And then on the fourth day out from the dry well, the desert broke up into a series of long rocky ridges running north and south. It was all torment and treachery to work our way over these fractured, knifelike formations. At the top of one of them, late in the day, I caught wind of a faint sensation that I dreaded almost more than any other. And as we crested the next ridge, farther to the west, Kane came up to take me aside. He pointed out into the wavering distances and told me that he thought he had described a flash of a white cloak and the bound of a white horse. I sat up straight as I held my hand to my forehead; if a rider was moving along the western horizon, the dust and glare hid him from my sight.
'So, I think we are alone no longer,' Kane said to me. 'That might have been one of the Taiji.'
'Or someone else,' I said, pressing my fist into my belly.
Kane turned his attention from the burning horizon to me. He looked at me deeply and said, 'Morjin?'
'Or his droghul, at least.'
'Are you sure?'
I closed my eyes as I let the currents of hot air sift over me. My blood seared my flesh like molten lead. Then I looked at Kane and said, 'No, I'm not sure. Since the Skadarak, Morjin seems to be everywhere — and inside me most of all.'
'In the desert,' Kane said, 'it's easy to mistake a mirage for a mountain. Perhaps you're only suffering a mirage of the soul.'
'Perhaps,' I said to him.
'Well,' he told me, looking out into the west again, 'if it is the droghul, fate will find him soon enough. But let us keep our swords ready tonight.'
Kane and I said nothing of our discovery to the others, for we had no choice but to continue toward the next well. Our water-skins were nearly empty. It didn't matter if the droghul — and all the armies of the Red Dragon — stood between us and it.
We camped that evening within sight of a stark, lone mountain rising up out of the lands to the south of us. I had little appetite for the food that Liljana set before me; it hurt to swallow the water that she rationed into my cup. A sickness began eating into my belly. Late in the night, as I stood guard with Kane, looking out at the moonlit land to the west, I opened myself to feel for the droghul's presence; the exercise of this strange sense of mine was something like sniffing the air for the taint of rotting flesh or listening for a hideous scream along the wind. All of a sudden, a wave of agony swept over me. I cried out as I grabbed at myself below my heart and fell writhing down upon the ground. The others woke then and gathered around me. Liljana feared that I might have been stung by a scorpion or perhaps the even more deadly black-ringed spider. Maram, though, took one look at my face and said, 'Ah, surely this is some magic of Morjin's. Surely it is the working of the Black Jade.'
It was Master Juwain who apprehended the real cause of my torment — and my great peril. He moved quickly to draw my sword and place it in my hands. He knelt by my side as he told me: 'Shield yourself, Val. Now, before it is too late!'
I tried to grip the seven diamonds set into my sword's hilt; the shimmer of my sword's silustria in the starlight seemed to envelop me like a silvery armor. I fought to breath. With the valarda I had reached out blindly, as of an open hand into a hornet's nest-now I withdrew this hand of my soul and made it into a tight fist that I pressed over my heart.
'Val.' Atara knelt above me and pressed her cool lips against my forehead, whispering my name.
Her deep regard for me, along with the radiance of my sword, proved a magic of its own. After a few moments, I was able to open my eyes and look at her. With Kane's and Maram's help, I sat up. 'Thank you, sir,' I said to Master Juwain. Then, 'Thank you all. I… almost died.'
'Died?' Maram said to me. 'But you haven't slain anyone, not for many miles! Died of what?'
'Died of death,' I said to him. I pointed out into the desert. 'Somewhere, near here, there is so much death.'
That was all I was willing to say then. After that I tried to sleep but could not. I failed even to meditate, as Master Juwain prescribed for me. I dreamed terrible waking dreams. Two hours before dawn, when it came time to rise and break camp, I could barely force myself to climb on top of Altaru. With my friends on their horses behind me, I rode toward the still-shadowed lands to the west as if moving into a black cloud.
Dawn brought a glowing beauty to the harsh, sculpted terrain of the desert at odds with the ugliness that I knew lay ahead of us. The sun rose higher and flared ever hotter and more terrible. As we approached the third well, I nearly retched to espy a dark cloud hovering low. in the sky a couple miles ahead of us. It was not a rain cloud. We drew closer, and the cloud broke up into hundreds of vultures circling above an outcropping of red rocks. Atara, I thought, was lucky that she could not see them.
Soon many tents came into view. Perhaps forty or fifty people lay on the rocky ground between the tents and the single, central well. They did not move. We shouted out to scare off a few hyenas who had already gone to work on them, then rode up ever closer. I feared we would find slashed throats and pierced bellies, but I could see no mark on any of the bodies, a few of which were stripped naked. They were, I thought, a tough-looking people. The men, though slight of stature, seemed hard as whipcord, with curly black hair and beards, dark skins and chiselled features as stark as the desert rocks around them. The folds and fissures of one old woman's face could only have been burnt by a lifetime of wind and sun. I tried to look away from the rictus of agony stamped into the countenances of a young boy and girl who lay near her. Kane dismounted and found more of the dead inside the tents. By the time he had gone about the encampment, making a count of them, I was ready to retch up the little water that I had drunk an hour before — either that or to kill whoever had killed these poor people.
'Sixty-four,' Kane said, walking up to where I sat stunned on my horse. His eyes picked apart the jumble of rocks farther away from the well. 'We might find more of them out there.'
So many dead, I thought, as I stared through the burning air. I wondered what their names were. I wondered how it was possible to slay so many innocents so wantonly just to strike vengeance into the enemy.
'Oh, Lord!' Maram said. 'Oh, my I too bad, too bad!'
The rest of us dismounted. Master Juwain examined a young man whose body and limbs were covered in a dusty white robe. He said, 'He is nearly twelve hours dead.'
'Dead of what then?' Maram asked him.
Maram, I saw from the dread that worked at his face, knew well the answer to this question. So did we all.
'Poison,' Master Juwain said. 'I'm not sure which one.'
Liljana joined him kneeling beside the man's body. After shooing away the flies, she sniffed at his open mouth and ran her finger over the whites of his eyes. She said to us; 'I believe it is zax. It is a slow poison but a certain one.'
'Who did this?' Maram suddenly raged, kicking at the ground. 'Who would poison all these people to get at us?'
It was a question that answered itself. It came time to tell of the rider that Kane had seen the day before, and this I did. When I had finished, Maram drew his sword.
'It is the droghul,' he said. 'It is surely the second droghul.'
He offered his opinion that the droghul must have ridden into the encampment last evening and either charmed these simple desert-dwellers or enchanted them with one of his illusions. And then somehow managed to pour his evil poison into the well.
Liljana confirmed that the well was indeed poisoned, walking over to lean down into it and sniff its water far down in the dark earth below. Atara stood looking at nothing; I wondered if she had seen this terrible moment in one of her visions. Kane went about collecting waterskins, from the tents and the many horses that stood about not knowing what to do. He pried them from the very hands of the dead. All the skins were empty. It seemed that the droghul must have poured their water into the sand.
'So,' he said, gripping his fists around one of the skins. 'I'd hoped we'd find at least a few of them full of untainted water.'
Maram brought hi
s sword up to his face and stared into its mirror-like steel. I heard him murmur: 'Ah, you're thirsty, aren't you, my friend? Very thirsty, and that's a very bad way to die, isn't it — the very worst?'
I asked Liljana how long our remaining water might last if we were very careful, and she slowly shook her head. Her voice trembled and nearly cracked as she looked at the children and forced out: 'Another day, perhaps.'
'And the next well?' I asked Kane.
'So. So,' he said, gazing into the burning land to the west. 'It is another seventy miles.'
'Seventy miles!' I wanted to cry out. We could not make such a distance in a single day, not with our horses worn to the bone and Maram nearly ready to drop from loss of blood. I could not let into my mind the meaning of Kane's words; the horror of what had happened poisoned my soul and nearly paralyzed me. Death was suddenly upon us. A short while before we had been looking forward to drinking our fill of cool, sweet water, and now we found ourselves sentenced to die. So it always was. Death always hovered behind one's neck like a great, black vulture, watching for its chance and waiting.
I knew better than to entertain such thoughts, or even to think them. Some of my despair overflowed into Maram, who said, 'That droghul did his work well. Now it's time to do our work as well.'
He began to contemplate the point of his sword in a way that struck fear into my heart.
'No, Maram,' I said, stepping over to grip my hand around his arm. 'We're in a bad way, it's true, but we can't give up hope.'
'Hope?' he cried out. 'What hope is left even to give up?'
I rubbed my eyes, which seemed as dry as my brain and every other part of my body. I tried to think; it was like trying to see my way out of a cloud of dust. I tried to think as Morjm would think. Finally, I drew my sword and swept it in a circle toward the desert around us. 'The droghul has journeyed on, and so he must have water. It may be that we can find his tracks and ride after him.'
'To appropriate his water?' Maram said. 'Even if we could overtake him, it wouldn't be enough.'
'It might be enough,' I said.
'If we did overtake him,' he said, 'he would poison his water before letting us have it.'
'He would,' I agreed, 'if he hadn't already poured all his poison into the well.'
'Then he would empty his water onto the sand. Do you think Morjin would care if his damned droghul dies of thirst?'
I shook my head and told him, 'It may be that we could take him before he does this.'
'Take him how?'
'Even a droghul,' I said, 'must rest sometime. We might be able to take him while he sleeps.'
'Do you really think that's possible?'
'It might be possible,' I said. 'The droghul must have been sent to meet us here. And so he might know of water that we do not.'
'Do you think he would just tell you where this water is, then?'
I looked over at Estrella, staring down at a fly-covered boy about her age. Her dusty face, I saw, almost concealed the anguish and suffering that she did not want me to see. I said to Maram, 'There must be a way — there's always a way. We can't just lie down and die.'
'No — can we not?' Maram looked around the well at all the bodies splayed there. He dropped his sword with a loud clang. With a great, heavy sigh, he sat down on a long slab of sandstone, and then collapsed back against it. 'Ah, my friend, this is surely the end, and since I'm in such fine company, I think I will just lie here and die.'
I could find no words to rouse him. It would take a horse, I thought, and a rope tied around his ankles to drag him from that spot. Just as I was contemplating such desperate actions, I overheard Liljana scolding Daj. It seemed that while the rest of us had concerned ourselves with other matters, Daj had gone about the dead stripping them of jewelry, which he had piled up on top of a sheepskin. Most of this was of gold, but a few silver bracelets and rings, set with bright, blue stones that I hadn't seen before, flashed in this mound of yellow.
'What are you doing?' she shrilled at him. 'Are we thieves that we rob the dead?'
Daj finished pulling a necklace off an old woman, and said to Liljana, 'But they won't need it where they're going! And we might need it to buy water or food, in case our coins run out!'
Liljana's round face flushed a hot red. I saw that she was ready to shame him for such an ignoble act, but I felt her check her natural inclinations. As she looked at me knowingly, her eyes softened with forgiveness. I could almost hear her thinking that Daj had learned to do almost anything to survive in the black pits of Argattha, and he would apply those lessons in the desert, and everywhere else we went. This little rat-boy would be the last of us to give up and die.
Liljana bent down and kissed Daj's head. Then she began to explain why we must not take the jewelry. At that moment, though, Kane let out a great shout. He pointed to the mound of rocks to the south of us as he cried out, 'Val! Maram! Arm yourselves! We are attacked!'
I looked toward the rocks expecting to see the droghul — and perhaps a company of the Dragon Guard — charging at us. But two horseman only came flying from around the edge of a great red standing stone. Both wore long, dust-stained robes. The one in the lead howled out a curse or a challenge, or perhaps both. His bearded face was as sharp as a flint and hard with hate; he pointed his saber at Master Juwain. The man behind him, I saw, could hardly be counted a man, for his smooth face showed a boy only a couple years older than Daj. He, too, bore a saber, which he held back behind his head as he whipped his horse straight toward Kane.
I was slow to move, not because of hunger or thirst or weakness of limb, but only because I had seen enough of death for that day — and for the rest of my life. I dreaded what now must befall. It seemed, though, that I had no choice: when death came screaming out of the desert like a whirlwind, who could think to stop it?
And so, with the sun beating down at me like a war hammer and the first horseman pounding closer, I went forward to do battle yet again.
`
Chapter 20
I waited on broken ground as my adversary pounded nearer. His face — dark and fine-boned — contorted with wrath. He must have thought that he would easily cut me down and make vultures' meat of me. But my father had drilled me, and all my brothers, in standing with sword at ready to meet the charge of armored knights. This man, though, was no Valari knight. His sword was shorter than mine, and only thin cloth covered his limbs. He fairly oozed overconfidence and a rage to kill. From the cast of his body and the angle of his saber, I saw his error in strategy; I sensed how he anticipated that at the last moment I would cringe in fear of being trampled, allowing him to slash his sword into me. I knew that I could fend off this cut and strike a death blow of my own. And then, as he whipped his horse forward and his dark, anguished eyes met mine, I knew that I could not. 'Well-poisoner!' he screamed at me. 'Well-poisoner!' My father had also taught me a strategy, little used because it was dangerous. I used it now. I stood fast, as if frozen with fear, as my adversary's horse practically drove its hooves into me and snorted into my face. At the last moment, rather than trying to avoid the sword slash by pulling backward, and to my left, I leaped to my right, past the front of the horse and toward its other side. As the sweating beast pushed by me, I reached up with my hand to grasp my startled adversary's arm, held almost straight out to counterbalance the sword gripped in his other hand. I jerked on his arm, hard, and pulled him flying off his horse. He hit the ground with a loud crunch that I feared broke his back. He lay stunned, coughing blood and gasping for breath. I stood with my boot stamped down on his sword arm as I brought the point of Alkaladur within an inch of his throat. 'What are you waiting for?' he managed to cry out. His eyes were dark pools of hate. 'Kill me! Better to die by the sword than by poison!'
I pressed down with my boot against his wrist until his fingers relaxed their grip upon his saber. I looked down at him and said, 'We are not poisoners!'
But the man wasn't listening to me. He spat out a mouthful of blood as he
called out, 'Turi, my son! Kill the white-hair if you can, or die on his blade! Don't let the poisoners capture you!'
Just then Maram finally came up to help me. The man I had unhorsed tried to drive his neck up into my blade even as Maram kicked him back to the ground and then fell on top of him, pinning him against the rocks. I turned to see his son whip his horse toward Kane, standing thirty yards away. It seemed that he had already made one pass at Kane and was about to make another.
'Don't kill him!' I shouted at Kane.
I was nearly certain that he would kill him, even if his opponent was only a boy, for I had never seen Kane suffer an enemy a chance to wound him or cut him down. But Kane surprised me. This time, the boy did not charge past him, but reined in his horse as he swept his sword at Kane's head. With a ringing of steel, Kane easily parried this stroke, and then another, and yet another. He stood in the hot sun fending off the boy's saber with his sword as iF giving him a fencing lesson.
'Call off the boy!' I said to the man beneath Maram. Struggle though he might, he could hardly move, for Maram must have outweighed him by ten stone. 'Call him off before he gets hurt! We are not well-poisoners, but we know the one who is!'
Seeing that our attackers were only two, the others came over to help Maram and me. Atara stood holding Estrella's hand. My fallen adversary looked at her and marveled: 'You bring the blind with you! And children, too!'
His hate softened to suspicion and then puzzlement. From beneath Maram, he gasped out, 'Who are you then, and who is the well-poisoner?'
'We'll tell you. happily,' I said to him. 'But first call off your son.'
Me turned his head to shout out: 'Turi, enough! But keep ready to fight again!'
Turi, I thought, had already had more than enough combat for one day. He seemed so tired that he could hardly raise his sword against the tireless Kane.
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