The Walls of Air Page 0,36

Raiders,' Ingold said at last.

Rudy turned his eyes from the gruesome remains of the Raiders' sacrifice. It was nearly a week old. What the vultures and jackals hadn't got, ants had. But it was still fresh enough to be revolting. He concentrated instead on the cross that had been erected beyond the head of the stretched victim; it was seven feet tall and wreathed in complicated streamers of feather, polished bone, and glass. The cross itself was wood, rare in this treeless land, with a skull nailed in the join of the beams. The tufts of feathers and knotted grass twirled skittishly in the wind, reminding him weirdly of the candy skulls with roses in their eyes of the Fiesta de los Muertos.

'It's a magic-post.' Ingold walked around it, cat-footed, leaving barely a trace of tracks on the dry crumble of the turned-up earth. His fingers caressed lightly the smoothed wood, as if to read something there by his touch, then brushed the dangling

glass. That's odd.' He said it half to himself, like a man who found in his garden flowers not of his own planting. Rudy shivered and scanned the horizon, as if expecting to see the Raiders materialize like Apache from the pale wastelands of sand and thorn.

'Did the Raiders make it?'

'Oh, yes.' Ingold went over to the remains of the sacrifice, hunkering down to examine the loathsome bones. Rudy looked away. The Raiders will make a sacrifice in propitiation of something that they fear - you saw that in the valleys below Renweth - and usually, but not always, put up a magic-post to hold the soul of the tormented dead.' He straightened up, frowning. 'Generally they will make the propitiation against the ice storms, which they consider to be evil ghosts; lately they have begun to do so against the Dark. But this...' He came back to the cross, like a ghost himself in the pallor of the shadowless afternoon. This I have not seen.' He moved a little way off, poking with his staff at the hard, cracked clay of the ground, the knobby yellow twigs of the catclaw snagging at his mantle and the blown dust blurring his tracks. They fear something, Rudy, and fear it enough to sacrifice one of their own band to divert its rage. But it wouldn't be an ice storm this far to the south -and it isn't the Dark.'

'How can you tell?' Rudy asked curiously.

'I can tell by the pattern of the streamers and the marks scratched in the wood. This isn't the regular hunting ground of any tribe of Raiders that I know - they do not range the desert at all, but stick to the plains, following the bison and mammoth. Only the extreme bitterness of the winter and perhaps the coming of the Dark have driven them here.' He came back and collected Che's lead-rope again, for all the world like a ragged old prospector hunting for the motherlode among the cactus and ocotillo. 'We shall have to be careful and cover our tracks,' he went on, turning back toward the road. The Raiders prize steel weaponry and would in all probability cut our throats to steal our swords.'

'Great,' Rudy said fatalistically. 'One more thing for us to worry about.'

Two,' Ingold corrected him. The Raiders - and whatever it is that the Raiders fear.'

But in the two empty days that followed, they saw no sign of White Raiders. Toward afternoon of the second, Rudy thought he could discern a dust-cloud and movement on the road ahead and he suggested concealment.

'Nonsense,' Ingold said. 'Any Raider who raised dust higher than his own knees would be expelled from the band and left for the jackals.'

'Oh.' Rudy shaded his eyes and gazed into the clear greyish distance. That's a hell of a dust for just one family, though.'

As they drew nearer, Rudy saw that this was indeed far more than a single family, or even several families. An entire town was on the move, as the refugees from Karst and Gae and the ragged survivors of Penambra had moved. A long line of swaying wagons was surrounded by a skirmishing ring of riders and a broad scattering of scouts afoot. The creak of leather and the barking of dogs sounded weirdly unfamiliar

to Rudy's ears. He had not been aware of how used he had grown to the silence of the desert. At the head of the wagon train, a cloaked woman walked afoot, and it was she who