by Cindy Dees
“I ran into a little snag at Alchizzadon—”
“Wait. Come over where we’re seated and tell all of us at once.” Sha’Li practically dragged her off her feet in her eagerness to show Raina to the others.
A round of hugs, exclamations, introductions, and laughter ensued as she and her friends, old and new, came together. Rynn flagged down a barkeep and asked for a private dining room. The Three Veils had one unengaged at the moment, and Rynn handed over a gold piece that purchased both room and food for the evening.
They piled inside, and everyone took turns telling the tale of their past month of travels over a table piled high with food and drink.
And then it was Raina’s turn to introduce Ayli. “Remember the zinnzari shaman Kerryl Moonrunner told us about? I found her.”
For her part, Ayli stared at Raina. “Moonrunner? You know him?”
“Yes. He’s the one who told us about you and where to look for you.”
“Canny old rat,” Ayli said fondly.
“Have you known him long?” Kendrick asked her.
“Couple of hundred years,” she answered.
Sometimes Raina forgot how long people of other races lived. She frowned. Except … She blurted, “How is it Kerryl, a human, has been alive that long?”
“Well, now. Kerryl has done some bad things in his life. And one of those is consuming the life energy of certain creatures to extend his own longevity.”
Raina replied, “That’s awful!”
Kendrick was quick to respond, however. “He had his reasons. He knows things—has seen things—that others have not. He had to stay alive to prepare for them.”
Raina and the rest of the party shared a group eye roll at the familiar refrain.
Eben asked Ayli, “What other bad things did Kerryl do?”
“Well, there’s the whole business with Quinton and the Hunter in Green.”
“The Tribe of the Moon Hunter in Green?” Sha’Li asked in surprise.
“Aye,” Ayli replied. “She loved Kerryl’s brother Quinton deeply. But the Hunter in Green cannot forgive Kerryl for taking her lover from her.”
Sha’Li leaned forward, asking intently, “Is this Quinton also called the Wild Prince?”
“Why, yes. I believe he is.”
“Ah.” Sha’Li sat back in satisfaction.
Raina rounded on her. “Who exactly is the Wild Prince?”
“He is a were-wolf. But not just any were-wolf. He is said to hold the spirit of the Great Wolf within him. This story confirms the legend.”
Sha’Li turned to Kendrick. “Is Quinton’s insanity problem the reason Kerryl used a scion of the boar to create you? Did he learn from his brother that the vessel had to be strengthened before it could handle the power and magic of a great beast?”
Raina interrupted, “Kerryl didn’t use a scion. He killed it.”
Kendrick glared at her, Eben glared at Kendrick, and Sha’Li glared at Eben. Funny how it had taken under two hours for the old arguments between them to resurface.
Ayli intervened. “For all his unorthodox methods, Kerryl did save the Great Wolf. And he showed the Widow of the Wood how to save the scion of Zinn.” She added, “It’s not as if he got off unscathed. Kerryl lost his wife when the Circle broke. Poor man never was the same after that.”
“How and when did the Circle break?” Raina asked.
Ayli studied them all, hesitating to answer. Finally, she mumbled, “If you’re going to wake the Sleeping King, you might as well know it all. You’ll either handle the truth or lose your minds as fate dictates.”
Raina urged her, “Tell us.”
“An Imperial Army came to take Haelos. The red-haired Kothite led it—”
“Ammertus?” Rynn interrupted.
“Aye. Just so.” Ayli continued, “He brought his daughter, Avilla, with him. She died in the battle that broke the Great Circle. Rumor has it Ammertus shunted her spirit to the dream realm in a last-ditch effort to keep her from dying permanently. But she’s become one of the most powerful creatures there.”
Raina shuddered. How were they supposed to beat Vesper to Gawaine’s body and keep her from possessing it if she was that powerful? First a dragon, and now a Kothite spirit of immense power? She commented wryly, “All we need now is for Anton Constantine to show up.”
Hatma spoke up from her spot in the shadows by the door. “Oh, he’s here. Got in just before the storm. He’s staying in the south quadrant with a dozen or more servants and guards.”
Raina and others traded horrified looks.
“How soon will it be safe to leave Kahfes?” Rynn asked, looking to Hatma and Ayli.
The scout answered, “As soon as the great doors open. Conditions won’t be ideal for travel, but a person won’t die if they know what they’re about.”
“And when will the doors open?” Will asked.
“Sometime tonight,” Hatma answered. “The scouts were lining up to head out when we came here.”
Raina swore mentally and joined her friends in pushing back from the table. No words were necessary between them. If Anton was so close behind them and Vesper in front of them, they had to go. Now.
* * *
Eben was shocked by the elemental energy swirling in the gritty air as he and his friends slipped through the barely open storm doors and into the last of the storm. The wind buffeting him was not mere air but elemental magic pulling at him aggressively, trying to suck the magic from his bones. Likewise, the sand stinging his facial tamgas was tinged with something dark and deadly. Individual grains sought bare flesh through the chinks in his armor and tiny gaps in his clothing and tore viciously at his skin.
Their party trudged west, across a vast, flat plain that did nothing to slow the attacking gusts. Daylight was breaking behind them before the air finally calmed, the dust settling. A crystalline stillness came over the Thirst, the sky overhead lightening from black to gray to pink.
No insects or other living creatures disturbed the silence. Only the quiet slide of sand under their feet marked their passing. In the wake of the storm, the peace was immense and filled the vastness of the desert.
A sense of rightness filled him. Kendrick was restored. They would wake the Sleeping King, find Marikeen, and then go home to Hyland as a family.
Hatma murmured from in front of him, “Eben, do you sense any moisture?”
He didn’t have to work hard to feel it through the soles of his feet. “A few degrees to the south of our current course. A league or so ahead.”
“Excellent. We’ll fill up our waterskins and try to get a reading on where the next water might lie before us,” the scout murmured.
They hop-skipped to three more seeps before the sun rose high and searingly hot, driving them under a rock overhang to wait out the afternoon heat. Waves of hot air mingled with dust devils—insubstantial beings that danced wildly across the sand, their transparent limbs whirling to and fro in deadly arcs.
“Don’t mess with those,” Hatma warned them. “They kill the unwary and suck all the moisture from your flesh.”
Eben sensed their lust for water even as they disappeared back into the heat mirages from whence they came. He napped through the day, taking his turn at the watch, glad that none of the dust devils came back.
A bright moon lit their night travels, turning the desert to powdered silver. They spent their fifth day of travel at a great oasis their guide called Immunwah. It apparently grew around the roots of a giant tetrakis tree, and hence was able to withstand the ravages of the storms.
They headed due west out of the oasis the following evening. Eben was in the lead, approaching another water source, this one extremely strong, when Hatma grunted beside him.
“What?” he asked her.
“I should have known your quest would bring you here.”
“I’m not leading the quest. That madness falls to Will and Raina. I’m merely leading us to water.”
“Then how do you explain those?
” She pointed west, and on the far horizon he spotted a cluster of spires rising up into the night.
“What are those?” he asked.
“The Towers of Triell. They’re said to be dragon-made to stop the Griefalls from splitting the continent all the way to the Estarran Sea.”
“And the Griefalls is…”
“A great crack in the Urth. It extends for hundreds of miles to the west of the Towers. At its western terminus lies the great Griefall itself, where the Nyghtflume disappears into Under Urth. The Nyghtflume is a massive river that flows down from the Crest, which is a great ring of mountains beyond the Thirst.”
He frowned. He didn’t sense a great river nearby. “How far away is this Nyghtflume?”
Hatma laughed. “It’ll be many hard days’ travel before we reach it, if that is where your quest leads you. But let us hope you go elsewhere. A foul river in a foul place is the Nyghtflume.”
“How so?”
“The water is poisonous upstream of the great cascade, but the fall purifies it. Beware the waters that bypass the falls and find other routes down into the chasm, though. They are still deadly.”
“How are we to drink if we have to traverse this chasm you speak of?”
Hatma snorted. “Carefully.”
“How big are yon spires?” he asked suspiciously.
“They tower like mountains over men, hundreds of men’s lengths in height.”
They looked like toothpicks on the horizon, which meant they were still many leagues away. Eben extended his awareness outward and felt the immense power of the stones, plunging deep into the earth, solid anchors placed there by great magics.
“The great fissure ran right up to the Towers,” Hatma explained, “but then it split into two lesser chasms, one running north, and one running south.”
Ayli chimed in. “The zinnzari enclave lies beyond the tip of the southern branch on the shores of the great inland sea, Shaelashal.”
“We go to Zarva, then?” Hatma asked in surprise.
Raina interjected, “I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t think we should speak directly to the zinnzari.”
Eben actually stopped walking and turned to stare at her.
“As we’ve been getting farther out here, Gawaine’s ring is starting to act like a magnet. It’s drawing me in a particular direction. Are you feeling anything from the bow, Eben?”
He frowned, concentrating. “I sense a great deal of energy concentrated in that direction.” He pointed nearly due west. “Like all the elements rolled into one. But I would not say it pulls me toward it.”
Raina nodded nonetheless. “That’s the direction the ring is pulling me.”
“Then we’ve got a problem,” Hatma said. “To continue in that direction past the Towers of Triell, we’ll have to descend into the Griefalls. And there’s no way anyone but the most experienced climber can make the descent without dying.”
“What about using magic to get down?” Will asked. “I have a feather fall scroll I’ve been itching to use.”
Ayli shook her head. “Magic doesn’t work normally in the Griefalls.”
Everyone stared at her.
“How not normally?” Raina asked.
“Healing magic still works. But the other kinds are hit or miss. Using magic to get into the crevasse or enhance movement in the crevasse, for example, doesn’t.”
“How will we get down there, then?” Eben asked practically.
“We could use the ktholes,” Hatma answered. “With a group this size, we should be safe.”
Should? That didn’t sound promising.
They walked for several hours toward the Towers, but the Towers barely grew any larger in size. They stopped to rest and eat, and Ayli regaled the party with stories of a great ruin south of them called Akaram, dominated by ziggurats nearly as tall as the Towers of Triell.
Eben would like to see such a thing. Maybe one day, he would come back this way. Or mayhap on the way home—
Ululating howls erupted from nearby, and Eben scooped up Eliassan’s bow and the new quiver of fine arrows he’d purchased in Kahfes. The bandits came at them in a ragged line, seeming to boil up out of the ground like ants pouring out of their mound to defend it.
The fight was challenging to the extent that a lot of bandits attacked them. But with a Heart knight, Kendrick, Will, Rynn, Cicero, and Sha’Li to wield weapons, himself to shoot arrows, Hatma to cast alchemy gases, and Raina, Rosana, and Ayli to cast healing, they formed a highly effective combat unit.
It took perhaps ten minutes to turn the tide of the fight in their favor enough that all the ambulatory bandits fled, disappearing back into the sand as abruptly as they’d appeared. Oddly, Raina didn’t do her usual race around the battlefield healing everyone in sight and sending the defeated attackers on their way with stern words of warning to behave themselves.
“Is she all right?” Eben asked Cicero, lifting his chin in Raina’s direction.
“The Mages of Alchizzadon did something to her. She hasn’t been right since we got her out of there. Complains of headaches and passes out if she heals too much.”
Indeed, Raina staggered and went down as the last partially healed bandit shambled off into the sand, and Eben joined the others in rushing over to her.
He was peering down at her in worry as the Heart knight, Lakanos, carefully fed Raina a potion when Rynn murmured, “We’ve got company. Arm yourselves.”
The bandits weren’t back, were they? The convention was that once the White Heart took the field, all combatants healed by the order had to retire from the field peacefully and not return. If that rule was broken, the follow-up rule was that the returning fighters would be killed and not healed a second time. He stowed Eliassan’s bow and pulled out his long sword and mace. They were more suited to the violent work ahead.
But when he scanned the sand for incoming attackers, he saw nothing.
“Where—” he started.
“Coming in fast from the north,” Rynn interrupted.
Eben spied them then. A caravan, if the pack animals and human porters were any indication. They approached in a long, single-file line, and every member of the group was dressed from head to foot in white. They glided across the sand with amazing speed and, as they drew near, were eerily quiet.
Now what?
* * *
Anton laughed as the Towers of Triell came into sight at the far edge of the horizon, bare twigs above the sound. “I see where our young quarry is going. You”—he pointed at about half his mercenaries—“follow them at a distance and keep out of sight. I’ll cross the Griefalls and will race ahead to Marringat.”
“Marrin-who?” the Cabal girl, Marikeen, asked him.
Impudent chit. “Marringat,” he answered impatiently. “An old Imperial fort just above the great waterfall at the head of the Griefalls.”
“I didn’t know there were any Imperial outposts this far into the western wilds,” Marikeen commented.
“Just because you didn’t know doesn’t make it untrue!” he snapped.
Marikeen looked at him steadily with those uncanny, dark eyes of hers contrasting in her pale, water-marked face. Girl gave him the creeps. He made a mental note to have a word with Richard Layheart when he got back to civilization. She was a liability to the current project of building a shadow mage’s guild. The girl needed to disappear discreetly.
He gave one last set of orders to his men. “Keep the pressure on them. Don’t let them rest or sleep or even eat in peace. I want them to be frazzled wrecks when they get where they’re going.”
“And where are they going, my lord?”
“You’ll see when you get there. That’s soon enough for you to know.”
* * *
Ayli gasped a little and bowed low to the figure at the head of the silent, white-garbed column.
A regal head nod was returned.
“We’re honored that you choose to show yourselves to us,” Ayli said respectfully.
“Yes, these younglings handled a bandit attack with ease.”
Eben wouldn’t exactly call it easy, but they hadn’t been sorely pressed.
“Is that one in need of healing?” the man in white asked, gesturing to where Raina lay.
Rosana rose from her side. “No, sir, she’s just overtaxed from healing.”
Raina? Overtaxed? Those mages at Alchizzadon must have done something drastic to her.
The man in white stared at Rosana from the slit in his head wrap. In fact, all the people in white were staring at her. Will must have noticed it, too, for he stepped forward to stand protectively at Rosana’s side.
“Will you share our fire with us?” Rosana asked the newcomers.
The leader of the white caravan bowed deeply. “It would be our pleasure.”
The group, two dozen in all, sat around the campfire and ate as silently as they traveled the Thirst, sliding food up under their veils to eat and not revealing their faces. They must be fugitives, the way they refused to show themselves.
Eben was intrigued to examine the light wooden frames the travelers unstrapped from their boot soles. A webbing of sinew stretched across each frame, providing a sort of ski that attached to the toe of their boot.
One of the caravaners gestured for him to try on a pair. He shuffled around, tripping himself at first, but as soon as he got the hang of the gliding stride required, he could move across the sand without sinking into it at all. Clever.
He took off the sand skis and returned them to their owner with a smile. “Very nice. Smart.”
The skin around the eyes of the one he spoke to crinkled slightly. He would take that as a smile.
The only man from the white caravan to speak so far asked, “If you would allow me the honor of a question, healer, how is it you came to be so far from your blood?”
Eben was startled to realize the question had been aimed at Rosana.
“I don’t understand,” the gypsy replied. “What do you mean, I am far from my blood?”
The white-swathed head tilted, and the white, swirling tattoos visible at the edges of the man’s eyes squinted. “You are a daughter of the rose, are you not? Your blood sings loudly to us.”