spoken,’ Maelaber said. ‘When I left the Westfolk camp, everyone there had thorns up their arses, too.’
Maelaber returned to his escort and the warband, but Neb and Salamander went outside to the dun wall. They climbed up to the catwalks, where they could catch the fresh summer breeze and lean onto the dun wall. Between the crenellations they could see the green meadows and streams of the tieryn’s rhan. The sun fell warm on their backs, and Neb yawned.
‘Tired already, are you?’ Salamander said.
‘Being married cuts into a man’s sleep.’
‘Oh get along with you! Braggart!’
Neb grinned and decided to change the subject. ‘Have you heard from Dallandra?’
‘I have,’ Salamander said. ‘She shares our wondering about that pestilence, but she doesn’t think it came from one of the Horsekin cities. No more does she think that those priests who took you to her uncle’s have anything to do with it.’
‘Well and good, then.’ Neb turned around to lounge back against a crenel. ‘Oh by the gods!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Look up!’ With a sweep of his arm, Neb pointed at the sky. ‘He’s back.’
Far above them, a bird with the black silhouette of a raven circled against the pale blue, far too large for any ordinary bird.
‘So he is,’ Salamander said. ‘Our mazrak, home again from wherever his peculiar tunnel led him.’
‘He waited to arrive till Arzosah left us, I see. Huh, the coward!’
‘I wouldn’t call him that. Would you argue with a dragon thirty times your size? Ah, I see by your expression that you wouldn’t.’
Neb slid his hands into his brigga pockets and found the weapons he carried, a leather sling and a round pebble. He brought them out as casually and slowly as he could. ‘I wonder if I can get a stone into the air before he notices.’
The raven floated in a lazy circle over the dun, then allowed himself to drift in closer. Neb could see him tilting his head from side to side as if he was examining everything below him. All at once he swung around and flapped off fast, heading north from the dun, a rapidly disappearing black speck against the clear sky.
‘He must have seen your sling,’ Salamander said.
‘He’s got good eyes then, blast him!’ Neb slapped the leather loop of the sling against a crenel in frustration. ‘You know, Salamander, it’s a cursed strange thing, but I keep feeling like I know that bird – or the person inside it, I mean. It’s as if I can see through his feathers or suchlike. Well, that sounds daft, now that I say it aloud.’
‘Not daft but dweomer,’ Salamander said. ‘Most likely, anyway. You may be mistaken, of course, but somehow I doubt it. I’d say he’s someone you knew in a past life.’
‘Truly? I certainly don’t have any fond feelings for him.’
‘Oh, when you recognize a person like this, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were a friend. An old enemy will call out to you, like, just as loudly.’
Neb paused, thinking, letting his mind dwell upon the image of the raven and the feelings it aroused. ‘An enemy, truly,’ he said at last, ‘but there’s somewhat more as well. It’s like a debt linking us, or more than one debt. I owe him somewhat, but he owes me far more.’
‘Odd, indeed!’ Salamander said. ‘Well, meditate upon it. The answer might be important.’
‘The chains of wyrd always are, aren’t they?’
‘True spoken. Very true spoken indeed.’
Salamander saw the raven mazrak again the very next morning. A little while past sunrise, his regular time to spy on Zakh Gral, he focused through a scatter of high clouds and scried for Rocca. He saw her immediately, standing before the altar in the Outer Shrine. For a moment he gloated over her image. Had she taken care of herself, she would have been beautiful, with her high cheekbones and thick dark hair, but her face looked sunburned and dirt-streaked, framed in messy tendrils of dirty hair. She was wearing a long, sleeveless dress of pale buckskin, painted with Alshandra’s holy symbol of the bow and arrow.
Behind her, on the rough stone surface of the altar, sat the relics of her goddess’s legendary worshipper, the holy witness Raena. Salamander had seen most of them before – the box with the wyvern dagger, the copper tray with the miniature bow and arrows, the bone whistle, and the obsidian pyramid. A new addition to the hoard startled him. They’d sewn the shirt he’d left behind onto a plain cloth banner and attached it to a long spear. It stood behind the altar and snapped in the wind.
Lakanza, the grey-haired high priestess, stood next to Rocca with a scroll in one hand. In front of them Sidro knelt with her head bowed, while the two Horsekin holy women stood off to one side, their faces grim, their hands clenched into fists. As Salamander watched, Lakanza unrolled a few inches of the scroll and studied it for a moment. Sidro raised her head and looked at Rocca with such venomous hatred in her blue eyes that Rocca took an involuntary step back, but when Lakanza lowered the scroll, Sidro ducked her head to stare at the ground.
Although Salamander could hear nothing, he could see Lakanza’s mouth moving in some sort of chant. She raised a hand and beckoned to one of the Horsekin priestesses. The woman stepped forward and took the wyvern dagger out of its box. She grabbed Sidro’s long raven-black hair with one hand and raised the dagger with the other. Salamander yelped aloud, thinking he was about to see Sidro’s throat slit. Instead, the woman pulled Sidro’s hair taut and used the dagger to hack it off, cropping it close to her skull. Sidro endured the ritual with her mouth tight-set and her eyes shut.
Disgraced, Salamander thought. Serves her right, too, nearly getting me killed like that! Yet what had she done, after all, but tell the truth and identify an enemy of her people? Salamander’s conscience bit him hard. No one would listen to her now, but she had guessed the truth – he was one of Vandar’s spawn, just as she’d said. His supposedly miraculous escape might well bring disaster upon the fortress and shrine both.
Once she’d cut off Sidro’s hair, the Horsekin woman turned and threw it into the wind, which took and scattered the long strands. A few more words from Lakanza, and Sidro rose, picking up the things lying at her feet – a sack and a blanket. Salamander watched as she left the fort and set off on the trail heading north to the forest lands. Had she been thrown out of the holy order? Not likely, since she still wore the painted dress that marked her as a priestess. More likely she’d merely been sent out to preach to the distant believers, much as Rocca had done. She might even be heading to Lord Honelg’s dun. If so, she’d walk right into Ridvar’s fortguard and end up a prisoner in Dun Cengarn.
When Salamander widened his Sight to look over the fortress, he saw the raven mazrak drifting on the air currents far above her. Impossible! he thought. Less than a full day before, the raven had flown over the Red Wolf dun, a distance of at least three hundred miles. Ye gods, don’t tell me there are two of them! Salamander broke the vision with a quick stab of fear at the very thought of there being more than one powerful mazrak ranged against them. Then he remembered the astral tunnel.
‘Don’t you think it’s likely,’ Salamander asked Dallandra later, ‘that he’s discovered
