Soon after that, following a terse discussion, the group split up. By common consent, Tiburé set off south-west back to Thield to report what news they had to Huldarion. Most of the news was bad, and Rothir did not envy her that task.
Meanwhile he himself, with Parthenal and Maeneb, rode north into the cold wind, following the stonemen’s trail and hunting for any further sign of Arguril.
There was no trace of the young man to be seen. The trail of rope-soled prints and wheel-ruts continued for many miles with no indication of the stonemen making any stop to camp. Riding in the army’s wake, they passed a hut, a traveller’s shelter, that had been burnt out: when Rothir investigated he found what might once have been a man’s body lying inside. However, from the little that remained – chiefly buckles, and hobnails in the remnants of its boots – it did not seem to be Arguril’s.
They left it and rode on until they reached the point at which the stoneman army had, at last, evidently halted for a night. The ground was littered with scraps of food and human waste. There they debated whether they should halt themselves.
“There’s still an hour of daylight,” argued Rothir, who was desperate to move on.
“Twilight rather. As the light drops we may miss something,” Maeneb countered.
“We can at least continue till the light drops too far. Another half hour.”
Rothir knew he was not being entirely reasonable. The daylight was already dimming fast beneath the sullen clouds. A damp, sour smell was sharpening the air: although there was little summer or autumn on the barren Iarad, the seasons were fast turning, and evening would now swing its curtain down upon them earlier each day. Rothir knew they needed both to eat and rest. The horses also needed rest. But he felt he could not rest while he could still see to hunt.
First Eled, then Yaret, now Arguril… This latest care clenched tight within his chest. He did not think that he had any tendency to succumb to unnecessary fear. Yet disaster on disaster was falling on the youngest members of the group, the ones he should be able to protect, and it hurt him. The self-reproach was a pain that would not leave, like a stone being driven hard into his head; a pain he had no remedy for, apart from action.
Never mind that it was Tiburé who had allowed Arguril to ride off alone. Never mind that Arguril himself had been so keen; he was inexperienced, and Rothir should have spoken out against it. He should have safeguarded Arguril.
Parthenal glanced at him from time to time as they rode on.
“You can’t be responsible for everyone,” he said.
“Only those I am responsible for,” Rothir retorted. His friend cocked an eyebrow and said nothing. On Parthenal responsibility never seemed to weigh as heavily as it did upon himself. Yet he knew that Parthenal was just as apprehensive as he was. They did not speak of what the stonemen might do to Arguril. It did not bear speaking of.
First Eled, then Yaret… Rothir told himself firmly that those two, at any rate, were safe. He thought of Yaret’s bandaged stump with a pang of loss – oddly deep, he was not certain why, because at least she was alive, he had managed to achieve that much – and then he put the thought firmly in a box and shut it away. Task done. Forget it. Now the next thing.
Box after box. There was little enough time to look back at them, all lined up along his past, let alone to open them and let memory back in. Why bother? Better to think of a future idealised Caervonn. Memory was often painful.
And he did not need more painful memories. So he needed to find Arguril.
The mere fact that Arguril’s corpse had not yet appeared along the trail meant there was still hope; although not much. If the stonemen found the scroll they would not spare him. The news within the scroll was old news now. But the very fact that Arguril carried it would mark him as a Rider of the Vonn, as the stonemen’s sworn enemy, and that would mean his death.
Amongst other things, the scroll mentioned the ignoble one, whose name Rothir preferred not to speak aloud if it could be helped; although that did not stop him from saying it in his closed mouth now with disgust and loathing. He would spit it if he could. Adon. All this was bound to be his work.
“Over there,” said Maeneb sharply, swerving to the left. He followed on Narba, and saw another overturned cart: another broken axle. The carts were not well made, but had been crudely nailed together.
“I missed it,” Rothir said shamefacedly. “I wasn’t paying enough attention.” Like the first cart, this one bore the signs of burning. And there were scorch marks on the thin grass for some distance; so he tracked them, bending down from Narba to peer at the shadowed ground.
At the end of the scorched path lay the remains of a man, his limbs distorted in agony, his clothes and face burnt badly but still decipherable: not Arguril. Neither was it a stoneman. Although the corpse was cold, it smelt of smoke and rank roast meat. Rothir turned away, trying not to retch.
“So who is he? There are no houses around here. Was he some slave who was pulling the cart? And when it overturned, perhaps the darkburn broke out and attacked him,” muttered Parthenal.
“Something like that. I hope the stonemen managed to round up the darkburn,” Maeneb said. “I wouldn’t want to find it lurking anywhere near here.”
“How do you round up a darkburn?”
“They must have a way.”
“There’s an end to the burnt trail here,” said Rothir, inspecting the ground, “so they evidently managed it somehow.”
“In that case, so long as there’s no darkburn on the loose, I vote we stop here for the night,” suggested Maeneb. “We are all too tired to be effective. We don’t want to miss anything else.” She looked pointedly at Rothir.
He gave in. Moving away from the stonemen’s trail, they halted and rubbed down the tired horses in the dusk. Then he ate and slept, because that was his job, and shook Parthenal awake early in the morning. Maeneb was already up. His mind turned to Yaret for some reason; doing her daily ritual, murmuring those words. Back into the box. His thoughts should be on Arguril and his plight.
Parthenal groaned as he heaved himself on to his horse. Normally Rothir would have made some joking remark about Parthenal not being the annoyingly early riser today that he usually was; but he did not do so now. There was nothing for them to joke about. Sensing his horse’s weariness, he hoped that Narba would continue to bear up under this enforced effort. It was probably still a full day’s ride before they could hope to catch up with the stonemen.
But then what? If Arguril were captive they could not rescue him from an entire stoneman army. The best they could do was to assess the situation.
“They’re on the move again,” said Maeneb, head cocked to the breeze, “definitely in two groups now. They’re diverging quite widely; one group is going further east.”
“Which group is the larger?”
She concentrated. “The other one, I think, that’s heading west.”
“The large group is marching towards Outer Kelvha, then. Can you sense Arguril?”
Maeneb shook her head. “I’ve been trying at intervals, all night.” He realised that there were shadowed circles underneath her eyes. “There’s nothing detectable. That might mean that he’s… unconscious. Or too far away. Or he simply might be drowned out by the large numbers of stonemen. I’m not good enough to distinguish one voice amidst so many.” Rothir knew she blamed herself, but he did not have the energy to spare to reassure her.
It was Parthenal who said, “Don’t feel bad about it, Maeneb. You’re doing a useful job. Without you we’d have no clue at all which way to go.” He was not normally so sympathetic.
However, if Parthenal was sympathetic to anyone, it was to Maeneb, thought Rothir as they rode off. His friend showed a gentleness to Maeneb which he demonstrated to few others. To some people he could be ruthless; even cruel. Rothir was often glad that Parthenal was on his side.
“If they have hurt Arguril,” said Parthenal now, deliberately, “I will cut their limbs off, one by one, and feed them to their darkburns.”
“And I will help you,” said Rothir. They both knew that such revenge was not remotely possible.
He urged Narba to a gallop on the moorland, which was not so barren now as the Iarad behind them. All the time he rode, he checked the landscape for a body. None was to be seen. But if the stonemen had killed Arguril, they would have left his body by the roadside, surely? They certainly would not bother burying him. If they had not killed him, what were they keeping him alive for?
Information, thought Rothir. But Arguril knew little information that was not also in the scroll. Even the location of Thield would have changed by now. The stonemen already knew the rest.
Sport. They might keep such a captive purely for their pleasure. Yet Rothir doubted this, because in his experience the stonemen’s pleasure lay in outright killing, not in torture. He had an idea they would regard it as a waste of time. Deaths were what counted.
Something to bargain with, then… He hoped that was the reason, because in that case the stonemen would have to keep Arguril not only alive but also relatively unhurt. However, the willingness to bargain was also something which he had not come across in stonemen previously.
There was, of course, one other possibility.
“They might be using him as bait,” he said aloud as he slowed his horse.
“In which case we are riding straight into their trap,” said Parthenal.
“Not really. The trap is still a long way off,” said Maeneb. “And we’ll hardly be taken by surprise.”
But Rothir now began to think, and to study not just the trail but the countryside around them as he rode, looking for clues as to what objective might drive on the stonemen in their swift march through this place. The empty lands appeared more welcoming than before, with increasing signs of cultivation if no actual people. The Iarad wilderness lay behind them: ahead, the gentle hills and wooded vales of the Iartir began a slow rise and fall, as if the Riders were poised on the verge of some wide green frozen sea.
They passed an area of farmland, full of yellow stubble, and then a homestead. It was burnt. When they rode up to it, the blackened stones still felt warm – hot, even, to Rothir’s cautious touch. This had happened within the last twenty-four hours. No survivors: three corpses lay outside the building, also burnt. Two, he thought, were female.
He bent down to check the third. “Not Arguril,” he said. Nobody else said anything, because there was nothing to say. Before he rose, Rothir bowed his head in a silent vow that the dead would be avenged. He would try, at least.
“Do you hear anything new, Maeneb?” asked Parthenal.
She shook her head.
“Keep listening.”
They continued riding fast, but with increased wariness now that they were drawing closer to the enemy. After a few more miles they came to a hill a little taller than the rest. Smoke rose thickly from beyond it. Mounting its summit to look out, they saw no stonemen. Instead, a second burnt-out farmstead lay below them: a black, steaming shell surrounded by a half-charred orchard. A few goats browsed the slopes as calmly as if nothing untoward had happened.
As they descended Rothir already knew what they would find. This time there were six corpses. One held a knife: a pitiable defence against a darkburn and its following army. Not far away a sack of flour lay on the ground, unburnt and split, a splash of white amidst the black.
“They take the food and kill the farmers,” muttered Parthenal. Rothir nodded.
The army had moved quickly on, for it could not be seen. But in the distance, beyond the swelling waves of the westlands, a long white plume of smoke was drifting to the sky as if pulled upwards by the clouds.
“That’s the western branch of the stoneman army, the ones that we are currently following,” said Maeneb. “The other smaller group is three or four miles east by now – maybe further.”
Rothir squinted east, to where high moorland again encroached on the cultivated Iartir. A distant pall of smoke seemed to lie over wide areas of the land.
“You still think the western group is larger?” he asked Maeneb.
“I believe so. Their voices are certainly stronger.”
“There are many more villages lying to the north-west than to the east,” observed Parthenal. “Moreva and Brul, and beyond them, Outer Kelvha. There’s nowhere so populous to our right. So the stonemen have split up accordingly.”
“And you think they’re going to attack those places?” Rothir demanded. “It would be a brave army that encroached on Kelvha.”
“But it would be a wise one that tested the defences of Outer Kelvha first.”
“We need to tell Huldarion,” said Maeneb.
“We need to find out more. And above all, we need to find Arguril,” said Rothir. They spurred their horses away from the ravaged farmstead and up the far side of the hill, through the swirling wind and scattering leaves, dispersing the goats who swirled and scattered in the same way.
Over the green hill they rode and down to the next vale, through lush water-meadows where lay the half-butchered corpses of a dozen cattle with only their heads left intact. At the bottom of the vale, a row of gracefully draping willows lined a wide stream. It was not too deep to ford, however, and they had splashed across it and were halfway to the next rise in the ground when Maeneb’s mare suddenly reared up, lurching sideways so that she almost unseated her rider.
At the same instant Alda stopped dead, throwing Parthenal forward in the saddle. Narba threw up his head and neighed.
Then Rothir felt it, and he knew that Parthenal did too from his sharp intake of breath. Strength drained from his limbs. Beneath him the horse was tense and trembling. He threw himself off Narba and drew his sword to meet what he knew was coming, although with the whirling wind behind him the warning stench came late.
But by that time he had already seen it hurtling down the rise towards him. Darkburn.