Luckily, Kialan had the sense to let go. For, as Moril ran up, Olob reared, frightened out of his wits. There were just too many enemies for him. Moril had to dodge his lashing front hooves, and Brid slid helplessly down his back, over his tail, and onto the ground. And as Olob stood high above them, screaming and slashing, an unlucky bullet took him clean through the head. His great brown body came down between Moril and Brid with the force of a falling oak. He was dead before he hit the ground.
They stared at one another over the huge corpse.
“Olob now,” said Brid.
“Right!” said Moril. “That does it!”
Keril’s captain had been sorting out the bottleneck. Now he galloped up and held down his hand to Brid. “Catch hold, lass! Up you come!” Brid caught hold and scrambled up behind him.
Kialan shouted to Moril and held down a hand to him, but Moril did not attend. He raced to the cliff at the side of the pass and climbed it like a maniac with the cwidder bumping and booming on his back. He was at the top in seconds—how, he never knew. Heaving deep breaths, he went scrambling along the cliff edge until he had a view down into the pass. He saw Kialan, not very far below him, at the gate of the fort, waving and shouting something. He seemed to mean there was a door in the fort at the top of the cliff. Then he went into the fort, and the gate shut.
But Moril, now he knew the Northmen were in the fort, was not interested in the door. He looked Southward along the pass. It was packed with Tholian’s horsemen more than halfway along. They were going more slowly now, because of the narrower space, and beyond the wide end of the pass, as far as he could see, there were more riders coming. It was truly an invasion.
Moril stood up and slung the cwidder in front of him. He felt a spatter of rain. There looked to be a storm coming, which was all to the good. For a second he gazed up at the heavy bruiselike clouds, feeling a little awed. He thought anyone would who was about to use the cwidder as Osfameron had used it.
Then he looked down into the pass where Olob’s body lay in the middle of the road. The nearest riders were not so far from it now. He struck one sharp, rolling chord, and the power in the cwidder swelled with it. There was no humming, but he could feel the power. “You’re not coming North,” he said to the jostling riders. “And this is why.” He struck two more chords. The power almost choked him. The answer was a great dagger of lightning, green and perilous, lancing down over the cliffs. A peal of thunder followed, and Moril led it on, pealing the lowest note of the cwidder, so that the power in it could grow. When it stopped, he spoke, in the way the singers spoke an incantation. He said:
“Kialan and Konian were caught in a storm.
The one you hanged in Holand had not harmed anyone,
Nor had Kialan when you caught him. This is for Konian first.”
He struck another chord, followed by a swinging, hanging, frantic phrase, and felt the power in the cwidder grow again. Then he said:
“Unlucky Clennen lies by a lake in Markind,
The singer you stabbed on suspicion only
And prevented him performing. This is for the Porter Clennen.”
He struck a sharp chord and a rolling one. The first horsemen were now right beneath him. They did not pause when they came to Olob but trampled over him and on. Moril saw, but he looked beyond them, to the center of the pass. Tholian was there, jostled on either side by his favorite friends. Moril waited, quite confident and implacable, and let them come on while the power in the cwidder grew yet again. Then he spoke his last stave:
“There was no mercy shown by the magistrate in Neathdale
To Dastgandlen Handagner. There was death in the South
And weeping in the Uplands. Now war comes North,
And all through Tholian. This is for Tholian.”
He struck the cwidder again, and again, and yet a third time, vengefully. The power grew enormous, until it possessed Moril, the sky, the clouds, and the entire pass. Then, as Moril had known they would, the hills began to walk.
They started mildly and slowly, as if the mountains on either side of the pass were shrugging their shoulders. But in a second or so, the shrugging was a deep rhythmic jigging. The tops of the cliffs bent and marched, regularly inward and downward, walking, piling, inescapably trudging together to fill the pass. The thunder pealed and was drowned in the grinding of ton after ton of rock, moving and jogging inward. Almost lost in the greater din was the lesser screaming of men and horses. At the far end of the pass Moril could see riders swirling and struggling to get back or get out. But leisurely, sleepily, rhythmically, the mountains were filling the center. The cliff Moril was on marched with the rest, downward and forward. Moril leaned backward to keep his balance and let it take him, until he was standing at the head of a heap of jumbled rocks, almost over the place where Olob had been shot. The rocks were piled into the rift, choking it so that it was no longer a pass.
Moril did not spend long looking, because the rain came down, and the torn surfaces of the rocks were black with it. But he knew, as he turned round to keep the cwidder from the worst of the wet and stripped off his coat to cover it, that Tholian was underneath somewhere and Barangarolob had plenty of company. He looked across to see that the fort was safe, as he had intended. It was there, standing on a steep-sided block of steady rock, and Keril was picking his way over the ruin of the cliff toward him.
“I’ve just done something really horrible,” Moril said to him. “Haven’t I?”
Keril jumped from one rock to another and then onto the one where Moril stood. “I don’t think we had much chance of holding the pass otherwise,” he said.
“You don’t understand,” said Moril. “I did it because of Olob.” He leaned against Keril and burst into tears. Keril took off his own coat, wrapped it round Moril, and led him quietly back over the rocks to the fort.
They left the fort the following day, after a big force of men from the North Dales arrived there to make sure the Southerners did not attempt to attack over the fallen rocks. Moril did not see as much of the journey to Hannart as he would have liked. He was exhausted and spent most of the time asleep in one of the wagons. Every so often he woke to find they were on a green road, or in a wood where the trees were still only budding in the later spring of the North, and went to sleep happy. He was awake to see the Falls at Dropwater, which he would not have missed for worlds. And by the time they reached Hannart he had come to himself again.
He was disappointed, but not really surprised, to find Hannart a city far larger than Neathdale, in the center of a big valley. Flags were flying in honor of their arrival. There were crowds of people carrying flags or flowers. Hannart was full of flowers in fields, in gardens, on trees, and growing wild, thick as the grass, on the steep sides of the mountains. Moril could smell them as soon as they entered the valley. At the end of the valley was a great tall thing, like a castle four times life-size, picked out in gold and blue and green.
Moril stared at it. “Whatever is that?”