As it only could have, the vital portion of the explanation of the mystery that Keera had built in her mind around the old man and his behavior came without any spoken question on the subject, one night when the winds atop the mountain ridge were building to what seemed an especially portentous fury. With ever more days of massive effort by increasing numbers of Bane laborers piling one atop the other, the southern horizon above Okot had never seemed to crack open with such great and purposeful fire; and, being as the mountaintops upon which the Bane forged the weapons with which they hoped to blunt any aggressive moves by the Tall army or Lord Baster-kin’s Guard stood at an even higher elevation than did the point upon Broken’s mountain where the Inner City, the House of the Wives of Kafra, and the High Temple were all located, it seemed only too likely that the God-King and his family and minions (to say nothing of the average citizen of the walled city) could not help but look out at that southern horizon and wonder what was taking place. Was their own god, Kafra, preparing some divine punishment for the Bane, one that would make the sacrifice of Broken’s young men, whether in the Guard or in the army, unnecessary? Or were, indeed, the demons of the old faith’s fiery Ninth Homeland preparing to enter humanity’s realm, and punish the subjects of Broken for having abandoned them in favor of the strange deity brought back by the followers of Oxmontrot from the world of the Lumun-jani, by first weakening the unfaithful with plague and then releasing their own demoniacal powers upon the kingdom north of the Cat’s Paw?
Keera’s secret work assisting Caliphestros in his private cave, guarded against all prying eyes by Stasi, only heightened this air of mystery; for the truth was, as she soon learned, Caliphestros was not producing a marginally additional number of spearheads and dagger and sword blades within that cave, but something altogether different. Every few nights, the forager, the old man, and the panther would journey to bog pits among the mountains above and below Okot, the existence of which Keera had never thought anything more than a danger to passing travelers. From these, the old man would extract buckets of a strangely pungent liquid, lighter and thinner than pitch as well as more inflammable, and then they would bring these back to his cave, where he would combine them in various mixtures with strangely colored powders and extracts from the very Earth, always working toward Keera knew not what, save that he produced a broad array of foul-smelling, combustible half-liquids and fluids, all of which he would speak of, at times, but none of which he would fully explain. Only when she returned to her home and her children, Keera believed, did Caliphestros complete these experiments; and in this fact she found reason for uneasiness as much as amazement.
Still, knowing that the Tall in Broken, from the lowliest worker to the God-King, might well be viewing all the fiery activity in the mountains of Davon Wood with real dread and fear was cause for ever greater joy; just as it was when — with the wind rising to a particular fury, creating especially plentiful fire, and with the heat and sparks of the now dozens of exile forges rising in great upward showers — momentous news arrived from those units of Ashkatar’s army that patrolled the barrier of the Cat’s Paw: a column of Broken troops were advancing on the river. It happened that, when this intelligence came, Keera was outside Caliphestros’s cave, beside Stasi at the jagged mouth of the place, a spot where the panther often sat, ever ready to spring forward, as her human companion within brewed and mixed the strange substance that absorbed him so.
It was, predictably, Heldo-Bah and Veloc who brought the news of this march to the old man’s cave, the pair being the only Bane, beside Keera, who had the courage to approach Caliphestros when he was laboring at his seemingly mad doings therein.
“Great man of science!” Heldo-bah called as he reached the cave’s entrance. “Come with us! Come and see the column of men that approach on the main road from Broken to the Plain, with torches lit in the night to show us just where they are!”
Caliphestros emerged from the cave, his skin smudged with the smoke and ash of his work, his face sweating as he pulled himself along upon his walking platform with his crutches; and it seemed, even to Heldo-Bah, amazing that a crippled man should be capable of such difficult labors of the mind and body. The wind was continuing to blow with true ferocity, causing the old man’s robe to drag directly across his body, and his beard across his face, as well; but his skullcap remained in place, and an expression of wilder emotion than any of his forager friends had ever seen him exhibit soon came into his features.
“So soon?” Caliphestros said, staring only briefly at the winding points of lights on Lord Baster-kin’s Plain before moving to a large, naturally formed basin in the outer rock of the cave’s entrance, one that was full of rainwater. A small cake of the same soap that the old man had insisted the Bane diggers use during their march to Okot lay on the basin’s edge. “Then they cannot be the column of Talons that is on its way from Daurawah,” he said, as he began to scrub himself clean of the coal dust and other black patches on his skin that had formed during the smelting and smithing processes earlier in the day.
“Not if they behave so stupidly as to light their path for us to see plainly,” Veloc replied. “Although how you could have known that the Talons went to Daurawah in the first place remains a mystery to me, Lord Caliphestros.”
“It was the only logical direction to take, if they needed to collect supplies and forage for their horses,” Caliphestros answered with a smile. “Besides, did not your tribe’s Outrager spies observe them taking the eastern road as they departed Broken?”
“Yes,” Heldo-Bah said, spitting on the ground. “But to trust in the reports of the Outragers is folly — and even if one accepts that they were right, it does not explain your insistence that the plague was also active in the Tall’s port, Lord Caliphestros.”
Caliphestros glanced again at the swaying treetops, and smiled slightly. “You must allow me a few secrets, Heldo-Bah.”
But Keera, also glancing at the loudly rustling branches above, knew the secret of the old man’s wisdom concerning this subject, even if she could not, at that moment, see either the starling called Little Mischief or the enormous (and enormously proud) owl named Nerthus.
“So — if it is not the Talons, the question becomes, Who is it?” Having voiced the question, the old man moved on his single wooden leg and crutches to stand beside Heldo-Bah, who was scratching at Stasi’s thick coat. Leaning against her other shoulder, the old man removed his walking device, then bundled the wooden leg and crutches, and slung them on his back. Climbing with little difficulty onto the neck and upper back of the panther, he settled himself as Stasi stood fully upright again, and Heldo-Bah took a step back “Well, whoever it is,” the old man continued, “Yantek Ashkatar must make his preparations — with all crossings over the Cat’s Paw save the Fallen Bridge destroyed, he must position his best men amid the Wood on this side of that pathway, so that he will, from the first, force these Broken soldiers to fight on the Bane’s chosen ground, and according to the Bane’s most practiced dispositions and maneuvers. Has he been alerted?”
“Yantek Ashkatar is even now about the very activities you have mentioned,” Veloc replied. “He has obeyed your counsel wholly, in preparing this first battle, my lord, despite the objections of the Priestess of the Moon.”
“And he is to be congratulated for that bravery,” Caliphestros judged with a nod. “For myself, I would observe the proceedings from the large rocks I took note of on our journey to Okot. You know the place of which I speak, Keera?”