Gallin shrugged and turned his mount left instead of right. The rest of them followed in a gaggle. The dogs, who had darted ahead in the opposite direction, paused and vented puzzled whines. When the riders continued their retreat, they barked a few times, then ran after.
As Penric made to lead them all across the wooden span, Arrow and Blood rushed ahead, turned, and set up a furious barking. The horses shied.
“Calm them,” Penric advised Inglis.
“Hush!” Inglis tried, and then, “Sit!” The apparently-maddened dogs continued to hold the party at bay. “Hush!” Inglis tried again, more forcefully. “Settle down!”
The two dogs recoiled as if blown by a gust of gale, but then remustered their battle line and took up their din again, standing four-legged and braced, the fur rising in a ridge along their backs.
“Enough!” cried Penric, laughing for no reason that Inglis could discern, and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Gallin, staring back and forth between the dogs and him, reined his horse around to lead back up the vale once more. A few villagers arrested by the uproar who had come to their garden gates nodded at their acolyte, frowned impartially at his visitors, and turned back to their interrupted tasks.
The two guardsmen fell in at either side of Inglis, albeit not too close, scowling at him in distrust. Oswyl nudged his horse up beside the sorcerer’s, and asked, “Did you do something, back there?”
“No,” said Penric, airily, “not at all. Very carefully not at all, in fact.”
“So what was all that in aid of?”
“I had three theories about what drives those dogs. This knocks out one of them. Two to go.” He nodded in satisfaction, and pushed his horse into a trot after Gallin. Oswyl seemed as baffled by this as Inglis, for he made an exasperated face at the sorcerer’s retreating back. What, did the locator find the blond man as irritating as Inglis did?
A little while later Penric reined back beside Inglis, displacing one of the guards, who looked more grateful than otherwise for being relieved of his post. “Well,” said Penric cheerily, “shall we beguile the ride with a bit more practice?”
“No,” said Inglis, mortified. And if a No! would have worked on the man, he’d have followed up with one. “Do you want us both to look fools?”
“That still concerns you, at this stage in your career?” Penric inquired. Entirely too dryly. “Though I have to allow, working for my god tends to knock that worry out of a person fairly swiftly.” The dryness melted to an even more excoriating look of sympathy.
“I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not going to work.”
“If you don’t know the first, how do you know the second?” Penric shot back. “Although I’m afraid planning may be too grandiose a term for it. Testing, perhaps. Like the bridge.”
Inglis hunched his shoulders. Penric eyed him a moment more and then, to his relief, gave up.
The day was gray, the air damp, the mountains veiled, but the wind was light, not spitting rain or snow at them. Inglis studied the vale as they rode up the right-hand branch of the Chillbeck. The high peaks that headed it, and easterly, led only to more peaks. One would have to circle back several miles to find any western trail with even a chance of leading to a high pass over to the main Carpagamo road. It was a half-day’s ride downriver beyond that to loop south to the same road, the way Inglis had come in. Given his prior disastrous experience with trying to climb out over this valley’s walls, that seemed the best bet. If a man had a head start on a fast horse. The notion of trying to retrace his route all the way back to the Crow Road and head east to Saone after all, as winter turned from threat to certainty, was near-heartbreaking.
The riders strung out as Gallin turned off the road and up into the woods. The sorcerer rode right behind Inglis, a thorn in his back; one of the guards went ahead, looking frequently over his shoulder. The woods were difficult but not, Inglis thought, impassible. Centuries of valesmen gathering deadfall and timber from these more accessible lower slopes had left them semi-cleared, although tangled steeper ravines and erupting granite rock faces broke up the area into a maze.
At length, the trail opened out onto a fearsome-looking landslide, much larger than Inglis had been picturing, and the riders pulled up. The two dogs scampered ahead onto the debris.
Penric peered out over the waste after the bounding animals, and asked Inglis, “What do you see?”
“When I am not in my trance, my sight is the same as yours. Er, as any man’s.” This was not quite true in this moment, Inglis realized. There was a breathless pressure in his mind, as if he were plunged deep underwater. A shiver up his spine. Tollin’s spirit, wound around the knife under the sorcerer’s shirt, was so agitated Inglis could sense its hum from here. “What do you see?”
“When Des lends me her vision, I can see the spirits much, I think, as saints are said to do, matter and spirit superimposed, like seeing both sides of a coin at once. Scuolla seems a colorless image, like a reflection on glass. I see he’s changed his rock since yesterday. So he can move about, some. May be a trifle smudgier? Or maybe that’s what I expect, or fear, to find.” Penric’s gaze had alighted where Arrow and Blood circled a boulder, whining. “He’s looking over at us. At you? He perceives us on some level, certainly. If you could—when you could—achieve your trance, did you see spirits? And could they speak to you, or were they silent?”
“I’d not encountered many. The old ones were always silent. I’d not evoked a new one yet.”
“Tollin.”
Inglis winced. “Tollin is bound to the knife, and does not speak. To me. In my normal mind. I don’t know if…” He trailed off, confused. If he could have ascended to the spirit plane, might they have spoken together despite the binding? Inglis wasn’t sure if he would have raged at Tollin for this disaster, or begged his forgiveness, or what. If he had lost a friend in more ways than one, or if some peace might have been salvaged between them, at an hour beyond the last. If Tollin hated him…
Penric, Oswyl, and one of the guardsmen dismounted, the latter taking the reins of all three horses. All of Gallin’s attention was on the dogs. The second guardsman kicked his feet out of his stirrups, preparing perhaps to go to Inglis’s aid. The sorcerer’s bow was still bundled with his quiver, unstrung, tied to his saddle. For the first time in weeks, the burden of the knife was taken out of Inglis’s hands.
If ever I am to have a chance, it is now, right now.
Inglis threw back his head and HOWLED.
Every horse in the party reared in panic and bolted, including his own. He tossed away his stick, wrenched at his reins, and managed to get the beast aimed generally uphill. They plunged into the patchy forest. From behind him, curses and a thump as someone fell off, more curses fragmenting as a man still mounted was carried away back down the trail. For a few moments, all Inglis could do was hang on to his saddle and reins as the animal under him heaved and jinked. He bent low as slashing branches tried to behead him, sweep him from his precarious perch.
Uphill and to the left was his goal—circle around the top of the slide and lose himself in the lower forests, then find his way somehow back out of this trap of a valley… the stolen horse was essential, crutch to his bad ankle, he couldn’t let it break its legs here… at this pace it must grow winded soon, and then he would regain control…
He had reckoned without the dogs. They gave chase, barking and baying behind him, weaving faster through the trees than the horse could. Incredibly soon, he saw a rippling copper flash at the corner of his vision, and, already above him, heard the profound deep barks of Arrow. They began to drive his horse through the tilted woodland like a red deer, hunted, and its laboring haunches bunched and surged in fresh terror—his fault, for filling its dim head with visions of wolves, echoing and reverberating now from the dogs? But a deer was built for these hazardous slopes; a horse was not.