Their flight was not mindless however. Vulkan's course angled to the road, where the new snow had been heavily tracked by Chithqosz and his escort. Within the forest edge, Vulkan stopped, and they looked back. Two figures were trotting to a point beneath Varia's balcony, where they stood as if studying the ground. Looking at tracks, Macurdy told himself.

Vulkan started down the road again at a brisk trot. Macurdy put a hand in his coat pocket. The crystal was noticeably warm. It hadn't been when he took it.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

‹Hopefully where you can destroy the crystal. You will have to tell me.›

"What about Varia?"

‹Your suicide will not benefit her.›

Macurdy's fingertips felt the crystal's glassy surface. Put it on a rock, he told himself, and hit it with another. But he hadn't seen a stone pile or boulder since the day before. Though he didn't know it, the locale was part of a postglacial lacustrine plain. The only stones were those brought in for construction.

"How much did you see or hear while I was inside there?" he asked.

‹Much of it.›

"I suppose taking the crystal caused the alarm."

‹Correct.›

And the crystal contained some of Kurqosz's essence-his and all his circle's, woven together by who knew what spells. With Chithqosz and his circle tied in. Macurdy was glad now for the hours spent in the Cloister library.

"When Kurqosz left earlier, where did he go? Or didn't he?"

‹He left the house with his circle. They went to the center of the clearing, where a pyre had been piled, and lit it. Perhaps you saw it.› Macurdy shook his head. ‹Then they sensed something amiss at the manor, and abandoned whatever they'd started to do.›

Macurdy put a hand in his jacket pocket. The crystal was distinctly warmer. "They're gaining on us," he said.

‹Seemingly.› Vulkan speeded his trot a bit.

Before long they saw a solitary horse ahead, coming toward them with a hithik rider. A courier, apparently. "Stop," Macurdy murmured. "I'm going to steal a horse."

Vulkan stepped off the road and stopped. Macurdy slid from his back, willed his own cloak off, and stood waiting, a powerful figure dressed as a rakutu, with a hand raised in command. The horseman stopped, and Macurdy walked up to him. "Get down," he said roughly in Hithmearcisc. Hoping the order was too brief for his accent to be conspicuous.

With a worried expression, the soldier dismounted, letting the reins hang so the horse would stand. Macurdy stepped up to him and peered intently into his face. Then, as if to see the courier's features more clearly, he removed the man's thick winter cap-and slammed him hard between the eyes with the heel of his hand. The hithu dropped like a stone.

Macurdy turned to Vulkan. "I'm going to load him over your back. Can you keep him on board?"

‹Hardly. I can carry him with my tusks, but neither fast nor far. And if he regains consciousness, I'll be unable to kill him. Killing an ensouled being is an act not available to me.›

Macurdy didn't hesitate. His thumb found the man's carotid, and he compressed it with force enough to crack walnuts. After half a minute he released it, and loaded the slack figure across the horse's withers. Then he swung into the saddle, and after recalling his cloak, he and Vulkan continued eastward side by side. A check found the crystal warmer than before. Kurqosz, Macurdy decided, could run even faster than he'd thought.

Not far ahead they came to a lesser road that crossed Road B. On its surface, not a single track marred the morning's snow. Macurdy stopped. "I suppose," he said, "they can sense the crystal, and that's what they're following."

‹I do not doubt it.›

"You turn south. They'll see your tracks, and probably follow them. I'll keep going east a little way, then circle north through the woods and head back to the farm. Where there are nice rock walls."

Vulkan answered by turning south and trotting briskly away through the virgin snow. For Vulkan's information, Macurdy continued his monolog mentally as he continued down the heavily tracked Road B. When they realize they're on a false trail, it should take them awhile to sort things out, and I should be able to keep ahead of them. When I get to the headquarters clearing, I'll head for the woodpile and grab a splitting maul or single bit. Lay the crystal against a stone wall, and smack the sonofabitch.

Then I'll get Varia out of there.

He didn't wonder how. A hundred or so yards farther east, he took advantage of a windthrown hemlock whose top reached the edge of the road. There he turned his horse northward into the woods, walking it along the very edge of the fallen treetop. If Kurqosz got that far, he was unlikely to see the tracks.

When he'd passed the hemlock's uprooted base, he continued northward a ways, then turned back toward the clearing. He reached the virgin snow of the lesser road where a sleigh trail entered it from the west.

He took it.

With the help of motion sickness pills, Kurqosz had learned to ride horses. Learned well enough to stay in the saddle at a gallop. Riding wasn't pleasant for him, nor were the pills, but it allowed him greater middle-distance speed than he had on foot.

Tsulgax rode ahead a hundred yards, and another rakutu behind. They were all the escort Kurqosz had on this mad ride. The loss of his crystal had shaken him deeply, and he would not wait for a platoon to be called out and mounted.

It was Tsulgax who saw the tracks of cloven hooves turn south on the lesser road. He stopped, and when Kurqosz got there, pointed them out. All three turned south then, following them.

Kurqosz was queasy from the ride, and his senses somewhat dulled from the pills. If they didn't catch up soon, he thought, he'd get down and run awhile. They'd gone nearly half a mile before he realized something was wrong, and called a halt. Tsulgax rode back to him, his expression concerned.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"We should not have turned. He must have thrown the crystal away, or hidden it. Near the crossroad. We are getting farther away from it."

He turned his horse then, and started back north, riding hard. The crystal! he told himself. Follow the crystal! The thief, the tracks, are secondary.

Macurdy had ridden half a mile up the sleigh trail, when he came to a three-sided woodsmen's shelter. In front of it lay a snow-capped heap of firewood blocks, with a splitting maul standing upright beside it. He stopped, and getting from his horse, stepped into the shelter. Inside was a split-log bench. A heavy steel splitting wedge lay on it, and he picked it up. It could almost have been made in Indiana; it had the familiar deep grooves on its slanting faces.

He knew at once what to do. Stepping outside, he lay the wedge on the battered maple chopping block, then reached into his pocket. The crystal was almost too hot to handle! Alarmed, he laid it hurriedly on a groove of the wedge, then reaching, took the maul and hefted it. Eyeing the crystal, he swung hard, overhead and down.

The heavy steel head slammed the crystal-and a shocking pain stabbed through Macurdy's skull! At the same instant he heard a terrible cry perhaps a hundred yards away. Dropping the maul, he staggered to the horse and pulled himself into the saddle. Then he kicked the animal into a canter, and lying low on its back, fled westward through the trees, toward the clearing.

Kurqosz lay shuddering and puking in the snow, with Tsulgax and the other rakutu kneeling beside him. The blow that had struck the crystal had hammered Kurqosz much harder than it had Macurdy, whose bonding with it had been brief and superficial. After a couple of minutes, the crown prince raised an arm for help, and Tsulgax hoisted him to his feet.