It took some time to arrange, of course, and several more weeks went by before the grey wizard was in a position to make his move.

     Spring gave way to summer and the crops grew tall in the fields. Tak's father took a pair of goats to the Callier homestead in one of their wagons, to keep an arrangement they'd made the previous market day, and returned four days later with a cockerel and four hens which he released into an enclosure Tak had spent the past few days building from some old wooden stakes and bits of string they'd found in the back of the barn.

     "We'll let him visit one of his wives, so we'll have chicks to grow up into hens for the table," his father said as the birds got busy scratching around. "The other three will provide us with a steady supply of eggs. You've never tasted chicken, have you?"

     Tak and Laira both shook their heads. Their mother had shot the occasional crow with the crossbow during the darkest days of winter in an attempt to stretch their food supply, and they had been bitter and stringy.

     Their father saw their expressions of disgust and laughed, ruffling their hair. "You've got a treat coming," he told them. "Chicken meat is the sweetest meat the Gods ever put on this world. We've got to keep an eye out for foxes, though. They like hens as well, and one of em'll slaughter the lot and carry away just the one. Old man Callier gave me a few tips for dealing with them."

     They had eggs for breakfast the very next day, and it was the last meal Tak ever ever had in that cabin. He'd eaten eggs before. Warbler eggs and meadowhopper eggs. They were little things they popped whole into their mouths, shells and all, but these eggs were bigger than any he'd ever seen, so big that he had to eat them one bite at a time as if they were honeycakes. His eyes widened in wonder.

     "It's delicious!" he cried in delight and gobbled the rest while his father grinned in amusement. "How often do they lay?"

     "So long as they have plenty to eat, they should lay every day."

     "Every day!" cried Tak in astonishment. "But other birds only lay once or twice a year!"

     "All birds will lay every week or so if you keep taking their eggs away. If you let a hen keep its eggs it wouldn't lay any more until they hatched. To lay everyday is exceptional, though. The Gods must have just made them that way."

     "So we can have eggs for breakfast every day?" cried the boy in delight.

     His father laughed again. "You'll get tired of them before long. You'll be crying out for your porridge and gramm."

     "No I won't!" stated Tak emphatically. "I want to have eggs for breakfast every day for the rest of my life!"

     He was still thinking about eggs when he went out into the fields with a wicker basket three feet across to pick taffleheads. Taffles grew as weeds wherever the ground was broken up by ploughing, and if left would choke everything else in the field, but most homesteaders set one small field aside for the twisty, climbing plants because their cottony seed heads were ideal for stuffing pillows and mattresses. Tak's mother had a favourite pillow that had belonged to her grandmother and was still as soft and plump as it had ever been, needing only a handful of new stuffing every few years or so.

     If tafflecushions were allowed to become damp, though, they became musty and smelly, and sometimes the shoot of a young taffle plant would poke its way through the richly embroidered covering. Several pillows now needed restuffing as a result of a leak in the roof that had appeared during the previous week's rainstorm, and it was lucky that this minor calamity had occurred just before the year's crop of seed heads were due to pop open.

     Tak's basket was half full when he noticed the thin coil of smoke winding its lazy way up into the clear blue sky to the north, where the snowcapped heads of the mountains were just visible on the dust shrouded horizon. The coil of smoke wasn't coming from the mountains, though, but from somewhere in between. From one of their neighbouring homesteads hidden below the horizon. The Rankin place, he guessed. His father had drilled into them time and again what a smoke signal like that meant and what he was to do if he ever saw it, but now that he was actually seeing it he found that he couldn't believe it was happening. His life was too stable, too peaceful. He was too happy living just the way he was for such an upheaval to happen.

     He looked around, back at their own cabin, and saw his father running towards him, shouting his name over and over. Behind him, Laira and their mother were hurriedly harnessing a pair of horses to one of their wagons and filing it with their most prized possessions. They must have seen the smoke signal some minutes before he had, and they certainly believed it was real. He dropped his basket and ran back to meet his father, who swept him up in his arms and carried him back to the cabin. "Get on!" he commanded, indicating the wagon, then ran forward to check the horses.

     "My books!" cried Tak in distress. The year before, his father had bought him two books, to teach him to read. The History of the Black Baronies and the Adventures of Gromm Gingerbeard. Tak had fixed upon with an enthusiasm close to fanaticism. He ran to the cabin to fetch them but his father grabbed him and swung him around, pushing him with savage force back towards the wagon.

     "Forget the drassing books! Get on, quick!"

     The fear and urgency in his father convinced Tak that it really was real and his eyes were wide with shock as he pulled himself up to sit beside Laira. The shologs were coming! They were on the move again!

     Tak's father lit their own signal fire, to pass the warning on to the homesteads further south, then joined his family on the wagon, slapping the reins to get the horses moving. Every other time Tak had ridden on the wagon they'd been content to amble along at an easy walk, but this time his father whipped the horses to a gallop and the children had to hang on for dear life as they bounced along the uneven ground. Tak feared for the wheels and axles as they hit one mound or pothole after another. They'd come to grief on much more even terrain in the past, but his father knew that their one hope lay in speed. If they were caught out in the open, they were finished.

     His mother looked behind her at the coil of smoke that continued to rise serenely, uncaring of their deadly peril. "It doesn't look as though the Rankin place's been torched yet," she said hopefully. "There's only the signal fire burning. Could it have caught fire by accident?"

     "Maybe," agreed her husband. "I hope so, but until we know we act as though the threat's real. Better safe than sorry." He gave a harsh, barking laugh. "Maybe we'll meet all our neighbours in Jalla and have a good laugh about it. Maybe string up the fool who forgot to turn his signal pile."

     Turning the signal pile, the heap of dry grass, paper, cloth and any other piece of rubbish that would burn, sheltered from the rain under a stretched animal hide, was necessary in order to prevent the heat of decomposition building up to cause spontaneous combustion. Tak's father did this essential job every week in the hottest part of summer, explaining that false alarms had to be prevented at all costs. People might stop paying attention to the warning signals, and the next sholog incursion might find everyone at home and unprepared. He wasn't joking when he said that a man who abused the lifesaving system might be hung. Tak hoped desperately that that was all that had happened as he watched their home receding behind them. Watched as it shrunk to a tiny dot on the horizon and vanished. He never saw it again.

     His father kept the horses at a gallop for a couple of hours, then had to stop to let them rest. Tak tried to see it all as a great adventure. A brief break from the tedium of everyday existence after which they'd go home to the comfortable, familiar surroundings he'd known his whole life. His parents were too tense and fearful, though. Even his father.

     Laira, in particular, was struggling to keep her fear under control as she remembered the last time they'd had to do this, when she'd been seven years old. They'd spent the three weeks in the fortified market town, drinking foul water and eating rancid food, watching their neighbours falling ill and dying from the diseases of squalor and overcrowding. When they'd eventually returned home they'd found their cabin burned to the ground, their livestock slaughtered and their crops trampled into the dust. They'd had to start all over again. Laira remembered it very well, and now she clutched her little brother's hand tightly, trying to pretend she was giving comfort instead of taking it.

     They moved on as soon as they could, but this time allowed the horses to keep to a steady walk. This reduced the amount of dust their passage threw up, advertising their presence for miles around, and made sure the horses had the strength to run should it be necessary. Shologs were powerful runners, easily capable of outrunning a man, but not even they could match the speed of a horse, even horses pulling a wagon. Some tribes of shologs had trained wolves to hunt for them, though, and there had been occasional sightings of shologs riding the larger wolf breeds like horses. If the shologs that had alarmed the Rankins had wolves, they could find themselves in real trouble.

     They avoided their neighbouring homesteads, in case there were shologs there. When Laira suggested that they ought to pay a visit to each farm they visited, to warn them of the danger, their father replied that they'd lit their warning beacon for precisely that reason and that he wasn't going to take any more chances with their lives. Tak looked back to see the smoke from their own beacon and gave a cry of alarm at what he saw. The thin coil of smoke had been replaced by a thick black, billowing column, stretching away to the east in the breeze.

     Hearing his cry, the others looked also. His mother gave a sob of despair and covered her face with her hands, and his father swore under his breath. He reached across to squeeze his wife's hand. "We'll build another home for ourselves," he promised. "Bigger and better than before. We did it before and we'll do it again." She nodded and bravely wiped the tears from her eyes.

     It took a few moments for the meaning of the exchange to sink into Tak's head, and then he cried out again in shock and loss. Tak was normally a quiet, peaceful boy, well mannered and helpful, but now he found himself possessed by a hot, burning anger and his small, calloused hands clenched into fists. He hated the creatures who had done this to them! He wanted to punish them, hurt them! Then he burst into tears and hid his face in his hands. He was vaguely aware of Laira's arm going around his shoulders, pulling him against her.

     Tak's father didn't stop the wagon as the yellow sun reached the horizon but carried on by the light of the red sun and three silver comets, stopping only when the horses themselves began to show signs of fatigue. They spent the rest of the night in a grove of trees where they would be able to see any approaching shologs against the dark horizon without, hopefully, being seen themselves. Tak's father remained awake the whole night, even after his wife offered to replace him on watch, and the same fear prevented the children from sleeping.

     The night seemed to last an eternity, and the family held tightly to one other as they stared out through gaps in the canvas covering at the blood red landscape. The waves the wind made in the tall grass used to have a calming fascination for the boy, but now it had a hideous look to it that chilled him. It almost seemed as though the grass itself was reaching out to them, groping blindly but greedily for the warm, living bodies it sensed were nearby. He screwed his eyes up closed and whimpered in fear.

     He got some sleep the next day, though, lulled by the rocking motion of the moving wagon, but he woke again when he felt the wagon coming to a halt and give a lurch as his father disembarked. He sat up and went forward to where Laira and his mother were staring anxiously as his father squatted down to examine the ground.

     Tak could see that the grass had been bent and disturbed along a path running from behind them and to the left to ahead of them and to the right, and he had enough trailcraft to see that it had been made by people on foot. Neither on horse or in a wagon. The path was a dozen feet wide and must have been made by a substantial number of people. Last night's dew had been disturbed on the affected grass, meaning that the path had been made since that morning. Their neighbours perhaps? Heading for the safety of Jalla, as they were?

     His father's face was grim as he climbed aboard again, though. "Snouts," he said, and his wife gave a gasp of fear. "They were here less than an hour ago. We were probably visible to each other, if we'd known exactly where to look."

     "But they aren't here now, are they?" begged Laira.

     "Yes, and no," her father replied. "There's only one thing over there they could possibly be heading for. The fords. They've cut us off."

     There was a moment of terrified silence as they absorbed this. "Maybe," Tak began, hesitantly, "maybe they just passed over. They might be gone from there by now."

     "No," his father said, however. "They're holding the fords against us. They want to catch homesteaders trying to cross." He swept his eyes across the horizon, as if afraid another band of shologs might show up at any minute.

     "So what do we do?" asked Laira, her face going pale with the fear she was trying so bravely not to show.

     Her father turned the horses and they set off to the east, towards land that was completely unknown to Tak. "We're going to the forest," he stated simply.

     His wife grabbed his arm with fear. "Dev, no!" she cried.

     "Yes!" her husband stated in a tone that said there would be no argument.

     "But the stories..."

     "Are mostly just stories. Yes, it's a dangerous place, but nowhere in the Borderlands is completely safe and it's certainly a lot safer than hanging around out here."

     "But the forest..."

     "We need cover!" cried Tak's father in exasperation. "Look around, woman! We can be seen from miles away! In the forest we can hide. In a few days the soldiers'll drive the snouts back to the mountains and we can rebuild our home, but until then we need to hide."

     His wife nodded dumbly, accepting the truth of it, but she put her arms around her children and hugged them tight as if afraid it might be for the last time.