by Dorian Hart
“This is a mockery! I am finished.”
“Scola, please, don’t—”
But Scola was gone. She had woken up.
Morningstar feared that Amber would follow her lead, but she showed no sign of even having noticed Scola’s tantrum.
Previa shook her head. “I’ll talk to her, back at the temple.”
“Please do,” said Morningstar. Ugh. She had already lost one of her first recruits, one of the three that Previa thought were most likely to embrace this unusual assignment. “I need her, Previa. Just as much as I must teach the mental aspects of dream-fighting, I was hoping that she would help instruct the rest of you in actual combat techniques. Say whatever you need to say, but get her back here.”
“Oh!” Amber’s face lit up. “I see now.” Her cushion changed from a uniform gray to a dark blue with black diamonds crisscrossing its fabric. Before Morningstar could congratulate her, the cushion shrunk down to the size of a throw pillow, and then to the size of an apple.
“Here, catch.” Amber tossed the tiny thing to Morningstar, and she nearly dropped it, as it had become as heavy as a stone.
It had taken Morningstar two days with the avatar to become so adept. “Amber, that is incredible! You have far exceeded my greatest expectations.”
Amber was obviously pleased, though more in a self-satisfied way than as a student happy to have impressed her teacher. “When Previa told me about you, I knew I’d be a natural. Do you have any more lessons for us today?”
Morningstar glanced over at Jet, who had returned to her task after watching Scola’s outburst with dismay. The girl’s cushion redrew itself in a variety of patterns—stripes, swirls, and of course Ellish triangles.
“No, I think you have done enough. It’s important to get proper rest each day; our training sessions will not provide you the rejuvenating benefits of real sleep. But there is something I wish to give all of you before you go.”
Jet rose from the grass, and all three sisters walked to stand before her. A flash of warm self-consciousness prickled her cheeks; here were her students, watching her just as she regarded the avatar of Ell. What could she possibly have done to make herself worthy of this? And what she would do next would only cement the notion.
“Hold out your arms with your sleeves rolled up,” she told them. “I am going to leave a mark upon the inside of your elbows. If I have learned my own lessons from the avatar, those marks will persist upon your waking body. They will serve as proof that this was real and not just an extremely vivid but otherwise ordinary dream.”
Jet’s eyes grew wide. “Will it hurt?”
Morningstar remembered the fiery pain of Aktallian Dreamborn’s sword as it opened her belly.
“No. I will make sure it does not.”
On each of their arms she traced her forefinger, gently, willing as light a mark as she could contrive while having it be visible at all. It was a triangle, faint and gray, a pale inkless tattoo. Amber rubbed it with her hand, as though testing to make sure it wouldn’t come off.
“Jet, Amber, I wish you to awaken. I will see you tomorrow. We must train every day if we are to have a hope of being properly prepared. And remember: secrecy above all!”
The two sisters vanished, leaving Morningstar alone with Previa.
“I’m sorry about Scola,” Previa said. “She’s such a tireless Shield, I thought she’d be more resilient. I promise I’ll try to get her back.”
Morningstar willed two cups of wine into being and handed one to her friend. “I would like to train more students as well. If there are any others you think have potential, please let me know.”
“I have some in mind,” said Previa. “One is someone from the temple in Minok, named Starbrook, whom I have met a few times over the years. And there are others in Tal Hae that I feel more comfortable approaching, now that I see what your training will be like. Though…”
She trailed off, obviously troubled.
“What’s wrong?”
“The sisters I brought today—they are also my friends. You’ve told me that Aktallian is dangerous, that he can kill us in our dreams. Even assuming we have time enough to recruit and train a dozen or more women to our cause…”
Yes, it was a bitter pill she asked Previa to swallow. “I know what you’re asking, and I can’t give you any certainty. I encountered Aktallian only one time—one time asleep, that is— but he was able to remove my weapon with no visible effort, and what he did to me in the dream also happened to my real body. Is it possible that with enough trained sisters we can kill him quickly? Yes. But it’s also possible that he could kill more than a few of us.”
“Then you are asking me to choose friends whom I may well be condemning to death.”
It sobered Morningstar to hear Previa state it so frankly, but it was the truth.
“I don’t know if it’s any comfort, but in the important sense it is not I who am asking. It is Ell who demands this sacrifice, and I will make it as willingly as any.”
Previa gave a little nod, a shadow of uncertainty in her eyes.
Morningstar put her hand on Previa’s shoulder. “You can’t know how much it means to me, to have you on my side. We haven’t spent as much time together as I would like, but—there’s something easy, something genuine about your friendship, our friendship, that I’ve never had before.”
“You may be the White Anathema,” said Previa, “but you’re a good person in a terrible position.” She looked down shyly. “I volunteered to be an archivist so I could spend most of my time by myself. I get along with most of the sisters, but the petty politics can be so tiring.”
“And now I’ve dragged you into it,” said Morningstar. “I’m sorry.”
Previa smiled at her. “You misunderstand. There’s nothing petty about this.” She swept her hand around at the glade. “You’ve put me somewhere that I can make a real difference. It’s only that it’s all so…bewildering.”
Morningstar had to laugh. “You and me together. To have friends, students—it is nothing I could have imagined growing up in Port Kymer. I’m still not convinced it’s what I want, but it is certainly what Ell needs, and that is enough.”
Previa stood up straighter and looked straight into Morningstar’s eyes. “And what Ell needs, we will provide.”
“We will do our best,” Morningstar agreed. “Now, before you go—did you speak with Eddings at the Greenhouse?”
“Yes. Why does he wear a blindfold?”
“It’s…a long story. Did he have anything to say about Abernathy? About Naradawk?”
“Your butler said that Abernathy and the other wizards are still absent and have sent no word. But he was thrilled to hear that you are alive and continuing on your quest, and he wanted me to come back regularly. He said also that ‘the eyes have been quiet while you’ve been gone.’ He said you’d know what that means.”
“And Naradawk?”
“Nothing. If Naradawk has escaped from his prison, he hasn’t done anything to call attention to himself. Not in Tal Hae, at least.”
“Good, good.” Morningstar had been hoping to hear that Abernathy had made contact with Eddings. The archmagi would certainly want to know that Horn’s Company had made it safely to Kivia and was still engaged in the search for the Crosser’s Maze. But it heartened her to know that some sand remained in the hourglass, so to speak.
Previa yawned. “If that is all, I should return to ordinary sleep. I’ll see you again tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. And thank you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tor tilted Vyasa Vya slightly forward and stared downward. A thousand feet below…that couldn’t possibly be a city.
No, no, it was certainly a city. Tor could tell because of the light haze of smoke floating over it, and the roads threading across the plains that converged at its walls, and by the fact that if he squinted with the sun behind his shoulder, that thing on the hill in its middle looked mostly like a castle.
B
ut the sheer size of the place was preposterous. All of the surrounding clues—the roads with their little dots of people and wagons, the fields and farmhouses spread out around it like a patchwork blanket of green and gold, the occasional isolated rows of trees serving as wind-breaks, the ribbon of the Softwater River that looped down from the hills and flowed south and east across the plain—would lead one to believe that the city could hold a million people, and were there even a million people in all the world?
“That has to be Djaw,” Tor said to himself.
Far below and off to his right flowed the slow and wide Softwater, speckled with dozens of barges and riverboats. A wide road ran parallel to the river, the Jeweled Road it was called, that collected travelers from Tev and Dir-Tolia and channeled them down onto the Plains of the White Sun and onward to Djaw, with which it eventually converged. Tor tried to envision the map Aravia had bought in Lyme, but he had difficulty recalling the details of maps. He had tried his best, thinking it would impress Aravia if he could casually talk about Kivian geography, but he didn’t always get things right.
To his left was the hazy dark green shadow of the largest forest in the world, stretching out to the northern horizon. “The Endless Wood,” the map named it, though on paper it did end eventually—Aravia had done some math in her head and figured the forest was roughly three hundred miles on a side.
The others said that from the ground, the smoke trailing out the back of the flying carpet looked like a small dark cloud. Was that conspicuous on such a clear afternoon? Were merchants and travelers looking up from the road and wondering what he was? Grey Wolf and Morningstar had voiced concern that someone would tell someone else and word would eventually reach Lapis, wherever she was, but there wasn’t much point in worrying about it, and getting everyone reoriented with bird’s eye views of the countryside was worth the risk.
Tor had learned to position Vyasa Vya so that the prevailing breezes carried the smoke away from him. He wished Aravia would come with him sometimes; she would love the views and the patterns of the hills and woods and roads and fields. It would be nice to spend some time alone with her, just talk to her about things other than her magic and her cat, but she was always busy studying her books, or doing mental or hand exercises, which was fine because her magic was so important.
He took a deep breath; when he thought about Aravia, his heart and his brain would race with each other, and his focus would become even fuzzier than usual. She still wasn’t paying much attention to him, which meant he wasn’t giving himself away, because how awful would that be, if she detected his romantic interest in her without him even having a chance to say anything? Ernie was encouraging, but he had warned Tor that sometimes he laid on his attention and hovering and compliments a bit thick. Had the others figured it out? Was Grey Wolf rolling his eyes and Dranko snickering behind his back?
He should think about something else. He should think about his job—collecting intelligence, getting the lay of the land. Grey Wolf sent him up on the carpet in the mid-afternoon of every clear day. He peered directly down over the side; below him were the vast spreading farmlands that fed the Jewels of the Plains, interspersed with wide swaths of white grasses and herds of roaming livestock.
They had been travelling that cross-country route, well north of the road and the river, in order to better avoid any more ambushes and to make traveling by carpet more inconspicuous. Every few days they’d stop in a small farming village or roadside inn to resupply, typically drawing curious attention from the local farmers for their light skin and odd accents. They had done their best to learn about the local cultures and customs, opinions and politics and all the rest, but there had been some awkward moments—like when they had been run out of one little hamlet for daring to enter a fenced market without dropping pennies into a collection box for…who was it? A demigod of the harvest whose name he had forgotten. Aravia would remember it.
Now they were nearly there, the city of Djaw, the place where they hoped to find the clue that would lead them to the Crosser’s Maze. Brechen’s brow, but Djaw was enormous! With luck, it wouldn’t take them long to find the shrine of Dralla and learn what they needed to know. Maybe the Crosser’s Maze was right there in Djaw, and in just a few days they’d have it and could turn to the problem of getting it back to Abernathy. Aravia said she was working on it, so Tor wasn’t terribly worried.
He did a bit of figuring in his head, looking down upon the majestic canvas of Kivia. It wasn’t just Djaw that was big; Kivia itself was an unfathomably large continent, many times bigger than all of Charagan’s islands together. Maybe it was just as well that the Uncrossable Sea was uncrossable; Kivia could launch an invasion fleet and conquer Charagan without even trying. But then, it looked as though Kivia was made up of lots of smaller countries that weren’t on the same side, and anyway politics and diplomacy made his head hurt; that stuff managed to be boring and incomprehensible at the same time. He needed only his sword and something evil to swing it at.
Two days. If he figured right, they’d be at the gates of Djaw in two days.
* * *
Tor took another step. The line moved so slowly! Twenty feet in front of him, a bizarre animal that resembled a six-legged ox let out a blast of flatulence.
Dranko chuckled. “You can’t blame that one on me.”
Grey Wolf rolled his eyes, then tore a piece of jerky off with his teeth and spoke while he chewed, his voice pitched low so as not to be overheard. “The cover story we used in Trev-Lyndyn isn’t going to work here, since no one south of Djaw would bother to travel so far northward just to fight against the Delfirians. From the bits and pieces we’ve picked up along the way, I’d say our best bet is to claim to be from Anlakis to the far north. We’ve been mistaken for Anlakans several times already because of our skin, and this far south no one seems to know much about their culture.”
“They’re nomads,” said Ernie. “Herdsman, mostly, following their herds.”
“Herds of what?” asked Grey Wolf.
“Uh…I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Cows?”
“We’ve got a while to figure it out,” said Dranko. “Do the men have beards in Anlakis? ’Cause at the rate this line is moving, we’ll have grown some by the time we get to the gate.”
They had joined the road some five miles outside the walls of Djaw and quickly caught up to the back of the slow train of travelers heading into the city. No one paid them much mind, so diverse was the collection of people who shared the road with them. (And the road was paved! It must have taken ages to lay all those stones!) Men and women with coal-black skin wore long robes striped with pastel colors. They drove carts laden with earthenware pots and pulled by the six-legged oxen. Others were almost as pale as Morningstar, dressed scantily in the bright heat of the afternoon, but whose clothing, sparse as it was, was trimmed with gray fur. Their skin glistened, having been slathered with an ointment that warded off sunburn. Maybe they should buy or trade for some for Morningstar.
Bronze-skinned folk with narrow jaws and wildly pierced ears were the most numerous, and from their chatter it was clear that these were local denizens of the Jewels of the Plains. (One side effect of his magical ear-cuff was that he couldn’t know how many different languages people were speaking since he had become used to simply speaking and hearing Chargish.)
One of these travelers spoke now, loudly, to Dranko, who had kept up a constant stream of chatter with whomever was nearby. It was good to see him feeling better after those awful days in Lyme when it seemed as if he might die.
“Djaw is the center of the known world!” A black-skinned man in a mint-green robe grinned at Dranko and gestured toward the distant wall of the city. “How ignorant they must keep you in Anlakis, for you not to know this! Djaw is the beating heart of trade and culture in Kivia, more so even than my beloved Kai-Kin.”
“So Djaw is the capital of its kingdom?” prompted Dranko.
“There is no kingdom that could claim Djaw f
or its own,” said the man. “The Jewels of the Plains are a loose confederation of city-states, ruled by the Empress Shining Mirror, may the sun never set upon her. She is the most powerful person on Kivia, and also the most beautiful. I saw her once, on the balcony of her palace perched atop the hill in the very center of Djaw.”
“You must have great eyesight,” muttered Dranko, but the man seemed not to hear.
“It is said that from the topmost tower of the castle, the empress perceives all that happens for a thousand miles around, from cold Delfir in the north to my own desert kingdom of Ocir far to the south. She knows of you, Anlaki, even if you do not know her.”
Dranko casually thrust out his tusks. “Maybe you could introduce us.”
The man gave a hearty laugh.
Two more hours passed, slowly, boringly. For Tor, anyhow. Aravia wasn’t bored—she had a book open while she walked, Pewter looking as if he was reading over her shoulder. Could the cat read? Probably, from what Aravia had said. Oh, how she loved her cat! Every time she sent him out to scout, her face darkened with worry, an expression she never wore at other times, even when things went wrong. Maybe he should find a cat for himself! That would at least give them something obvious to talk about.
The Softwater ran its slow, flat course directly by the road, its boats and barges floating past in lazy procession. Dranko, walking at the river’s edge, glanced from side to side before tossing a small glass bottle into the river.
“What was that?” Tor asked.
Dranko gave a little laugh. “Nothing important. Old habit, I guess.”
At long last, with the sun only a finger’s breadth from the horizon, their dull slog came to an end.
The outer wall surrounding Djaw rose up fifty feet, with numerous guards patrolling conspicuously across its top. Guard towers capped the wall every hundred feet, and far off down toward the south something like a trebuchet balanced on a wide platform. The entryway through which they were being funneled could fit a dozen wagons side by side, and an enormous sun cut from yellow crystal was set into its oversized keystone, catching the last radiance of the day and sending it lancing out in faint beams.
