Berit pointed towards the west where the sunset was no more than a lighter shade of grey in the rainy sky. In the centre of that lighter spot hovered an amorphous cloud of inky black. ‘It’s moving the wrong way, Sir Sparhawk,’ Berit said. ‘All the other clouds are moving west. That one’s coming east, right towards us. It looks sort of like the cloud those dawn-men were hiding in, doesn’t it? The one that’s been following us?’

Sparhawk’s heart sank. ‘It does indeed, Berit. Sephrenia!’ he called.

She rode back to join them.

‘It’s there again,’ Sparhawk told her, pointing.

‘So I see. You didn’t expect it to just go away, did you, Sparhawk?’

‘I was hoping. Can we do anything?’

‘No.’

He squared his shoulders. ‘We keep going then,’ he said.

The steep ravine wound up through the rock, and they followed it slowly as evening began to descend. Then they rounded a sharp bend in the ancient course and saw a rockslide, which was not a slide strictly speaking, but rather a collapsed wall – a place where the south face of the gap had broken free and fallen into the ravine to apparently block it entirely.

‘That’s fairly intimidating,’ Bevier observed. ‘I hope Kring gave you good directions, Sparhawk.’

‘We’re supposed to bear to the left here,’ Sparhawk told them. ‘We’ll find a clump of limbs and logs and brush on the downhill side of the rockfall right up against the north wall of the ravine. When we pull those out of the way, we’ll find a passageway leading under the slide. The Peloi use it when they ride back into Zemoch looking for ears.’

Kalten wiped his face. ‘Let’s go and look,’ he said.

The pile of broken-off trees and tangled brush looked quite natural in the rapidly fading light, and it appeared to be no more than one of those random accumulations of driftwood and debris which wash down every ravine during the spring run-off. Talen dismounted, climbed up a steeply slanted log and peered into a dark gap in the tangle. ‘Hello,’ he shouted into the opening. The sound of his voice returned as a hollow echo.

‘Let us know if someone answers,’ Tynian called to him.

‘This is it, Sparhawk,’ the boy said. ‘There’s a large open space behind this pile.’

‘We may as well get to work then,’ Ulath suggested. He looked up at the rainy, darkening sky. ‘We might want to give some thought to spending the night in there,’ he added. ‘It’s out of the weather, and it’s getting dark anyway.’

They fashioned yokes from pieces of driftwood and used the packhorses to pull aside the pile of logs and brush. The mouth of the passageway was triangular, since the outward side leaned against the north face of the ravine. The passage was narrow and smelled musty.