The warrior had seen a slight figure in loose robes, cowl hanging down its back. The head was wide and round like a human’s, without the delicate bone structure of an elf. He had an impression of pale hair, a blank, unfinished face, and empty black eye sockets.
Despite his terror, Favaronas’s scholarly instincts were engaged, and he seemed disposed to stand in the cold, dim tunnel, comparing and discussing their very different impressions of the ghost. Glanthon put a stop to this by taking his arm and hauling him forward.
“Wait! We’re going on?” said Favaronas, wide-eyed.
“Not far. Fifty more steps, then we’ll go back and report what we’ve seen.”
Favaronas complained at the arbitrariness of his decision. “Why fifty? Why not twenty? Why not just turn around now? It isn’t logical. What’s the point?”
Glanthon ignored the mumbled commentary, deciding it was only Favaronas’s method of coping with his fear. Although he kept muttering, the archivist also kept moving forward, sword held up, albeit in a very shaky hand.
They’d gone no more than thirty paces before the tunnel brought them to a chamber. About three times as wide as the tunnel and twice as high, its walls were barren of the painted reliefs. Along one side were a multitude of stone cylinders, each about a yard long and four or five inches thick, stacked on their sides like cordwood. The opposite wall was covered with peeling white plaster.
The strange cylinders drew Favaronas like a magnet. He lifted one. It was heavy, made of a soft, slippery stone like talc or gypsum. A hole was bored through its long axis.
The object looked for all the world like- “A scroll?” asked Glanthon, holding his torch close.
“No one ever made books of stone,” countered the archivist. Still, the resemblance was uncanny.
At his suggestion, they decided to take some of the cylinders back with them. Favaronas discarded his torch and laid two scrolls in the crook of each arm. Glanthon also took four, but bore all in one strong arm so he could keep his torch.
The elves were walking back down the long tunnel to the entrance when they heard alarm trumpets on the surface. Struggling under the burden they carried, warrior and scholar hastened to the waiting rope lift. The warriors above shouted for them to hurry. They stepped onto the shield platform and were hoisted back up. More horns sounded as they neared the surface.
Glanthon dumped his four cylinders on the ground as soon as he cleared the opening. “Where’s the trouble?”
“We saw lights among the ruins, over there!” A Wilder elf pointed northeast. “The Lioness has gone to investigate.”
She had left behind only enough elves to watch the hole and pull the two explorers out. The rest of her shrinking command had galloped off with her. Once Favaronas was safely out of the hole, Glanthon left a warrior behind with him and ordered the rest to horse.
Sitting on the ground, Favaronas watched them gallop away. The single elf with him also stared after his departing comrades, the look on his face eloquent of his desire.
“Go with them,” Favaronas said, waving a hand. “I’ll be fine.”
The warrior shook his head. “You’d be alone.”
The archivist sighed. “The trouble, whatever it is, is out there, not here.”
With only a little more prompting, the elf rode away. By the light of the torches that ringed the hole, Favaronas studied one of the cylinders. Glyphs were incised into the soft stone. In the uncertain light, his sensitive fingertips gave him a better idea of their shape than his eyes could. The writing was Elvish, or at least the characters were Elvish, the old writing used in Silvanost on monuments, palaces, temples, and public buildings. He sounded out the syllables his fingers detected.
“Ba-Laf-Om-Thas, Hoc-Sem-Ath.”
It made no sense. Perhaps this was some ancient dialect. But it seemed to confirm the notion that Silvanesti elves had inhabited this valley long ago. What of the apparition in the tunnel below? What was it, and why had it appeared to him as a catlike, female creature, and to Glanthon as a faceless human?
Less than a mile away, the Lioness galloped through the tall monoliths and cedar trees. Ahead was her quarry-a pair of glimmering green lights, flying at saddle height above the ground. Some of her warriors were strung out behind her, trying to keep up. Others had split off in smaller bands to chase different lights.
She was convinced these lights were flesh and blood riders, carrying hooded lanterns to lure the elves into an ambush. That must have been what happened to her missing warriors. A local tribe of humans was playing a deadly game, and she intended to put a stop to it tonight.
The twin green lights slowed. She reined back, not wanting to rush into a prepared trap, and waited for the soldiers trailing her. Once they caught up, she directed them to ride out wide on either side, then sent her horse ambling forward.
The green glimmers retreated, keeping the distance between themselves and her always the same. As she emerged from a copse of juniper trees, she glimpsed dark shapes close to the two lights.
Triumph sang through the Lioness. She was right! There were people out there!
She secured the reins to the pommel of her saddle and braced her bow. In seconds, she’d sent an arrow speeding toward the right-hand light. The missile flew true. The light shook violently, then was still. The left-hand light moved off swiftly, leaving its comrade behind. Crowing with satisfaction, she loosed her reins and cantered forward.
Her arrow was embedded in the trunk of a thin tree and one of the lights was impaled on the shaft. The fist-sized green glow was fading fast. By the time she’d freed the arrow and brought it close enough to study, the light was gone. Her gloved hands felt nothing foreign on the shaft.
Shouts from flanking riders told her the other light had been found. She rode toward them. A curving expanse of gray wall loomed. A band of mounted elves waited beside it. Kerian spotted Glanthon in the group.
She hailed him. “How was your crawl underground?” she asked.
“Like a sorcerer’s nightmare, General, but right now, we seem to have an intruder trapped.”
He gestured at the wall behind them. Massively thick, its top was at eye level to the mounted elves. No structures showed beyond it.
Kerian shook her feet free of the stirrups. Crouching on her saddle, she sprang atop the wall. Glanthon and eight other elves joined her on the broad stone barrier.
The wall was a perfect circle, enclosing a paved area forty yards across. In the center of the pavement was a raised platform ten yards across and four feet high. Great wedges of gray stone had been fitted together to make the round platform. Drifting over it, like leaves wafting on an autumn breeze, were four glittering lights: one each of green, red, yellow, and blue.
Kerian dropped to the pavement inside the wall.
“Our quarry has slipped away and left these will-o’-the-wisps to keep us busy,” she said. “I intend to take one back to study.”
“Wait! We don’t know what they are!” Glanthon warned, gathering himself to leap down and follow her.
She told him to stay where he was, and kept going.
When she neared the center of the platform, the lights abandoned their aimless paths and began to circle her. Faster and faster, they whirled in ever-tightening circles. Remembering how the sand beast had disappeared when the lights touched it, Kerian didn’t wait for the inevitable. She threw herself flat on her stomach. The lights crashed together above her and vanished in a silent burst of greenish light.
By the time Glanthon and the others arrived, she was sitting up. “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” she said, accepting Glanthon’s hand to help her stand.
The Lioness thought it likely the lights were responsible for the mysterious disappearances among her warriors. Where the elves had been taken, and why, remained unknown, however, and she couldn’t risk searching any further.
“We’re getting out of this valley. Now.”
* * * * *
The ride to Khuri-Khan
would become legend. After Prince Shobbat’s messenger departed, Adala’s people hurriedly broke camp and began the journey south to the city of the Great Khan. Clouds, rarely seen over the high desert, blew in from the sea, piling up like brilliant white dunes in the sky. The heat of the wasteland caused the clouds to writhe and twist, forming fantastic patterns of light and shadow on the ground below. Shade was an experience few nomads ever had while crossing the burning sands. They rode with faces turned skyward, watching the spectacle with a mixture of fascination, awe, and not a little fear.
Adala swayed across the wind-driven wastes on the back of stolid, faithful Little Thorn, dozing when the glare of the sun became too intense. The frowning clouds were to her a portent of things to come. She saw in them the boiling anger and pride of the laddad, rising from their squatters’ camp to try to frighten the children of the desert and turn them away from their holy purpose. Like the masses of clouds, the bluster of the laddad was impressive to behold but without substance.
Two days away from the Valley of the Blue Sands, just after sunrise, scouts brought word that a large mounted force was approaching from the west. Alarmed, the desert warriors unslung their bows and shields, forming themselves to receive an attack. Adala’s warmasters and clan chiefs gathered around her, drawn swords resting on their shoulders.
Wapah, seated behind Bilath, speculated that the laddad had heard of the Weya-Lu approach and come out from Khuri-Khan to meet them, away from their vulnerable camp.
“Ten thousand pardons, O Weyadan!” said one of the scouts. “Those coming toward us are not laddad, but men.”
Bilath shifted in his saddle. “Soldiers of Sahim-Khan?”
“They bear the banner of a scorpion on a field of yellow, with three notches in the wind’s edge.”
“The standard of the Mikku,” Wapah supplied. He was widely traveled and knew the standard of every tribe and clan. The Mikku were far from their usual range, but they were nomads, too, brothers of the Weya-Lu, the Khur, the Tondoon, and the rest.
Zaralan, chief of the Black Horse Clan, voiced the prevailing opinion when he said, “They’re invading our territory.”
“We’ll stand them off!” vowed Bindas, young and hot- tempered.
“No. We are not here to shed the blood of our own,” said Adala. She addressed the scouts. “How far away are they?”
“Four miles when we first saw them. Less by now, Maita.”
She lifted a mostly empty waterskin and wrung a warm trickle into her mouth. Their time at the Valley of the Blue Sands had left the Weya-Lu short of water, Adala most of all.
“I will meet them,” she said.
The chiefs protested vigorously. If the Mikku had come to fight, the Weyadan could be captured or killed before the rest of her host could defend her. She shrugged off all their arguments.
“Brothers or enemies, the Mikku will not raise a hand I against me.”
Out of respect they did not contradict her. Zaralan suggested she take an escort, for protection. Even a small escort would be better than none.
Adala smiled a little. “I choose Wapah.”
The garrulous philosopher, who even then was explaining in hushed tones the habits of dress and dining of the Mikku tribe to the clan chiefs beside him, heard his name and broke off his monologue.
“Weyadan? You want me?”
“Yes, cousin. Ride with me to meet the Mikku.”
This was not what Zaralan had in mind. He said as much, assuring Wapah he meant no disrespect.
“No need to abase yourself,” said Wapah as he guided his horse through the ranks of clan chiefs and warmasters. “I pledge my life to protect the Weyadan’s.”
He positioned his horse alongside Little Thorn. Adala noted the tears in his hat brim, made by laddad arrows, and frowned. Poor Wapah, unmarried and without mother or sisters, had no one to mend his clothes.
“Remind me to sew those up for you,” she said, flicking a hand at his hat brim.
By her order, the nomad host was to remain hidden on the northern side of a high dune, so their great numbers would not startle the oncoming Mikku. Bowing to the wisdom of her logic, the warmasters rode back to their warriors. The clan chiefs remained.
“I don’t like this,” Bindas said. “The Mikku know the law of the desert. They should not enter our land unbidden.”
“Honored Chief, be of strong heart. Whatever their purpose, the Mikku are just like us. The desert lives in their souls, and Those on High speak to their hearts. Believe in my maita. It leads me to a more distant place than this.”
So saying, Adala tapped Little Thorn’s flank with a cane switch. Ears flapping, the donkey shuffled over the crest of the dune with Wapah riding close behind.
Bindas turned to Bilath, Zaralan, and the other chiefs who had known Adala longer. “Does this woman think she holds fate in her hands?” he said.
“Permit me to say, Chief Bindas, you have it backward. It is not Adala Weyadan who holds fate, but Fate which holds Adala.”
It was eloquence worthy of Wapah, but the words came from Bilath, brother of Adala’s slain husband.
Adala and Wapah soon saw lines of darkly dressed Mikku riding across the sun-baked plain. Unlike the northern nomads, who rode in loose, time-tested formations, the Mikku were deployed cavalry-fashion in four exact lines, each a double horse-length apart. They wore a great deal of metal armor, signs of the favor shown them by the Khan. Wapah watched their slow, steady progress through the shimmering morning haze, early sunlight flashing off their brass and iron equipment. He commented on how heavy and hot their armor must be.
“When we reach the city, you may wish you were so burdened,” Adala answered. She knew the laddad and Sahim-Khan’s soldiers wore even more armor as a matter of course.
Between the lonely pair and the several hundred horsemen was a long, flat expanse swept by hot wind from the south. Adala tightened Little Thorn’s reins, halting him on the lip of the sandy ridge above the plain. Wapah drew up beside her.
“Let’s wait here.”
Folding his hands across the pommel of his saddle, Wapah nodded, his pale eyes flicking skyward briefly.
“It is a good day,” he said.
Even this early, the heat was devastating. Both of them had pulled the loosely woven dust veils over their faces, to protect their eyes from the parched south wind. The strange clouds towered above the land, rising so high their undersides were gray from lack of sunlight, while their tops were tinted orange by the dawn. Yet Wapah wasn’t referring to the weather. He spoke of the feel of the day and his joy in their holy purpose. Adala’s maita was running high. The broader world soon would feel its power.
They had been seen. The Mikku halted, studied the two mounted figures poised above them on the ridge, then came on. Four lines of horsemen became two as the Mikku spread themselves wide. Fifty yards away they halted.
“So many swords to take one man, one horse, one woman, and a donkey,” Adala said. “What are they afraid of?”
The philosopher at her side said, “We all fear something. Those who wield swords are often the most frightened of all”
Nine riders from the center of the Mikku formation continued forward, while the remainder waited. The nine found their imposing display bedeviled by the loose sand on the face of the ridge. Horses sank up to their hocks, drawing their shod feet out with considerable effort. Wapah smiled, the expression hidden by the dust veil covering his face, as the full import of Adala’s logic became clear to him. Stopping here had given them the moral advantage of meeting the Mikku on higher ground, but she had foreseen a tactical purpose, too. The Mikku lost momentum and dignity as they labored up the shifting slope.
Twenty yards away, the nine riders halted. In the center was a nomad with the tallest, brightest helmet the Weya-Lu had ever seen. Golden horns sprouted from the polished steel brow, curving up and back like a desert antelope’s. From their tips fluttered squares of shiny gold silk. The sides and rear of the helmet were pr
otected by heavy curtains of mail.
“I am Shaccan, warmaster of the Mikku,” said the warrior in the horned helmet. “Who are you?”
Before speaking, Wapah glanced at his leader. Adala had shifted her dust veil, exposing her fiery eyes to the Mikku. She nodded slightly at Wapah.
“Greetings, brothers of the desert! Peace to you, and all your kin!” he called, then introduced himself and Adala.
“Are you alone, Weya-Lu?” Shaccan asked.
“Those who believe are never alone,” Adala replied. “Is this not so?”
The warmaster plainly did not like having his question answered with a question. Gruffly, he said, “We were told the Weya-Lu had left their range. Is that so?”
“We went to the Valley of the Blue Sands, but we have returned. Why are you here?”
“With the Weya-Lu gone, we ride for Kortal, to hire as caravan escorts.”
“You cannot.”
Wapah flinched at the impoliteness of Adala’s abrupt command. Shaccan’s thick eyebrows rose.
“By what right do you stop us, woman?”
Adala lifted her eyes to the sky. “I claim the right of divine maita. Those on High have chosen me to lead all the people of the desert to Khuri-Khan, to cleanse our land of foreign corruption. You may join us.”
After a moment of stunned silence, Shaccan put back his head and laughed. He laughed so long and hard, tears streaked his cheeks.
“You’re either mad or the greatest woman in Khur,” he said, dabbing at his eyes. “I like you! Are you married?”
For the first time in many years, Adala was nonplussed. As she regained her composure and admitted being a widow, six of Shaccan’s men surrounded her and Wapah, and the other two rode off to confirm the presence of the rest of the Weya-Lu tribe.
Shaccan grinned. “I thought this was going to be a dull journey. When I heard the Weya-Lu had gone, I thought it must be because of plague or war. Now you speak of gods and corruption and maita. You’ve been out in the sun too long. Stand aside. It would be bad luck for me to harm one so insane.”
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