“Do?” he finally asked.
Valerus nodded at the broken meal site. The few warriors who straggled out ahead of them. A quick glance back at Ossian, Hydallan, and Garret, who would bring up the rear. “You travel harder and faster than most mounted companies. Up before light. Hardly a rest till sun’s set. And we’re pushing our mounts to keep up.”
The man’s Cimmerian was getting much better. Very clear, if spoken with an Aquilonian’s lilting accent.
Kern reined in his own pace to walk with Valerus for the moment. Nahud’r stalked forward not too far away, and Ossian moved up from behind.
“We run hard because we must,” he finally said. “Often that is the way of things here. Fall down seven times, get up eight.” Behind, Ossian grunted his agreement to the Cimmerian adage. “We stop running, we die. You ask how we do this.” He stopped, caught the horseman in his cold, wolf-eyed gaze. “I ask why you do not.”
“I don’t know,” Valerus admitted.
The Aquilonian stepped back to the side of his charger and swung up into his saddle, careful of the lance tied to the side of the horse.
“But I’m learning,” he said. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” He considered the words, as if tasting them for the first time, nodded, then kicked his horse forward to catch up with his countrymen.
“My question,” Ossian said, moving up on Kern’s shoulder the other side from Nahud’r. “We heads north. Why the horsemen still with us?”
Kern wondered the same thing. Had wondered since the Aquilonians joined them back in Callaugh. Nahud’r, though, had an idea.
“They search,” he said in halting Aquilonian. The dark-skinned Shemite understood Cimmerian, but rarely spoke it.
“For what?” Ossian asked.
The Shemite shrugged. “Whatever is, not find yet.” Then he tugged up the folds of his scarf, shielding the lower half of his face from the biting winds. When he finished, only his eyes showed out of the headdress wrap. His voice was only slightly muffled when he added, “We not find yet either.”
Kern nodded. That was certainly true.
Though it would have helped if he could put a name to what it was he was personally looking for. His angers and frustrations would serve him much better. He might even know, then, when he had reached his end.
Unless it, too, came with a large blade.
THEY FOUND THE massacred settlement not long before sunset, as shadows stretched out toward the east, and the small pack moved north along the foot of a steep rise, hoping to find a horse path before night fell like an anvil over the Hardpan.
Dark clouds massed in the north and to the west. Kern watched them with an uneasy gaze. Black piles in the north, heavy with rain or possibly a late-spring snow ready to roll down over the Eiglophians and into Conall Valley. The western overhang looked more like thunderheads, dark and sooty but lacking the full, pregnant look of truly wet weather. The clouds bunched up with clear skies south and north, as if Venarium burned (still), and the smoke gathered into a solid mass.
Bad weather coming, from one direction or another, and they all knew it. The air felt brittle and cold, tensing for a new storm. It set teeth on edge and flushed out game both small and large as creatures stirred before twilight. Brig Tall-Wood bagged a pair of marmot with his bow, and Daol two braces of the large, lean rabbits fairly common on the flats. Frostpaw hunted as well. Twice, Kern walked through a killing ground of blood and fur surrounding a half-eaten carcass. Twice more he actually saw the dire wolf, which did not stray so far on the open flats that it could not be found loping to one side or the other.
Ehmish (under Hydallan’s eye and training) had actually discovered and tracked an elk stag. It took half the pack to corral the animal, driving it up against the escarpment, putting three arrows in it and finally tracking its blood trail along a rain-swollen stream of ice-fresh water as it twisted and splashed its way among a rocky bed. His blood up from the chase, Ehmish ran ahead with Daol while Kern and Gard Foehammer and a few others trotted forward at an energy-conserving pace. They knew no reason to hurry. Kern did not want to lose the rest of his band, trailing behind.
Which was why he was still around a few sharp bends when he heard Ehmish’s yell of excitement or fear. And Daol’s voice raised in a call to the others.
Running forward, splashing through the cold shallows of the burbling stream, he heard the spray and hammer of water before ever seeing the small, dropping torrent. A white-water falls, crashing down the side of the scarp, brushing the air with a cold, silver-gray mist. It fell into a large pool among soft-edged boulders and red clay, feeding a muddied stream.