Steven Brust - Jhegaala

I waded over several brooks and streams, one of which showed signs of becoming a river soon: it seemed to be in a terrible hurry, and had a lot of force for being only a foot or so deep and maybe ten feet wide. I didn't much care for that, either.

In spite of the annoyances, I was never in any danger so far as I know (though I'm told Dzur sometimes hunt the forests). I made it through; leave it at that. The trees became lower, sparser, and the grasses taller, with large, jagged boulders intruding on the landscape as if the mountain were encroaching.

"Well, for marching blind, I guess we did all right, Loiosh."

"We sure did, Boss. And only modesty forbids me from saying how we managed."

"Heh.”

An hour or so later we found a road. A real road. I could have danced, if I could dance. It was getting on toward evening, and the Furnace was sinking behind the mountains. The shadows— remarkably sharp, looking almost tangible—were long, and a certain chill was coming into the air on a breeze from behind me.

"That way," said my familiar, indicating down the road to the right. Since the mountains were to the left, I'd have figured that one out on my own, but I didn't say anything. I set out.

After mountain and forest, it was a positive luxury to walk on a road; even a rutted, gouged, untended road like this. My feet thanked me, as did my left elbow, which was no longer being cracked by my sword's pommel when I raised my left leg to climb onto a rock.

For an hour or so, I saw no one and nothing save a lone farmhouse far across a field. The shadows lengthened and Loiosh was silent and my mind wandered.

I thought about Cawti, of course. A few weeks ago, I'd been married. A few weeks before that, happily married; or at least I thought so. Anyone can make a mistake.

But what was odd was how little I was feeling it. It was pleasant walking down the road, and I was in good shape from all the climbing, and the evening wasn't too cold. I knew the whole thing was going to hit me—I mean, I knew it. It was like seeing an outof-control team barreling down on you, and watching it come closer, and knowing it's going to flatten you. Here it comes, yep, I'm about to be either killed or messed up. Any second now. How interesting.

I could even be sort of dispassionate about it. I pondered whether I could convince her to take me back, and, if so, how? I ran through the arguments in my head, and they seemed very persuasive. I suspected they'd be less so when 1 actually tried them on her. And, even if she was convinced, I'd still have to deal with her politics, which is what had gotten between us in the first place.

And there was still the big problem, which was that circumstances had conspired to force me to save her. I don't know if I could have forgiven her if she had saved me; I didn't see how she could forgive me for saving her. It's an ugly burden. Eventually, I was going to have to try to overcome it.

And in the meantime, I was heading in the opposite direction, while somewhere behind there were people who wanted to get rich by putting the shine on me.

No, it didn't look good.

How interesting.

"We getting close to the water, Loiosh?"

"Wind shifted, Boss. I don't know.”

“All right:”

I should mention that nothing so far was at all familiar from my previous journey to Fenario, but that had been years before, and I wasn't paying all that much attention to my surroundings then.

With an abruptness that caught me by surprise, it was, dark—I mean completely dark. There were small pinpoints of light in the sky, but they provided no illumination. Maybe they should have; I was told by a human physicker once that I had poor night vision. I could have had it corrected, but the process is painful, and a spell to compensate is absurdly easy. Except, of course, when you are unable to cast the simplest of spells for fear of removing the protections that keep the bad guys from finding you. So for now, little points of light or no, I was effectively blind. I wondered if failing to have that fixed when I could, would end up being what did me in. Come to think of it, I still wonder.

I stepped a few paces off the road, and, having no better idea, took off my pack, spread out my blanket, and lay down. Loiosh and Rocza, I knew, would take care of any annoying beasts, and wake me if there were any dangerous ones. It wasn't until I was prone that I became aware of the sound of night insects all around me. I wondered if they were the sort that bit; then sleep took me.

Evidently they weren't the sort that bit.

I'd been walking about two hours the next day before I passed a young man driving a wagon filled with hay. I hailed him, and he stopped the horse—one of the biggest I'd ever seen—and greeted me. I had the impression he was a bit disconcerted by the jhereg on my shoulders, but was too polite to say anything.

"Which way to Burz?" I asked him.

He pointed the way I was going. "Over the bridge," he said, “in a while the road will fork, and there's a sign. You'll likely smell it after that."

"Good enough," I told him, and gave him a couple of copper pennies. He tapped his forehead, which I took as a gesture of thanks, and continued, on his way.

I suddenly felt as if I was too relaxed, not paying enough attention, and resolved to stay a little more on my guard. Then it hit me that I had now made that resolution around a dozen times since coming down out of the mountains.

"I'm feeling safe, Loiosh. As if I'm out of danger. I can't decide if I should trust that feeling.”

"I'm not sure, Boss, but I've been feeling the same way."

"Like we're out of their reach?"

"Yeah."

"Well, we probably are, but let's not trust it too much."

I found the bridge—it spanned a stream maybe twenty feet wide—and went "a while," which turned out to be most of the rest of the day. Once over the bridge, the road abruptly improved, showing signs of regular maintenance. I stopped a couple of times to eat bread, cheese, and sausage I'd gotten in Saestara (the village, not the mountain). The bread was getting stale, but it was still better than the hardtack. As I walked, I noticed that the forest, which I had thought was left behind me, seemed to be returning on my right; or maybe it was a different forest. I ought to have tried to find a map, I suppose, but I'm told they are hard to come by and rarely reliable.

Over the next several hours, the forest seemed to come closer, but avoided the road (I know, the road was dug around the forest, but I'm telling you how it looked, all right?). Eventually, I found the fork, and there was a sign just as there was supposed to be, on a stout wooden pole.

I followed it, and the road bent closer to the forest. It took us over low hills, and in places there were crops I didn't recognize in neat rows. More farmhouses appeared. The outbuildings were in good shape, and well painted. I tried not to look down on the locals for building everything out of wood; I knew that just came from living among Dragaerans. From an unbiased viewpoint, this seemed to be a more prosperous area than similar regions near Adrilankha. I wondered what Cawti would say if I made that observation to her.

The shadows lengthened, as the Furnace prepared to vanish behind the mountains, still looming up behind me. Presently, I became aware of a low rumble to my right, and I saw that the road had been joined by a fairly respectable river.

The Furnace plunged below the mountains, and it became significantly darker; still somewhat lit by the glow behind me, but—I was going to have to get used to how much more quickly it became dark, and how very much darker it was here. It had never occurred to me that the permanent overcast above the Empire might somehow provide a bit of ambient light, but apparently it does. I went another mile or so, and realized sadly that I was probably going to have to spend another night on the road.