We left none alive. The formation was intended to scoop up
as many of the scattered as was possible. The men carried with them the
frustration of the Stair. My mood was little better, for Ki. They’d damned near
cut her leg off. I’d had to leave her at the Stair, along with the artillery
and five thousand men to keep it.
“In case it
matters,” I’d said, charging her with their defense. “Don’t let them do unto
us.”
She had
nodded, and known it for the gesture that it was. But five hundred pieces of
artillery would make our pursuit no faster, and there had been no other logical
place to leave them, or her and others while they healed. And after the Augers
revealed that they could see through our chameleon, I didn’t want any more
surprises.
Hence my
maneuver on the eighty-ninth day. We could have, simply, ridden around them.
They would not have been likely to catch up. But it’s always poor form to have
an enemy on your tail. So except for one or two who actually broke and ran away
in the gloom, no doubt to die lost in the frigid waste, we let none surrender
or escape. After, we cracked the three relics they’d been carrying. We lost
fifty-four valkyries and riders in the battle. That day, we were not nice people.
I thought
about it through the afternoon. The Road to the Sun turned out to be more or
less exactly what Nogilian said it was. A long ribbon of silver, broad enough
for ten valkyries to pass, that began exactly in the middle of nowhere and went
all the way to the horizon, bearing not a fleck of snow or ice upon it. I
dismounted and put a hand down to confirm: warm to the touch. Profusionist
metal, then, acting in a special way.
One
wondered. The holy roads of the Shuni pleateau, Nogilian had told me, were
altogether strange. Some joined cities. Some went to holy sites like the Cup of
Gods. Some both began and ended no place in particular. The Historians of the
world had been unable to explain their presence.
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