But Mhornym and Naybahn set a rolling pace that the destrier could match without exhausting itself quickly. In spite of his impatience, Covenant tried to tell himself that twenty leagues was trivial for the Ranyhyn—and possible for his mount. Yet his doubts weighed on him; and the gait of the horses felt as sluggish as lead.

Gradually dawn spread out of the east, muted and ruddy, like a forecast of storms. As the sky grew brighter, it took on an ashen hue, the ominous grey of smoke from distant wildfires. For a while as the sun crested the horizon, pale streaks of a more welcome blue showed through the pall. But they were soon occluded, and the whole firmament of the heavens became a sealed lid the color of hammered iron, uneven and depthless.

“This bodes ill, ur-Lord,” Clyme remarked unnecessarily. “The natural currents of sky and wind and weather are disrupted. They foretell the onset of some great violation.”

Instead of responding, Covenant dug in his pockets for treasure-berry seeds. As he and his companions rode, he scattered seeds two or three at a time, sowing the grassland with aliantha like a gesture of defiance. And with every toss, he murmured to the Despiser, Come on. Try me. Whatever happens, you aren’t going to like it.

In this region between the Shattered Hills and the Sunbirth Sea, turf filled the south for several leagues, interrupted only by occasional fissures in the cliff, chewed scallops of erosion, barren stretches where sheets of stone denied incursion. Provender for the horses was plentiful. Water was not.

But as the sun crossed midmorning, the jagged jumble of the Hills crowded closer. Grasses grew more sparsely as the expanse of fertile soil dwindled. The shape of the terrain pushed the riders more and more toward the rim of the precipice.

By some fortuitous quirk of orogeny, however, freshwater springs became easier to find. The same harsh forces which had raised the twists and ridges of the Shattered Hills had also webbed the underlying gutrock with flaws. There ramified splits and gaps had formed the ancient habitations of the jheherrin. The same breaks had supplied the Despiser’s armies with lines of march beneath the Hills. And they had tapped sources of water as old as the world. In hollows like denuded swales, or cracks so thin that they were barely visible, or crude basins as unexpected as fonts, springs bubbled forth. The Ranyhyn and the destrier and their riders could at least quench their thirst. Then the horses cantered on, heading more southeastward now than south, and probing for a path across the increasingly obstructed landscape.

Covenant suspected that they were beginning to curve toward the long promontory which had once held Foul’s Creche; and he still had no idea what he would do if or when he located Joan.