Swinging the Devi up, he followed her into the saddle and again reined the stallion westward. The bundle of garments she had given him, he hurled over a cliff, to fall into the depths of a thousand-foot gorge.
'Why did you do that?' she asked. 'Why did you not give them to the girl?'
'The riders from Peshkhauri are combing these hills,' he said. 'They'll be ambushed and harried at every turn, and by way of reprisal they'll destroy every village they can take. They may turn westward any time. If they found a girl wearing your garments, they'd torture her into talking, and she might put them on my trail.'
'What will she do?' asked Yasmina.
'Go back to her village and tell her people that a stranger attacked her,' he answered. 'She'll have them on our track, all right. But she had to go on and get the water first; if she dared go back without it, they'd whip the skin off her. That gives us a long start. They'll never catch us. By nightfall we'll cross the Afghuli border.'
'There are no paths or signs of human habitation in these parts,' she commented. 'Even for the Himelians this region seems singularly deserted. We have not seen a trail since we left the one where we met the Galzai woman.'
For answer he pointed to the northwest, where she glimpsed a peak in a notch of the crags.
'Yimsha,' grunted Conan. 'The tribes build their villages as far from the mountain as they can.'
She was instantly rigid with attention.
'Yimsha!' she whispered. 'The mountain of the Black Seers!'