by Troy Denning
A tug on a guideline attached to her waist brought her to a stop. Several moments later, ten fist-sized sling stones appeared in the darkening sky and rained down on the sentries. Two fell unconscious. By the time the third made enough sense of the assault to turn and see the raiding party-rendered visible when they attacked-galloping toward him on their camels, two warriors were already clubbing him senseless. Bruised as the young herder might be when he awoke, Ruha took the fact that the warriors used the butts of their lances instead of the tips as a sign of Sa'ar's concern about angering the Shadovar. Bedine raiders usually killed the sentries, so there would be that many fewer warriors available for the counter raid.
The sheikh and his other warriors were already charging into the flight of resting veserabs, hurling loops of braided rope around the necks of the smallest beasts and securing the other ends to their saddles. Most of them were coughing and reeling, struggling to stay on their mounts as the veserabs filled the air with their noxious fumes. Ruha cleared the air with a powerful wind spell, then saw an angry veserab cow leap onto a camel's neck and rip the thing's head off with four sharp-taloned feet.
More veserabs began to rise all around, filling the dusk air with fluttering clouds of dark wings. Most were simply trying to escape, but a few, especially those with calves whistling for help, were beginning to wheel toward the Bedine warriors. A veserab dived low in front of Sa'ar, pulling a grizzled warrior off the camel ahead, then dropping him back to the ground in pieces. Ruha dismissed the silence spell and pointed toward the wadi they had chosen as their escape route. "Enough, Sa'ar!" she yelled. "Flee!"
The sheikh did not need to be told twice. He sounded three notes on his amarat. His warriors-those who were not fleeing already-turned as one, each pulling two or three panicked veserab calves through the air behind them. Ruha hurled a flurry of magic bolts into the air and dusted half a dozen adults off the raiders' tails, then Caladnei raised a force barrier behind them. A dozen veserabs slammed into the invisible wall and dropped to the ground with broken necks and wings. The confused survivors circled away, whistling in frustration and sorrow.
Ruha and Caladnei followed. By the time they reached the mouth of the wadi, the veserabs were beginning to find their way over the force barrier. Ruha leaped off her camel and scraped up a handful of sand, then voiced an incantation and blew it toward the growing number of creatures streaming after them. A howling wind rose at her back and, scraping the canyon mouth clean of sand and dust, roared out toward the lake. The veserabs vanished into a cloud of swirling dust and did not emerge.
"Your magic has grown stronger, witch," Sa'ar observed behind her. "Remind me to be patient with you."
Ruha turned to find him holding the reins of her camel. The rest of his warriors were emerging from their hiding places in the mouth of the wadi, half of them covering the raiders' back trail with bows and arrows, the other half pulling the captured veserabs down out of the air and binding them with leather hoods and wing jackets. Though most Bedine were adept at handling falcons and other birds of prey, veserab calves were both larger and more ferocious. The battle was not all that one-sided, and the warriors were paying in blood for every lace they threaded.
Ruha commanded her camel to kneel, then, as she mounted, heard one roar a little way up the wadi. She pivoted toward the sound and saw a line of tethered mounts collapsing, their throats and bellies being opened by glassy black blades as a Shadovar patrol peeled itself out of the shadows along the gulch. She loosed a lightning bolt at a figure rising up behind Sa'ar's camel and saw the fellow's head come apart before he sank back into the murk. Caladnei cried out in shock behind her, and Ruha turned to find the Cormyrean on the ground, pinned beneath her wounded camel with a ruby-eyed Shadovar warrior leaping over the top. She flung a ball of spider silk at the figure and uttered a spell, and he hit the ground encased in a sticky cocoon.
Finally, there was time to scream, "Shadovar! Defend yourselves!"
Even Ruha could barely hear her voice over the battle din that had already risen in the wadi. Bedine were shouting to each other about demons and djinn and, finding attackers at their backs no matter which way they turned, falling fast. The Shadovar were rising from the shadows to hack off an arm or leg, then vanishing back into the murk before they could be counterattacked.
Ruha grabbed Caladnei under the arms and pulled her from under her camel. "Are you hurt?"
"Stunned," the wizard replied, mouth gaping at the carnage. She lowered her hand and sent a golden bolt streaking through a Shadovar rising behind Ruha, then shook her head in astonishment. "Where did they come from?" "Out of the shadows," Ruha said.
She slipped around to Caladnei's back and shot a long stream of fire at a Shadovar rising behind a Bedine camel boy, no doubt holding reins on his first raid. The fireball exploded without harming the shadow warrior, as Weave magic sometimes did, and the dark figure ran his sword through the young warrior, then melted back into the shadows. "This is how it often is with them," Ruha said.
"Really?" Caladnei gasped. She was silent for an instant, and Ruha glanced over her shoulder to see the wizard rubbing the purple dragon on her signet ring. "Hhormun, come quick. You need to see this!" "Come?" Ruha cried.
She glimpsed a Shadovar rising up from behind a boulder with a blowpipe in his hands and flung a pebble in his direction, then spoke a single word. The pebble became a bead of magma. When it hit the boulder, the boulder erupted into a thousand drops of molten stone as well, and the warrior vanished in a searing orange spray. "We should be fleeing!" said Ruha.
"Flee?" Caladnei shook her head. "There can't be more than two dozen left." "And more where they came from," warned Ruha.
She had no idea how close they were to the city, but she knew the Shadovar well enough to feel certain this was just the first wave of the attack. Even if they didn't realize there were Cormyreans involved in the raid, they would send a company of veserab riders to make an example of any tribe that dared steal from them. "They're just trying to delay us," Ruha said.
'Yes, so I guessed when they attacked our camels first."
The Cormyrean loosed a silver ray at a pair of Shadovar charging Sa'ar, who was still struggling to slip a hood and wing jacket over the last veserab tied to his dead camel. When the attack succeeded only in stunning the shadow warriors back into the murk, Ruha left Caladnei's side and dodging one black sword and reducing the owner of the second to a cinder even darker than his normally swarthy complexion, stopped at the sheikh's side.
"Are you mad, Sa'ar?" She swatted the creature's head aside as it swung around to bite at her knee, then continued, "Let it go! A few veserabs cannot be worth so many Mahwa lives."
The sheikh did not even look up from his work. "Mounts that can fly across the sky? The Mahwa will be the masters of the desert!"
He finally managed to pull the hood over the creature's faceless head, then was struck from behind by a bolt of shadow magic that pitched him face first over the waist-high calf. His arm went limp and Ruha saw ground through a jagged hole in it. Before she could sweep a pebble off the ground to counterattack, the sheikh had pulled a throwing dagger with his good hand and pivoted around to whip it at his charging attacker.
The throw missed, of course, but it distracted the Shadovar long enough for Ruha to pull her own jambiya. She grabbed the laces of the calf's hood and held it beside her for the half second it took the shadow warrior to close. Ruha came up beneath his guard and opened him from groin to ribs. She was mildly surprised to see that the stuff spilling out of him looked much the same as that coming out of the Bedine.
"May Elah smile on you," Sa'ar gasped, his good arm thrown over the veserab's back, supporting him. "How many times have you saved my life, now?"
"Too many times for one sheikh," Ruha said, pulling him to his feet. She took his curved amarat horn and pressed it into his good hand. "Now blow your horn and scatter your warriors. Veserabs are no good to dead men."
Sa'ar thrust the horn
away. "They are my veserabs now," he said, "and no man steals from Sa'ar, Sheikh of the Mahwa." Ruha let her chin sink. "You are a fool, Sheikh."
"Almost certainly," Sa'ar said, pushing the calf's head toward her. "Now help me lace this up, before the battle turns against us again." "Again?"
Ruha looked around and saw that while the battle was continuing to rage, the Shadovar were now being assailed by magic and iron whenever they drew near a Bedine. She glanced up the slopes of the wadi and saw Hhormun standing atop a boulder, his aba tossed aside somewhere to reveal the black battle cloak of a Cormyrean War Wizard. He was wielding two wands at once, hurling blazing nuggets of fire or crackling forks of lightning whenever a Shadovar dared emerge from the murk to attack. Flanking him were two full ranks of Purple Dragons, loading and firing their iron crossbows by turn, while a smaller ring of three wizards and two dozen dragoneers stood by staring into the murk, attacking any shadow that so much as flickered.
"The fool!" Ruha hissed. "Does he think no one will see him? Or that the Most High will think the iron bolts came from Bedine crossbows?"
"I do not know what he thinks," Sa'ar said, "only that he is a man of his word. Now, will you help me or not, witch?"
After a quick glance around to ensure they were under no imminent threat of attack, Ruha helped him lace the hood. By the time she finished, Caladnei was standing at the upper end of the battlefield, waving the Bedine survivors up the wadi.
"Come along, and quickly!" The Cormyrean's gaze was fixed on the sky above the lake, where Ruha's sandstorm was still raging. "Be quick about it."
Ruha pushed Sa'ar and the reins of his three veserab calves into the arms of a group of stunned-looking warriors, then turned in the direction Caladnei was facing and saw a large company of veserab riders approaching from the north, flying high above her sandstorm. They were still too distant for her to tell much more than that there were several hundred of them, but she would have bet her veil that a force of that size was being led by a Prince of Shade.
Hhormun and his dragoneers began an orderly withdrawal toward Caladnei-and Ruha was not at all sorry to see the Shadovar survivors concentrating their efforts on the Cormyreans instead of Sa'ar and his Mahwa. The shadow lords were being more careful now, emerging from the murk just long enough to fling a shadow bolt through a warrior's knee or hamstring a wizard, clearly attempting to delay their retreat until the veserab company arrived.
Ruha ran up the wadi and joined Caladnei, who was busily spraying magic into the hillside shadows in an attempt to help her struggling companions. With her attack magic all but exhausted, Ruha prepared a sand dragon spell, but held it in reserve in case Caladnei irritated the Shadovar enough to draw an attack.
Between the wizardess's attacks, Ruha said, "Had Hhormun been waiting here with the rest of Sa'ar's warriors, the Mahwa might have lost fewer lives."
"Or we all might have lost more," Caladnei said. "This way, it was the Shadovar who were surprised, not us."
"And you had a chance to watch them fight." Ruha did not bother to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
Caladnei sprayed a pair of Shadovar with some sort of green ray Ruha was not familiar with, reducing both warriors to smoky wisps and opening the way for Hhormun’s battered company to join them in the bottom of the wadi.
She cocked her brow and glanced at Ruha. "We had a chance to watch them fight, but it was their idea to steal the veserabs."
"True-and you took advantage." Ruha was fighting to keep from yelling. The story was an old one, the berrani from outside Anauroch entering the desert and using the nomads for their own purposes. "Sa'ar would never have attempted such a thing without Cormyrean magic."
"It sounds to me like we took advantage of each other." Caladnei shrugged and pointed up the wadi, where Sa'ar and his warriors were leading their new veserabs into the teleport circle that would carry them to safety-at least temporarily. "I don't see the sheikh complaining."
Hhormun and the rest of the Cormyrean scouts arrived, with half a dozen Shadovar close on their heels. Caladnei took out two with one of her green rays, then Hhormun and another wizard killed three more. The last warrior glanced over his shoulder and, finding the veserab company still too distant to aid him, began to run for the nearest shadow. When no one else started a spell, Ruha scraped a handful of sand off the ground and started hers-only to be interrupted when Hhormun brought his arm down across her wrists.
"Let him go," he said. "He's not hurting anybody now."
"Hurting anybody?" Ruha gasped. "He's seen your wizard's cloak. He'll run straight to the Most High and confirm that we're a scouting party from Cormyr."
"Will he?" A faint smile came to Hhormun’s bearded lips, and he turned up the wadi. "Then we had better hurry to our next campsite, hadn't we?"
Ruha's jaw fell behind her veil. She stood there staring after the old wizard until Caladnei took her arm.
"Come along," the Cormyrean woman said. "The point has been made. Vangerdahast wouldn't be happy if you stayed behind to confirm it… not happy at all."
Rivalen had battled three phaerimm at once, toe to thorn and with no chance to call for help. He had dallied with twin succubae and awakened to find them-well, he didn't want to relive that again. He had fought demons- bare-handed, by Shadow-and been the one who flew away. And never, not in eight-hundred years-not even when he gave his spirit over to the shadowstuff-not once had he been frightened. Not like this.
"How?" the Most High asked. His voice was calm, gentle-even reasonable-in that terrible tone it assumed just before he condemned someone to an eternity of wandering the Barrens of Doom and Despair. "Can someone please explain this?"
They were looking down at the camp of the Harper witch and her Cormyrean scouts. Not scrying it through the world-window, mind you, but looking straight down on it from the Most High's personal observation balcony in the Palace Most High. Staring down through the shadow mists at an imminently defensible camp, located in a maze of canyons so narrow a veserab's wings would touch both sides. A maze of canyons flooded by magic light with no particular source, where the few shadows that did exist were guarded by a squad of sentries armed with both magic and steel. A maze of canyons where the Shadovar would have to fight their way in like common ore foot soldiers, and a maze of canyons with plenty of room for more Cormyreans… and Sembians… and Dalesmen… and the Hidden One only knew who else, all determined to deny the lands of lost Netheril to the Shadovar.
The witch could not see them, of course. Certainly, her Bedine vassals had reported to her the stream of veserabs that constantly dropped into the lake there, and no doubt remarked on the dark storm cloud that never seemed to leave the area, but she could not see Shade Enclave. There were still the shadow mists and the thousands of feet above ground and, not least of all, the Most High's magic, but Rivalen was not so sure. "Rivalen?"
Rivalen felt the weight of the Most High's gaze upon him. He did not bother to look up. There was nothing there to see anyway. He simply swallowed his fear, then addressed his father.
"There is a reason Ruha hides her face behind a veil, Most High," he said. "Of all the races on Toril, the Shadovar have more reason than any to know the power of the hidden." "True, but that explains nothing."
Rivalen swallowed-hard. "Most High, who can explain the will of the Hidden One? The witch is down there; that is all that matters-save my own failure in stopping her in Cormyr."
It was this last that saved him. The weight of the Most High's scrutiny vanished at once, and the air grew still and cold as he came to Rivalen's side.
"You did as you thought best, my son," Telamont said, and Rivalen's shoulder grew numb with cold. "I am sure you will make it up to us." "As am I," Rivalen said.
"Good." The Most High squeezed his shoulder until Rivalen thought it would break. "Now, we must concern ourselves with what to do next."
"The answer is clear, Most High," said Clariburnus. "We must kill the witch." The Most High was silent.
"And that will help us how?" the Most High asked, his voice alarmingly reasonable and calm. "By disposing of your mistake?" "My mistake, Most High?"
"Was she not your guide, brother?" Rivalen asked. "Yours and Brennus's?"
"She was," Brennus answered, "and we controlled her."
"Enough!" the Most High spat "There is no use in blaming each other. I am disappointed in all of you." The Most High remained silent.
Escanor was the first who dared to speak. "What does the witch matter? If she cannot enter the city, what does it matter if she camps below us for a century?"
"It only matters if you are wrong," the Most High responded.
The question hung in the air as heavy as lead. None of the brothers dared answer.
Finally, the Most High said, "You have all failed me. All of you princes." The shadow mists briefly obscured the tents of the Cormyrean camp, and when they cleared again, the princes were looking at a circle of white rocks. "Do you see that circle?" "A teleportation circle," Rivalen said.
His knees nearly buckled under the weight of the Most High's question. "For retreat, I believe," Rivalen said. More silence. "But I could be wrong," Rivalen admitted.
"If he is, there will be an army below us in hours," Clariburnus said. "Laeral required less than three hours to transport her entire relief army to the Sharaedim."
Rivalen glowered into Clariburnus's lead-colored eyes. As the Eleventh Prince-and the youngest still surviving-he was an ambitious one, always eager to raise himself at his brothers' expense.