Alliances ee-2

by Paul B. Thompson

  That was not Wapah’s voice. “Who are you?” she asked, setting aside her loom. “Who dares possess the Maita’s cousin?”

  Wapah’s head lifted, and she flinched in surprise. His gray eyes were leaf green.

  “I am the Oracle of the Tree.”

  “The Oracle was a man. He died many generations past!”

  “I am he. Time and place mean nothing to me. I can converse with you now even as I walk the face of Krynn five hundred years in the past.” Wapah’s slack lips barely moved, but the voice coming from his throat was strong and deep.

  Understanding dawned on Adala’s face. “Are you the sign I was expecting?”

  “You must release the laddad you have captured. Take your people from this place. Abandon your campaign against the foreigners.”

  She recoiled in shock. “But they are murderers!”

  The memory of her dead daughters was a wound that would never heal: Chisi lying with one arm thrown across Amalia, as if to shield her gentle, older sister from the death that had ripped their bodies apart. No matter what, Adala had sworn never to rest until their killers were destroyed.

  A fresh gust of wind, colder than before, flooded the Weya-Lu tents. They flapped as if trying to take wing. Adala covered the lower half of her face with her scarf and squinted against the rushing air.

  “The laddad must be freed to continue on their way!” the voice boomed. “The balance of the world depends on it!”

  “Vengeance is balance!” she retorted, as angry as she was astonished. “Keep your world! I know only the sands of Khur, and here, the laddad are a curse and will be dealt with!”

  Leaders of the tribes had come seeking Adala’s counsel regarding the strange frigid wind. A few arrived in time to hear the voice’s last pronouncement. All saw Adala rise to her feet and shout at her cousin. Wapah’s talkativeness annoyed them all, but no one had ever seen Adala lose her temper with him.

  “I will see the laddad out of Khur one way or another!” she raged at her cousin. “This is my maita! Those on High have shown it to me! Do you dare stand against Them, ancient seer?”

  Thunder crashed. There were no thunderheads in sight, just high streamers of white cloud. As one, the nomad chiefs threw themselves to the sand. Those who had not witnessed it for themselves had heard how Adala’s maita brought down lightning from a clear sky and obliterated a Mikku warmaster who dared oppose her.

  Adala raised her hands to the sky. “Do you hear that, false oracle? Your lies have aroused my maita! Begone before Those on High blast you down!”

  “It is you who are in danger, woman. You have my warning,” hissed the strange voice. Wapah’s right arm lifted, fingers pointing limply toward the deep desert south of the camp. “Give up your aggression now, or you will find a maita you do not want: the fate that awaits all who hate.”

  Suddenly Wapah collapsed in a heap. Thunder pealed once more, and the icy wind ceased. Slowly the chiefs and warmasters got to their feet. Wapah seemed none the worse for his possession. In fact, he was sleeping soundly until two men shook him awake.

  “Eh?” he said blearily. “I dreamt a storm was coming-”

  He was interrupted by the cry from the nomad camp. Adala’s tent was pitched on the east side of a low dune, sited to catch the first rays of the sun. She hurried over the rise, with her chiefs and Wapah trailing behind.

  In camp, men and women stood outside their tents, staring southwest at a point where the sharp line between pale sand and blue sky was blurred. The hazy spot grew rapidly in size until all could see the tall column of dust that was rising above it, like a dagger pointing from sky to ground.

  “Whirlwind!”

  Dozens of voices screamed the dreaded word, and the warriors around Adala took up the cry. Those in camp dashed for their tents. The warriors with Adala vaulted onto their horses and rode hard for their threatened families. Only Adala did not panic. She stood calmly, alone until Wapah joined her.

  “What a vivid dream I had!” he said, scrubbing his eyes with both hands. When he took his hands away, he saw the danger bearing down on them, and his mouth dropped open. “Maita, we must flee!” he cried.

  Every nomad feared whirlwinds. They weren’t frequent, but their terrible power was the stuff of campfire legend. The greatest hero of the desert tribes, the war chief Hadar, was said to have been carried off by a monster whirlwind, which flung him to the Dark Moon. Hadar battled the god of the dark moon for centuries. When Hadar finally defeated him, the god fled, convincing his brother on the White Moon and their sister on the Red to go as well, lest the stalwart war chief attack them too. That was when the sky had changed and the moons vanished, what foreigners called the Second Cataclysm.

  Adala had Wapah’s wrist in an iron grip. He strained against it, pleading with her to get to safety. She would not be moved.

  “My maita will not allow this!” she said, eyes squinted against the rising sand. “My maita is stronger than any false oracle!”

  And so she stood, one hand clamped on Wapah’s wrist, the other drawing the scarf over her nose and mouth. Around her, men and women fled or dug holes in the lee of the dune, seeking cover from the killer windstorm. Adala closed her eyes. Terrified, Wapah did likewise.

  The wind roared like the howls of ten thousand wolves. The sand beneath their feet was sucked away, and Wapah went down on his knees. Adala sank up to her ankles but remained proudly upright. She was shouting into the teeth of the storm. Wapah couldn’t hear her words. He bent so his face touched his thighs. The wind pushed him backward slowly, until his arm, still held by Adala, was stretched in front of him.

  He looked up. The column of wind writhed like a living thing, shredding tents and flinging their contents in all directions. A bronze pan, used to cook a family’s communal meal, spun through the air and landed next to Wapah. The flat, three-foot span of metal buried a third of its width into the sand. Had it struck him, he would’ve been sliced in half.

  He reached for the pan, stretching himself as far as he could since Adala stubbornly refused to move. He managed to wrap his fingers around the handle and dragged the pan close. With it in front of him like a screen, he began to inch forward on his knees. When he was directly beside Adala again, he banged his fist against her leg until he got her attention. He stood, and they held the broad pan before them. Sand sang off its bottom. Now and then a larger object torn from the camp caromed off the makeshift shield.

  The center of the whirlwind passed directly over them. The bronze pan was torn from their hands. Adala released his arm, and Wapah fell to his knees. Adala’s feet lifted six inches above the ground. -

  He threw his arms around her ankles. The force of the wind lifted him until only the toes of his sandals still touched the sand. Face buried in his cousin’s robe, sand clogging the air, Wapah couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see. He felt Adala being pulled from his grip.

  All at once, like a string breaking, the force holding them aloft suddenly was gone. They dropped onto a drift of sand. Wapah rolled away from Adala and began brushing sand from her sleeves and gown, all the while asking if she was all right, if she had been injured. She pushed herself up on her hands. He saw she was trembling, but one look at her face told him it wasn’t fear that moved her.

  “I have taken his measure!” she declared, eyes blazing with triumph. “The false seer thought he could forestall my maita. No one can do that! Those on High are with me!”

  He helped her stand. Sand cascaded from their robes. As Wapah brushed himself off, Adala stared at the dissipating whirlwind. It tracked northeast, rapidly losing cohesion. Soon it was only a rolling cloud of dust, tumbling over the dunes toward the Lion’s Teeth. She hoped it would hold together long enough to drop a load of sand upon the laddad.

  Wapah’s attention was fixed in the opposite direction. Their camp was completely wrecked. Not a single tent still stood. The ground in all directions was littered with debris. Here and there frantic men and women tore at mounds of sand, d
igging out those buried beneath. Adala’s face wore a fierce grin, but Wapah saw precious little to be happy about. He was immensely relieved to see Adala’s niece. Zayna was pulling the lap loom from the flattened remains of her aunt’s tent. She began cleaning the mechanism with careful fingers.

  Riders arrived from the camps of the other tribes. None but the Weya-Lu had been hit by the whirlwind. Even the Mikku camp, in direct line with the storm, had escaped damage. The storm had twisted wide around their tents, causing only minor problems.

  It seemed a message directed at Adala and her tribe. Those few chiefs who had heard the voice tell Adala the laddad must continue passed that information on to their fellows. Many wondered aloud whether it might not be best to release the captives, so as to appease the wrath of the ancient oracle.

  “In one more day,” Adala announced, “the laddad khan will have his people back. Their numbers will swell the ranks of the hungry and thirsty on Broken Tooth and Chisel, and their khan will know his doom is at band.”

  The chiefs were relieved. She had heeded the oracle’s warning.

  She seated herself in the shade of her tent, which Zayna had erected with Wapah’s help, and picked up the lap loom. Since she obviously intended to return to her weaving, Wapah and the nomad chiefs began to drift away.

  “One thing more,” Adala called out, cleaning the last of the grit from the loom. “Let every male among the captive laddad be branded on the back of the left hand. Use the herd mark of the Weya-Lu.”

  Wapah stared at her in shock. He took a step toward her, hands held out as if in supplication. “But why, Maita? What purpose can such terrible cruelty serve, except to anger the laddad khan?”

  “It will tell him, and everyone who sees the mark, that his people were freed by our will, not by the hand of Sahim-Khan, not by the efforts of the laddad khan, and not by the meddlesome false seer who calls himself the Oracle. The mark will stand as a sign of their failure and our maita.”

  The chiefs were not happy with the order. They were men of honor. Only slaves and herd animals were branded. To put such a mark on a captured enemy was a gross insult. But all had seen Adala stand before a whirlwind and emerge unscathed. Such courage demonstrated great power of the soul. Her survival underscored the awesome strength of the Fate that worked within her. They could not disobey her command.

  As Wapah watched the chiefs and warmasters ride away, he felt something shift within himself. Perhaps it was the eyes of his soul opening wide at last, perhaps it was only the breaking of his heart, but in that moment, he knew Adala was wrong. Powerful forces were undeniably at work in his cousin, but he no longer believed that maita and the will of Those on High guided her actions. If he hadn’t held onto her when the whirlwind had passed over, she would have been torn from the sand and flung heavenward like Hadar, never to return. He had felt the terrible pull of that wind, and it was he who had saved her, not divine fate. That and the pointless cruelty of the order she had just given were proof he could not ignore. Adala was on the wrong path. Hatred and pain had blinded her.

  He found his horse, thankfully spared by the storm. Taking a skin of water, he rode out of the ruined camp. His mission- his maita-was clear,

  Chapter 12

  Like a vast black mirror, the Lake of Death covered what had once been the great city of Qualinost. By day, the water was a deep jade color, but at dawn, before the sun first broke over the eastern rim of the sky, the water resembled the darkest ink imaginable. Despite the summer season, the air was chilly, and perpetual fog drifted over the lake. Beryl’s impact had created so mighty a crater, the ground around the lake sloped down to its forbidding shore. Here and there, bits of masonry stood out dull gray against blasted trees that reached into the lightening sky like blackened, fleshless arms. Everything dripped gray moss and smelled worse than a hundred cesspits.

  “You fell into that?” Samar exclaimed. “Somewhere there’s a sorcerer who does not like you.”

  Kerian did not agree. Whoever had plucked her from Khur and dropped her here was watching out for her, not trying to harm her. A malign magician could have left her where she was, facing death among the nomads, or could have let her plummet unchecked into Nalis Aren. She had been saved for a reason. To fight in Porthios’s rebellion? Perhaps. There were many questions. Being here again, beholding the awful lake, invited questions.

  The column of elves paused briefly to rest just after dawn. No one wanted to leave the road and pitch a tent or unroll a blanket in the murky domain surrounding the lake, so they slept in or under their carts or didn’t sleep at all.

  The lake and its immediate environs were cloaked in a perpetual twilight. Only the elves’ own innate sense of time told them when an hour had passed. Alhana rode the length of the caravan, rousing the Bianost militia and wishing them good morning. Weary shoulders straightened, and the townsfolk bowed their heads respectfully as she rode by. She was very different from Orexas, who appeared seldom, spoke rarely, and commanded by mystery. With a kind smile and warm words, Alhana revived their spirits as she progressed along the line.

  At the tail of the caravan she asked Samar, who rode with her, to send a few riders back down their path to look for signs of pursuit. The heavy atmosphere around the lake blunted vision and smell to an alarming degree. They did not want to be surprised by bandits.

  Back at the head of the column, Alhana found Kerian and Chathendor studying the map Kerian had found in Bianost. It didn’t show the lake, of course, having been drawn well before the fall of Beryl, and they were trying to reconcile the current topography to that shown on the map.

  “This must be the road we are on,” Kerian said, tapping the map with a blunt nail. “Silveran’s Way.”

  “I recall it,” Chathendor said, eyes closed, drawing on his memories. “It wended gently across the land north of the city.” Opening his eyes, he returned to reality with a jolt. “It does not seem possible.”

  Alhana asked if they’d seen Orexas. Kerian had. She’d been dozing on the ground when he ghosted by her, heading straight down the road.

  It was time to follow him. No heralds cried; no silvery trumpets trilled. Alhana gave the word and it was passed through the royal guards to the Bianost militia. She led them forward. Kerian and Chathendor followed half a horse length behind, and Samar rode a few yards back, at the head of the royal guards.

  A walking pace was the best they could manage, given the state of the road. The once smooth, well-tended way was cut by fissures. Mud, stones, and boulders from higher up the steep hillside had washed down onto the road. The town elves were not experienced drovers, and many of their beasts were not suited as draft animals. Frequently, elves had to jump down and push the wheels by hand to help the laden wagons over rough or muddy spots. Progress was so glacial, the lead riders were forced to stop and wait for the caravan of wagons to catch up.

  “At this rate Samuval will die of old age before our revolt gets under way,” Kerian observed.

  The encouraging words Alhana meant to say died on her lips. Instead, she gasped, “Merciful E’li. Look!”

  Above this end of the lake a sizable cloud of vapor had collected. It writhed as if stirred by contrary winds, yet the air was perfectly still.

  “Do you see it?” Alhana cried.

  “The fog, lady?” asked Chathendor, confused.

  “Yes! It looks like a dragon!”

  Kerian squinted, staring hard. “It does?”

  “Its jaws are opening!”

  The cloud dissolved, ribbons of mist snaking apart. Alhana turned sharply to her companions, but they reported seeing only an amorphous bank of fog. Chathendor murmured, “You are very tired, lady. You haven’t rested properly since leaving Bianost.”

  Kerian was not so dismissive. “It may have been a vision, an omen meant for your eyes only.”

  “An omen of what?”

  Kerian could not guess, but once the mist had thinned, she saw an odd yellow gleam over the lake. Alhana saw it as wel
l, but neither of them could say what it was. Only Chathendor, whose aged eyes were too weak to pick it out, realized what it was.

  “The Tower of the Sun,” he whispered.

  Formerly the seat of the Speaker of the Sun and the center of every Qualinesti’s life and heart, the great monument was awash in the foul waters of Nalis Aren, the sunburst glory of its golden peak reduced to a faint ocher smudge.

  Trying to dispel the murk before their eyes and in their hearts, Alhana called for torches. Branches were hacked from the skeletal trees. Kerian feared they would prove rotten, but it was not so. The wood was dry and very hard, almost petrified. It burned readily, with a flame so pale it was nearly white, and gave off little smoke.

  Two riders went ahead, carrying torches. Almost immediately their light fell on Porthios, standing in the middle of the road. All of them flinched in surprise, and Kerian looked as though she had a choice obscenity for him, but she glanced at Alhana and stifled it.

  “We cannot continue on this road,” he told them. “The bridge that once spanned the White-Rage is destroyed.”

  The White-Rage River flowed north out of Nalis Aren. They could not continue their course unless they could cross it. Locating a ford suitable for the wagons would require a long journey north.

  In the bleak silence, Porthios said, “Another bridge still stands.”

  Kerian slapped her thigh with one hand. “Why didn’t you just say so? How much farther north?”

  “Not far, but the only way to get there is His ragged robe swung like a tattered banner as he pointed up the hillside. The way was not only steep, but the ground was torn up and strewn with boulders, making for a difficult climb.

  Once more the map was called for. Studying it, they determined that the bridge Porthios had found was reached by Birch Trail, a narrow track that more or less paralleled Silveran’s Way.

  Hardly had they decided to ascend to Birch Trail when a rider came galloping recklessly down the broken road. He clattered to halt before Samar.