(no subject)
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 ten seconds--how, he never knew. Heaving deep breaths, he went scrambling along the cliff-edge until he had a view down 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 kew 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 gaed up at the heavy bruise-like 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 let 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 cuaght 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 from 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 favourite friends. Moril waited, quite confident and implacable, and let them come on while the power of 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 inwards and downwards, 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 inwards. Almost lost in the greater din was the lesser screaming of men and horses. At the far end of the pass, Moril could see the riders swirling and struggling to get back or get out. But leisurely, sleepily, rhythmically, the mountains were filling the centre. The cliff Moril was on marched with the rest, downwards and forwards. Moril leant backwards 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 towards him.
"I've just done something really horrible," Moril said to him. "Haven't I?"
Keril jumped from one rock to another, and then on to 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 leant 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.