Circle Of The Moon Part 21

"Yes," replied Oryn gravely, "all my courtiers agree that I'm the premier harpist of the land." And Pebble-as Oryn no doubt intended she should-dissolved into giggles. Oryn chuckled, too, but his face sobered as he saw Soth step around the lattice screen. As if he read Soth's expression he inquired, "More good chickens perished for naught?"

Soth took Oryn gently by the elbow, led him out onto the garden terrace. "You should get some sleep." Oryn had promised to do so when he'd walked Soth back to his quarters behind the palace library at noon. By the look of him he hadn't.

"Why, do you think my dreams are going to be that entertaining?"

Soth said nothing.

"I'm sorry," said the king immediately. "It's just that . . . I'm sorry."

And Soth squeezed the surprisingly muscular arm that he held. "Moth tells me the four of them are going to combine their powers tomorrow morning, to try to bring Summerchild out of her coma," he said. "It may be indeed that spells that do not work with three enchantresses may work with four. If we can try the same some evening with these warding spells-"

"I won't have Summerchild left alone."

Not even to save your own life? Looking into his former pupil's eyes, Soth didn't say it; in the naked glance he already read the answer.

The true answer, not the one Oryn knew he must make for the sake of the realm.

The next moment Oryn looked away, the muscles clenching suddenly in the heavy jaw. In an almost inaudible voice, the king said, "Yes, I know you're right." He took a deep breath, looked back at Soth with weary resignation. "Tell me, dear friend, were there any kings who didn't survive the tests of their consecration? Or who refused, when it came time to pa.s.s through the renewal of their relationship with the G.o.ds at the jubilee?"

"There are only ten kings, in all the records of the Later Hosh and Durshen dynasties, whose reigns lasted forty-nine years." Soth settled himself on a bench beside the pool, where the fat crescent of the waning moon's reflection floated on the water. "Before that, the records are incomplete-mostly because the Hosh made a practice of burning anything that didn't agree with their version of history. As far as I can make out, in the time of the Zali kings, the ent.i.ties whom we know as the Veiled G.o.ds were the only deities of this land-only then, as now, they weren't exactly G.o.ds. And in putting himself into the hands of the priests of each temple in turn, the king gave each of the local groups the power of veto in his ascension. Only when the kings of the House of Hosh aligned themselves with the Sun Mages-who did start out as a priesthood themselves-were the kings able to supersede the lesser magic of the Veiled Priests and break themselves free of their control."

"And I don't suppose there's a chance the magic of the Veiled Priests is still active, is there? I didn't think so." The king sighed and plucked a strand of jasmine to trail across the moon's reflection in the water. "It was just a thought. Where did you learn all that, Soth? It wasn't part of the histories that you taught me as a child."

"Ironically, in this past year I've been able to study the inscriptions in the Zali tombs and on the jewelry that's been taken from them. And a great deal of it has been showing up on the market lately."

"I know." Oryn shook his head wearily. "The thieves aren't even bothering to melt it down anymore. Yet another thing my successor will have to deal with."

"And it's all quite common magic." Soth kept his tone matter-of-fact, as Oryn had kept his when, in years past, Soth had been in the grip of his own demons. "Once the curses and wards ceased to work one can go in and out with impunity. Even the inscriptions we don't understand-the precursors to those standard formulae you still find in tombs about 'corpse walkers' and 'dream eaters'-are sourced the way ordinary magic was, for all the years of its history, from the earth or the sun or whatever."

"Corpse walkers I understand." As Soth had hoped, his former pupil's shoulders straightened a little at the prospect of a puzzle of scholarship. "At least, according to Raeshaldis, when the djinni began to lose their magic they apparently did take refuge in corpses, some of them, to keep from dissolving completely, the G.o.ds only know where they are now. If they did that in times past, no wonder the old priests put spells on tombs to keep it from happening."

"I think it likelier," said Soth, "that some of those formulae were written to prevent the mages of the Black Cult from sourcing power from the energies released from human minds at death. Which, whether we like it or not, was a very strong source-for those who could manage to use it without going mad."

The king raised his gaze from the reflection of the moon in the water, the half circle whose inner edge showed the faintest concavity, and met Soth's eyes. The question hovered for a moment between them, palpable and deadly: Would it work?

Not to save his own life, thought Soth, but to save Summerchild's.

Instead he shook his head. "Well, let's hope Mohrvine's frightful mother doesn't think of that one. She's dangerous enough sane. And thank goodness all records of the Black Cults were destroyed. What were dream eaters supposed to be?"

Soth removed his spectacles, polished them on the end of one of the sun veils looped around his neck. He was dressed and booted for riding; if the two men listened, they could hear the far-off sounds of horses being a.s.sembled in the Golden Court for the ride to Three Wells. "Mortuary spells have been almost standard for thousands of years," he said. "The formulae written in Zali tombs are almost exactly what you'll find today, allowing for the change in the style of the runes. I know along the northwestern sh.o.r.es of the Great Lake there's a belief that the dead continue to dream-that your dreams are the world to which your soul returns after death."

"I can see why the idea of Ean's paradise superseded that one." Oryn shivered. "Or even the transmigration of souls, if Tsocha's followers are to be believed. On the other hand-" He smiled a little, as if recalling the more delightful dreams of his childhood. "I suppose if one generally dreamed of the happier parts of one's life, one would be a bit peeved if something came into the tomb like a maggot and chewed them all away, leaving you with . . . what? Continually reading and rereading the rest of the mortuary formulae written on the inside of your coffin? How ghastly dull! You'll see to it that there's something more interesting pasted in mine, won't you, Soth? A good novel or a couple of volumes of poems?"

"Since the point of all our work tonight is for you to outlive me," retorted the librarian, "I'm not going to answer that." He got to his feet. "According to Bax, his riders will be ready to accompany me to Three Wells at midnight. It's nearly that now."

"You don't mind? What a silly thing to ask; of course you mind, you've just journeyed five hundred miles after slaying a truly fearsome lake monster, or at least convincing it to stay in its lake. Speaking of problems my successor is going to have to cope with. But truly, I'll feel a great deal better when a trained observer has had a look, not only at Three Wells but at the aqueduct camp as well." Oryn got to his feet, walked a short distance into the scented shrubbery of the terrace garden. "It's growing harder and harder to keep provisions moving out to the camp, you know. Everyone keeps asking me what's the use? And I must say I'm becoming quite offended by the universal a.s.sumption that I'm going to be eaten. I understand the wagering on the subject has reached proportions previously reserved for theoretical mathematics. I do hope Raeshaldis is investing the Sun Mages' money thus."

"I hope so, too," replied the tutor mildly. "Since without your support, those three old men up at the Citadel are certainly going to starve." Above the cobalt stillness, the jewellike lamps of the palace, the chimes began to sound from the Marvelous Tower, bronze voices and silver mingling.

The king held out his hand in farewell. "Make sure everything's all right out there, Soth," he said quietly. "I daresay it's a foolish hope, but if I am going to die, I should like to do what I can to make sure everyone else in the realm isn't going to die with me."

"There's no way that you can do that," replied Soth. In the scented darkness he remembered his own pain, the hideous sense of helplessness when he'd first realized his magic was failing. It still came over him, that awful darkness that even the strongest sherab would not lighten. It was like a dagger in his heart, that the man he'd met as a curly-haired child, this tall, fat, sybaritic harpist whom he loved as a son, had to face that dark alone. "But I'll certainly do what I can."

Oryn frowned a little, straining his eyes at some movement among the reeds and mud of the lakesh.o.r.e visible from the terrace. "What is that?" he asked. "That greenish light. It's gone now, but it was there a moment ago. See? I've seen it before: sometimes it looks like a light and sometimes like a mist."

"I've seen it before, too," agreed Soth, and his quiet voice was grim. "Twice, recently, as we came down from the Lake of Reeds. And it glimmered over the lakesh.o.r.e tonight when we were testing spells, Pebble and Moth and I, about where you see it now. A glowing mist among the dead papyrus, maybe a thousand feet?-fifteen hundred?-to the north of where we stood. Since there were about a thousand crocodiles in that s.p.a.ce I still didn't get a good look at it, though it's the closest I've ever seen it."

He glanced at Oryn, and in the moonlight his thin face was grave. "It used to be I'd only see it in the desert. This is the closest it's come to the walls of the city."

"That we know of," said Oryn. "So far."

He turned and walked back to the golden lights of the pavilion, where Pomegranate waited for him beside Summerchild's bed.

THIRTY-FOUR.

Shaldis kept herself from saying I thought so out loud, and simply pointed to the line of ruined pillar stumps, barely visible among the tangle of camel thorn and mesquite along the sides of a flat rectangle of land below the hills. Though Jethan had not a mage's night-seeing eyes, he'd been following her in the clear desert starlight for long enough that now, with the waning moon just showing over the hill's rim above them, he nodded and signed to her that he understood.

Logically, if this level ground had been the rear court of a mortuary temple, it would have connected by tunnel to the main temple on the other side of the hill-on which Ahure's house now stood. Shaldis could see where a niche had been carved into the red rock of the hill itself, and though the niche was choked now with the more stubborn varieties of rangeland foliage, she could see the beam holes where a second floor had been.

The entrance to the tunnel was covered with a curtain of interwoven tumbleweeds and, behind that, a door that looked new. When Shaldis probed at the latch with her mind she encountered not only the usual levers and tumblers but also a wire connected to a bell. This she stilled as she moved the mechanisms of the lock.

Interestingly, it was in the niche near the tunnel entrance that she found the slight trace of magic on the stone. It was so faint that it didn't even feel entirely like that which she'd detected near her grandfather's house, but it certainly was similar.

She touched Jethan's hand, signing him to follow.

There were three more b.o.o.by traps in the tunnel, none of them serious, warning bells only. A Crafty-man or woman-could see and avoid them in the dark. The last, on the narrow stairway up to what Shaldis guessed was the house itself, she felt as she pa.s.sed it: a ward sign.

Cattail's.

She heard a bell ring somewhere in the dark at the top of the stair.

"Curse," she said. "Come on, fast. . . ."

She heard footsteps approaching the door at the top of the steps as she dragged Jethan behind her by the hand. Probed with her mind at the bolt and slammed it open, shoved against the door as a man's stride reached it and a man's weight tried to slam it shut against her.

Jethan heaved on the rough planks and thrust them back. After the moonlight and darkness, even the dim orange flicker of a grease lamp in the room beyond seemed bright.

"My grandfather didn't send me!" shouted Shaldis as she slithered past Jethan into the room. "We're here for advice!" She stumbled a step or two, then realized it wasn't Ahure who stood with his shoulder to the door but a wiry little bald man in rough clothes whom she did not know and two young men whom she vaguely recognized as the two men who'd come calling on Melon the harlot at Rosemallow's place in Greasy Yard.

"d.a.m.n, I tried to tell him that, miss." The wiry little man shook his head. "I got my orders from Noyad, 'Do as he says, Ghru'; and teyn is one thing, but, bless it, teyn don't ride horses." He spit. "Mad, he is. Lord Ahure, I mean, though these days Noyad- Was he always mad?"

"It's a little hard to tell." Shaldis looked around the room, a rock-cut cellar from which a further stair mounted the far wall to a door hidden in shadows some fifteen feet above the floor. "Have teyn attacked the house before this?"

"I told him," said the taller man in a disgusted voice. "Like I was sayin' to my brother, Dupy, here, only today." He jerked his thumb at his chubby brother. "Teyn won't attack a house. Not even wildings'll attack a house, 'less they see there's only kids there or something."

"He says they have." Ghru scratched his scarred nose. He was also missing the tips of both ears-a frequent penalty for theft-and had been branded on the hand for manslaughter. "He says they come after him ten feet from the front door one night, and another night tried to break into the place, hammerin' at the doors and the shutters with rocks. And you can see where the wood's fresh splintered, that's for sure. We've had 'em snoop three or four times, since the boys and me came out, and we managed to kill one or two with lucky shots. But attack? Nah. You really Chirak Shaldeth's granddaughter that's the Crafty, like he says?" And he looked past her at Jethan, sizing up the crimson tunic and trousers.

"I am," agreed Shaldis. "Though I'm here to ask advice-" She'd made sure she had some genuine questions to ask, though in fact she had no expectation of getting a word of truth or help out of the Blood Mage. All she really wanted was a look around the house. "What is the quarrel between him and my grandfather, anyway?" she added in the voice of one puzzled and exasperated about a matter of ultimately little moment. She looked from Ghru to the brothers, whom she guessed to be simple and good-natured souls at heart, a bit like Jethan's friends in the guards but not so wellborn. "One of my aunts told me there'd been a shouting match of some kind ten nights ago, but it's a long way from a shouting match to ordering you to kill me."

"By BoSaa's boots, more than a shouting match, missy-lady," Ghru corrected himself. Then he shrugged. "What do you expect, bringin' in outsiders to the tomb-riflin' game? Two men take a fancy to the same bit of glitter and think that gives them claim over the rules of division."

"Rules of division?"

"Of course, rules of division!" Ghru drew himself up proudly. "What you think we are, street brawlers? Smash-and-grab thieves? Tomb riflin's a game that's been goin' forward as long as kings been plantin' their daddies. If there wasn't rules, hard rules, about who gets what, and what happens to them that doesn't like it, we'd all have killed ourselves off inside the first year. They'd all have killed theirselves off," he added. "I only knows this from hearsay, of course."

Yeah, right, thought Shaldis. And I bet you got your ears clipped in a terrible accident at the barber's, too.

"Drupe, Dupy, let's get these folk upstairs and see if his lordship's still awake. Come along, now."

He shifted his lamp to his other hand, and led them wide around the lines of baskets that occupied most of the center of the room, a precaution that would have served well in the cellar's darkness had Shaldis not been able to see perfectly clearly in the dark.

Some baskets, she saw, contained jars of alabaster and onyx of the sort that royalty and n.o.bility had buried with them filled with the highest-quality ointment and wine. Other baskets held jewelry, sorted by size: pendants, earrings, bracelets. The amulets that had been wrapped in the bindings of mummies, to call down curses on those who robbed them.

Only of course, those curses had no power now, any more than the curses written around the doors of the tombs. At one end of the cellar a couple of hampers brimmed over with coils of stiff and friable linen, glinting with the sullen gleam of gold.

"Now, I hope you understand me to say Noyad doesn't buy a single jewel or ounce of gold if he thinks it's from a tomb," Ghru went on with a self-righteous glance at Jethan. "Mind the steps here-we had to fill 'em in with adobe, they was so worn, and it don't hold up so well to traffic. And I'm sure it's just a misunderstandin' that some has accused Noyad of dealin' with robbers, for he'd never do such a thing in his life. But the fact remains that with the city guards pickin' and pryin' into his affairs, and Ahure not bein' able to vouch for every single piece that he trades for, they had to bring your grandpa into it, missy, him bein' proctor of the market and all."

The long stone stairway debouched into a storeroom cut into the living rock of the hill and raftered in pine poles and brush. One wall was built up of adobe: a low door let them through into a tiny chamber, furnished with two solid plank doors, remarkable in so humble a house. In most poor dwellings, especially away from the wood port on the lake, a pantry or a closet like this one would have been equipped with a curtain or a lattice screen.

"As I understand it," Ghru went on in a hushed voice as he guided them through one of the doors to the house's rather bare front hall, "Noyad made your grandpa a gift of a choice piece, to thank him for all his help, one that Ahure wanted to keep for his own. Now me, I could care less about that old stuff." He held the lamp higher and tapped one of the several figures that its light revealed, standing in plastered niches of the adobe wall. "Crude, it is, and who cares if it's two thousand years old? The Durshen had a way with jewels and gold that n.o.body's had since, if you ask me, though I like a lot of the Interregnum pieces. But these? Pish."

Pish indeed, thought Shaldis, politely putting her hands behind her and studying the image. It was crude, with its distorted face and lumpish body, yet the gla.s.s it was molded of was exquisitely colored, pale greens and browns like water, with a chain of trapped bubbles twisting through it. She glanced back at the scar-faced bodyguard, who displayed such a surprising streak of connoisseurship, and said, "This is Zali Dynasty work, isn't it?"

"Supposed to be." Ghru shrugged. "We're gettin' a lot of Zali plunder now. Trash, I call it, and half of it gla.s.s. You, Drupe! See if his lordship's awake. The piece his lordship got into such a lather about with your grandpa was just gla.s.s. One of those gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s they find in the Zali tombs-pretty, I suppose, but nuthin' to make yourself sick angry over, walkin' the floors at night and carryin' on."

"You'd think if Lord Ahure was a mage," said Shaldis, knowing she was rushing things but keeping a wary eye on the taller brother as he disappeared back out the door through which they'd come, "and he wanted something that badly, he'd take steps to get it, wouldn't you?"

"You'd think." Ghru ran a hand over his pink scalp. "I thought he would, myself. And after all his pesterin' and cursin' to Noyad, I was ready for there to be no end of trouble, if he tried anything. You know." And he made twiddling gestures with his fingers, in a layman's imitation of a mage casting a spell. Then he frowned, puzzled and a little pitying. "It's like it took everything out of him, that fight with your grandpa, miss . . . m'lady. I thought we'd have trouble after that. But since that time-and it was just a night or two before that that the boys and I started coming out here-seems like he just crumples up, come nightfall, and falls asleep like a child. Like havin' it took away from him is burnin' him up inside. Noyad's right peeved about it, I can tell you."

"He must be," remarked Jethan sarcastically, turning back from his examination of a beautiful Durshen statue of Darutha G.o.d of Rain that stood in another niche. "Considering it's the custom to-er-meet with the traders from whom he gets all these pieces by night, isn't it?"

"That it is." Ghru winked. "I tell you, other than one night when he went into town on business, it's quiet as tombs out here. But he insists he's in danger from the teyn, so who am I to contradict?

"Who are you, Ghru," whispered a harsh, sibilant voice from the shadows at the far end of the room, "to speak of me and my affairs to anyone, much less to a demon brat in the pay of my enemy?"

Except where niches broke the wall, most of the front chamber of Ahure's house was curtained floor to ceiling in black, which Shaldis had guessed already concealed one or more doorways as well as any number of the scorpions and spiders inseparable from desert living. Thus Ahure's seeming materialization didn't surprise her. As she'd spoken to Ghru she'd walked about two thirds around the perimeter of the room brushing these curtains with her hand-albeit gingerly-and had found no trace of magic, not even Ahure's.

Which didn't mean that he wasn't holding the unknown Raven sister in some kind of thrall. Or wasn't simply paying her, as he'd clearly paid Cattail to come and mark his house with ward signs-and, for that matter, had clearly paid poor Nettleflower, either to steal back his coveted trinket or to let him into the house to steal it himself.

She'd already ascertained what she'd come to the house to learn: namely, whether the unknown Raven sister had worked magic inside his house as well as just outside the connecting tunnel, and if so, how much. But she stood for a moment, shocked at Ahure's appearance. Burning up inside, his bodyguard had said, and Shaldis saw by the lines around the deep-set pale eyes that this was true. He was wasted and haggard, his long hands uncontrollably trembling. Behind her she heard Jethan's swift intaken breath; the Blood Mage had clearly been trying to raise power in the old way, and his shaven scalp, mutilated hands, and scarred cheekbones were crisscrossed with lines of fresh scabs.

Beneath those wounds-and by the smell of old blood and poultices he was cut all over his body under the filthy black robe he wore-lay a horrible palimpsest of older injuries, some self-inflicted, others crude and jagged in a yellow-green mottling of three-week-old bruises.

Shaldis gasped. "Did the teyn attack you, sir?" Somebody certainly had.

"Did the teyn attack you?" mimicked the Blood Mage through his nose. "You know that well enough, witch, for it was you who set them on. Have you come to gloat? To take word back to your grandfather, may the maggots devour his bones."

"It was not me who set them on," said Shaldis, thinking fast, and she executed the deepest and most elaborate salaam she could think of. "Rather, I came to you in the hopes of ending this quarrel, for your curses have brought sickness and ill fortune to my grandfather's house."

"And they will bring worse!" declared Ahure, clearly under the impression that he still did have the power to curse. "He will find-"

"Sir, we are finding it so!" Shaldis had to shout to be heard against the Blood Mage's impa.s.sioned shriek. "I want to end this! Tell me what it is you're looking for and I will see what I can do."

"Don't-you-touch it!" Ahure strode toward her like a monstrous bat, black robes billowing, white face inhuman with rage. He seized Shaldis by the shoulders, shook her like a child shaking a doll. She heard Jethan swear and the clatter and shuffle of a struggle behind her with Drupe and Dupy, even as Ghru darted forward.

"Now, my lord, now, my lord, no call to lay a hand on the young lady!"

"s.l.u.t!" Ahure screamed as Ghru pulled his grip away from Shaldis's arms. Ahure's hands had the strength of a madman's, but like most Blood Mages he'd cut off a number of his own fingers in the raising of his particular style of magic, and his clutch was easy to break. "Witch! Demon! Keep away from it! It is not for the likes of you!"

He twisted in Ghru's grasp, and both Drupe and Dupy released Jethan and hastened to their chief's aid. Jethan caught Shaldis against him, drew her away as the Blood Mage began to spit as well as howl and claw at her with his few remaining hooked and grimy nails.

"You tell that senile cheat that it's mine! Tell him that the evil that has befallen him is nothing to what will happen unless it is returned to me! Tell him-"

The door shut behind the struggling group of guards and Blood Mage. Shaldis stood, shaking a little with shock, in the circle of Jethan's arm. She realized she could have, and probably should have, used a spell of some kind to hurl Ahure back from her but wondered if one would have worked on him, any more than it had worked on poor Gime, who had died howling in Little Hyacinth Lane.

Ahure's screams could be heard through the adobe walls, gradually subsiding into silence. A moment later Ghru slipped out through the door of the little room from which the stair led down to the tunnel.

"d.a.m.n me, miss, I'm sorry." The bodyguard had a bruise on one cheek and claw rakes from Ahure's nails on the other side of his face. Shaldis hoped he'd douse them with the strongest brandy he could find, fast. "He's been bad since that quarrel with your grandpa, but never this bad. I hope you understand-you seem an understandin' kind of girl-lady-that he's not in his right head when he gets so. My boys and me"-he jerked his thumb toward the back room where Drupe and Dupy were no doubt putting the wizard to bed-"we do the best we can, and if you was to put a bad mark on the house, or even on him personal, we'd be the ones would suffer. I doubt he'd notice."

"No, I think you're right." Shaldis stepped forward and laid her hands on Ghru's muscular arm. "In truth, I came out here to see if Ahure had the power to do the harm that's been done to my grandfather, and having seen him, I don't think he has. You say he's been here every night but one since his quarrel with my grandfather. Which was what? Two nights ago?"

Ghru counted back on his fingers. "Night before last it was, miss. Now, I tell a lie, he was in town twice since his little set-to with your grandpa: first time was the last night of the full moon. He came back late that night, and cursing."

The night of Nettleflower's death, thought Shaldis. Presumably, because he'd gone to the alleyway door at the back of the house to meet her, only to find the household in a hubbub over her death.

"Then, yes, he did go in night before last, to meet the boss, Lord Noyad, I should say, and he come home in a foul mood. He'll be fine during the day," the bodyguard went on, "or as fine as ever he is, at any rate-seein' those who come out from the city to have spells or curses, or sometimes goin' out into the hills with . . . er . . . to meet them as trades in old gold." And he gave her a wink at the euphemism. "But he'll get restless with the coming of night, and then as soon as it's dark, it's like he's had a draft of somethin', and he's off to bed, sometimes before the light's out of the sky. Me and the boys stand watch here, to guard him from the teyn he says are after him, but it's a lone and dismal stand, let me tell you."

"These visitors who come," said Shaldis, determined to take advantage of Ghru's eagerness to placate her out of cursing the house. "Who are they?"

"Folk from the city." Ghru shrugged. "Some rich, some not so rich. Noyad don't like it-he says it takes away from the sales of them 'enchanted amulets' he sells-but Lord Ahure just agrees with 'im and sees 'em on the quiet. Myself, I hear tell wizards don't got no power no more-that only Crafty ladies such as yourself can work spells-but there's many and many that don't believe it and will come to them as claim the power still. And I must say, his lordship puts on a good show, with his colored lamps, and them levers he's got behind the curtains. Whether his spells really work, well, the feller who used to watch here with us-Gime was his name, one of Noyad's boys-he said those were poisons Ahure brewed up out of the herbs in his garden. Poisons and healing drafts both. Who's to say the words he lays on 'em don't make 'em stronger to their tasks?"

"Are any of those who come to see him Crafty women themselves?" asked Shaldis.

Ghru considered. "That Cattail from down the Fishmarket's been here once or twice. She's supposed to be a Crafty. The G.o.ds know she talked enough about how she was."

"Any others?"

The spa.r.s.e eyebrows pulled together for a moment; then he shook his head. "If they was, they didn't say so. It might be as some of the nomads was Crafty. They don't come inside, just meets him by the gate or halfway up the path."

"Nomads," said Shaldis thoughtfully.