Orkamor's eyes met mine, reaching in and in as if he meant to search out every thought, no matter how deeply buried it lay in my brain. And that searching was as keen as if he sought for a flaw he knew lay there. Then he smiled and raised his hand, and I saw there was a great, angry-looking bruise across its back, and one of his fingers was splintered and stiffly bound. But the gesture he made was of welcome, and, more than welcome, of happy surprise.
"It is done, and done well."
He did not speak aloud, and his words must have rung in Maelen's brain also, for she stirred, her head coming up a little, turning slowly, her eyes to rest upon me at last. I saw surprise and a kind of wonder in them, which astonished me in turn. For if she had wrought this change for me, why should the results amaze her?
She spoke to Orkamor. "Is this well done, Eldest Brother?"
"If you mean, sister, have you accomplished as you wished—yes, it is well done. If you mean will it lead to more complications, then I cannot answer you yes or no."
"The answer"—if thought could be a whisper, then was hers now—"is mine now. Well, what is done is done, and what must be done– With your permission, Eldest Brother, we will ride forth to see the end of all this."
Still she had not spoken to me, and now it was as if she did not want to look at me again. For after that first measuring stare, she turned her head away. I was curiously chilled, as if I had put out a hand in greeting, only to have it refused, myself ignored. And yet I could not make any move to draw her attention again.
We went inside to find food and drink. Maelen ate as one who must fuel an engine for running. And I did the same, discovering my body welcomed what I gave it. But still she was behind a wall I could neither breech nor climb.
I judged it midday when we came out into the courtyard of the temple. There was no sign of the van, but two riding kasi awaited us, journey cloaks across their saddle pads, bundles of provisions hanging ready. I would have aided Maelen to mount, but she was too quick for me, and I went to my own kas. Could it be she shrank from any contact in aversion?
We went through the devastation in the Valley. There were fire-blackened ruins, other signs of the fury which had hit to cripple, but not totally to destroy. Maelen pushed ahead along the road to Yim-Sin. It was plain she was in desperate haste to fulfill the rest of her plan, to return us both to Yrjar and resolve, as far as she could, the tangle fate had snarled about us.
Nor would she look at me during that upward climb, even touch thought with me. Was it so revolting to her that I now wore the body of one who had been closekin and who might be now deemed doubly dead? I chafed at that. Nothing of what had happened to me had I asked for.
But I had, memory responded. Twice I had asked through some Thassa ritual for these changes. And twice perhaps they had saved me from death. For the first time I wondered who would inhabit the body I now wore when and if I finally regained my own. Would Maquad indeed die then, totally and finally?
Since the pace Maelen set took us much farther than the former speed of the van, we were well out of the Valley before sunset. By sunrise we might again see the ruins of Yim-Sin. Then across the plains to Yrjar—But what was happening on those plains? And because I must look a little into the future, I forced myself on my companion.
"What could the servant of Umphra tell you about what might be happening on the plains?"
"Those who came from the west," she answered, "were strangers. It seems there is a new enemy abroad in Yiktor, more ruthless than any plains lord has ever dared to be. And that force comes from off-world."
"But the Traders—" I was too astonished to grasp it quickly.
"These are not Traders like unto the men of the Lydis. These newcomers fight to carve themselves a rooting in our soil, gather to themselves power, build their own kingdom. Some of the lords they have already overwhelmed, having worked secretly for a time to sow dissension among their people; others they have gathered to them with promises of much treasure to be later shared. They have set one against another, stirring ever the caldron of war with that spoon which will make it boil the most furiously. I do not know what we shall find now in Yrjar. I do not even know if we can reach the city. We can only try."
What she said was not too enlightening, and not at all promising. It sounded as if this had been longer building than we had suspected– To plunge into a land where every man's hand was raised against his neighbor was daunting. But the port was at the outskirts of Yrjar, and there lay my only chance of reaching the Lydis.
Yrjar lay some distance away, and as I chewed upon what Maelen had said, the journey appeared to double. Were we wise to take the road at all now?
That thought was already shaping in my mind when the summons came. It was sharp and strong, as ringing as any horn call. But it did not reach me through my ears.
There was an after moment of silence, then once more the pealing, demanding order we could not disobey. I heard a small cry from Maelen, of protest—
Then, before we willed it, we had turned our mounts to the right, out of the road into the wilderness of the northern ridges, answering a call which body and mind must obey—the horn-in of the Thassa, which sounded only in times of great import.
XVIII
What I had seen of Yiktor had been much like any other world of its type—plains backed by hills, covered with vegetation varying in shade. But Yrjar, the fort of Osokun, Yim-Sin, the temples of Umphra, had their counterparts on many planets and were also familiar to me in part. Where we rode now was very different.
The horning set such bonds upon us that we could not have disobeyed its order. And we rode on and on, ever north, always into higher country. The rises here were not softened by any growth of trees, or even slightly veiled by brush and shrubs. Only small patches of grass, now killed by the first breath of winter, broke the general desolation of the stone.
For this was truly a desolate country. I have visited planets burned off in some nuclear war of such antiquity that it antedated the coming of my own species into space. That is ruin to daunt the heart of any who look upon it. But this was even more alien than that. It was a vast loneliness which rejected life as our kind knows, a stark stripping to the bones of Yiktor itself.
Yet there was life here. For when we rode deeper and deeper into this wilderness of naked stone and sand, we saw traces of those who had gone before us, tracks left by vans, hoofprints of riding kasi.
It was as if we lay under some spell, for we did not speak to each other, neither did I have any desire to turn back to the plains and what had once seemed my pressing business there. Night came. From time to time we dismounted, rested our kasi, ate of the supplies in the bags, walked up and down to ease our own bodies, only to remount and take up the trail once again.
At dawn our road wound between two towering cliffs. I thought that at some immeasurably early time in Yiktor's history this must have been the bed of a great river. There were sand and gravel and rumbles of bounders which looked water worn, but no living thing, not even so much as a single tuft of withered grass. And that river bed brought us into a huge bowl, also ringed by heights. If we had come up the river, now we entered a lake bed.
Here for the first time had man, or some intelligence, broken the austerity of the wilderness. Cut back into the cliffs about the lake bed were a series of wide openings, each bordered with carving which had once been chiseled deep, but now worn away to faint, unreadable tracings.