He looked up at the silver sky.
‘Oh God,’ he whispered. ‘Can it really be true?’
No answer sounded in a booming voice, no lettered banner appeared in the fog. He laughed at himself and went to find Dallador.
The Great River ran shallow where it issued from the Mistlands, allowing the comnee to ford safely and head east. As usual Ammadin rode at some distance ahead, but she kept watch for Zayn’s enemies. One of her spirit crystals, the one she’d named Sentry, made a humming sound whenever the Riders appeared in the sky, even during the day when no one could actually see them. At the sound Ammadin would halt her horse and dismount. She’d take another crystal, Spirit Eyes, out of her saddlebags and unwrap it. For as long as the Riders were overhead, Spirit Eyes would show her a vision of the territory around her, as much as a walking person might cover in a morning. Once the Riders had passed below the horizon, the spirit in the crystal would fall asleep and refuse to wake, no matter how many times she chanted the magical commands.
In the crystal Ammadin would see a circle of purple grassland, overlaid with pale yellow numbers that seemed to float in the air. She would see her horse and herself as a tiny black dot in the centre of the field of vision. The moving comnee, a tiny blotch of herds and wagons, would appear just at the edge, under one of the spirit numbers etched around the crystal’s equator. If she called that number, the view would shift, and the comnee would reappear in the centre of the circle. She could then see the country around them on all sides, or she could refocus her eyes and magnify the image in the centre until it seemed large enough to show every detail. Once she’d finished her scan, she would carry the crystal in one hand as she rode on, holding it up to let the spirit feed on the sunlight as its reward. A shaman who forgot to feed her spirits would soon find herself with dead crystals.
Three days out from the Mistlands, Sentry sounded his alarm not long after she’d left the comnee behind. As she stared into Spirit Eyes, Ammadin thought she saw a group of figures, or their smudged, tiny images, riding and leading pack horses at some long distance from the comnee. When she tried to transfer the vision to look straight down at them, Spirit Eyes made a sharp chirping little cry.
‘You can’t see that far?’ Ammadin said. ‘Or is nothing really there?’
Once more she tried to scan; once more the crystal chirped.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘If they’re that far away, they’re not a real threat anyway.’
The next time that the Riders appeared overhead, Ammadin saw a far stranger sight than the men who might have been Zayn’s enemies. Her crystal showed her three ChaMeech loping along through the grass, again, at the very edge of its range. Although she coaxed the spirit with commands and praise both, it simply could not show her more than three tiny ChaMeech shapes moving fast. From then on she kept a watch for them as well. That afternoon, not long before sunset, they reached the Blue Stone River, running from the north-east to the south-west. Near the river lay a regular Tribal campsite, but the surrounding grass, standing high and untrampled, told them that no one had passed that way for months. While the women tethered out the horses, the men began cutting down the grass to clear the areas around the stone fire-pits. The comnee would be making a full camp and raising all the tents. Apanador and Ammadin walked into the meagre shade of a stand of spear trees to talk.
‘My wife says that some of the mares are ready to drop their foals,’ he told her. ‘And there’s no meat left. We’ll have to stay here for a couple of days.’
‘Good. I have some work I need to do.’
‘What about those Kazraks? Zayn’s enemies.’
‘They’re following us, but they’re clever. I only catch glimpses of them now and then.’
‘I’ll tell Zayn to stick close to the other men when he goes hunting.’
Once the men finished raising the tents, Ammadin carried her saddlebags into hers. Zayn had already laid the floor cloth and spread out her blankets on one side of hearth stones under the smokehole and his own bedroll on the other. She set up the god figures on their rug, then sat down on her blankets and took out her crystals.
She owned eight, each etched with a belt of different symbols. Five had been gifts from her teacher, though normally she only used four of them – Sentry, Spirit Eyes, Rain Child, and Earth Prince. The fifth, Death Chanter, she brought out only when a person had been gravely injured or lay ill with extreme old age. If Death Chanter glowed when she laid him on the victim’s chest, the sufferer would most likely recover. If he remained dull, it was time for her to start instructing the victim about the road to the Deathworld.
The last three crystals she had found in the trading precinct over in the Cantons, one at a time and at intervals of years. Where the merchants had got them, they refused to say, but they had known their value and bargained hard over them. These three still glowed with life every time Ammadin took them into the sunlight, but since she didn’t know their command words, the spirits had stubbornly stayed asleep.
The work she’d mentioned to Apanador involved the three crystals and Water Woman, the spirit who had called to her some days past. Perhaps here, near another river, Water Woman would do so again, and perhaps one of the sleeping crystals might let her answer.
‘Spirit Rider?’ Zayn lifted the tent flap and stuck his head in. ‘Do you want me to bring you some light?’
‘Please, yes.’
In a few minutes Zayn returned, carrying a stone oil lamp that he’d lit at someone’s fire. He set it down on the hearth stones. By the flickering golden light she began wrapping the crystals and stowing them in their usual saddlebag. He sat down opposite her and watched.
‘Are you hungry?’ Zayn said. ‘We’ve got some jerky left, but Dallador’s down at the river, catching fish.’
‘I’ll wait, then,’ Ammadin said. ‘He’s really good at finding food, Dallador.’
Zayn nodded, smiling a little as he watched her wrap her crystals. He was sitting cross-legged, his hands resting on his thighs, broad hands but somehow fine, with long fingers that might have belonged to a craftsman or even a scholar back in the khanate. Soon enough they would become scarred, calloused, and blunted, she supposed, as the hands of all the comnee men did, sooner or later. For the first time, though, she noticed his wrists. At first she thought them tattooed, then realized that a thick line of pale scar tissue circled each, as if his hands had been bound together by something that had rubbed him raw.
‘We haven’t had much chance to talk, this last few days,’ Ammadin said. ‘Have you been thinking about your vision quest?’
‘Every day. A lot.’
‘Good.’
Ammadin put the last crystal into the saddlebags, then set the bags down at the head of her bed.
‘Tell me something,’ she went on. ‘Your father, did he threaten to kill you?’
‘Often.’ Zayn looked down at the floor cloth as if he found it suddenly fascinating. ‘Whenever I slipped. That is, whenever I did something that showed I had the talents.’
‘But you Kazraks have laws against murder. Or didn’t you realize that as a child?’
‘Of course I did. But they wouldn’t have applied to me. I wasn’t human. I was demon spawn, and killing me would have been like
