by Troy Denning
“That explains why they’re so quick to destroy the tribes who won’t cooperate,” she concluded. “They’re more concerned about eliminating potential enemies than about making allies.”
Lander nodded, impressed by the young woman’s grasp of the situation. “Their intentions are worse than I thought,” he said. “With the asabis, they have the allies they need to take military control of Anauroch. They only need the Bedine to use as slaves—in the worst sense of the word.”
“Did you ever doubt that?” Ruha asked.
The young widow rode unusually close to the Harper’s side for the rest of the day. She remained quiet and thoughtful, but Lander had the vague sensation that she enjoyed being next to him. The feeling was pleasant enough, but it also gave the Harper a giddy sense of excitement that discomforted him.
Late in the afternoon, Lander looked down and noticed that the ground had changed from barren, dun-colored dirt to a flat, endless mosaic of coin-sized stones. The pebbles were mostly red in color, varying in hue from blond to dark brown. All had been polished glass smooth, which gave the desert floor a fiery, pebbled appearance that seemed more appropriate to the caldera they had left behind than the open flats through which they were passing.
Leaning over to study the burnished stones, Lander asked, “Was there a lake here once?”
Ruha laughed. “Don’t be foolish. This is At’ar’s Looking Glass,” she said, glancing toward the sun. “Kozah hopes to win his wife’s heart back by keeping it swept clean with his wind so that she can admire her reflection in the pebbles.”
Lander looked at the heavens above. Though the sun was white and the earth red, he could see why the Bedine associated the fiery ground with their cruel sun goddess. “Yes, I see it now,” he said, sitting upright again.
Ruha chuckled at his ignorance as they moved onward. They rode across At’ar’s Looking Glass for the rest of the afternoon, and Lander was soon convinced that burnished sea of stones continued forever. At first, it had seemed eerily beautiful. Now it seemed infuriatingly uniform.
Two hours before dusk, the entire tribe turned ninety degrees north. Lander searched the horizon for some landmark he had missed, but there was nothing but the fiery rock flats. Shadowed closely by Ruha, he urged his camel forward until he rode abreast of Sa’ar.
The sheikh still appeared to be asleep, but when the Harper approached Sa’ar opened one eye. He glanced first at Lander, then at Ruha, and raised an eyebrow at the pair’s close proximity. “Yes? Is there something I can do for you?”
“Why are we turning?” Lander asked. “Are we close to the Well of the Chasm?”
Sa’ar shook his head. “No. We are turning so we are not in the Zhentarim’s path when they overtake us tonight.”
“What?” Lander nearly shrieked the question. He could not help thinking of how hard he had been trying to get ahead of them for the last few weeks.
The sheikh shrugged. “We cannot move as fast as the invaders. The asabis, at least, could overtake us tonight. Our only choice is to be out of the way when they pass.”
“What about your allies at the Well of the Chasm?” Lander asked.
Sa’ar smiled. “Don’t worry about them. The Zhentarim will not arrive before the messenger I sent ahead,” the sheikh replied. “The Raz’hadi will stall the invaders until we arrive.”
“You’ll still be outnumbered. What will you do then?”
Sa’ar only shrugged. “I can’t speak for Utaiba and his people,” he said. “We’ll see what happens when we get there.”
“Sheikh Sa’ar is correct, Lander,” Ruha said. “The Bedine do not plan everything out in advance.”
The sheikh nodded, then pointed at Ruha. “You would do well to listen to this woman, my friend.” A moment later, he scowled thoughtfully, then eyed Ruha and added, “But from a discreet distance.”
Ruha’s eyes went wide, then she allowed her camel to fall behind. Confused by the exchange, Lander also allowed his mount to fall behind and brought it alongside the widow’s. When he came too close, she tactfully guided her camel away and opened the space between them.
“What was that all about?” the Harper asked, once again guiding his mount close to hers.
Ruha carefully moved her mount away. “Sa’ar thinks I’ve been brazen,” she replied.
“That’s ridiculous!”
The widow’s eyes sparkled with agreement, but she shook her head. “Not really. In his eyes, I’m still part of my husband’s family. Please don’t ride any closer.”
Sa’ar’s admonition irritated the Harper, for he saw nothing wrong with talking to a widow and did not think it was anyone’s business to tell a woman how close she could ride to a man. For the next hour, he tried to draw Ruha back into conversation, but she avoided his questions. The Harper felt hurt by the sudden distance between Ruha and himself, and he could not help silently cursing Sheikh Sa’ar for upsetting his friend.
When less than an hour of light remained in the day, Sa’ar called a halt to the caravan. Immediately the women began to unpack supplies and arrange them on the flat, rocky ground in tentless semblances of their normal camp.
Lander attempted to help Ruha unpack the supplies for herself, him, and Kadumi, but she curtly instructed him to go and sit with the sheikh. More confused than ever, the Harper went over to the area of ground that Sa’ar’s first wife had staked out as his tent, then sat on a kuerabiche and sipped the cold tea that a servant provided. Fortunately, the sheikh was occupied with the details of posting sentries and arranging the camp, so Lander felt no obligation to make small talk.
When Ruha had laid out the camp, he returned to the area that would serve as the trio’s khreima. Someone had provided her with a hare for the cooking pot. As she skinned the hare, the widow did not acknowledge Lander’s presence. That only made him want to talk with her that much more.
If he was going to succeed, Lander knew he would have to say something to overshadow the warning that had passed between Ruha and the sheikh. Remembering her inquiry about Sembia, the Harper decided to lure her into a discussion about his home.
“In Sembia, the rabbits are as juicy as sheep,” he began, eyeing the stringy hare she was skinning.
His tactic worked immediately. “What are sheep?” Ruha asked, nervously glancing in the direction of the sheikh’s family.
The question caught him by surprise, for he had never before had to describe one of the beasts. He held his hand two and a half feet off the ground. “They’re about this tall, they come in herds, and they’re covered with wool—”
“Like tiny camels?”
Lander shook his head. “Not even close. Their fleece is soft and white.”
“How much milk do they give?”
“They don’t give milk,” Lander corrected. “At least not that Sembians drink.”
“Then what good are these sheep?” Ruha demanded.
Lander laughed at her desert pragmatism. “They give wool. We make clothes from it.”
“That’s all?” The widow pulled the hide off the rabbit and threw it to a saluki lurking on the edge of their camp.
“They can be eaten, too,” he said. “My father and I used to eat mutton—sheep—every year when we went to Archendale.”
“Archendale? Tell me about that,” the widow demanded.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Lander said, closing his eyes. “The River Arkhen flows through a rocky gorge. The whole valley is filled with lilies and moss.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
Ruha’s eyes were fixed on the Harper’s face, and he could tell from their dreamy expression that she was trying to imagine the paradise he described.
“Archendale is a wonderful place,” Lander confirmed. “But it was almost destroyed. The Zhentarim tried to take it over, too.”
“How did you stop them?” Ruha asked.
“It wasn’t me. My father did it,” Lander replied, growing melancholy at this turn of the conversation.
&n
bsp; “Was he a Harper, too?”
Lander shook his head. “No, he was a merchant, but he was a good man.”
Ruha’s eyes remained fixed on Lander’s face, and he realized she expected him to continue the story.
“Archendale’s farms were the best within riding distance of Sembia,” Lander began. “Every summer, my father and I would go there together to buy produce. One year, my mother wanted to come along.”
“Why should that bother you?” Ruha asked, studying him carefully.
Lander looked away, uneasy that the widow had read his feelings so easily. “My father married a beautiful, charming woman,” the Harper said. “What he didn’t know was that my mother was also a deceitful Cyric-worshiper. She had intentionally married a wealthy merchant in order to gather commercial information for the Zhentarim—information they used to fill their own pockets with gold at the expense of honest men like my father.”
Lander paused, a lump of anger growing in his breast as he recalled how his mother had used him to dupe his father. When he turned ten, she had started taking him to the house of a famous mercenary three times a week, presumably for lessons in swordsmanship. What neither the Harper nor his father had realized, however, was that while Lander was learning to fight, his mother was meeting with her Zhentarim masters in the back of the house.
“Go on,” Ruha urged.
“The time came when the Zhentarim decided to take over the rich farms and orchards of Archendale. They assigned my mother the task of gathering the names of all the farmers and landholders in the valley. That was when she insisted upon joining my father and me on our annual trip,” Lander continued. “Fortunately, my father was an observant man, and my mother, as usual, underestimated his intelligence. When she insisted upon meeting all of his business contacts and asked about men he did not even deal with, he decided to find out what she was doing.
“When we returned to Archenbridge, my father hired someone to follow my mother while he was out of town. The man was able to stalk her to a secret meeting of Cyric’s evil sect and to see her meeting with a known Zhentarim agent.”
“What a shock for your father,” Ruha said, absentmindedly holding her bloody jambiya in her hand. “What did he do? Kill her?”
Lander grimaced. “In Sembia, men don’t do that sort of thing to their wives,” he said. “My father set out for Archendale to warn the farmers about the Zhentarim plot. He sent me to another city with a message for a trusted friend.
“My mother saw me leaving town and came after me with two men. When she caught me, she tried to convince me to join the Zhentarim, but I couldn’t help remembering all the wonderful times my father and I had shared in Archendale. I told her to let me go and, when her guards tried to take me prisoner, I killed them.”
“And your mother?”
Lander shook his head. “I made the worst mistake of my life,” he said. “I let her go.”
Ruha gave him a exonerating nod. “A man shouldn’t—”
“My mother went straight to her Zhentarim masters,” the Harper interrupted, an intentionally sharp tone in his voice. “They sent their agents into Archendale.”
“What happened?” the widow asked, her concerned eyes showing that she had already guessed the answer.
“I don’t really know,” Lander replied, looking at the ground. “I passed my father’s message to his friend, then waited for him as he had made me promise. I didn’t hear anything until nearly a fortnight later, when a Harper came and told me that both my parents had died in Archendale.”
Ruha’s voice dropped to a shocked whisper. “How did it happen?”
Lander shook his head. “A Zhentarim assassin caught my father shortly after he entered the valley. The Harper wouldn’t tell me how my mother died.”
They sat in uneasy silence, both of them staring at the pebbled ground. After a time, Ruha cleaned her jambiya on a piece of cloth and sheathed it. She took some dried camel dung out of a kuerabiche, then reached into her aba and withdrew a flint and steel. She handed the dried dung and the flint and steel to Lander. “Will you please light a fire?”
Without speaking, the Harper pulled some shreds off the hem of his tattered aba to use for tinder.
Ruha withdrew a pot from another kuerabiche and half-filled it with water. “I see mirages from the future,” she said, avoiding the Harper’s eyes. “When I was a little girl, I was not wise enough to hide this.”
Lander piled the tinder on a dung-patty. “So? Seeing the future is a gift.”
“Not among the Bedine,” Ruha replied. “I was shunned.”
“As a child?” Lander exclaimed.
The widow nodded. “It was my father’s decision, but he had no choice, of course. The elders demanded it.”
“The elders were fools!”
When Ruha did not meet his gaze, Lander leaned over the dung patties and began striking sparks. The third one caught, and he gently blew on it until it produced a small flame in the tinder.
“Who are fools?” asked a youth’s familiar voice.
Lander looked up and saw that Kadumi had returned from his duty as a scout. The boy was standing at the edge of their campsite, his bow and quiver in one hand and the reins of his camel in the other.
“Er—nobody,” Lander said.
The color rose to the visible part of Ruha’s cheeks, and Lander looked uncomfortably back to the flame.
Kadumi scowled, then turned to unsaddle his camel. After a moment of tense silence, he asked again, “Who are fools?”
“Nobody,” Lander replied, looking up from his fire. “Ruha and I were just talking about the differences in our cultures.”
Though he wasn’t sure why he should be embarrassed, Lander could sense from the attitudes of both Kadumi and Ruha that he and the young widow had violated an unspoken rule.
The Harper’s explanation did not satisfy the youth. Tossing his bow and quiver aside, Kadumi advanced angrily. “Ruha is my brother’s wife,” he said. “You may not have secrets with her!”
Lander stood. “We don’t have any secrets—”
Kadumi reached for his jambiya.
“Kadumi, no!” Ruha cried.
The Harper was so shocked by the action that the boy actually had the blade halfway out of the scabbard before Lander caught his arm. Grasping Kadumi’s wrist tightly, he helped him pull the dagger the rest of the way out of the sheath, then quickly used his free hand to press inward against the joint. Kadumi cried out in pain and dropped the dagger.
“Don’t draw a weapon on a man you can’t kill,” Lander said. His heart was pounding hard, but he kept his voice even.
Kadumi’s response was direct and heated. “Blood!” he yelled.
The word resounded across the rocky plain, bringing the camp to sudden silence.
Ruha shook her head violently. “Kadumi, don’t do this.”
Lander released the youth and pushed him away. Before the Harper could kick the boy’s jambiya back to him, Sa’ar and several warriors arrived.
“What’s happening here?” the sheikh demanded.
Kadumi pointed at Lander. “He’s courting Ruha,” the boy accused. “I have challenged him.”
Sa’ar looked from the boy to Lander, then back to the boy again. “You’re sure?” he asked. “We could have misunderstood you.”
“You did not misunderstand,” Kadumi snapped. “It is my family’s honor.”
The sheikh sighed, then gave Ruha an accusatory glance. “We had better do this according to tradition,” he said. “Give the boy his jambiya, Lander.”
The Harper did not move to obey. “Why?”
Sa’ar frowned. “He challenged you,” the sheikh responded. “Kill him, and Ruha is yours.”
The Harper looked from the sheikh to Kadumi. The boy was trembling, though Lander could not be sure whether it was with fear or anger. Regardless, he was standing tall and staring at Lander with an unwavering gaze.
“He’s just a boy!” Lander objected.
/> “He’s a Bedine warrior,” Sa’ar corrected. “Don’t worry. We’ll witness the fight. Nobody will doubt your honor if you win.”
Lander snorted his disbelief, then shook his head. “I won’t do it. I refuse the challenge.”
The warriors gasped, and Sa’ar looked confused. “What?”
“Kadumi can try to kill me if he wishes,” Lander explained. “But I won’t kill him. I refuse his challenge.”
“You can’t do that!” the youth yelled.
“I can, and I have,” Lander replied calmly.
The Bedine stood, looking confused. Several moments later, Ruha burst out laughing. “Kadumi, if you must, try to kill him. I doubt that any harm will come of it.”
The warriors could not restrain a few chuckles, but Sa’ar did not seem amused. He pondered the situation for what seemed like an hour, then turned to Lander and pronounced his judgment.
“Very well. Since you are not a Bedine, it is your privilege to refuse Kadumi’s challenge,” he said. “But being a berrani does not entitle you to ignore all of our traditions. Ruha is still the widow of Kadumi’s brother, and it is a matter of family honor that he defend her reputation, whether she wishes it or not.”
The sheikh glanced at the Harper meaningfully, then continued, “Therefore, you will not speak to Ruha except in Kadumi’s presence. In return, he will not challenge—or attack—you again. This is my decision, and be it known that any who ignore it violate my hospitality.”
Ten
Ruha’s camel had begun to limp, but the widow did not bother to dismount. After four days of travel on At’ar’s Looking Glass, half the Mahwa were riding lame beasts. With the merciless goddess blazing down on the wind-burnished stones, the searing heat blistered even the tough pads of the camels’ feet.
In order to reach his allies as quickly as possible, Sa’ar was pushing his tribe through the worst part of the day. Heat rose off the desert floor in rippling waves that gave the Looking Glass the appearance of a huge lake of molten rock. On the horizon, a line of tiny spires danced in the shimmering air. Though still so distant they looked like billows of violet smoke rather than minarets of desert rock, the obelisks were a welcome sight to Ruha’s aching eyes. The stony towers marked the edge of At’ar’s Looking Glass, and not far beyond lay the Mahwa’s destination.