Law of the Broken Earth(90)
The road climbed and climbed, and then they came up and around a particularly steep and awkward turn around a dramatic cliff that raked against the sky. Mienthe immediately understood exactly why the engineers had designed the curve as they had, despite its awkwardness. As they came around the last sharp turn, they found the whole world spread out unexpectedly before them in one long eastward sweep of stone and sky, down and down and dizzyingly down, until they could see the green of trees far below, and the town of Ehre, its high wall and wide streets and granite houses faintly blurred by a haze of smoke and distance.
Mienthe had checked her horse without noticing, and now she turned to Tan and smiled.
He gazed back at her, not smiling himself. Indeed, he looked rather pale and serious. Mienthe had not realized until that moment how nervous Tan was about entering Casmantium, about delivering himself into the Arobern’s hands. But he only said after a moment, lightly, “Casmantium before noon, as I said. No doubt it shall tremble at our coming. What were those odds?”
As it would not be kind to notice his anxiety, Mienthe laughed and said, “It’s farther than it looks, I believe, and noon’s not so far away. I think I’ll win our wager yet—which is good, as you know perfectly well it was three to one!”
She patted her horse on the neck and nudged it forward, in no particular hurry—not that she would mind losing the wager, but because she found herself oddly reluctant to arrive at Ehre, and thus in Casmantium, with the freedom and peace of the mountains behind them.
* * *
They came down out of the mountain pass and rode through the great iron gates, the gates that marked the border of Casmantium, exactly at noon, when the sun stood precisely overhead and all shadows were as small and unobtrusive as they ever could be. On the mountain side of the gates, the paving stones of the mountain road ran broad and smooth up into the pass behind them. Before them, on the other side of the iron gates, the road was narrower and made simply of pounded earth, with plain timbers to keep it from washing too badly when streams fed by melting snow came down from the mountains in the spring. Ehre, westernmost town of Casmantium, stood with its imposing square stone towers rising up behind its high stone walls, less than half a mile farther on down this ordinary road.
They had actually come to the iron gates a scant few minutes before noon, but Tan caught Mienthe’s reins and held her back until they could tell by the shadows of the gates that the sun stood precisely at noon. Then he led her horse through the gates onto Casmantian soil and solemnly offered Mienthe three coins. It was absurd, of course, but she nevertheless gave him one back. Then they traded again, so that both of them were back where they’d begun. She tried not to laugh, but it was impossible not to smile. It was hard to remember the fear that had dogged their steps for those last days. Mienthe did not know what they would find in Ehre, but she was at least confident it would not be Linularinan agents.
After they passed through the iron gates, she turned once more to look wistfully back up the long sweep of the road behind them. The achingly brilliant blue of the sky stretched infinitely far, above gray and silver mountains that shaded away to violet as they rose to meet the sky. Mienthe could make out the narrow thread of the road, snaking its way up and up until the narrow thread of it tipped at last over a curve high above. She sighed and began to turn away for the final time, toward Ehre and the last long stretch of their journey. But then she paused, her attention caught by the movement of tiny black figures high above, coming slowly over that last high curve. They were so far away and so tiny that she probably would not have seen these other travelers at all except they paused, gazing down from the crest of the road as she and Tan had done, and as they paused there they were clearly silhouetted against the brilliant sky.
Though she knew other travelers must use the great road, though she knew there was no reason to suspect those barely visible flecks were anything sinister or anything to do with them at all, she nevertheless found her pleasure in the day instantly quenched, as swiftly as a smothered candle flame. “Tan,” she said.
He turned, following her gaze up to the high curve of the road, and stilled. He said at last, deliberately calm, “The road is open to anyone, after all.”
“Yes,” said Mienthe, and heard her own voice come out small and tight.
“There’s no reason to think they’re anything to do with us.”
“No,” Mienthe agreed.
Tan gave her a level glance and added, still in that calm tone, “But we might ride on, even so. We might ride straight through Ehre and be well out in the countryside by dusk, do you think?”