Nyx watched constantly for signs of the desert tribesmen, but the Imaziren remained elusive. Rhenna grew more grim as the leagues passed.
“The animals can’t abide these conditions much longer,” she told Nyx as the women shared the morning’s meager supply of water. “We’re almost out of grain, and there isn’t enough grazing even beside the wells. Where are these desert folk of yours?”
Nyx gazed toward the Southern horizon. “Have patience,” she said. “They will come.”
“Patience will not carry us when the horses are dead.”
Cian watched the two women in wary silence. Before this journey began, he would have sworn that no woman in the world could be as stubborn as Rhenna of the Free People. But Nyx shared that quality in full measure. In Karchedon she had been one of many rebels, subordinate to the leader Geleon; she’d been a prisoner of the Stone priests and barely escaped with her life. But there was something in her carriage that suggested a very different past. She was as proud as an Ailu in the days before the Children of the Stone came to steal Cian’s people from the Shield, and her courage was admirable.
Admirable. Cian shifted uneasily on his mount’s back and tried to wet his cracked lips. He couldn’t deny that he was drawn to Nyx in a way he couldn’t define. Her powers were of Earth, like his; she was graceful and beautiful. Rhenna had ignored Cian since that night outside the village, and it was Nyx who asked how he fared, who treated him as an honored companion.
Once or twice at the afternoon camp Cian caught Rhenna looking at him by the wan firelight, but she always turned her head before their eyes could meet. He knew that she didn’t dare show any sign of weakness now that she’d placed herself at the head of their expedition. Affection was an encumbrance for a warrior, even one who had given her body and some small piece of her heart to the man who rode beside her.
Cian wouldn’t beg for her attention. He’d lost nearly all right to pride, but that remnant lingered. When Rhenna kicked her mount into a trot and Nyx fell back to join Cian, he had his emotions under control.
“You are well, Watcher?” Nyx asked.
“Well enough. Where is Rhenna going?”
Nyx adjusted the cord that bound her headcloth over her braided hair. “Ahead, to scout. She won’t go far.”
Cian scanned the horizon, where Rhenna’s vanishing shape was a distorted blur in the rising heat. “What does Rhenna hope to find?” he asked.
“I think she has begun to doubt that we will meet the Imaziren,” Nyx said. “Do you share her distrust in me, Watcher?”
Cian sighed. “You’ve told us very little about your part in this journey. Perhaps if you explained, Rhenna would be less suspicious.”
“Of my motives?” Nyx tossed her head. “I intended to do so, but she can make such conversations difficult.”
“She prefers action to discussion,” Cian said wryly.
Nyx curled her fingers about the shaft of her spear, which rested in a makeshift harness of rope tied across her horse’s withers. “Action is not always possible or advisable,” she said. “I would have you understand, even if she does not.”
Cian reined his gelding to a stop. “You had better make clear what you expect of me, Nyx, or I may sadly disappoint you.”
“That is not possible.” Her dark eyes glinted with passion. “You are the one. The one my father sought, the one written of in the prophecies.” She glanced back at Tahvo, who rode her stolid pony with eyes half closed. “I will tell you some of what you wish to know…but I ask you to say nothing of it to the others until I am ready.”
“If it puts them at a disadvantage…”
“It will not.” Nyx shifted her slender weight and urged her horse into motion again, her spine strong and flexible as a willow branch. “I must begin with my father. You see, he was not born in my mother’s land. He came from the East, from a city unknown to all but a privileged few. His people call it New Meroe.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“If you had, my father’s people—my people—would be in grave danger.” She met his eyes. “New Meroe is the true home of the prophecies, the ancient writings that predict the rise and fall of the Exalted and the Stone God. It was from there that my father left in search of the Hammer of the Earth, and it was his quest that sent me across the desert to find what he could not.”
Nyx continued her remarkable tale as they rode through the morning, while Cian listened with astonishment and growing apprehension.
“So at last I arrived in Karchedon,” she said, her voice grown hoarse with the story’s telling. “I heard rumors of panther men taken captive by the Stone priests. I joined the rebels in the hope that Geleon would work to free the Watchers, but his people hadn’t the strength for so desperate an act. Then you came.”
“Ignorant of everything but what Philokrates had told us,” Cian said.
“As I was ignorant of your presence when Quintus and Talos asked for our help. But after Danae set me free and I met you, I knew you were the one.”
“How? Other Ailuri escaped from Baalshillek—”
“They were not chosen.”
“I would rather have died with them.”
“No.” She jerked on the reins, and her horse tossed up its head. “Do you think that Rhenna and Tahvo would long have survived your fall?”
“I didn’t save them. I didn’t save anyone. Many lost their lives because of me—”
“What you will save is a thousand times more important than any one life.”
Cian laughed. “The world?”
For a long time Nyx didn’t answer. “Not only the world’s body, but its soul.”
Cian had learned from experience that there was no arguing with the faithful. “What of the Weapons? We were told that each of them is guarded by an Exalted who escaped the Stone prison. Do your prophecies say which deva took the Hammer?”
“They tell that the god of chaos, Sutekh, created the Hammer to fight the Exalted, but they do not reveal who stole it.”
“And the other three Weapons?”
She bit her lip. “My father was able to share with me only what he knew. The priests of New Meroe understand far more than a simple warrior. When we take the Hammer—when you take it—we must continue on to the holy city.”
Cian heard the conviction in her words and wondered what Rhenna would make of them. She would certainly object to Nyx deciding the seekers’ destination, but she knew they had all too little information to go on. If New Meroe held the key…
“Was it your father or your mother who gave you your gift with growing things?” he asked.
“My mother. Clan Amòtékùn is blessed with such abilities, passed from mother to daughter.” She hesitated. “What became of the females of your people, Cian?”
The question startled him. “We have no females,” he said slowly. Liar. There is one…unnatural, forbidden….
He shook himself. “We…take mates from among the Free People, whose country borders our mountains. Male children of such matings return…returned to us in their sixth year.”
“No female has ever been born with the shapeshifting gift?”
“None. Female children of Ailuri sires usually became leaders among the Free People, but they did not change their shape. Why do you ask?”
“Did you not find it lonely without mates of your own kind?”
Cian looked away. “Our elders said we were meant to be alone, close to the devas and apart from man. We had no need of such companionship.”
“Yet you left your people.”
“I was not content with the life to which I was born, so I left the mountains. When I finally returned my people had all been taken.”
“And you blame yourself. This is an indulgence you cannot afford, Watcher.”
He almost smiled, thinking again how much she sounded like Rhenna in one of her more reproachful moods. “I doubt there will be many indulgences for any of us,” he said.
“Sacrifice is necessary if
great deeds are to be achieved.”
“What else do you demand of me besides saving the world?”
She looked into his eyes. “Your courage and strength, when the time comes to leave behind all that you love.”
He knew what she meant, and the beast within him howled in protest. The blood raced hot in his veins. His mount plunged, feeling the wildness simmering under his skin.
Nyx reached across the space between them and took his hand. “I have faith in you, Cian of the Watchers. You will defeat the god of evil and take your rightful place.”
“Where? On a temple pedestal, with priests of his own to worship him?”
Rhenna’s voice was tight with feigned amusement, and her eyes were slits in a dust-coated face. She drew her horse alongside Cian’s and pushed straggling hair from her forehead. “It seems I’ve missed a fascinating discussion,” she said. “Perhaps you can share it with me.”
“I doubt you’d find it of interest, warrior,” Nyx said. She and Rhenna glared at each other. A sharp burst of wind blew up from beneath the horses’ feet, carrying grit into Cian’s eyes.
“The wind is rising,” Tahvo said, trotting up to join them. “We must find shelter.”
Cian sneezed. The air was already laced with tiny particles of dust and sand, blotting out the horizon and turning the very ground into a whirlpool of earth and pebbles.
“This should not be,” Nyx said. “It is the wrong season for windstorms, or I would have been prepared—”
“Prepared or not, it comes,” Rhenna said. “Where do we ride, Nyx?”
The Southern woman sat still on her trembling mare. “Cover your faces and follow me.”
She turned her mount into the wind. It seemed insanity, and as the gusts grew more violent the sting of spinning gravel became lashing whips, tearing at skin and cloth with equal viciousness. The air was too thick to breathe. Cian lost sight of both Nyx and Rhenna. Guiding his horse with his knees, he reached for Tahvo’s reins and tugged her pony as close as he dared.
Soon every step was a struggle for the terrified, half-blinded horses. The exposed portion of Cian’s face was a mass of tiny welts and abrasions. Blood trickled into his eyes. If shelter lay ahead, he couldn’t sense it. He and Tahvo might have been alone in a world of unbeing.
“It is Rhenna!” Tahvo shouted, muffled by the cloth wrapped over her mouth. “This wind is of her summoning.”
“I can’t see her,” Cian replied. “I can barely smell her. Can she control it?”
“Only if recognizes her own magic. She must understand….”
But Rhenna obviously didn’t understand. If she’d created this storm as Tahvo claimed, it had come not from her will but from her anger. And if she didn’t find a way to bring it under control, she would surely kill them all.
Chapter Four
R henna reined her gelding away from the wind and rode back to find Cian and Tahvo. Their horses walked with lowered heads, barrels heaving, eyes shut against the flaying wall of sand. Rhenna pulled the last of her spare clothing from her pack and cut the linen into strips, dismounting to fasten makeshift blinkers over the other horses’ heads, as she’d done with her own mount.
Nyx reappeared, harsh coughs wracking her long body. “We can’t stop!” she cried.
Rhenna fixed blinkers on Nyx’s mount. “We’ll have to lead the horses,” she said. “Do we have far to go?”
“Not far.” Nyx slid to the ground, and Cian helped Tahvo to dismount. They turned back into the wind. The storm grew more savage by the moment. Rhenna murmured to her weary horse and waited until Cian and Tahvo caught up.
Step by step Nyx led them through the rain of grit and gravel. A journey that seemed to last many hours might have taken only a few thousand heartbeats; the sun was invisible, the heat unabated. Boulders rose monstrous and strange out of the haze. They stood like old men with hard gray skins, seamed and scarred by the elements.
Mountains. They were nothing like those Rhenna had known, as alien to her as the desert and just as forbidding. But as the travelers gained altitude, the force of the wind gradually died from a raging blizzard of sand to a mere tempest. The horses’ hooves skidded and echoed over the slick surface of a massive sheet of granite. Sand and dust blew across the rock in swirls and eddies, movement without life or purpose.
“There are caves among these mountains,” Nyx called. “We will take refuge there until the storm abates.”
“Is there water?” Rhenna asked, as much to Tahvo as Nyx.
No one replied, and that was answer enough. Nyx continued to lead them higher, where ancient wind and water had carved sandstone cliffs into bizarre shapes, pinnacles and pillars like the ramparts of a city. A few ragged brown tufts of grass pushed between cracks in the stone. The horses were trembling with fatigue by the time Nyx found the shelter she sought.
The mouth of the cave was wide and unobstructed, easily large enough to accommodate the horses. Rhenna remembered another cave in very different mountains, the first time she’d held a real conversation with Cian after his escape from his Neuri captors. There had been a new, strange intimacy between them then, even with Tahvo standing between them. Rhenna hadn’t acknowledged it at the time. Now she had to pretend it no longer existed.
She forced the useless anger away and followed Nyx under the overhanging arch of dark-polished rock. The horses came readily enough, nostrils flaring as they sucked in breaths of cool, clean air. Rhenna led the animals to a place where the wind couldn’t reach but there was still enough light to see. She stripped the blinkers from the horses’ eyes and spat out a mouthful of grit.
“Where are we?” she asked Nyx.
“In the mountains the tribes call Speaking Stones. This is Amazi territory.” She peered out at the gray afternoon light. “It’s too late to continue today, but if the storm breaks, I’ll scout for sign of the Imaziren.”
“The horses must drink soon.”
“Give them my water.” Nyx turned her back on Rhenna and began to remove her mare’s pack. Rhenna went to her own mount and untied waterskins and the collapsible leather dish Nyx had bought to serve the horses. She poured as generous a helping as she dared, and the animals crowded close.
Cian had already unpacked his gelding and Tahvo’s pony. He accepted a waterskin from Rhenna without touching her hand.
“Where is Tahvo?” Rhenna asked.
Cian looked around in surprise. “She was with me a moment ago. Perhaps she’s looking for the spirits.”
“I hope she finds them. They aren’t speaking to me.”
“But you still speak to them.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I’ll find Tahvo.” He set off into the darkness at the back of the cave, his panther’s vision keener than any human’s.
Nyx had started a small fire with twigs and branches she had collected from the rare trees and shrubs that grew beside the desert wells. “It grows cold at night in these mountains,” she said, “but we have little left to eat.”
“If there were game here, I could hunt,” Rhenna said. “At least there’s some grain left for the horses. When that is gone…”
“I know.” Nyx rubbed her high forehead with the palm of her hand, revealing the brown skin beneath the dust. “We will reach the Imaziren soon. They do not permit strangers to pass unchallenged. When we—”
“Rhenna.”
Cian’s voice was a hollow whisper, as if it came from a great distance. Rhenna snatched up a burning stick and strode the way Cian had gone. She found him much sooner than she’d expected, standing beside Tahvo in an alcove off the main chamber.
“What are you two doing?” she demanded. “Tahvo—”
“She found them,” Cian said. “The Speaking Stones.”
He pointed to the nearest curved wall. At first all Rhenna saw were pale scratchings and lines on the darker rock, and then she picked out the images by firelight: men and beasts, graceful drawings and engravings of hunters and horseme
n, animals of impossible features and proportions. Indeed, the stones did speak. They told stories of people who had lived in this harsh country in another age, an age when the desert had nurtured abundance that had long since vanished.
“I felt them,” Tahvo said. She sat cross-legged on the floor, an arm’s length from the painted wall, eyes closed, hands resting on her thighs in an attitude of prayer or contemplation. “The spirits are no longer here, but some part of them remains in the stone. Can you tell me what you see?”
“They are the ones who came before,” Nyx said. She settled to her haunches, gazing up at the pictures with reverence on her face. “The ones who hunted here when the desert was grass, when the àgùnfón and àjànànkú walked beside the rivers. They who gave birth to the Imaziren and saw the Exalted’s City fall.”
Rhenna held the torch closer to the walls. “Here men hunt beasts on foot with spears,” she said to Tahvo. “But I’ve never seen such animals. One is spotted and has a neck as long as its legs. Another creature has a head that is all mouth, with broad feet and tiny ears—”
“The akáko,” Nyx said. “They still live in Southern rivers.”
Rhenna moved a few steps deeper into the cave. “People—women—are dancing. Herds of deer with strange horns. Men with bows and arrows.”
Tahvo ran her fingers across one of the lowest engravings. “There is more,” she said. Slowly she got to her feet. “Yes, I hear.” She spread her arms wide and crept along the wall. “It is the story of the coming of the Exalted.”
There were no voices. The spirits had gone long ago, just as Tahvo had told the others, but their bones were here, infusing the paints with which vanished artists had made these pictures.
Rhenna had described images of men hunting and women dancing in a time when fantastic creatures roamed a vast plain. And Tahvo could see it: rolling steppes dotted with trees, rivers filled with the great-mouthed water horses and horned beasts of enormous size.
“When the desert was grass,” Tahvo repeated. “When men lived in harmony with the spirits, before the Exalted came.”
“She’s having a vision,” Cian said. “Tahvo, are you all right?”
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