And now the sapper saw the object of the Dam's attention — off to his right, almost behind Tremorlor, still a thousandpaces distant, yet fast approaching. A swarm like no other.Bloodflies, in a solid black cloud the size of a thunderhead,billowing, surging towards them.
Leaving the dhenrabi in the throes of violent death behind them, the group sprinted for the House.
As he passed beneath the leafless arch of vines, the sapper saw Apsalar reach the door, close her hands on the broad, heavy ring-latch and twist it. He saw the muscles rise on her forearms, straining. Straining.
Then she staggered back a step, as if dismissively, contemptuously shoved. As Fiddler, trailed by Crokus, Mappo with his charge, Apsalar's father, then Pust and Blind, reached the flat, paved landing, he saw her spin round, her expression one of shock and disbelief.
It won't open. Tremorlor has refused us.
The sapper skidded to a halt, whirled.
The sky was black, alive, and coming straight for them.
At Vathar's sparse, blistered edge, where the basolith of bedrock sank once more beneath its skin of limestone, and the land that stretched southward before and below their vantage point was nothing but studded stones in windswept, parched clay, they came upon the first of the Jaghut tombs.
Few among the outriders and the column's head paid it much attention. It looked like nothing more than a cairn marker, a huge, elongated slab of stone tilted upward at the southernmost end, as if pointing the way across the Nenoth Odhan to Aren or some other, more recent destination.
Corporal List had led the historian to it in silence while the others prepared rigging to assist in the task of guiding the wagons down the steep, winding descent to the plain's barren floor.
'The youngest son,' List said, staring down at the primitive tomb. His face was frightening to look at, for it wore a father's grief, as raw as if the child's death was but yesterday — a grief that had, if anything, grown with the tortured, unfathomable passage of two hundred thousand years.
He stands guard still, that Jaghut ghost. The statement, a silent utterance that was both simple and obvious, nevertheless took the historian's breath away. How to comprehend this. .
'How old?' Duiker's voice was as parched as the Odhan that awaited them.
'Five. The T'lan Imass chose this place for him. The effort of killing him would have proved too costly, given that the rest of the family still awaited them. So they dragged the child here — shattered his bones, every one, as many times as they could on so small a frame — then pinned him beneath this rock.'
Duiker had thought himself beyond shock, beyond even despair, yet his throat closed up at List's toneless words. The historian's imagination was too sharp for this, raising images in his mind that seared him with overwhelming sorrow. He forced himself to look away, watched the activities among the soldiers and Wickans thirty paces distant. He realized that they worked mostly in silence, speaking only as their tasks required, and then in low, strangely subdued tones.
'Yes,' List said. 'The father's emotions are a pall unrelieved by time — so powerful, so rending, those emotions, that even the earth spirits had to flee. It was that or madness. Coltaine should be informed — we must move quickly across this land.'
'And ahead? On the Nenoth plain?'
'It gets worse. It was not just the children that the T'lan Imass pinned — still breathing, still aware — beneath rocks.'
'But why?' The question ripped from Duiker's throat.
'Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks — all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.'
'Did the Jaghut seek to reason with them, Corporal?'
'Many times, among those not thoroughly corrupted by power — the Tyrants — but you see, there was always an arrogance in the Jaghut, and it was a kind that could claw its way up your back when face to face. Each Jaghut's interest was with him or herself. Almost exclusively. They viewed the T'lan Imass no differently from the way they viewed ants underfoot, herds on the grasslands, or indeed the grass itself. Ubiquitous, a feature of the landscape. A powerful, emergent people, such as the T'lan Imass were, could not but be stung-'
'To the point of swearing a deathless vow?'
'I don't believe that, at first, the T'lan Imass realized how difficult the task of eradication would be. Jaghut were very different in another way — they did not flaunt their power. And many of their efforts in self-defence were … passive. Barriers of ice — glaciers — they swallowed the lands around them, even the seas, swallowed whole continents, making them impassable, unable to support the food the mortal Imass required.'
'So they created a ritual that would make them immortal-'
'Free to blow like the dust — and in the age of ice, there was plenty of dust.'
Duiker's gaze caught Coltaine standing near the edge of the trail. 'How far,' he asked the man beside him, 'until we leave this area of… of sorrow?'
'Two leagues, no more than that. Beyond are Nenoth's true grasslands, hills. . tribes, each one very protective of what little water they possess.'
'I think I had better speak with Coltaine.'
'Aye, sir.'
The Dry March, as it came to be called, was its own testament to sorrow. Three vast, powerful tribes awaited them, two of them, the Tregyn and the Bhilard, striking at the beleaguered column like vipers. With the third, situated at the very western edge of the plains — the Khundryl — there was no immediate contact, though it was felt that that would not last.
The pathetic herd accompanying the Chain of Dogs died on that march, animals simply collapsing, even as the Wickan cattle-dogs converged with fierce insistence that they rise — dead or no — and resume the journey. When butchered, these carcasses were little more than ropes of leathery flesh.
Starvation joined the terrible ravaging thirst, for the Wickans refused to slaughter their horses and attended them with eloquent fanaticism that no-one dared challenge. The warriors sacrificed of themselves to keep their mounts alive. One petition from Nethpara's Council, offering to purchase a hundred horses, was returned to the noble-born leader smeared in human excrement.
The twin vipers struck again and again, contesting every league, the attacks increasing in ferocity and frequency, until it was clear that a major clash approached, only days away.
In the column's wake followed Korbolo Dom's army, a force that had grown with the addition of forces from Tarxian and other coastal settlements, and was now at least five times the size of Coltaine's Seventh and his Wickan clans. The renegade commander's measured pursuit — leaving engagement to the wild plains tribes — was ominous in itself.
He would be there for the imminent battle, without doubt, and was content to wait until then.
The Chain of Dogs — its numbers swollen by new refugees fleeing Bylan — crawled on, coming within sight of what the maps indicated was the Nenoth Odhan's end, where hills rose in a wall aross the southern horizon. The trader track cut through the only substantial passage, a wide river valley between the Bylan'sh Hills to the east and the Saniphir Hills to the west, the track running for seven leagues, opening out on a plain that faced the ancient tel of Sanimon, then wrapped around it to encompass the Sanith Odhan and, beyond that, the Geleen Plain, the Dojal Odhan — and the city of Aren itself.
No relief army emerged from Sanimon Valley. A profound sense of isolation descended like a shroud on the train, even as the valley's flanking hills began to reveal, in the day's dying light, twin encampments, both vast, of tribesmen — the main forces of the Tregyn and the Bhilard.