the Highway was openly barred. Each time Benayu flicked a screen around the area—he seemed now able to do this almost as easily as raising a hand to scratch his nose—and cast the bandits into a magical sleep, leaving them for the next party of travelers to find and despoil of their weapons and loot. Both times, Maja turned her attention south to where, she was sure, their true enemies were still searching for them. Perhaps it was this endlessly wearing attention forward and backward that hid from her something that had been quietly happening all the time since that first ambush.
It had been a long, hard day’s travel, across an endless-seeming plain, all boringly the same, with a scattering of hamlets among huge square fields almost ready for harvest but nothing as interesting as actual harvesters to look at. There’d been a nagging wind in their faces, carrying vicious little showers, the last of which had drenched them just before they reached the final way station. And then there’d been the hassle of getting their wet cloaks hung to dry in the inadequate space of their booth. Saranja for some reason had been unusually on edge all day, biting Ribek’s head off whenever he opened his mouth, almost, and now she was driven to fury by the way station ostler. Ostlers never did anything for the horses in their charge, other than allocate the stalls and take the fees and bribes, so on fine nights most travelers stabled their beasts in the open, but at times like this they could charge pretty well what they chose, and would insist that the stable was already full until they got what they wanted. Saranja knew from experience that there was no way round the system, and usually paid up grimly, but tonight she raged as if it had never happened to her before.
Her fury filled the booth. It was like Woodbourne on a bad day. Nobody, not even Striclan, dared say anything. She insisted on getting a fire going in the covered hearth in front of the booth but the wood was damp and at first wouldn’t do much more than smolder until Benayu woke up from his day-long trance and set it ablaze. They ate their supper late, and in silence. Maja must have fallen asleep halfway through.