"They're nomads, it's their way of life. They're strong enough to fight off the brainless attackers, the hungry mouths, and the rest of us thank them. They're the only link we have with the outer world. They bring things we haven't got and can't make, and most of all they bring news. Being nomads, they don't compete with us for food and shelter. Besides, we're used to them."

"And they cross the Witchfires."

"And more. It is said that they even trade with the Hooded Men on the far side of the Bleak Mountains." He paused, considering. "It is said that they trade with the Children of Skaith."

Stark kept his voice free of irritation, though with an effort. "And what do the Ha.r.s.enyi say of the Children?"

"That they are monsters, and greater magicians than we. That they have power over stones and all things belonging to the ground, which they can cause to shake whenever they wish. They say-"

"They say. The Ha.r.s.enyi are doubtless the fount of all wisdom, except that traders have been known to lie before now in order to keep their markets secret. Does anybody know?"

"If you mean, can I give you firm knowledge of the Children-no, I cannot."

"You're trying to talk them away, Dark Man," said Halk. "They will not go so easily."

Stark glanced at him, but did not bother to reply. He wondered if he looked as trail-worn and hollow-eyed as did Halk and the others. The st.u.r.dy furs bought at Izvand had turned mangy with use, showing bare spots where the thongs had rubbed. The men had stopped shaving, perforce, since Amnir had allowed them nothing in the way of knives or razors. Since their release they had been content to enjoy beards and longer hair as a protection against the cold. The women covered their faces with wrappings against the cold. Breca walked steadily beside Halk. Gerrith, now, walked beside Stark, and her eyes smiled. She alone seemed alive, here and now. The rest were like automatons, waiting for someone to press the b.u.t.tons.

Stark felt much the same way himself. Land and sky lay upon him like a burden: cold, empty, without promise.

And no one knew what had happened in the south.

The shadows lengthened. The wind blew down from the high north, skirling dry snow.

They came to a place, and Kintoth caught Stark's arm. "There! See there? In the sky, Stark. Look up!"

Stark looked, and saw a glitter and dazzle of pale gold.

"Those are the Witchfires."

The peaks disappeared again as the road bent.

Two of Kintoth's men who had gone ahead as scouts came racing back down the road, loping like greyhounds.

"A party, coming from Thyra."

"How large?" asked Kintoth.

"Large. We saw them only from a distance."

In a few moments they were off the road, settling themselves among the rocks and hollows. Stark left it to Kintoth to make sure there were no betraying marks. He found himself a vantage point where he could overlook the road. Halk lay down beside him. A short distance away Hargoth watched and waited, and presently Kintoth joined him.

The Thyrans were audible a long way off. Drums beat a steady marching pace, accompanied by the intermittent squealing of some shrill-voiced instrument and the clashing of metal on metal. After a while the party came round a bend in the road.

Stark estimated the Thyrans at half a hundred men, including pipers and drummers and cymbal-dashers. All were armed with iron weapons. All wore iron caps, and iron-studded back- and breast-plates over their furs. Iron-bound targes were slung behind the left shoulder. Banners and pennons lashed in the wind above them, barred scarlet and black, with the device of a hammer. They were short broad men who had a look of power about them, and they marched with a driving purposefulness that had in it something chilling, like the march of army ants. They were not, one felt, accustomed to defeat.

Behind the soldiers came a party of unarmed men hauling iron-framed carts loaded with supplies.

"They'll be going to meet the trader," said Halk, low-voiced even though the drumming and clashing would have drowned any other sound. "I wish them joy when they find him."

Stark waited until the last clanking cart had vanished along the road, and then he went to Hargoth.

"Do the Thyrans send out an escort every year for the trader?"

"No. We keep watch for large parties of armed men."

"That is so," said Kintoth. "Once or twice we've watched the trader almost to the gates of Thyra, and they've had no more than the usual lookouts. There's no way of telling just when the wagons may come, and anyway, Amnir had a force sufficient for his safety."

"Nevertheless," said Stark, "Halk thinks that's where they're going." He pondered. "Could they be going to attack, say, the Towers?"

"Not with fifty men. I'd say Halk's right."

"Yet as you say, Amnir had a force sufficient for his safety. This force is large enough to overcome, or at least overawe, Amnir's force. It looks as if they have a very special interest in the trader this year, perhaps connected with something he might have that the Thyrans might want to take away from him-something of unusual value. I wonder if the Thyrans have had some late word from the Citadel about us."

"We were undoubtedly followed to Izvand," said Gerrith. "Fast messengers could have taken word up the Wandsmen's road that Amnir left there in search of us."

"Fast or slow, it makes no difference," said Halk. "We'll never get past Thyra anyway unless we can make ourselves a new road."

"We start on that right now," said Stark. The old road had suddenly become menacing. There might be any number of patrols and lookout posts. Stark tried to calculate how long it would take the armed escort to find whatever was left of Amnir and his wagon-train, and get word of the disaster back to Thyra. Presumably they would send a runner. And then what? Would the Thyrans start scouring the hills?

He reckoned they had better be through the Witch-fires as quickly as possible.

They struck away from the old track. It was not difficult to keep direction. Old Sun smeared the southwestern sky with dull red-ochre, and when that had faded the green star shone hugely, almost as bright as a little moon, in the northeast. Stark depended on Kintoth to tell, him where Thyra ought to be. The going was by turns fairly easy, and very rough, and often the way was barred completely by a sheer cliff or an impa.s.sable gorge. This made for weary backtracking. Progress was discouragingly slow.

There was no love-making that night. They did not stop at all except when weariness forced them to, and then only until enough strength returned to let them go on again. There was no complaint, even from Halk. They all seemed to feel that the hills were dangerous, too dangerous for peaceful rest, and they were anxious to be out of them.

The Lamp of the North climbed higher. The aurora, brilliant in the sky, flared white and rose-pink and ice-green. And there was a new presence in the night.

The peaks of the Witchfires stood tall in the north. They caught these delicate colors on their ice-sheathed flanks and sent them gleaming and glimmering back in flashes of many-faceted light, a wonder born of the cold.

"The Witchfires are sacred to the G.o.ddess," said Hargoth, "though we see them seldom."

Along toward midnight, Stark found a trail.

18.

It was a furtive, cunning sort of trail, such as animals make, and it was only because Stark had lived his life in the wild places that he saw it at all. The trail was going the way he wanted to go and so he decided to follow it for the time being. It was very narrow, sliding up and down the slopes, twisting cleverly to avoid the cliffs and canyons. After a while he realized that it was not a single trail but one of a network of footways through the hills.

He asked who might have made them, and Hargoth said, "Outdwellers, probably, though other beings may use it. Cities attract them, as I told you. There is always the hope of food."

It was impossible to tell if the trail had been recently used. The bare ground was frozen too hard, and where the snow lay there was no sign of prints. If there had been any, the wind or some other agency had wiped them out.

Stark went ahead of the party, trusting to no one but himself.

He caught a taint of smoke in the clean air. Going more cautiously, he saw a ridge ahead. Sounds came from beyond the ridge. Unbelievable sounds.

He went back to warn the others, then crept on his belly up to the top of the ridge.

He looked down into a shallow bowl between the hills. A fire of dead lichen burned small at one side, within a ring of blackened stones. The tiny flickering it made was no more than a pinpoint. The bowl brimmed with the light of the aurora and the green star. The Witchfires sparkled against the north. Snow covering the slopes of the bowl sparkled more faintly, and in that shadowless gleaming a score of figures danced to the wild thin music of a reedy pipe.

They danced in a wide circle, moving widdershins round the slopes. They leapt and whirled, and when they did so they laughed and their tatters flew: the height and the lightness of their leaping, and the grace and the swift rushing joy of it made them seem to take wing upon outstretched arms. Joyousness, Stark thought, was a rare thing anywhere, and he had seen little of it on Skaith. But this was a curious place in which to find it.

There was no set pattern to their dancing, except that they kept the circle. Now and again two or more would join together and go skittering hand in hand, with the laughter spilling out of them in long trills like birdsong, to caper about the piper, who leapt and whirled by himself in the center of the dance. Sometimes he would do a contral-step with them, and sometimes he would do a circle of his own, clockwise against the circle's turning.

After a while it seemed to Stark that there was something more than joy in their frolicking. A certain quality. What was the word Hargoth had used? Demented?

He turned as someone slid softly up beside him. He could see the twin lightning strokes on the mask. Kintoth peered over the ridge and then drew back.

"Outdwellers," he said.

Stark nodded. "They seem to know every inch of these hills. Perhaps they know of a way around Thyra."

"It's worth a try," said Kintoth, "but remember, they're an unchancy lot. Don't turn your back on them, even for a moment." He added, "And remember, the Wandsmen may have spoken to them about you."

"That had occurred to me," Stark said. "Tell the others to come up and stand along here, where they can be seen. Weapons ready."

Kintoth hurried away. Stark waited a moment or two. Then he rose and began to walk down the slope.

He could not say who saw him first. But the piping wavered away, and the dancing stilled. The dark figures stood quietly in the beautiful shining from the sky. They watched him, not speaking, and their tatters ruffled in the wind like feathers.

Stark gave them the formal greeting. "May Old Sun bring you warmth and life."

One of the Outdwellers came forward. It was a woman, he thought They were a thin people, with wild locks hanging under curious little caps, and their coverings were not revealing. The coverings, he saw now, were made of many small skins sewed together, and the tatters were the legs and tails flapping free. The woman's face was narrow and pale, with a pointed chin and enormous eyes that slanted upward. There were no whites to the eyes, only irises of lambent green with hugely expanded pupils that seemed to reflect the night entire.

"Old Sun is well enough," she said carelessly. Her accent was strange, difficult to follow, and her mouth was strange too, with exceedingly sharp protruding teeth, "We worship the Dark G.o.ddess. May the night bring you life and joy."

Stark hoped that it would. He did not count on it. "Who is your leader here?"

"Leader?" She c.o.c.ked her head on one side. "We have all sorts. What's your fancy? A leader for singing the clouds and stars, a leader for catching the wind and one for setting it free again, a leader . . ."

"One for the making of trails," said Stark. "I wish to pa.s.s by Thyra, unseen."

"Ah," she said, and looked past him over his shoulder, to the rim of the bowl. "You alone? Or with these others I see: Gray Warlocks of the Towers and five persons unknown."

"All of us."

"Unseen?"

"Yes."

"And unheard?"

"Of course."

"But you are not as fleet as we, nor as light of foot. We can go where a snowflake would be heard, and it falling."

"Nonetheless," said Stark, ''We will try."

She turned to her people. "The strangers and the Gray Ones would pa.s.s by Thyra in secret. Slaifed?" She sang the name.

A man came to her, laughing, kicking the dry snow. "I will lead them." They were a small people, these night-dancers, the tallest of them reaching no higher than Stark's shoulders. Slaifed looked him up and down and across and made a rude sound. "I can do that, but I can't make your great hoofs be silent. That is up to you."

"And their weapons," said the woman. "Don't forget their weapons."

"No one forgets weapons," said Slaifed, and laughed again, a peculiarly lilting sound that somehow sent a shiver across Stark's nerves. Slaifed himself bore no weapons, at least none that Stark could see, except for a knife such as everyone carried for the necessities of daily life.

"Follow me," said the Outdweller, "if you can."

He went gusting away across the snow, seeming to ride the wind. The others of his tribe returned to their dancing, all but the woman, who came with Stark. The thin voice of the pipe was audible for some time, fading slowly with distance.

Hargoth's people and the Irnanese went very quickly, in spite of Slaifed's doubting. They went with their hands on their weapons and their eyes alert The scarecrow figure of the Outdweller flitted ahead. The Witchfires gleamed and glittered under the shaking aurora.

The woman looked up sidelong at Stark. "You are from the south."

"Yes."

"From the south, and not from the south." She circled him, her small nose lifted. She walked backward, studying the Irnanese. "They are from the south. They smell of Skaith." She turned to Stark again. "Not you. You smell of the dust of heaven and the sacred night."

Stark was not aware that he smelled of anything except a lack of soap and water. But he did not miss the significance of the remark . . . unless the Outdwellers were clairvoyant. He said, "You're given to fancies, little sister." His gaze roved constantly over Slaifed, the trail, the ever-shifting hills. The piping had ceased now, perhaps because it was too far away to be heard. "How are you called?"

"Slee," she said. "Slee-e-e-e . . . like the wind running over a hill."

"Were you always wanderers, Slee?"

"Since the beginning. Our people have never had roofs to prison them. All this is ours." Her wide arms touched everything, hills and sky, the Witchfires, the darklands behind them. "In the time of the Great Wandering we were the free plunderers who fed on the roof-dwellers."

Stark thought that probably she meant that quite literally. She was proud of it. She danced with pride, going a little ahead of him. Slaifed was even farther ahead. This part of the trail was fairly straight, with a steep hillside on the right and a sharp drop-off to the left, into a ravine with a frozen stream at the bottom. The hillside could be climbed at need, but not easily.

A hundred feet or so on, the trail bent around a jutting shoulder of rock. Suddenly Slaifed began to run.

So did Slee.

So did Stark.

Slee's hands were at her breast when Stark caught her and flung her aside with a swinging slash of his hand, never breaking stride. Slaifed looked back, not believing that anyone but an Outdweller could move so swiftly. He reached into the breast of his tunic, still going like the wind.

Stark caught him halfway round the rock. It was like catching a bird. He sank his fingers into the long thin neck that was all cord and muscle, and set his feet, and did a thing that made Slaifed's body snap upward as one snaps a whip.

Stark saw the Outdweller's absolutely incredulous face, saw a double set of iron talons, only half drawn on over thin fingers, drop to the ground. Then he had flung the body against Slee, turning as she came into his back.

Her iron claws were in place and slashing. He felt the metal, still warm from her flesh. Then she fell under Slaifed's dead weight and Stark killed her with one blow. She stared up at him from the white ground, the great dark pupils still reflecting the night, though not so brightly.

The column, headed by the Irnanese, had come to a halt. Weapons were rattling along the line. Stark touched the angle of his jaw where Slee's claws had cut him, two shallow grooves just above the neck. The blood was already beginning to freeze. He drew his sword and went on around the rock.