L. Modesitt - Mage-Guard of Hamor

"Won't some of them still escape that way?" Rahl asked.

"Of course, some will, but most of the holdings and crops will be intact. The holders will have script and coins they can use to buy seed. They'll grouse about why two brothers had to fight when both had all they needed, but it won't affect them nearly so much, and the Emperor doesn't have to keep fighting in his own lands."

"Doesn't Golyat see that?"

"I'm sure he does. He doesn't have much choice. He can't feed his forces back here, not and hold them together, and he can't maintain a large enough army to fight off the Emperor if he leaves the coast. He's wagering that the Emperor and the High Command will botch things up enough that there's a standoff. If he can do that, he becomes outright ruler of Merowey, and he's still got a claim on the throne in Cigoerne. If that happens, he'd get support from Fairhaven, Austra, and maybe even Sarronnyn. Recluce wouldn't be displeased, either, I'd wager."

If that occurred, from what little Rahl had seen in Cigoerne, he suspected that Mythalt would not remain emperor all that long. "If he does that, things could get interesting in Cigoerne."

"That they could. Very interesting."

Rahl hadn't even considered that if the Emperor did not lose, but simply failed to win-to crush Golyat thoroughly-he might end up losing more than Merowey. But if matters were that important, why had Taryl sent him with Third Company? It might be just as Taryl had told him, but Rahl had learned that very little was just what was explained. Rahl could think of a number of possible additional reasons, but he didn't know. Again, he wished people would explain fully, and not just what they thought one should know. While he trusted Taryl far more than he had any of the magisters in Recluce, he still disliked being kept in the dark.

"A man could go mad," Drakeyt went on, "trying to guess all that might happen, and a mad captain doesn't do anyone much good. I imagine it would be worse for a mage-guard." He paused, then grinned. "Not that some mage-guards might not be mad anyway."

Rahl merely grinned back. Drakeyt was far better company than all too many mages and mage-guards he'd encountered.

The road began to climb as it wound out of another long and twisty valley, but it was close to noon when they finally reached a rise in the road-almost a pass between a long line of hills that looked to run from the southeast to the northwest. The summit of the crag to the north was at least five hundred cubits above the road, and slightly farther to the west and downhill, a stream splashed down in a thin waterfall. All morning they had seen not a single wagon on the road and but a handful of holders heading into Koldyrk.

He surveyed the land spreading out to the west in the valley ahead. Beyond where the road began to level out in a wider valley, on the south side, a low meadow surrounded by hardwoods stretched for several kays. "I don't see anything grazing down there in that meadow."

"You won't. The chaetyl and black heather won't support cattle or sheep. Mostly, when we get closer to Dawhut, you'll see them harvesting peat and chaetyl from the bog meadows. They use them in brewing Vyrna. This is too far out, and I'd wager there are better bog meadows closer."

"You'd wager? You don't know?" bantered Rahl.

"I know that if someone could make golds from harvesting, that bog meadow would have women and children cutting the turf, and wagons would be headed down to the distilleries around Dawhut."

"Bog meadow? Does it rain that much here?"

Drakeyt shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I'd guess it rains in winter and spring here. It's not raining now, and it wasn't raining in late summer, and you don't get all these tall trees without rain."

Rahl looked to the north and the heavy clouds gathering there. He had the feeling that they'd be experiencing those winter rains all too soon. Not for the first time, he wished he knew more about the geography of Merowey than what he had learned from the few maps he had seen.

By midafternoon on fourday, Rahl could definitely see the difference in the terrain. Instead of covering almost all the ground, the forest was much more scattered and mainly on the higher areas of the hills-except for the expanses of rocky areas-and they had passed bog meadows, swamps, and some small lakes. Some of the bog meadows had been partly harvested, but not recently.

They had lost another day, because the clouds that had been gathering had descended and pummeled them all through threeday. The road might have been clay-surfaced, but it had to have been built with sand and gravel beneath, because while it was soft on fourday, it was not extraordinarily muddy-just bad enough for Rahl's boots and lower trousers to become mud-caked.

For all of the patrols and scouts sent out, none had seen tracks near the main road, which wound and twisted around hills more than it had closer to Kysha. The older road that the rebel cannoneers had used swung much farther north, and, if the maps were correct, was more than thirty kays away at the nearest point to the route Third Company traveled. The holders in the scattered steads they had passed had seen almost no travelers at all in recent eightdays, and no one who might have been a rebel.

As Rahl rode around a long curve that followed the base of a rocky hillside that held only brush and scattered trees, he could see an expanse of rushes and cattails on the right side of the road extending for at least a kay to the west and north.

"Do you think we should have sent a patrol on the old road?" Rahl asked.

"With the two roads that far apart? What's the point? Our forces are taking this road, and this is the one we need to scout. Besides, we'd have to split our forces before we knew where the rebels might be."

Farther ahead, Rahl could see the glint of gray-blue water-a lake of some sort. On the left side, a long ridge with scattered trees climbed gradually into a high hill, largely forested, on which he could see outcroppings of dark gray rock. He had the feeling that the road swung more to the north between the lake and the rocky hill. "I suppose you're right. If there were a road, it would still take close to two days to get from the nearest point on the old road to here, and we haven't seen any lanes or roads heading north." There had been more than a few branching off to the south over the past two days, but the handful to the north had only gone a kay or less, basically to logging camps or forest steads.

"They won't mount an attack from the old road, not from so far away and from over those hills and rocks." Drakeyt pointed to the line of rocky crags to the north. "Certainly not this far away from the coast."

Rahl tended to agree with the older captain, but then, he wouldn't have expected a cannon attack on the Fyrador, either.

After they had ridden another kay or so, with the marsh to the right and downhill from the road widening every cubit they traveled, Rahl could see that the road turned almost due north to circle around the rocky hill more than a kay ahead. In fact, the road seemed to emerge from the marshy reeds and separate the hill from the lake. The road had actually been cut out of the hillside. For a moment, Rahl wondered why, until he looked north once again and realized that the middle of the lake extended all the way to an even rockier set of hills a half kay or more away. Digging the roadbed out of the side of the base of the hill ahead had probably been easier than it would have been to construct a road in the rugged terrain to the south or along the base of the rocky crags that rimmed the lake on the north. Equally important, a level road alongside a lake was easier on wagons and mounts than a route through the surrounding hills.

"Good thing it's cold," observed Drakeyt. "We'd get eaten alive by red flies in the summer."