Stark said to Gerd, Run. Send fear to the servants if they fight. Hold them all until I come.
Gerd called his pack together. They fled away, nine pale shadows. They bayed, and the terrible voices rang down the wind. The people of Gelmar's party heard and faltered in their going.
Stark handed his lead-reins to Ashton and flogged his beast into a lumbering gallop.
A spume of sand had begun to blow from the tops of the dunes. The wind was settling into the northeast quadrant. Stark lost the voices of the hounds. For a time he lost sight of the party, because of a dusty thickness in the lower air that came down like a curtain on the flat below the ridge. When he saw them again, blurred shapes of men and animals rubbed with a dark thumb on an ocher canvas, they were standing perfectly still. Only the hounds moved, circling.
Stark rode up to the group. The face he was looking for was not the first one he saw. That was Gelmar's. The Chief Wandsman of Skeg sat his mount a little apart from the others, as though perhaps he had turned to intercept the hounds. The strain of the journey showed on him and on the three other Wandsmen who accompanied him. Stark knew them all by sight but only one by name—that was Vasth, who had wrapped his ruined face in a scarf against the cold. Halk had struck him down at Irnan, on that day when the city rose and killed its Wandsmen. Vasth was apparently the only survivor. His remaining eye peered at Stark, a vicious glitter between the wrappings.
Gelmar had changed considerably since Stark first met him, tall and lordly in his red robe, secure in his unquestioned authority, ordering the mob at Skeg. The Wandsman had taken his initial shock that night, when Stark laid violent hands on his sacred person and made it clear to him that he could die as easily as any other man. He had received further shocks, all connected with Stark. Now he looked at the Earthman, not as would a superior being with power unlimited, but as a tired man, one who was exasperated, thwarted and quite humanly angry—seeing another defeat, but not beaten. Gelmar was not ever going to be beaten as long as he could breathe.
Gerd ranged himself at Stark's side. Wandsmen angry we follow N'Chaka.
Angry with N'Chaka. Not you.
Gerd whined. Never angry at Flay.
Flay is dead. Ferdias say follow me, for now.
Gerd subsided, unsatisfied.
Gelmar smiled briefly, having understood Gerd's side of the exchange. "You'll have difficulty holding them. They're not equipped to serve two masters."
"Would you care to put it to the test now?"
Gelmar shook his head. "No more than Ferdias did."
The Yur, ten or eleven of them scattered along the line, were standing quiet. Some were on foot, and they seemed less tired than the mounted Wandsmen. But they were bred for strength. They stared at the hounds with their blank bright eyes, and Stark thought they were puzzled rather than afraid. They knew what had happened at the Citadel, but they hadn't seen it. They were armed with bows and light lances, swords and daggers at their belts.
"The servants," Stark said, "will lay down their arms, very carefully. If any hostile move is made, the hounds will kill."
"Would you leave us at the mercy of the Runners?" cried one of the lesser Wandsmen.
"That concerns me not at all," said Stark. "You have a dagger at your own waist. Discard it." He motioned to Gelmar. "Give the order."
"The hounds will not harm us," said Vasth. His voice came muffled through the scarf.
Gelmar said with cold impatience. "There is a sandstorm blowing. We need the Yur." To Stark he said, "The Runners come with the storms, living where other creatures would die. They come in strength, devouring everything in their path."
"So I have heard," said Stark. "Give the order."
Gelmar gave the order. The Yur dropped their weapons into the blowing sand, Gelmar loosened his own belt.
Stark kept his eyes on Vasth.
Gerd said, Wandsman throw knife, kill N'Chaka.
I know. Touch him, Gerd.
Not hurt Wandsman.
No hurt. Touch.
Gerd's baleful gaze turned to the Wandsman. Vasth was stricken with a sudden trembling. He made a strangled sound and let the dagger fall.
"Stand quiet now," said Stark, and called. "Gerrith!"
There was a covered litter slung between two animals. She came from beside it, shaking back the fur hood that covered her head. The wind picked up thick strands of hair the color of warm bronze. She smiled and spoke his name, and her eyes were like sunlight.
"Come here by me," he said.
She reined her beast to the side away from Gerd. Her face had been thinned by the long journeying, all the way from Irnan, across the Barrens and through the haunted darklands to the Citadel. The fine bones were clear under honed flesh and taut skin colored by the winds of Skaith to a darker bronze than her hair. Proud and splendid Gerrith. Stark was shaken by a stabbing warmth.
"I knew you were coming, Stark," she said. "I knew the Citadel had fallen, long before Ferdias' messenger reached us. But we must go on now, quickly."
"I have no mind to stay." The wind had strengthened, driving the sand. The weapons were already half-buried. The world had become much smaller. The twilight had deepened so that even the faces of the Wandsmen and the Yur were indistinct. "Is Halk living?"
"Barely. He must have rest."
Ashton appeared dimly out of the murk with the led beasts. "Let them go, Simon," Stark said. "Gerrith, can you two handle the litter?"
They went at once and took the places of the two servants who had been leading the animals. Then they rejoined Stark.
"Gelmar. Tell your people to move."
The cavalcade moved, reluctantly, thinking of weapons left behind. Riders hunched in saddles, covered faces from stinging sand. Little drifts piled on Halk's litter.
They passed a marker, and Stark was squinting ahead trying to see the next one when Gerd said:
Humans. There.
Stark rode closer to Gelmar. "What humans? Hooded Men? The wayhouse?"
Gelmar nodded.
They went on.
When Stark reckoned they were far enough away from the buried weapons to make impractical any attempt to recover them, he reached out and caught Gelmar's bridle.
"We leave you here. Follow too closely and your servants die."
Kill Yur? Gerd asked hopefully.
Not unless I tell you.
"After you have secured the wayhouse," Gelmar said, "what then?"
"He will leave us to die in the sand," said Vasth "May Old Sun shrivel the men from the stars!"
The cavalcade had halted, bunching together behind Gelmar.
"I would prefer to show you the same mercy you have shown us," said Stark. "But if you make it to the wayhouse, I'll not deny you shelter."
Gelmar smiled. "You could not. The hounds would force you to let us in."
"I know," said Stark. "Otherwise I might be less generous."
He rode away from the party, with Ashton and Gerrith and the litter.
Lead us to humans, he said to Gerd, knowing that Gelmar would be following the same mental beacon. They could forget about the markers.
They plunged on, across whaleback dunes that blurred and shifted shape beneath them. The litter swayed and jolted. Stark was sorry for Halk, but there was no help for it. The desert cried out in torment, a great hissing gritty wail rose and circled and fell away again to a deep moaning.
Then, abruptly, the wind dropped. The lower air cleared in the sudden stillness. Old Sun shone raggedly above. From the top of a ridge they saw the wayhouse half a mile or so ahead, a thick low structure of stone with a series of drift-walls about it to keep the desert out.
Ashton pointed away and said, "God Almighty."
A tsunami, a tidal wave of sand, rushed toward them out of the northeast. It filled the whole horizon. Its crest of dusty foam curled halfway up the sky. Below, it was a brightish ocher shading down through dirty reds and browns to a boiling darkness at the bottom that was almost black.
Stark saw a scudding of many shapes that ran fleetly before the edges of that blackness.
For the second time Gerd said, Things come.
Gelmar's party appeared on the back trail, clear in the placid air. They paused and looked northeastward, then came on again at a run.
Stark lashed the beasts forward. The wave had a voice, a roaring almost too deep for the human ear to register. The heart felt it, and the marrow of the bones, and the spasming gut. Even the animals forgot their weariness.
All at once Gerd spoke urgently in Stark's mind. Wandsman says come, N'Chaka. Come now or things kill.
He turned with the pack and raced away down the back trail, answering Gelmar's call.