“Tahvo,” Cian said from a place above her head.
“Cian?”
“Do you hear them?” he asked.
She reached toward the warmer air in front of her, and her hand came in contact with the matted fur of the beast’s shoulder. It was no horse nor any animal she knew. It nibbled at her hair with soft, mobile lips.
Come.
“I hear them,” she said in wonder. “What are they?”
Cian didn’t answer. His hand grasped at her cloak, urging her closer. She felt a long, arched neck and humped back sliding under her fingers, and then a second questing muzzle. Two beasts, one already bearing a rider.
Come.
Obeying instincts she hardly understood, Tahvo felt her way back to the tent. Rhenna slept on undisturbed. Tahvo found a loaf of bread and a handful of fruit left from the evening meal, wrapped them in a bit of cloth, and returned to Cian and the beasts.
“We must go,” Cian said. “Can you mount?”
Stretching her hands out before her, Tahvo clambered across the crouching animal’s bony rump and grasped at the sloping back, pulling herself up until her legs dangled at the animal’s round sides. It heaved to its feet, hindquarters first, so delicately that Tahvo never lost her precarious hold.
“Where are we going?” she asked Cian in a whisper.
Once again he gave no answer, and she knew he was as ignorant as she, caught up in some spell of his own. His beast turned toward the South. Her mount followed. They began to run with a swaying, rocking rhythm that lulled Tahvo into a sense of perfect safety.
“Rhenna.”
Rhenna opened her eyes at the sound of Nyx’s voice and rolled to her knees in a single fluid motion, feeling for the knife at her belt. Nyx caught her arm just as Rhenna saw that Tahvo no longer lay beside her.
“Where is Tahvo?” Rhenna demanded, shaking free of Nyx’s hold.
“Gone.” The Southern woman retreated to kneel at the opposite side of the tent, hands fisted on her thighs. “Gone with Cian. No one knows where.”
Rhenna sheathed her knife and fought sudden panic. “They escaped?”
“We were never prisoners here,” Nyx said. “But last night…” She hesitated and met Rhenna’s gaze. “Last night the Imaziren took Cian to see the creatures they call sand horses. These animals are sacred to the Imaziren and have not been ridden since the Godwars, but Cian—”
Rhenna got up and flung back the tent flap. Harsh morning sunlight lanced through her eyelids. Warriors, talking and gesticulating in a fury of sound and motion, turned to stare as Rhenna and Nyx emerged from the tent.
“It was a test,” Nyx said, her voice subdued. “I had no chance to tell you. They have said that Cian is safe and will return.”
“Return from where?” Rhenna strode away from the tents, her feet sinking in the sand with every step. “Where was he last seen?”
Nyx caught up as the Amazi warriors fell in behind her. “I told you the Amazi legends of those they call the Guardians. Last night I learned the one tale I did not know—that only a true Guardian can tame and mount the sand horses.”
Rhenna came to a halt in the shadow of a black pillar, scanning the rolling horizon for any sign of movement. “Sand horses? What are they?”
“Ugly creatures that bear no resemblance to true horses.” She knelt in the sand and drew a shape with her finger, marking four legs, a crooked neck and humped back. “They reside only here, near the City. It is said that they can go for leagues without food or water, walk where the strongest horse could not, and survive even the most ferocious of storms.”
Rhenna stared at the drawing as if she could will it to come alive and lead her to Cian. “You said these beasts are sacred to the Imaziren?”
“Their tales say that the sand horses were created at the same time as the Guardians, to bear the ancestors of the Imaziren into battle against the Exalted. But the sand horses grew wild when the old gods left this land. Some have believed that the Guardians will return to tame the beasts and make the Imaziren invincible warriors again.”
“So Cian obliged them by mounting one of these creatures and simply rode away?”
“Into the desert, with Tahvo,” Nyx said.
“Tahvo.” Rhenna kicked at Nyx’s sketch with the toe of her boot. “Whatever madness was in Cian’s head, she wouldn’t have gone without good reason.”
“Such is the magic of the sand horses—so the Imaziren believe—that no rider can come to harm in their care. Madele says this must be part of the test.”
Rhenna snorted. “Tests and more tests. Will these people be satisfied only when we are dead?”
“Cian has proven himself,” Nyx said. “I believe they will agree to help us now.”
“I would hear this from their own elders,” Rhenna said. “Tell Madele I wish to speak with them.”
Nyx grinned, suddenly of one mind with Rhenna. “Come with me.”
She led Rhenna to the cluster of expansive tents at the center of the Amazi encampment. Warriors standing watch came to attention, snapping up their javelins. Nyx addressed them, mentioning Madele’s name, and one of the warriors slipped inside the largest tent. He emerged a few moments later and beckoned the women inside.
Like Rhenna’s quarters, the elder’s dwelling was simply furnished with woven rugs, skins and intricately decorated storage bags that hung from the tent poles. Madele sat with three elders and several other warriors near the back of the tent, where a portion of one wall had been opened to let in a light morning breeze.
Madele beckoned Rhenna and Nyx to join them, inclining her head. Rhenna brusquely returned the bow.
“These are leaders and elders among the Imaziren,” Nyx said. “They give you greeting—”
“Will they send warriors to look for Cian and Tahvo?” Rhenna interrupted.
Nyx turned to the elders, two men and a woman whose faces were scored by age, sun and weather. The old female smiled tolerantly and addressed Nyx.
“Zamra says there is no need,” Nyx translated. “The Guardian will return when the sand horses are ready.”
“I prefer not to leave the fate of my friends in the hands of animals, no matter how intelligent they may be.”
“They are not mere animals,” Nyx said, relaxing Madele’s irritation. “You would know this if you had seen them. They are a gift from the gods.”
The gods who abandoned you, Rhenna thought. “And where have they taken Cian and Tahvo?”
“Only the sand horses know.”
Rhenna kept a fragile hold on her patience. “They’ll keep their riders from dying of heat and thirst?”
“As they did our people in ancient times.”
She glared at Madele. “We have enemies other than the desert.”
The elders murmured to one another. Madele answered for them. “No man or beast can catch the sand horses, or enter the City undetected.”
Rhenna glanced at Nyx. “You told them that our enemies may still be pursuing us?”
“I did.”
“Clearly it wasn’t enough. We must tell them everything…about the prophecy, Baalshillek and the Weapons.”
Nyx nodded slowly. She faced the elders again and spoke at length, occasionally punctuating her tale with graceful gestures. The Imaziren listened intently. Women brought fruit and cool water to wet Nyx’s dry mouth, but she never faltered.
When she was finished, Madele looked at Rhenna with new interest and touched her hand to her chest.
“Now she understands why you are such a formidable warrior,” Nyx said, “and how it is that you command the winds without the use of foul sorcery.”
“They believe our story?” Rhenna asked, hiding her relief.
“The Guardian has proved that all you say must be true.” Nyx paused for one of the elders to speak. “The sand horses would not permit one tainted by evil to touch them. Most of our people now accept that the time has come for the Imaziren to take up arms and fight the Stone God.”
“Most?”
The female elder, Zamra, smiled as Nyx translated. “Some still resist, but they will come to understand.” She studied Rhenna through clouded gray eyes. “Your people live in the North, near the home of the Guardian?”
“Our country lies in the shadow of mountains we call the Shield of the Sky.”
“Where all is green, and water flows freely, as once it did in our homeland. You have protected the Guardian in his journey to us.”
“In our journey to find the Hammer.”
“We understand this. The Guardian cannot remain in the City.”
“Then you will help us cross the Southern desert?”
“We will provide all the assistance you require. But there is a thing that you, warrior, may give us to strengthen the faith of those who doubt.”
Rhenna straightened uneasily. “What is that?”
The elder spoke to Madele, whose face took on a tinge of red beneath sun-browned skin. Nyx was silent for a long while afterward.
“What did she say?” Rhenna asked, the back of her neck prickling.
Nyx drew in a deep breath. “She knows that you and Cian have been mates. She asks if you are prepared to give the Guardian up for a single night, so that he may father a child who will become a great leader of their people.”
Rhenna’s cheeks flamed to match Madele’s. With an effort she kept her seat. “I am not…the Guardian’s keeper.”
“He—” Nyx began, and coughed. “He refuses all other women because of you.”
A curse bubbled up and died in Rhenna’s throat. She stared hard at Madele, who refused to meet her gaze. Her chest tightened with an ache that stabbed through heart and belly like a lethally cast javelin.
“I am not the Guardian’s mate,” she said. “He is free to…lie with whomever he chooses.”
A heavy silence fell over the Imaziren and their guests. After a while Zamra spoke, face and voice solemn.
“We will make preparations for the Guardian’s return,” she said. “And for your journey to the South.”
Rhenna rose and bowed stiffly. She turned to go.
“Rhenna,” Nyx said. “Zamra has one more question.”
“Ask.”
“Do you…do you carry the Guardian’s child?”
For a moment Rhenna was blind and deaf to everything around her, hurled back to that exultant, terrifying day when she and Cian had lain together in the magic-bound courtyard of Danae’s house. Her belly was as flat and hard now as it had been then, untouched by an Ailu’s potent seed. Shameful tears came to her eyes.
“Tell them I do not,” she said, and left the tent without another word.
Chapter Ten
F or two days the humpbacked beasts carried Tahvo and Cian across the desert, over endless hills of sand and flat expanses of pebble and stone. Several times each day the sand horses found waterholes, where they stopped to allow their riders to dismount, drink and rest. The animals themselves drank little but slept kneeling in any shade they could find.
Tahvo shared her scant ration of bread and fruit with Cian, but he had no appetite. He did not suffer from the oppressive heat, nor did his skin burn like hers. He had felt nothing since leaving the Amazi camp…nothing but a sense of waiting, a strange certainty that some new trial lay ahead.
On the third morning he found the bones.
His mount came to a shuddering stop just below the crest of a sand hill. There was no shelter, no shade nor water, but the beast grunted and sank onto its knees, refusing to move another step. Tahvo’s animal did likewise. Cian dismounted, placing his feet carefully on the shifting ground, and struck something other than sand.
The bone was bleached white by sun and scoured by wind, half lodged in the desert’s ever-shifting surface. Cian crouched to pick it up. He recognized its origin by its length and shape, yet he felt no sorrow for the man or woman who had died in this barren place.
Tahvo joined him. She didn’t speak; they had done without talking during the journey and had no need of it now. But she picked up the bone carefully, fingers curled as if she feared to touch such a symbol of extinction.
Cian let her take it and climbed the hill. Fierce sunlight needled his eyes. His boots found a second bone, and then a third. Two dozen bones lay behind him by the time he reached the top of the hill, but he was not prepared for what lay on the other side.
The land fell away in a vast crater, stretching two stadia from one edge to the other. The hue of the depression was neither the gold of sand nor the brown and gray of stone. It was the white of bones beyond counting, piled a hundred deep as far as the eye could see. The entire crater was a single mass burial ground.
Cian fell to his knees. An empty-eyed human skull grinned at him from amid the twisted skeleton of a horse. The fleshless claws of predators mingled with the spiraled horns of goats and cattle, and the tusks and spines of bizarre and unimaginable creatures. The silver of long discarded weapons glinted like beacons among the bones, shields and spears and swords cast aside as if at the very moment of their wielders’ deaths.
But this was not merely a place of slaughter. Cian felt the same power here that he had sensed in the City of the Exalted, a thrumming in his belly both loathsome and triumphant. It sang to him with the voices of his ancestors, summoning him to change and dip his claws in the blood of his enemies, dance out his victory on gut and bone and sinew.
Cian crawled away from the rim of the crater, the taste of decay foul on his tongue. He stumbled to his beast and attempted to mount. It cast him off with a heave of its shoulder. Tahvo sat cross-legged in the sand, clutching the long human bone so tightly that her knuckles stood out sharp and pale through the burned skin of her hands.
“Tahvo,” Cian whispered.
She turned toward him, her blind silver eyes as bleak as a grave. “They are here,” she said. “All that remains of a hundred thousand gods. Do you see them?”
Cian collapsed to the ground beside her. “No gods,” he said. “Only bones.”
She shook her head. “I feel them, Cian. They gathered here for the greatest battle, and they died.”
Her words stripped away the last of Cian’s defenses. He pried the bone from Tahvo’s fingers and took her hands in his. They were cold as ice. “Where are we?” he asked.
“Do you not know? This is the place the beasts intended to bring us. It is the prison of the Stone.”
The prison of the Stone. Cian hurled the bone over the crest of the hill. A part of him had guessed from the moment they had arrived; part of him must have known the sand horses’ destination before they had ever left the Amazi camp. He understood the sickness that claimed him, the dread and exultation that warred to a bloody standstill in his Ailu heart.
This was where his people had wielded their magic of Earth to bind the Stone for all eternity. That magic still lingered, perverted by Ailuri treachery. But a greater power overwhelmed even the memory of the shapechanger’s enchantment, for here the Stone had lain for millennia, its concentrated evil sustained by the remnants of all those creatures, mortal and divine, who had died to defeat it.
“This is where Alexandros found it,” he said. “Found it and moved it to a place hidden from all but the highest priests of the Stone God.”
Tahvo rocked back and forth, her arms clamped over her stomach. “Part of it endures, even now. Enough to destroy. Enough to—” Her body arched violently, and her eyes rolled up beneath her lids.
Cian caught and held her as she convulsed through the fit, wedging his thumb into her mouth so she wouldn’t bite through her tongue. The humpbacked beasts drew close, craning their long necks and groaning mournfully. Tahvo gave a final shudder and went limp in Cian’s hold.
“Tahvo,” he said, stroking matted hair away from her face. “We must leave this place. Tahvo.”
She opened her eyes. “I saw him, Cian. I saw my brother.”
“Your brother?”
“He died. But he is still alive. He came to me in Karchedon.
I promised him everything if he would help me save you….”
“Hush.” Cian pulled her close, terrified that she had finally succumbed to madness. “Can you ride, Tahvo?”
She struggled against him. “Do you hear them? They are drawn to the prison of the Stone like crows to a carcass.” She clutched his shirt. “They are coming, Cian.”
“Who?”
The earth shivered. Bones rattled. Loose grains of sand bounced down the hill like miniature boulders in an avalanche. The humpbacked beasts surged to their feet, baring great flat teeth.
Cian left Tahvo and ran up to the lip of the crater. The sky was black over the field of bones. A plume of fine sand rose beyond the right edge of the pit, dust from the marching of many feet.
Cian plunged back down the hill and swept Tahvo into his arms, carrying her to her sand horse. The animal tossed its ugly head and danced away. The other bellowed, snapped at Cian and raced toward the crater’s edge, leaping over it in a single jump.
There was no hope of escaping on foot from whatever was coming. Cian set Tahvo at the base of the hill and ran after the smaller of the beasts. It flung up its feet and followed the first into the crater. Cian swallowed the rising nausea in his throat and pursued, his feet rolling on the upper layer of bones as he skidded into the depression. Smaller bones cracked under his weight, releasing a stench of corruption as if they still bore rotted coverings of flesh.
The sand horses stood some five hundred paces down the slope of the crater, where the ground began to level. They trembled on their long, knobby legs, heads turned toward the approaching plume of dust. Cian held out his hand. The beasts let him near enough to touch them, but they refused to move a finger’s breadth from their position.
“Do you think we’ll be safe here from whatever comes for us?” Cian asked his mount. “This is a place of evil.”
“They know,” Tahvo said. She slid down the side of the crater on her rump, no better able than Cian to keep from touching the animal and human remains. Her lips curled in sorrow and horror. “They know what comes. It is the warriors of the Stone.”
Cian grabbed Tahvo and pulled her up beside him. “You’ve seen them?”
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