The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [175]
“I do agree. Alas, though, I do fear me the answer will come in some hateful way.”
“True spoken. We’ll have to keep an eye on him.”
On the morrow morning the Horsekin army lingered in camp. Since Salamander had seen it with his physical eyes, he could scry it out by using the running water of the stream as a focus and thus spare himself the strain of scrying in the body of light. Once he had a clear image of the camp, he sharpened the image and magnified it until it seemed that he hovered some ten feet above.
There he had a stroke of luck. He had seen in the flesh one of the Horsekin priestesses in Zakh Gral, both before and after that fortress had been destroyed. By following her, he could see as clearly and in as much detail as if he stood among the holy women.
Unfortunately, what he couldn’t do was hear. Everything unfolded in silence, just when he desperately wanted to hear their talk. Some of the priestesses looked as grim as death; others openly wept; all of them milled around their special area of the camp and talked with each other in little groups that formed and broke up like autumn leaves swirling on the surface of a stream. He could guess that they were discussing the two ill-omened appearances of their goddess, but what they might have said about them remained beyond him.
Salamander was on the verge of breaking the vision when a messenger came running from the main army’s camp. He knelt to a woman who wore an elaborate headdress—likely the chief priestess, Salamander decided—and spoke briefly. She nodded, then turned and beckoned to the other women. Together, in an orderly crowd, they followed the messenger out to the empty stretch of grassy ground between the camps.
Four Horsekin men, with cloth-of-gold surcoats over their mail, stood waiting for them. They talked at some length, until the head priestess shook her head no. One of the rakzanir began waving his arms as he spoke. From the way that the head priestess stepped back, Salamander could assume that the rakzan was bellowing. A second officer grabbed his arm and calmed him. The chief priestess turned and stalked away with her women following her. The rakzanir returned to the army, talking among themselves. The rakzan who’d lost his temper earlier kept pounding his fist into the palm of the opposite hand.
With a shake of his head, Salamander broke the vision, then got up and walked over to his brother, who was lounging on the ground in a patch of sunlight among the trees.
“We’ve certainly stirred them up,” Salamander said. “The priestesses and the rakzanir are arguing among themselves.”
“Good.” Rori yawned with a show of fangs. “Are you planning on making things worse?”
“I am, indeed, but I need to get ahead of them on the road.”
“Easily done. Get your gear together.”
When Rori and Salamander took to the air, Salamander looked down to see the army lining up for its day’s march in a somewhat different order than before. First came the fighting men, then directly behind them the cluster of priestesses on their white mules. Servants, carts, and slaves formed an untidy mob at the rear as usual. Rori kept circling as the army moved forward, one rank at a time, until the entire cumbersome parade was at last marching down the valley. When Rori flew off to the south, Salamander looked back and noticed that the ranks of servants had fallen some yards behind the main line of march, as if perhaps they followed even more reluctantly than before.
While the western rank of hills remained steep, the eastern range was beginning to lower and flatten out, ultimately to merge with the downs bordering the Northlands plateau. The army was drawing closer to Cerr Cawnen. Soon they’d reach easy terrain and could march faster. If Salamander was going to disrupt them, he would need to do so that very day. When he spotted another rocky outcrop to