“So,” I said to the warriors, “they would not wait. Let’s make on and surprise them. They will piss blood when they see us. But there’s half a day’s riding yet.”

The men growled agreement, turning their mounts along the track.

I set a hot pace for them on my new horse, using its starry spurs, and dragging my silver-faced slave by her bridle.

4

The sun was long down, the night moonless and black, when we picked over a narrow pass between the craggy, pine-bearded heights, and the spoons of the camping valleys appeared below, falling away into the mountains, and scattered for miles with several thousand yellow coals of fires.

The warriors were already breaking into bands, making for their own krarls and their own revelations. Already the bond was snapped that had held the twenty-three as one, and their shout for me was only so much frosty breath left behind. I saw then I should have bound them harder to me, that it might have profited me to do so. They had been ripe for swearing blood-brotherhood; they might have followed me after, strength at my back. It was too late now, the time of action blown away, ridden off over the slopes with them. Even Ettook’s five men still with me were champing to get home, the dangerous adventure just a story nagging to be told. I had lost my chance.

It was not so much slovenliness that had made me miss it, either, but the arrogance that had come on me when I entered the fortress, and which had never ebbed from my veins. And she had made it worse, my goddess-slave. Her razor contempt had sharpened mine. I saw them all through her eyes, as she was seeing me, a herd not worth the driving.

As I idled there, the impact of the other grim farce smote me. For not frequently do the dead sit among the mourners at their own burying.

To Ettook’s warriors I said, “Once we are over a ridge or two, maybe we should go quietly. It will be pleasant to see how we are missed, and by whom.”

And they showed their teeth, tasting the flavor of it, though their loyalty to me was gone.

So we went, delicate as mice, into Ettook’s krarl.

As I got closer, I could hear plain enough what they were at.

There was a humming and howling, and sometimes a screaming like beasts in a trap. They had lost the most of any krarl: seven dead from the cannon, five stolen or dead, and one of those the chief’s heir. They could not choose but hold a death-watch tonight, the fourth night, as the custom was.

I left Ettook’s braves to their own plots, and tethered my city horses on the outskirts of the camp. Whatever else, I did not think the warriors would come back and steal them. Demizdor, however, I kept with me, still mounted.

They had cleared a great square below, I could see it from the pines, and I came down following the trees like a shadow, to watch the fun.