Old Mars

Thoughtfully, I rounded up my own mount, climbed back into the saddle, and jogged on. It might complicate matters if anyone else was up here—and by anyone else, I meant Nightwall Dair. Whether he realized it or not, we’d crossed paths all that year, first over the face of the plains, then most recently in Cadrada, and I was getting sick of it. If he knew me at all, it was as a man called Thane, and that cover had seemed to hold. If he found out who I really was, and what—a woman named Zuneida Peace—I was in deep trouble, and I didn’t want that. Zuneida was a former temple dancer, a seductress of princes (and princesses), a poet—a very different person to my taciturn alias Thane, who hid black hair beneath a hat, and drops of juice in his eyes to conceal the blue, who wore a half mask allegedly to hide the damage done by a scar, who spoke as little as possible, and in an accent that betrayed the north.

Half a day later, and we were high up into the slopes of the Khor; another full day, and I estimated that we would reach the edge of the Cold Deserts themselves. I camped that night in the shelter of a high tor of rock, one of the inexplicable piles of stones left by a people long gone, and decorated with the stylized wings of birds. A ban-lion called once, a throaty gasp against the silence of the mountain wall, then the night birds sang. I lay in a fleece wrap and watched the stars wheel over me until I slept and dreamed of warm Cadrada and a night filled with jasmine and golden wine, and of someone, now gone, beside me in the dark.

Next morning, the temperature had dropped another couple of degrees. I washed as best I could in the icy waters of the Yss and brewed tea on a makeshift fire. The tope yawned and snorted in the morning air. Later, high on the slope, I looked down across the plateau that was opening up ahead of me and saw the tiny figure of a rider on a black-furred mount, speeding over the tundra toward a stand of trees. There was something oddly familiar about the mount, and I wondered if I had seen it down in Scarlight. Then it disappeared into shadow and was gone. I skirted the cliff, keeping close to the anonymity of the rock wall, just in case. I knew that the Tribes did not come down this far, preferring the higher plateau of the Cold Deserts.

At midday, I saw the first outpost of the Tribes: a squat tower made of blackened stone. This was not something that they had originally built but a remnant of some long-gone people that they had taken over, perhaps once a military fortification, perhaps a temple of some kind. It could have been either, and it was impossible to tell—whatever sense of the practical or the numinous that it had once possessed was also long gone, leaving it a gloomy shell. But there were signs of a recent fire scorching the stone of its floor and witch-marks daubed in soot around the walls. I smiled when I saw them, because I was one of the ones whom the marks were intended to deter, but they held no trace of power, not this far west. It was only when you reached the inner desert that the sand-singers knew what they were doing; these marks would have been made by a warrior, superstitious, and thus afraid. Something clattered high in the roof, and, outside, the mount gave a rumbling bellow. A bird, nothing more, one of the leather-winged shrikes that haunted the mountains. I went outside again and looked down the valley. There was the bird, a low shadow shooting over the grass.

It was too early to camp in the tower, so I set off once more, heading through a stand of desert birch whose bare trunks arched out of the soil like golden bones. It was as the mount was traversing its thickest point that I heard a distant cry, borne on the wind. I steered the tope to the edge of the little wood and looked down. The wood stood high on a ridge of rock, looking out onto the plain, and, against the pale grass, I saw again the man on the black tope, but this time I could see that he wore the emblem of a tribe upon his hat and that he had a pursuer.

The pursuer rode a green beast, one of the burrow-dwelling things that live in the hills of Ithness, and it was therefore a long way from home. Part reptile, part cat, it leaped along sinuously, and I could see its rider casting the malefic incantations that the sorcerers of Ithness are wont to employ, hurling poisons like bolts. I grinned. I should not get involved, and yet—well, I knew Ithness all too well, had danced for a time in their slave palaces, and for Cadrada itself I had a score to settle. Besides, bestowing an unlikely favor is never a bad thing. I kicked the mount forward and rode down onto the plain.