JOSS WHISTLED SCAR in at dawn. The enemy camp was in turmoil, men arming, rafts abandoned. It looked as if they were readying to march upstream to Hammering Ford. He got high enough to scan several mey down the road, and he did suck in air, then, as Scar chirped interrogatively, feeling the shocked tightening of Joss’s shoulders.

“The hells!”

He hadn’t thought the strike force could really ride that far, that fast, but cursed if they hadn’t managed it: about three hundred riders, a mix of Qin and local men who’d been training with them. Joss signaled with his flags.

Eagles closed in, thirty strong. Below, the strike force approached at a ground-devouring pace, pounding up the road with their remounts left behind for the final dash. Before the enemy could break north into the forest, the eagles flew low and dropped oil of naya in their path, driving them back toward the road. In confusion, they fled. The unluckiest caught a scrap of the unquenchable fire on their bodies. Those who ran screaming into the water still burned.

In the direction of the road, the clash of arms rang with ugly vigor, the shouts and screams of a battle engaged. But Joss’s attention was caught by a throng clamoring after the cloaked man, who was riding away into the forest. He was abandoning his own troops. Reaching open space, the horse opened its wings and flew.

“There, Scar!” But the eagle did not fix his keen eyes on the other beast. Even Joss found himself losing track of the horse’s flight, as if it literally possessed less substance in the air than on the ground, fading like mist under sun.

He wasn’t going to lose the cursed Guardian after all this!

He yanked ruthlessly on the jesses, and at first Scar swept a full circle and only reluctantly pulled in the direction Joss directed him. There! A wink of light stung the reeve’s eye. He followed sparks until he flew over a narrow ridge overlooking the booming ford. He tugged on the jesses and, sluggishly, Scar obeyed, gliding down until they skimmed low over the rock and, with a final tug on the jesses, landed at one end.

He’d seen Guardian altars as a young man, when he had defied the holiest law and, after the first transgression on Ammadit’s Tit, gone looking for other altars, trying to understand why the Guardians were lost. Why Marit had died.

Now he had followed a man who by any measure could be identified as a Guardian. Yet he saw neither horse nor man on the ridge, only a shimmering of light above a glimmering pattern etched into the rock. Was that a shadow of horse pacing to the center of the labyrinth? Did a ghostly figure walk the maze, no more substantial than fog rising off the ground at dawn?