by Troy Denning
The trio crouched on the ridge for most of the morning, watching the specks below scurry about their business. Soon, the Zhentarim began butchering the Mtair Dhafir’s camels, and the breeze carried the smell of roasting meat up to them. Lander’s mouth began to water, bringing back the memory of the special feasts he and his father had once shared.
As a merchant, Lander’s father often ventured up the Arkhen River to purchase fruits, farm produce, and freshwater crabs. The people of the valley were haughty and arrogant, so Lander had often gone along on these trips to keep his father company. He and his father would sit in country taverns until late at night, eating roasted mutton and discussing the highest price they would pay for the next day’s goods. Even then, Lander had never believed his advice was truly needed, but he had looked forward to the trips eagerly. For the son of a traveling merchant, any opportunity to spend time with his father had been precious.
Unfortunately, the meat making Lander’s mouth water was camel instead of sheep, and Rahalat’s barren shoulder was a poor substitute for the humid valley of ferns and lilies. Now Archendale’s abundant orchards and sweet waters seemed a distant and fantastic mirage, much as Anauroch’s empty wastes and scorched mountains would have seemed a bad dream to him then.
The Sembian opened his waterskin and took a long drink, trying to wash the recollection away before it became distressing. It didn’t help. He was hungry and the smell of roasting meat automatically triggered memories of every feast he had ever eaten, especially memories he had thought long forgotten.
Trying to keep his mind focused on stopping the enemy’s plans in Anauroch, Lander began to count the specks in the camp below. Sooner or later, he knew, the Bedine would fight the Zhentarim. When they did, it would be useful for them to know just what they were up against.
It was not an easy task, for invaders kept moving from fire to fire. Occasionally, one patrol returned to camp and scattered to a dozen different fires to eat, while another group left to take its place. Lander found that he had to keep track of the Zhentarim by scratching a grid in the ground and moving pebbles from one place to another to represent every ten specks that moved.
As Lander was finishing his count, Kadumi crawled to his side and peered over the Sembian’s shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Counting the Zhentarim,” Lander replied.
“And how many are there?” asked Ruha, turning to face the pair.
Lander looked at the grid, then added the figures in his head. “I would guess about fifteen hundred.”
“Impossible!” Kadumi objected.
“At least we know why they’re so hungry,” Ruha said, studying the cooking fires down in the camp. “The largest khowwan I’ve ever heard of numbers only three hundred. The invaders will never find enough grazing to keep all their camels in milk.”
“Or enough game to fill their stewpots,” Kadumi added.
“They don’t need to,” Lander replied. “The Zhentarim don’t intend to be in the desert long. They’re carrying all the food they need on their camels.”
“You mean they’ll go away in a few months?” Ruha asked, her voice growing hopeful.
Lander shook his head. “No. A few months are all the Zhentarim need to complete their task. They’ll subdue a dozen khowwans, then use hostages, bribery, and violence to enslave the tribesmen. Once their powerbase is secure, they’ll take their army away and use the tribes they control to overpower the others. Before the Bedine realize what’s happened, the entire desert will belong to the Black Robes. The only way to stop them is to drive the Zhentarim from the desert.”
“Then the Bedine are doomed,” Kadumi said, pointing at the specks in the camp. “No tribe can stand against so many.”
Lander frowned and pulled the boy’s arm down. “Of course not. Any tribe that fights the Zhentarim alone will meet the same fate as the Mtair Dhafir and the Qahtan. We’ll need a hundred tribes.”
Ruha and Kadumi looked skeptical. “That’s impossible,” Kadumi said. “No tribe has that many allies.”
Lander shook his head. “Kadumi, this isn’t a matter of traditional alliances. Tribes that have never heard of each other must ride and fight under the same banner. They’re all battling a common enemy.”
“It will never—”
Ruha interrupted Kadumi’s reply with an alarmed gasp. Pointing over Lander’s back, she cried, “Look out!”
Lander reached for the jambiya at his waist with one hand and for his sword with the other. The effort made his wounded shoulder burn with agony. He clenched his teeth, then pulled the blades from their sheathes and spun around on his knees to meet the unseen attacker.
There was no one there. Fearing his enemy to be cloaked by invisibility, Lander jumped to his feet. He sliced through the air in front of him with the scimitar, then crossed the pattern with a slash from his dagger. Neither blade hit a target. Groaning with pain, Lander took one step backward and repeated the pattern first to his right and then to his left. Still nothing.
The Sembian backed away one more step. Kadumi moved next to him, scimitar drawn but held in a confused and tentative low guard.
“Where is it, Ruha?” Lander demanded.
There was no answer.
“Ruha, I can’t see it,” the Harper repeated.
When there was still no response, Lander hazarded a glance over his shoulder.
Ruha was staring at him as if he were ghost. Her eyes were glassy, and she had a confused, distant expression on her brow.
“Is something wrong?” the Harper asked, beginning to suspect that the cause for her alarm had not been an attacker. “Are you sick?”
The widow did not respond to the question. Instead, she looked him over from head to toe, then took the material of his filthy robe between her fingers. “Blessings to Rahalat,” Ruha said. “You’re alive.”
“Of course he is,” Kadumi said, scowling. “So am I. What made you think otherwise?”
Ruha shook her head, then said, “I saw a Black Robe behind Lander—or at least I thought I did. He had a dagger.” She squinted toward the sun, then shook her head. “It must have been At’ar.”
Kadumi sheathed his dagger and took his sister-in-law by the arm. “You’re getting sun-sick again,” he said. “Let’s find some shade and get you a drink of water.”
Ruha started to protest, then seemed to think better of it and allowed Kadumi to lead her off the ridge.
Lander crouched back down and peered over the rocky slope to the camp. To his relief, he saw no sign that the Zhentarim had not noticed their excitement. The flea-sized spots were still milling calmly about camp.
After assuring himself that they remained undetected, the Sembian found a hiding place on the shady side of a boulder. Gently rubbing his wounded shoulder, he drank down one of the healing potions Florin had given him, then followed it with a long swallow from his waterskin.
For the next few hours, Lander remained on watch while Kadumi tended Ruha. Nothing happened, save that a dozen vultures came to hover over the camp. With their red-rimmed eyes, nude heads, and snakelike necks, the birds normally appeared grotesque and repulsive to Lander. Watching them from above, as they circled a few yards below the ridge, was almost enough to change the Sembian’s opinion. Their magnificent wingspan, gleaming black feathers, and keen ebony eyes gave a proud, almost noble streak to their character.
A vulture glanced up and fixed its dark stare on Lander’s hiding place. A chill ran down his spine, for in the bird’s look he saw the sable eyes of his mother. The expression seemed at once rapacious and dangerous, devoid of tenderness and demanding of veneration. The Harper’s stomach knotted with an emotion somewhere between fear and anger. He felt his mother reaching out from Cyric’s palace, imploring him to remember her face, to open his mind to her now as he had refused to open his spirit when she lived.
Lander forced himself to look away. The last thing he wished to do, now or ever, was contact his mother’s spirit. She had chose
n her new home, and to yield to her call would be to betray all that he had come to believe.
The Sembian kept his good eye closed, clearing his mind by concentrating on nothing but his breathing. His mother had reached out from her grave once before, after he had joined the Harpers, and he knew from that experience a bitter contest of wills would follow if he allowed her a hold in his thoughts.
At last Lander’s stomach settled and his body relaxed. Sensing that his mother had retreated, the Sembian opened his eye. Once again the vulture was just a vulture, patiently circling the camp with its fellows. The Harper could not even tell which one had looked at him.
Lander kept a close eye on the approach to their ridge for the rest of the afternoon. If his mother had found him through a vulture, then Cyric might also know where he was. If what the Zhentarim were doing in Anauroch was important enough to the evil god, and if Lander posed a big enough threat to his plans, it did not seem unlikely that the Prince of Lies would try to communicate that information to his followers at the base of the mountain.
Twice Lander thought that a patrol was approaching the ridge, but each time the search party turned onto a different path. It appeared that either Cyric was not guiding the Zhentarim, or Rahalat had somehow turned them aside. Whatever the case, Lander was thankful. Fleeing during the heat of the day would have been hard on his wounded shoulder. If Ruha was sun-sick, he did not think it would do her any good either.
Periodically rotating search parties, the Zhentarim continued to feast and rest all day. Several times, Kadumi volunteered to change places, but Lander did not accept the offer. It made no difference to the Harper whether he spent the day watching the Zhentarim or sitting with Ruha, and he suspected that the youth knew more about preventing sun-sickness than he did.
When the sun dropped below the western horizon, both Kadumi and Ruha joined Lander. They all sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the birds of prey that nested on Rahalat’s craggy slopes take wing with eerie silence. As the raptors spiraled down toward the spring, the cautious vultures widened their circle to give their ferocious cousins a wide berth.
“We should sneak away under cover of darkness,” Kadumi said at last. “There is no telling how long the Zhentarim will rest at this oasis.”
“Even in the dark, it is too dangerous to move until the invaders are gone,” Ruha countered. “We would have to travel along the ridge all the way to the bottom of the mountain. Sooner or later, somebody would see our silhouettes.”
Both the widow and her young brother-in-law looked to Lander for his opinion. Before giving it, he glanced at the camp. Already, dusk had cloaked the site in purple shadows and the dark-robed Zhentarim had disappeared. The hundreds of campfires they had kept burning all day twinkled in the night like orange stars.
“We have plenty of water and milk,” Lander said. “Let’s stay one more day. If the Zhentarim know we’re still here, they’ll be expecting us to leave in the dark.”
Ruha nodded. “I’ve been resting all day, so I’ll take the first watch.”
After telling the widow to wake them if she felt weak before her watch ended, Lander and Kadumi agreed, then went down to sleep near the camels.
The Harper did not wake until shortly after dawn. Ruha sat atop the ridge, and Kadumi was still lodged between the two boulders that he had claimed as his bed last night. Lander stretched his sore muscles, then climbed up the hill and sat next to the widow.
“You should have wakened me,” he said, taking a healing potion from his pocket.
Ruha shrugged. “You seemed tired, and I had slept all day.” She regarded the glass vial in his hand. “What’s that?”
“A potion for my shoulder,” Lander explained. He opened the vial and drank the bitter contents in one swallow.
“Magic?” Ruha asked, one eyebrow raised.
Lander made a sour face and nodded. “Nothing else could taste that bad.”
The widow studied him with a shocked expression. “Don’t let Kadumi see you drinking those,” she said. “The Bedine think ill of those who use magic.”
Lander grimaced at his blunder, then slipped the empty vial back into his pocket. “You don’t think magic is wrong, do you?”
Ruha shook her head. “I understand, but no one else.” She studied him with an uncertain expression in her eyes, then nodded her head as if making up her mind about something. “There is something I must tell you, but only if you swear not to tell Kadumi or anyone else.”
“Of course,” Lander replied, wondering what the widow would tell him that she would not tell one of her own people.
“Sometimes I see mirages from the future,” Ruha began. “That is what happened yesterday, when you and Kadumi thought I was sun-sick.”
Lander nodded. “It did seem odd that you were affected and not me. What did you see?”
Ruha looked away. “I’m not sure. Someone is going to try kill you,” she said. “He will attack from behind, with a dagger. You will be wounded.”
Lander raised his eyebrow, unsure of how to take the news. “You’re sure?”
The widow met his gaze evenly. “It is my curse that what I see always happens.”
“Could you see what he looked like?” Lander asked.
Ruha shook her head. “All I saw was a dagger slicing along your ribs. I don’t know who was wielding it or what the outcome will be.”
“Or when it will happen?”
The widow shook her head.
The warning did not frighten Lander, for he had long lived with the idea that the Zhentarim might try to assassinate him. Still, knowing that such a thing would occur—without knowing when or where—made him feel rather helpless. While sobering, the knowledge that such an attack would occur contained no hint as to what should be done about it—if, indeed, anything could.
“Thanks for the warning,” Lander said. “I’ll try to be careful about who I let behind me.”
“It will do no good,” Ruha said. “No matter what, you will be cut.”
“At least you didn’t see the dagger stuck in my heart,” Lander said.
“I just thought you should know,” Ruha replied. “I didn’t say this to upset you.”
“I know,” the Harper replied, looking toward the base of the mountain and hoping to change the subject. In the growing dawn light, he saw a few wisps of smoke rising from a half-dozen dying fires, but otherwise the camp seemed empty and motionless. “Are they gone?”
Ruha nodded. “Their fires died last night, but I thought they had just fallen asleep. I didn’t realize they were gone until nobody stirred with the dawn.”
Lander studied the camp for a few minutes more. When he saw a vulture appear out of the east and drift straight into camp, he realized that there was no sign of the birds that had hovered below the ridge all day yesterday. The Zhentarim had, indeed, slipped away in the night.
“If the vultures are bold enough to land, then they’re gone.” The Harper called, “Kadumi, wake up! It’s time to go.”
As soon as the youth woke, the trio untethered the camels and led them down the mountain. By the time they reached the bottom, the sun had risen into the blue sky and the rosy morning light had faded to its usual white blaze. They paused at the spring to let the camels drink, then moved into the camp. Dozens of vultures took wing and hovered fifty feet overhead, watching the three companions with black, jealous eyes.
As at El Ma’ra, the invaders had razed all the khreimas, and the odor of singed camel-hair still hung thick in the air near the charred tents. There were Zhentarim fire rings everywhere, many of them still smoldering, and every combustible thing in camp had been burned. The entire area was littered with the hides and bones of half-eaten camels, and it appeared that even one or two dogs had been roasted.
The trio studied the ghastly scene in silence for several minutes before Ruha asked the question still troubling all three of them. “What happened to the bodies of the Mtair?”
Lander shook his head withou
t speaking, then walked toward the edge of the camp. After picking up a waterskin to replace the one that had fallen off the mountainside with Kadumi’s gelding, the widow and the youth followed with the camels. The companions soon found the spot where the Mtair warriors had made their stand. Crossbow quarrels, arrows, and broken-bladed weapons lay scattered along a quarter-mile battleline. Along the entire course, the sand was mottled with the brown stains of dried blood. Here and there lay camels or fleet-looking dogs unfortunate enough to have been caught in the crossfire, and Lander even found a golden jackal that had somehow gotten mixed up in the battle.
There were no human corpses. At El Ma’ra, the Zhentarim had taken care not to leave any of their dead behind, so Lander had not expected to discover any Black Robes or their reptilian mercenaries. On the other hand, he had expected to find the Mtair Dhafir’s dead warriors. Instead, all he saw here were shredded abas, blood-stained keffiyehs, and discarded jambiyas.
“Look at this,” Kadumi called, motioning for Lander to join him and Ruha.
The youth had discovered a trail of long, splayed-toed tracks. “Good work,” Lander said, recognizing the footprints as those of the Zhentarim’s mercenaries.
The trio followed the trail around to the north side of the mountain to a wadi they had not been able to see from their perch atop the ridge. As they approached the edge of the dry gulch, the thick odor of blood and entrails assaulted their nostrils, and all three of them nearly wretched. Lander motioned for the others to stand back, then stepped to the edge and peered down into the draw.
The bodies of the Mtair Dhafir lay scattered along the bed of the gulch, dozens of vultures feasting on their remains. If Lander was sickened by the desecrations of the scavenger birds, he was outraged by the mutilations that had been performed upon the bodies before the vultures began their grisly feast. The entire khowwan looked as though it had been attacked by man-eating beasts. The soft parts of their bodies had been ripped open and savaged as he had seen Sembian bears do to deer and other large game.