Isaiah moved rapidly through the north of Isembaard. He had his own methods of speeding travel; none so impressive as that used by the Lealfast, but good enough that he covered more territory per day than other men could.
He met no one. By this point anyone who had been in the extreme north of Isembaard had already traveled into the Salamaan Pass. In any case, this part of his tyranny had always been sparsely populated.
The soil was poor this close to the FarReach Mountains, unable to sustain any farming communities, and the only inhabitants had been goat herders and peddlers, traders and soldiers moving through in order to reach somewhere else.
Isaiah could feel a presence to the south. He couldn’t define it any more than that, but it was very keen and he knew that it knew he was here.
It wasn’t Kanubai, although Isaiah could sense some shadow of Kanubai hanging about it.
Kanubai was dead. Eaten.
On the third day after he left Bingaleal and the Lealfast, Isaiah came upon what was left of the River Lhyl.
His feet slowed as he approached, his heart thumping. Its wrongness leapt out at him, even from a great distance, and that sense grew stronger as he approached.
The river suffered. It still lived, but under such a burden of powerful and dark enchantment that its entire existence had become a torment. Here, where the Lhyl emerged from the FarReach Mountains, it should have been a narrow torrent of foam and joy, but all Isaiah could see was a jumbled morass of dulled, fractured glass.
He dropped to his knees on the riverbank, staring.
There was nothing but the glass. Isaiah had wondered if only the surface had been affected by the enchantment, and had hoped that beneath this horror the water still flowed, but every single drop of water down to the riverbed had been turned to glass.
Glass. The pyramid.
A tiny green frog crept from Isaiah’s hand and inched its way to the river’s edge. It reached out a pad and touched a glassy wave hesitantly.
It sprang back immediately, and hid once more within Isaiah’s flesh.
Isaiah stood, and turned south.
He could feel the presence in the south watching him ever more closely.
“What do you want?” whispered Isaiah.
The One stared north. About him Skraelings milled, begging favors, but he ignored them. For the moment he wanted nothing to do with them—they could roam as far through Isembaard as they liked, eating what they wanted. Later they would be useful, but not now.
But north…
Isaiah the river god was back.
The One smiled sardonically. Come to release his beloved river? Come to save Isembaard from the Skraelings?
“What do I want, Isaiah?” he whispered. “For the moment, I want you, I want what that foolish girl holds so close to her heart, and I might as well take this opportunity to begin some amusing diversionary tactic to keep you and Maximilian occupied and your eyes away from the Lealfast.”
Maximilian would be expecting something, some move on the One’s part, and the One was ready to oblige.
He started walking north, taking great strides that ate up the distance, and he walked directly up the center of the glassy surface of the River Lhyl.
Isaiah walked south along the riverbank. Occasionally he saw Skraelings roaming in small bands. The first band he saw, just after he’d started south, had moved toward him, patently thinking him an easy meal.
But when they were about twenty or thirty paces away they’d pulled up in their tracks, hissing, their terrible jackal faces twisting in disappointment, and backed off. They’d shadowed Isaiah for an hour or two, but eventually drifted away.
They’d been warned away from him.
In the afternoon, after he’d traveled nonstop for almost nine hours, Isaiah stopped suddenly, peering ahead.
At the very limits of his vision he could see the figure of a woman standing on the riverbank, her arms wrapped about something she clutched to her chest.
She was looking directly at him.
It took Isaiah another half hour to reach her. He approached slowly, not knowing who or what she was, nor why she would be standing out here so vulnerable.
Yet so intact.
The Skraelings had left her as alone as himself.
As Isaiah came close, he wondered if he knew the woman. She looked somewhat familiar. She was pretty—or could be if she had some decent clothes, if her hair was combed and neatly arranged, and if she didn’t look so worried—but a little too thin for Isaiah’s liking. She also had the demeanor of a servant. She clearly recognized Isaiah, and he saw her arms tremble slightly as she held the book to her chest.
He stopped a pace or so away from her. The woman was very anxious now, and Isaiah suspected it took all her courage to stand her ground.
He supposed she was fighting the instinct to abase herself.
Isaiah gave a nod of greeting, holding her eyes with hers. “Do I know you?” he said.
The skin across her cheekbones tightened, and Isaiah thought she might be angry. Gods alone knew why. Surely she didn’t expect him to remember the name of every one of the hundreds of servants who had attended him?
“My name is Hereward,” she said. “I was your kitchen steward at Aqhat. You’ll remember Aqhat. It was a big, sprawling palace. Very beautiful. Not anymore. It is covered in blood now.”
“Hereward—”
“You arrogant bastard,” Hereward said. She stepped forward, lifted the book, and with all her strength slammed it into the side of his head.