Occasionally—when they crested a hill or rode along a ridgeline—he caught a glimpse of the entire Urghul strength. Each time, the sight of it staggered him like a fist to the face. The Eyrie trainers had described tribes of fifty or a hundred, little more than extended families, really, nothing like the group in which he rode. There must have been tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, the herd of horses stretching out over the steppe as far as he could see. There was no column, no order of march, just a pounding, thundering mass of horseflesh and riders flowing over the hills like a shifting blanket. No one set up tents, not anymore—the Urghul were in too much of a rush—and some nights, when Valyn could see out over the black hills, he felt as though he were adrift on the night sea, that each of the campfires was a star reflected in the chilly water, that, bound hand and foot as he was, he might sink beneath the surface and drown.

He tried to gauge numbers, to count fires or horses, but there was no way to keep track. Not that it mattered. Even when he was lashed to the horse’s back, even when he could see nothing but clods of dirt, sweaty flanks, and streaming tails, he could hear the sound clearly enough, a thunder louder and deeper than thunder, the very ground trembling with the Urghul passage. It was not a taamu that he rode with, not a tribe, but a whole people.

Old Fleck back on the Islands had insisted that the Urghul could manage fifty miles a day, riding hard. The figure had always struck Valyn as inflated, but he was starting to understand how it could be possible. The riders ate on their horses, pissed from their horses, slipped a knee through the crude girths and slept on their horses when necessary, yellow-white hair streaming behind them. Valyn had even seen some of the younger taabe and ksaabe leaping from the back of one cantering beast to another, as though the ground itself were anathema. At one point he caught sight of an enormous herd of bison darkening the plains to the north. The nearest beasts swung their stupid, noble heads ponderously toward the passing horses, and a few score riders peeled off, lances held high, voices eager in the morning air. The rest of the mass continued west, hammering relentlessly across the steppe.