Gerin walked through the dark hall, kicking at rushes and bones. Once in the corridor beyond, he stopped and looked about: which sconce's torch, he wondered, had he used to flatten Wolfar? Was it the one by that much-scarred wooden door, or its neighbor a few feet down the hallway? Unable to recall, he turned a corner—and almost ran into Elise.

Later he realized he must have been trying to find her, searching for the one happiness he'd found in a collapsing world. At the moment, no thoughts intruded. She was warm in his arms. Her lips and tongue met his with the same desperation he felt. "Where—?" he whispered, stroking her hair.

"Follow me."

It was, he thought, the chamber in which he'd slept on his way south. That seemed fitting, somehow. He chuckled under his breath. Elise made a questioning sound. He shook his head. "It's nothing, love."

The straw of the matress rustled as he drew her down. She softly cried out beneath him, three times: first in pain, then in wonder, and then, at last, in joy.

When she rose to leave, the pain of separation was nearly more than Gerin could bear. She bent down for a last kiss, said softly, "Come back to me," and was gone. He was sure he would toss for hours after the door closed behind her. Almost at once, though, he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

XI

It was nearly noon the next day before the Fox and his companions began the last leg of their journey. He left the wagon behind. Ricolf lent him his own stout three-man chariot, and with it a lean, weathered man named Priscos son of Mellor, his driver and shieldman.

Gerin suspected Ricolf guessed what had happened the night before, why he'd left the celebration so early. It showed in no overt way but, as the Fox made small talk with the older man while getting ready to leave, he felt an acceptance, a closeness between them of a different sort from their earlier friendship. He was glad. Ricolf's good opinion mattered to him.

Elise's farewell was wordless. He tasted tears on her lips as they kissed goodbye. He, Van, and Priscos climbed into Ricolf's chariot; Nordric and Amgath were beside them, as were Rihwin and Effo, the survivors of the fighting tail the Fox had recruited along the way, and a few volunteers from Ricolf's holding. They were twenty-two in all, with four three-man and five two-man chariots.

Priscos clucked to the horses. The little army started to move. The gatekeepers lowered the drawbridge. One of them caught Gerin's eye as he passed. "What are you running off with this time, my lord?" he asked.

"Nothing you don't see, Vukov," the Fox answered, pleased he remembered the fellow's name. He doubted the gatekeeper had had a happy time the morning after Elise left. He turned for a last glimpse of her, but the cramped confines of the gatehouse already blocked his view.

Priscos was a man of few words, most of them about horses. "You don't see many Shanda beasts hereabouts," he remarked. "Where did you come by this one?"

"What's the name of that town in the mountains, Gerin?" Van asked.

"Cassat."

"Aye. That's where I picked him up. Cheap, too—the clod of a horse-trader didn't know what he had. He's been a rare worker."

"They're ornery, I hear," Priscos said. He went on, more to himself than Gerin or Van, "Reckon I can handle that, though." Gerin was sure he could. Priscos had an air of quiet competence he liked.

As the sun sank, they camped by what had been the border station between Ricolf's land and Bevon's. Now the square wooden building which had housed Ricolf's guardsmen was only charred ruins. One more debt to pay, the baron thought, among so many.

The ghosts were strange that night. Their keenings and wailings were more intense, and also more nearly understandable, than the Fox had ever heard. One in particular flitted round him as if drawn like moth to flame. For all its efforts, he could neither make sense of what it would tell him nor recognize its pallid form in the flickering firelight.

"That is an uncanny thing," Rihwin said, watching the wraith's frantic but vain efforts to communicate.

"Likely it's like a Shanda spirit, seeking to lure you away from the light so it can drink your blood," Van said.

Gerin shook his head. "I feel no harm in it, even if I can't understand what it would say. Besides, Van, every ghost in the north country must have had a glut of blood by now."

To that the outlander had no reply but a grave nod.

Remembering the fraternal strife tearing Bevon's barony even before the Trokmoi invaded, Gerin wanted to cross it in a single day if he could. He did not want to camp inside it: if he could expect night marauders anywhere, Bevon's tortured land would be the place.

And tortured it was. The Fox's band passed two battlefields before the sun was high in the southeast. The woodsrunners had plundered both fields, but all the bloated, naked corpses seemed to be Elabonians. Here brother had fought brother, and fought with a hate greater than they turned against the Trokmoi.

As he surveyed the second meadow filled with bodies, Gerin's face was stony and full of bitterness. "Poor fools," he said. He wondered if his words were not an epitaph for all the northland.

Whichever brother had won the war, he had not enjoyed victory long. A lot of the keeps still standing were held by small bands of Trokmoi. They hooted in derision as they saw Gerin's force go by, but did not move against it. "They think us beneath contempt," the Fox said to Van, "and perhaps we are."

"Honh! The next time I care what a woodsrunner thinks will be the first."

A bit more than halfway through Bevon's barony, they passed a roadside holding destroyed in a way Gerin had never imagined before. The timbers of one whole wall of the palisade lay like jackstraws in the bailey, as if kicked in by a monster boot. The stone keep itself was a pile of broken rubble.

Something white stuck out from under one limestone slab. As the baron drew closer, he saw it was the skeleton of a human hand and arm, picked clean of flesh by scavengers. No one, Elabonian or Trokmê, garrisoned this keep.

"This is the work of your Balamung?" Rihwin asked.

"He's not mine. I wish with all my heart I'd never heard of him," Gerin said, but he had to nod as he spoke. His warriors eyed the shattered keep with awe, fear, and wonder. Hand-to-hand fighting against the Trokmoi was all very well, but how could they hope to hold against sorcery like this? Even Nordric was grim and quiet.

"I wonder why such powerful wizardry has not been used further south," Rihwin said. "Few castles could stand against it, yet here, so close to the Niffet, is the first sign we've had of anything more than a simple barbarian invasion."

"What difference does it make?" Gerin said bleakly, staring once more at the blasted holding.

"Maybe none, maybe a great deal. One explanation I can think of is that your northern mage may have so much trouble trying to lay low one particular keep—I name no names, mind you—that he has had little leisure to help his men elsewhere."

Gerin gave him a grateful look. The line of hope the southerner had cast him was thin, but he was all but drowning in despair. Anything that buoyed his spirits was welcome.

His renewed optimism and his hope of crossing Bevon's lands in one day both collapsed not long after noon. His band came to the top of a low rise. There they stopped in horror and dismay. For the next three or four miles, the Elabon Way and most of the surrounding landscape had been brutally wiped out of existence. All that was left was a ruined expanse of raw-edged muddy craters, some a hundred feet across and twenty deep. They overlapped one another in the mangled earth, as if the same giant who had pulverized the keep had then amused himself by pelting the ground with thousands of huge boulders. But there were no boulders, no visible explanation of how the devastation had been committed.