The humans filling the edges of the hall shifted, murmuring among themselves. They had not expected this.
Sahim-Khan, on the other hand, could not stop the grin that split his face. He beamed, saying the Speaker’s generosity would not be wasted.
Polite robbery! thought Hytanthas. From his place with the honor guard, he seethed at the injustice of the gesture that the Speaker should pay for a riot not of the elves’ making. Sahim was stealing just as surely as if he held the Speaker at the point of a knife and demanded his purse! And Hytanthas had no doubt every steel piece of the so-called indemnity would end in the Khan’s pockets.
To distract himself from his anger, Hytanthas let his gaze wander. The honor guard was divided into two lines, each facing inward toward the Speaker. Hytanthas was on the Speaker’s right, looking toward the Khurs on Sahim’s right, those crowded along the north wall of the hall.
As he scanned the Khurs, he hoped to see the rag-draped man among them, but be did not. He did spot Lord Hengriff. Although draped in civilian dress, the Nerakan was unmistakable. Standing behind him were four more large humans. Like him they were clean-shaven and dressed in civilian finery. Hytanthas had no trouble recognizing them for what they were-the Knight’s personal bodyguard and most probably the same men who had tried to take Hytanthas and Planchet at the Temple of Elir-Sana last night.
Hamaramis suddenly barked an order. The honor guard made a quarter-turn, facing away from the throne. The Speaker bowed slightly as the Khan slipped away. His audience was over.
The elves went out with proud dignity, but every heart burned with shame, and every jaw was clenched tight. Only the Speaker appeared calm. He spoke a few words to his valet. Planchet’s angry color lessened. He nodded obediently, and drifted away from the Speaker’s side.
Outside, musicians, courtiers, and standard bearers began to form up again. Hytanthas took his place at the rear of the honor guard, but was pulled aside.
Planchet pushed a Khurish robe at him and hissed, “Shed your armor, and don this. You’re staying in the city.”
The captain knew why: to look for Faeterus. Unbuckling his breastplate under cover of his milling countrymen, he whispered, “What do I do if I find him?”
“Send word. We’ll take care of the rest.” Planchet added, “The word is ‘Eagle Eye.’ That will mean you’ve found the sorcerer.”
Hytanthas pulled the robe over his head. It smelled as though it had just come off its previous owner. With a sun hat pulled down over his ears and his chin down to hide his hairless cheeks, he slipped away from his comrades.
An investigation of the robe’s pockets yielded a purse containing twenty steel, a sizable sum. It ought to be enough to buy the information he needed.
* * * * *
One of the forward scouts came galloping back, his horse’s hooves clattering loudly on the stony soil. Kerian reined up, halting the column. Although the Qualinesti said nothing until he’d halted his mount before her, she could tell by his face that he’d been successful.
“I found the pass, General! The entrance to the valley!”
He confirmed the identifying landmarks Kerian had memorized from Gilthas’s map. The three peaks, snowcapped, were there, lined up abreast. No tracks went in or out of the pass.
Kerian was relieved. She didn’t imagine the nomads were done with them yet, but at least they hadn’t reached the pass first. The sand beast, too, haunted her thoughts. There was no telling when the creature might turn up again.
While the scout and his panting horse quenched their thirsts, she turned to another important task. It was time to apprise Gilthas of their progress. The sun was low in the late afternoon sky, but she didn’t want to wait until morning to dispatch a courier.
She chose a rugged Kagonesti named Redhawk to return to Khurinost with the reports she’d composed. The sealed letters went into a leather pouch, which the Kagonesti looped around his neck. She handed him one last missive, a flat parcel wrapped in oilskin and sealed with wax.
“This,” she said, “is for the Speaker personally. No one else. The other dispatches may be handed to Planchet or Hamaramis, but this goes into no hands but Gilthas Pathfinder’s.”
Redhawk swore to carry out the mission exactly. Laying a blue-tattooed hand on the pouch around his neck, he vowed, “This will not leave me so long as I live.” None knew better than she the seriousness of a Wilder pledge.
When Redhawk had diminished to a smudge of dust on the horizon, she turned her attention back to the Qualinesti scout.
“Lead us to the entrance into the pass. We’ll camp there for the night.”
With the Qualinesti in the lead, the column moved out.
The three mountain peaks loomed ahead, blotting out all sight of the way beyond. Kerian stared in amazement at their snowy tops. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d seen snow.
As the column entered the mouth of the pass, the last fingernail slice of sun vanished below the western range to their left. With the light gone, the temperature plummeted, leaving shivering riders to don long-unused cloaks. It really wasn’t so cold, but compared to the blast furnace of the High Plateau, the air felt frigid indeed.
The pass was a silent place. The wind, which had swirled around the elves since the Khalkist mountains first came in view, died away. Although there were more plants about- scrub pines and gnarled junipers, thorny greasebushes and spiky aloe-the area seemed oddly lifeless. The only sound to be heard was the clink of their horses’ hooves on the pebbly soil. No birds chattered from the trees, no insects buzzed.
Color was returning. To elven eyes, the desert was dull, all tans, browns, and grays surmounted always by a blue sky that, cloudless, seemed oddly flat. At the mouth of the Inath-Wakenti, subtle shadings were restored to the landscape’s palette. The mountainsides were softly washed in purple and blue. Dark green pines stood over dwarf junipers in lighter greens. Moss and lichen mottled the rocks in silvery gray, or a green as bright as the limes popular in Khuri-Khan.
Kerian did not like it. When the valley had been nothing more than a spot on a map, she’d had many reasons for not wanting to come here, much less to live here. Now that it was real, now that she was here, her objections only increased. The very feel of the place was wrong. Tainted somehow.
She wasn’t the only one to notice this. Favaronas had drawn his cape close around his shoulders. “Feels like a graveyard,” he muttered, his eyes darting left and right.
Unconsciously, the elves slowed their pace. They’d come through the fiery crucible of the High Plateau, losing many of their number to nomads, the sand beast, and heat stroke, and they had reached their goal at last, yet no one felt any joy. No one smiled. Like Favaronas, all were looking around uncertainly, not drinking in the sight of their fabled destination, but regarding it with suspicion. Talk ceased. Every face reflected the same thought: What sort of place have we come to?
“General! Tracks!”
Kerian shook off the tomblike mood and urged her mount into a trot. The vanguard riders had found an area of prints. Horses had crossed the elves’ intended path, from left and right. Kerian dismounted and joined one of the scouts, kneeling to study the prints.
“Small hooves. Unshod,” she observed.
“Nomad ponies,” agreed the Wilder scout. “Many.”
“How long ago?”
He put his sun-darkened face scant inches from the prints, then lifted a handful of trampled dirt, crushed it, and let it fall from his fingers. “Half a day or less, but more than an hour,” he reckoned.
So much for having beaten the nomads to the pass, she thought unhappily. Kerian rose. Favaronas arrived leading his horse. He asked what they had found.
“Nomads,” she said. “Probably the same ones we’ve fought twice before.”
“Why? We aren’t in their desert anymore,” the archivist said, exasperated.
“To keep us out of the valley.” Dusk had come and gone. Stars were appearing overhead. Keri
an realized that even she, with her keen eyesight, found it difficult to penetrate the shadows ahead. A sudden shiver chased itself down her spine, and she muttered, “I almost wish they would.”
The howl of a wolf pierced the air. Immediately it was answered by others both ahead and behind the elves. Kerian’s gloomy mood shattered.
“Stand to horse!” she cried, drawing her sword.
Favaronas did as she ordered, but didn’t see the need for such alarm. Surely even a large pack of wolves wouldn’t attack a column of armed elves.
The Lioness glowered at him. “Those aren’t wolves, librarian! The enemy is upon us!”
Her officers came cantering up, the balance of the company following.
“Deploy your riders, now!” she ordered.
Favaronas’s uncertainty evaporated abruptly as a hail of arrows fell out of the darkened sky. The wolf cry was a nomad signal.
With a hundred riders, the Lioness moved down the slight slope to the east, seeking the hidden archers. The ground was broken by deep gullies cut during winter rains. Nomads skulked in these crevices, raising their heads long enough to loose an arrow, then ducking under cover again. The mounted elves were forced to bend low to saber the enemy, but in a few minutes they put the archers to rout. Whooping with victory, they would’ve chased the fleeing humans, but the Lioness called them back.
Returned to the main body of warriors, she sat motionless in the saddle, her head up, straining to hear the slightest sound. She divided her attention between north and south. From one direction or the other, the main attack would come. She was beginning to understand nomad thinking. Feint into ambush was practically their only tactic. Wolf calls and a burst of arrows were intended to strike fear, to fix the enemy’s attention in one direction, while the main assault came from elsewhere. The pass here was too wide for a strike from the west; it would come from the north, directly ahead, or the south.
“Keep alert,” she called. “Watch the shadows.”
From the north came the rumble of approaching horses. The Lioness spread out her small band in skirmishing order, each rider seven or eight feet from his neighbor. By the sound of the enemy’s approach, she estimated she faced a force slightly greater in size than her own.
Others in the line had made the same mental calculation. An anxious voice asked, “Should we sit still and receive their charge?”
“Unless you want to die tonight,” the Lioness replied. She was certain this was yet another feint. The main attack still had not shown itself.
A dark mass of riders appeared out of the north. The nomads were strung out in a long, thin line, stretching beyond the limits of the elves’ small formation. Fortunately, the rough ground prevented the Khurs from charging at full speed. They had to pick their way around broken ground and small trees, then climb through steep gullies in small groups. Under the Lioness’s steady hand, the elves waited. When the first nomads reached level ground, she ordered half her command to charge. A brisk melee began, with the elves battling the Khurs as they arrived, piecemeal. This effectively destroyed the nomads’ numerical advantage.
The battle continued, Khurs and elves wheeling and turning on the ground as the stars overhead performed their own slow, stately march between the high peaks. A rider made his way to the Lioness. He reported large numbers of nomads coming up from the south.
She felt a kind of relief. At least the waiting was over. “How many?” she asked.
“Difficult to say, General. Three hundred, maybe more.”
She sent him back to his comrades. Three hundred nomads against fewer than one hundred of her soldiers, awaiting their charge. Even with the advantage of darkness, those were daunting odds.
The elves around her watched her in silence. The veterans, with her since the days of rebellion in Qualinesti, sat as motionless as she. Younger warriors shifted nervously. Since she was the Lioness-admired just short of worship, yet first among equals-one spoke up, asking what her orders were.
She turned a thoughtful look on him. “Who carries our fire?” she asked.
Certain elves in the warband were detailed to carry live coals in clay pots. From these each night’s campfires were lit. The young elf couldn’t fathom why the Lioness would ask about this now, but he replied after only a brief, confused pause: “Sergeant Vitianthus has our fire, General.”
She knew Vitianthus. A Silvanesti volunteer, he was a former horse trainer and an elegant rider.
“Tell the sergeant I want fire-lots of it.” Twisting in the saddle, she pointed to a copse of cedars forty yards distant, on their right flank. “Have him set fire to those trees.”
The young elf saluted and galloped away.
“Everyone is to remain where they are,” Kerian commanded. At her order, swords were drawn and rested on shoulders.
Sergeant Vitianthus and a contingent broke off from the band and galloped to the cedar copse. For a long interval nothing could be seen, then sharp elven eyesight noted smoke rising, nearly invisible in the night air. The sweet cedar smoke drifted back over the motionless warriors. An orange flame leaped up. Then another.
To the main body of nomads, advancing steadily from the south, the sight of fire was a shock. The leading elements of Adala’s tribe faltered, uncertain what was happening. Adala, mounted on her donkey, saw the flickering flames and shrugged.
“So much the better. A fire will make it easier to see the laddad and kill them.”
Gwarali, who had begged for the honor of leading the attack, agreed with her. The burning trees clearly showed him elves on horseback waving fiery brands. It seemed a futile gesture. The trees were too few to make a blaze large enough to ward off the nomad warband. All the desperate elves were doing was illuminating their own destruction.
He drew his sword and uttered the new war cry-“Adala maita!”
Hundreds echoed him, as he led the men forward. Wisely, they did not gallop toward the foe, but rode at a fast trot. They saw the elves who’d started the fire retreating from the burning copse, and naturally went for the enemy they could see.
As the nomads skirted the blaze, the crackle of burning wood and snap of boiling sap masked other sounds. The Weya-Lu never heard the hail of arrows that emptied a score of their saddles.
“Where are they coming from?” Gwarali shouted. The firestarters were still in view, galloping away to the north.
No one could answer him. Another wave of arrows fell. These weren’t random volleys, lofted in the general direction of the Khurs. Every missile found a target; the arrows were well aimed. Even nomads farther from the fire and not illuminated by its light were being hit.
The answer hit Gwarali like a bolt of lightning: Laddad could see in the dark!
He shouted a warning. It was echoed back through the ranks, and the Weya-Lu faltered. Gwarali roared, “They can die in the dark, too! Up swords!”
More arrows came, scything across the starlit landscape, each wave bringing down men and horses. Gwarali pulled his horse up short, causing the pony to rear on its hind legs. He bellowed, “Will you leave your murdered families unavenged? Did your fathers and brothers die in battle for nothing? Are you men?”
Backs straightened, blood surged anew. The Weya-Lu lifted swords high and prepared to charge.
“Believe in your maita, Sons of the sand! Follow me! For your gods! For-”
A perfectly aimed arrow cut off Gwarali’s rallying cry. The point took him in the left eye, burying itself deep. The nomad chief was dead even as he toppled backward off his horse.
The Lioness watched with satisfaction as the Weya-Lu attack melted away. The fire had worked even better than she’d hoped. By lighting it on their right flank, the elves drew the nomads to that point. The flames weren’t enough to light the battlefield for the humans-in fact, their proximity to it served to ruin what little night sight they had-but the elves, with their keener vision, could clearly see the nomad riders.
There was no time to celebrate. The fire was dying out. Stung
by the elves’ arrows, the nomads would probably return with everything they had. It was time to go. She and the archers rejoined the northern half of her army. They had empty saddles of their own. This was not a horseman’s battle, blundering through gullies with archers about.
According to Gilthas’s map, the pass narrowed about a mile in. Kerian decided they would advance and make a stand there.
The noise of the enemy approaching from behind them grew louder. In close order, the elves rode straight down the center of the pass. Favaronas kept close to the Lioness. With luck and her tactical skill, he hoped they might yet escape the nomads’ pursuit.
Adala took the loss of Gwarali in stride. Bilath, brother of Adala’s dead husband, was leading the flanking riders now. Gwarali’s nephew Bindas took his uncle’s place at the head of the southern warband. Bolstered by the Weyadan’s calm conviction, Weya-Lu warriors once more pushed forward, eager to close with the laddad.
On a rocky pinnacle three miles away, the sand beast raised its head and tasted the wind. Its prey was close by, and in great numbers. The itch in its iron claws soon would be salved by elf blood. It gathered itself to spring. There were humans in its path, but they posed no obstacle. One blinding rush and all the elves would die, then the burning in its heart would be extingui.hed. One rush, and it would all be over-
Anew odor, propelled by the east wind, teased its nostrils.
The sand beast froze. The scent was familiar, an ancient memory, one that caused the scales on its back to ripple in fear.
A strange warbling cry pierced the night High overhead, a black object occluded the stars.
Kerian heard it over the thud and jingle of her troops in motion. Hardly believing her ears, she looked skyward.
“Eagle Eye!”
Favaronas, slightly ahead of her, tried to look back while maintaining his seat. “What?”
“My griffon! That’s his cry! I know it as well as my own voice!”
She had no idea how Eagle Eye could be here, when she’d left him in Khurinost, but the griffon’s call was unmistakable. Standing in her stirrups, she whistled shrilly. To her delight, Eagle Eye answered, sounding closer now.
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