The Walls of Air Page 0,41

horse had been pressed into service to draw a wagonload of mouldy, filthy grain bags and the smoked carcasses of half a dozen swine. The road was bad here, and the Red Monks and Alwir's troops had fallen to, helping to lift and force the sinking wheels through the knee-deep slop. Every wagon was laden.

She saw Janus stop and raise a hand to signal a general halt. He was almost directly below her, and she noticed that, in the week of foraging in the valleys, he'd visibly lost flesh; his square face under a grimy, reddish stubble was drawn and marked with sleepless nights and bitter, exhausting labour by day. He stepped forward, probing the road with a stick he carried; it sank in the ice-skimmed slush. His whole body, like those of his troops, was plastered in half-dried, half-frozen mud, his dark surcoat scarcely distinguishable from the scarlet ones of the men he led, except for the places where the mud had been brushed off. With a gesture of disgust, he summoned the troop to him; Gil heard his voice, assigning men to collect pine boughs and branches to lay over the road, to make some kind of footing so they wouldn't be stuck there until this time next week.'

The men and women scattered, scrambling up the frozen banks, vanishing into the darkness of the woods. They were fewer than when they had gone down to the river valleys, worn,

exhausted, and muddied to the eyes.

Janus walked back to stand among the handful who were left, glancing uneasily at the crowding, close-ranked trees. There was something in all this that he, too, misliked. Then he saw Gil, and some of the tension lightened from his eyes. 'Gil-Shalos!' he called up to her. 'How goes it at the Keep?

The same,' she called back down. 'Little word of the Dark; a few broken heads. Did you pass the camp at the Tall Gates?'

He nodded, and his taut, over-keyed face seemed to harden with regret. 'Aye,' he said, more quietly. 'Curse Alwir, he could take in those who are left. There's few enough of 'em now; they wouldn't cause him trouble.'

Another voice, soft and gentle and a little regretful, replied, 'Perhaps more than you think.'

Gil looked up. Maia of Thran stood on the high bank of the road opposite her, looking like the rag-wrapped corpse of a starving beggar whose hair and beard had grown after death. There was a stirring in the woods. Clothed in the skins of beasts, with their matted hair like beasts themselves, half a hundred of his men appeared from the monochrome darkness of the trees. Among them they pushed the bound, gagged, and unarmed dozen or so of the Red Monks who had gone to look for pine boughs. Janus' call for help died on his lips. 'It is an easy matter,' the Bishop continued in his soft voice, 'even for starving warriors to ambush a warrior or two alone. Easier indeed than it has been to keep that road shovelled and churned into mud impassable by laden wagons and to watch here for you. If you had been gone three more days, I doubt we would have been able to keep it up. But now, as you see, we have food...' He gestured toward the stocked wagons.'... and the wherewithal, once we have recovered our strength, to go see for more.'

Gil heard a noise behind her. Penambrans were coming out of the woods on her side of the road as well - grimy, wolflike, so thin that the women could be distinguished from the men only

by their absence of beards. Those who did not have steel weapons had clubs or makeshift armament. One woman carried an iron frying-pan whose blood-stained undersurface proclaimed successful use. They were already scrambling down the banks to the road to carry away the contents of the wagons.

'Once upon a time we trained together as warriors, Janus of Weg,' Maia continued, his clawed, crippled hands shifting their grip upon the staff that Gil suspected was all that kept him on his feet. 'Perhaps you will do me a service now and carry a message for me to the Lord of the Keep of Dare.'

Gil sighed and rubbed at her tired eyes. 'I would sell my sister to the Arabs,' she announced to the empty darkness of the Aisle around her, 'for a cup of coffee.' But no one heard this handsome offer, and only the echoes of midnight stillness murmured to her