Gathrid started up the bank. "They won't get onto your trail as fast if you shove the boat back out into the current."
Gathrid looked to the east. A procession of torches was snaking across the fortified bridge. He did not have the adventurer's mentality, he concluded. It seemed cruel to waste a man's boat. Stealing it had been bad enough.
"Do it!" Loida snapped.
"All right, already!"
"This isn't my first escape," the girl said.
"Don't put too much faith in her experience," Gacioch rumbled. "She's never gotten away."
Gathrid spent a moment watching the boat slide off into the darkness. What was the demon's game? Gacioch was doing his best to avoid his masters. Why?
He had to move. The torches were approaching. Perhaps his underminds could resolve his questions while he concentrated on escape.
He did not expect the Ventimiglians to remain out of touch long. Locating Gacioch and the Sword should present no problem for a sorcerer. Both would strain the fabric of this plane.
Gathrid tramped along head down, silent. He missed Rogala. He told himself that was because he would find the dwarf's perception of distant events useful.
The voices down inside him chuckled. They always did when he lied to himself.
Gacioch kept up an abrasive commentary. It made Rogala's reticence appear ever more attractive. Gathrid suffered through all the latest gossip from the courts of Ventimiglia and Hell. Then the demon offered to do his scouting. All he had to do, Gacioch claimed, was decorporealize him. Any fool could manage the necessary spell.
Alarm bells clamored in the depths of the youth's mind. "No. I don't need any help. Thank you."
A ghostly, merry tinkle of Toal merriment assured him that the offer had been a trap.
Rogala remained in his thoughts. What had become of Theis? He no longer had that feeling of being followed from a distance.
If he wanted to reach the Library, he had to start thinking like the dwarf. Eschew mercy. Make the goal everything. Don't let anything else matter. Be willing to sacrifice anyone and anything . . . . His stomach knotted. His thoughts disgusted him.
Near midnight they came upon a manor. Gathrid found himself feeling an inexplicable homesickness. Ah. Some of his souls belonged to men who had begun their lives here. Their emotions were bubbling. He drew their memories to his forebrain.
Using their knowledge, he traveled westward till he reached a manor famous for the horses it bred. He stole two. He rode away wondering how soon their loss would be noted, and if it would be connected with him.
After a time he turned northward again. He planned to make a grand swing, west and north, around Dedera. That should be less predictable than his former, more direct route.
Fate, luck or the masking hand of Suchara herself, served him well. Even by day no one challenged his party, though they passed manor after manor and hundreds of people glanced at them incuriously.
He pushed hard all day. Loida became too tired to complain. Late in the afternoon he started following roads tending eastward again. By dusk he and Loida were directly north of Dedera. The peaks of the Chromogas looked like bloody teeth in a horizon-spanning jaw as the setting sun illuminated their snowy peaks. Gathrid kept pushing.
Then a Toal appeared on their backtrail.
Whence it came Gathrid had no idea. He glanced back and there it was, gleaming black astride its black stallion, keeping a respectful distance. It had not been there minutes earlier. He thought it was the one he had dueled near the Bilgoraji border. It had the same feel, and the lance it bore blazed against the gathering darkness.
Attack seemed far from its mind.
"Oh, it won't," Gacioch grumbled. "It's just here to keep an eye on the Sword."
"I'll still end up fighting it." Gathrid shuddered. He did not want another of those dread entities drifting along behind the corners of his vision. Would they squabble over him like jackals over a carcass? "Loida can't go much farther."
He expected a Rogala-like suggestion that the girl be ditched. Gacioch disappointed him. "Then stop and let her rest. He isn't going to bother you. In fact, he'll make sure nobody else does."
"What?"
Gacioch's great failing, as he himself confessed, was that he talked too much. "He has orders to make sure the Sword doesn't get snatched by the wrong people. He can't do anything but follow orders."
"How do you know?"
Gacioch sniggered. "You'll just have to take my word."
Gathrid took the chance. It was not as much a matter of trusting