Still the Ranyhyn refused to travel faster than the Giants could walk. As the storms closed around Linden, constricting her percipience, they inspired a kind of claustrophobia; and she could not resist asking Hyn for haste. But Hyn ignored her. Together the horses maintained a trot that felt as slow as plodding.

Yet they were not tired. Linden could feel the ready power of Hyn’s muscles. And the Ranyhyn did not lack for provender. At irregular intervals, they continued to find patches of sufficient grass for themselves, huddled clumps of aliantha for their riders. When they did so, they did not resume their battered trek until both they and their riders had eaten. Stubbornly they allowed Covenant and the Humbled to run farther and farther ahead.

Did they seek to diminish the likelihood that the company would be caught by a caesure? Linden did not know. Occasionally Narunal or Hynyn trumpeted a warning. At those times, however, she felt nothing except the moil and barrage of rain, the incessant to-and-fro of wind. Falls had apparently vanished from this region. Joan was concentrating her madness elsewhere, or she had exhausted her fury, or she was dead—or Linden was wrong. If the mounts were alert to some other peril, Linden could not detect it. Even when she used the Staff to extend her senses, she recognized no threat except the weather and her own frailty.

What could the great horses fear under these conditions, if they were not endangered by caesures?

Gradually the terrain changed. For a time, there were mounds, and eroded thrusts of rock like worn-out teeth, and drenched ridges. Then the ground became poured sheets of dark stone as smooth as recent lava. Later the stone gave way to a plain so featureless that it seemed to have been pounded flat. Later still, erosion gullies like cracks in the landscape’s flesh complicated the company’s path. Then came more hills arrayed in lines like barricades raised to force anyone advancing from the northwest to turn eastward.

Doubtless the mounts and the Giants could have held to their course. Long millennia had softened the contours of the hills. Shaking their heads, however, and snorting in apparent disgust, the Ranyhyn allowed themselves to be deflected. For the first time, they began to travel more east than southeast.

Toward Foul’s Creche? Linden had no idea.

Late in the afternoon, the storms finally resolved their contention. The winds became a rough blast out of the west: the rains dwindled. Soon the clouds broke open behind the company, letting sunlight touch them for the first time since dawn. Thunderheads scudded along. In a rush, the sky cleared.

But as Linden watched the clouds race away, she saw with a shudder that the revealed sky was not blue. Instead it had acquired a dun color tinged with grey like smoke as if the gales of an immense dust-storm had found untended flames somewhere on the Upper Land and fanned them into wildfires.