Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(82)

He left his horse with the others and went exploring.

Ielian found him staring down at a mostly dry creek bed.

"They're still trying to decide which way to ride," Ielian said. "The maps disagree."

Rufort grunted. "What do you see when you look here?" he asked.

"Rocks and mud," Ielian said cautiously, in a manner of a man who'd been the butt of too many jokes. Being a Passerine made you wary after a while.

"I don't want to move, or I might lose this perspective," Rufort said. "Would you go get..." Whom? Tier? Toarsen or Kissel? "Lehr. Would you get Lehr for me?"

Ielian nodded and ran back the way he'd come. The others weren't far, so it didn't take him long to come back with Lehr.

"What is it?" Lehr asked.

"What do you see?" Rufort asked again, nodding at the creek bed.

Lehr looked, and when he crouched, Rufort knew he was right.

"You see it, too?" he asked.

Lehr nodded, stood up, and picked his way down the bank and stood in a dry part of the creek bed, looking first one way, then the other. He reached into the sluggishly flowing water and came up with a large, squarish rock, which he carried back to Rufort.

"Good eyes," Lehr said.

"What is it?" Ielian peered at the rock.

"A cobble," said Rufort, patting Ielian on the back. "A cobble put in a road to keep it from getting muddy. Streams meander, Ielian, my city-bred friend, but this one runs straight as an arrow. Straight as a road."

Lehr grinned, "Rufort's found the road to Colossae."

Rinnie was right, it did rain. For the next four days water drizzled from the skies as if it were spring rather than late summer.

"There's too much water to keep it from raining, Mother," she told Seraph. "And the storm is going the same direction we are. It's better for it to fall now when it can do it gently, than if I hold it off, and we get flooded."

Everything they owned was wet or damp by the second day. Since they had been heading more north than east since they left Shadow's Fall, Seraph figured that they would be fortunate if they didn't run into more snow before they found Colossae.

In some places, Rufort's road had become so overgrown it was impossible to tell roadbed from undisturbed forest floor, as it disappeared under years of soil and reappeared a half mile later. Following the old road was made harder when the forest thickened until it was difficult to see more than a hundred yards in any direction.

In the early afternoon of the fourth day of rain, Jes, who had taken Gura ahead to check out the trail, came loping back from his explorations.

"River ahead," he said. "Road goes across."

"We can't get any wetter," said Phoran, with a grin. "I just hope it's shallower than the last river we crossed. I'd hate to float away when we've come so far."

Seraph looked closely at Jes, who was even wetter than most of them from the waist downward. The dog panting happily at his feet was soaked through. "Did you try to cross it, Jes?"

He nodded. "It's fast," he said. "Not too deep for the horses, though."

"We could have sent one of the horses across," complained Hennea. "You don't have any more dry clothes."

Seraph, who had been about to make the same complaint, closed her mouth.

Jes looked down at himself and shook his head. "It's only water, Hennea. We are all wet."

"Wait until you're chafed in all the wrong places from wearing wet clothes," Hennea said. Then, "I'll try and dry out some things tonight when it isn't raining."

Seraph smiled to herself.

As Jes promised, the road took them to the edge of a river, where the bank led gently down into the water. Upstream and downstream, where mountains arose on either side, the river was narrow and swift, but here it spread out to twice its normal width.

"They must have had a bridge here," said Tier, riding beside Seraph. "In the spring you wouldn't have been able to ford it at all. I'd not want to try and take a wagon across here even now."

"It feels as though no one has ever been here before," said Ielian, just behind them.

"I feel it, too," Seraph agreed. "Even the things that are man-made - the road and such - feel as if they've been around so long that they've been cleaned of human touch."

"We'll find a good flat area to camp," Tier told Seraph, when Jes, who had waited until everyone else had safely crossed, arrived dripping and smiling. Tier started up the rise of land that edged the river, still talking. "If Rinnie can put a hold on the rain for a few hours, we'll rig something to hang up clothes around a fire..." His voice trailed off, and he stopped his horse.

Seraph stopped her horse beside him and looked down into the valley stretched below them. It was a sight worthy of a Bard's silence.

Colossae.

Chapter 13

If the trip had taught Hennea anything, it was the power of time. Five centuries was enough to bury Shadow's Fall, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, had died - she'd forgotten which. She'd seen that a thousand years was enough to hide a road built to last through the ages by mages more powerful than the world had seen since before the dawn of the Empire. It was time enough to reduce a great city to rubble.