"Get him on the beast and don't be a fool, woman," he added, when she turned to gather up bedrolls and packs. "'The bandits will have those one way or the other."

"But we carried those clear from..."

"No, no, Hethya, the boy is right." Linok struggled with maddening slowness to get himself upright.

"There will be others. Of course there will be others."

The Icefalcon already had the donkey over to them. He reminded himself that among civilized people it was not done to grab old men by the backs of their clothing and heave them onto pack-beasts like killed meat, no matter how much more efficient such a procedure might be for a speedy getaway.

His sword was in his right hand, his attention returning again and again to the place in the trees where the birds were silent-somewhere between the big elm with the lightning scar and the three smaller elms close together.

"You're from the fortress, aren't you, young man?"

"Be silent, both of you." He was too preoccupied with trying to track potential attackers by sound to inquire where else they thought he might have emerged from, if not the monstrous black block of the Keep, whose obsidian-smooth walls were visible from nearly any point in the lower part of the Vale.

They were there. He felt their presence as one sometimes felt the spirits of holy places, felt their eyes on the little party with all the training of his upbringing in the Real World, the empty lands beyond the mountains. He'd killed their companion and was in charge of two and perhaps three sets of weapons and a donkey, far rarer than gold in this devastated world. He and his companions were outnumbered... So why didn't they attack?

And why didn't these two idiots he'd rescued shut up?

But they didn't. And the bandits kept to the trees, invisible and unheard. As far as the Icefalcon could tell, they didn't even follow them as they moved from clearing to clearing down the ice-fed stream, until they came to the open land that surrounded the Keep of Dare, the last refuge of humankind between the Great Brown River and the glacier-rimmed horns of the Snowy Mountains, somber towers blotting the western sky.