them I was drawn into the curved surface of the mirror so that I was drawn out of myself; the drainer was a mere blur in the darkness, unreal, unimportant, and I spoke now directly to the god of travelers, who would heal me and send me on my way. And I believed that this was so. I will not say that I imagined a literal godplace where our deities sit on call to serve us, but I had then an abstract and metaphorical understanding of our religion by which it seemed to me, in its way, as real as my right arm.
My flow of words halted and the drainer made no attempt to renew the outpour. He murmured the phrases of absolution. I was done. He snuffed the godcandle between two fingers and rose to doff his robes. Still I knelt, weak and quivering from my draining, lost in reveries. I felt cleansed and purified, stripped of my soul’s grit and debris, and, in the music of that moment, was only dimly aware of the squalor about me. The chapel was a place of magic and the drainer was aflame with divine beauty.
“Up,” he said, nudging me with the tip of his sandal. “Out. Off about your journeys.”
The sound of his splintery voice doused all the wonder. I stood up, shaking my head to cure it of its new lightness, while the drainer half pushed me into the corridor. He was no longer afraid of me, that ugly little man, even though I might be a septarch’s son and could kill him with one wad of my spittle, for I had told him of my cowardice, of my forbidden hunger for Halum, of all the cheapnesses of my spirit, and that knowledge reduced me in his eyes: no man newly drained can awe his drainer.
The rain was even worse when I left the building. Noim sat scowling in the car, his forehead pressed to the steering-stick. He looked up and tapped his wrist to tell me I had dallied too long at the godhouse.
“Feel better now that your bladder’s empty?” he asked.
“What?”
“That is, did you have a good soul-pissing in there?”
“A foul phrase, Noim.”
“One grows blasphemous when his patience is extended too far.”
He kicked the starter and we rolled forward. Shortly we were at the ancient walls of Salla City, by the noble tower-bedecked opening known as Glin Door, which was guarded by four sour-faced and sleepy warriors in dripping uniforms. They paid no heed to us. Noim drove through the gate and past a sign welcoming us to the Grand Salla Highway. Salla City dwindled swiftly behind us; northward we rushed toward Glin.
THIRTEEN
THE GRAND SALLA HIGHWAY passes through one of our best farming districts, the rich and fertile Plain of Nand, which each spring receives a gift of topsoil stripped from the skin of West Salla by our busy streams. At that time the septarch of the Nand district was a notorious coinclutcher, and thanks to his penury the highway was in poor repair there, so, as Halum had predicted in jest, we were hard put to wallow through the mud that clogged the road. It was good to finish with Nand and enter North Salla, where the land is a mixture of rock and sand and the people live on weeds and on scuttling things that they take from the sea. Groundcars are unusual sights in North Salla, and twice we were stoned by hungry and sullen townsfolk, who found our mere passage through their unhappy place an insult. But at least the road was free of mud.
Noim’s father’s troops were stationed in extreme North Salla, on the lower bank of the River Huish. This is the grandest of Velada Borthan’s rivers. It begins as a hundred trifling brooks trickling down the eastern slopes of the Huishtors in the northern part of West Salla; these brooks merge in the foothills to become a swift stream, gray and turbulent, that rushes through a narrow granite canyon marked by six great steplike plunges. Emerging from those wild cascades onto its alluvial plain, the Huish proceeds more serenely on a northeastern course toward the sea, growing wider and wider in the flatlands, and splitting ultimately so that, at its broad delta, it gives itself to the ocean through eight mouths. In its rapid western reaches the Huish forms the boundary between Salla and Glin; at its placid easternmost end it divides Glin from Krell.
For all its length the great river