Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  The witch snorted. "I live alone in a desert cave. You think I'm a fan of other dwarves?"

  They slogged onward until an hour before dusk, then broke from their march to locate a leeward cliff to set their tent against. They were soaked and half-frozen. Joti had no hope for a fire, but Nod walked out into the white landscape and returned with two small bricks of yellow matter. When she set them afire, they burned with a low but steady warmth.

  Their cloaks and body heat were enough to keep the tent tolerably warm. Even so, Joti had a hard time falling asleep. So far, he hadn't done a thing to help the Marshals find the Orange Lady. It was nice to be traveling with Shain again, but once they'd located their quarry, she'd go back to the Peak and he'd go back to the castle. His life had diverged from theirs. Wasn't it better to progress down his new path rather than taunt himself with glimpses of his old one?

  He woke cold and stiff. The night had only brought a dusting of new snow, but they'd barely started on their way before the flakes began to swirl down on them again. The accumulated snow only came to his shins, but the witch's legs disappeared to the knee, slowing her. He wanted to ask her why dwarves loved mountains so much when a moderate snowfall practically had them burrowing around like rabbits, but anticipating that he'd be told to go and ask those dwarves about it, he kept his mouth shut.

  That afternoon, the witch led them to a gap between two bluffs. As they neared it, a man appeared on the right-hand cliffs. He held a tall spear, the snow gusting about him.

  "Turn back," he called. "This is Daryar land."

  The witch leaned on her staff and tipped back her head. "It's been Daryar land the last five miles. About time one of you yellow-bellies showed up to defend it."

  "Do we know you?"

  "You don't. That's all that matters here, isn't it?"

  He leaned over the cliff. "You're the dwarf, aren't you?"

  "Sharp eyes. No wonder Vakka posted you on sentry."

  "A red eye watches, too."

  The dwarf nodded to herself, gazing up at the cliffs. "Its quarry doesn't move."

  "Neither does it. Neither will leave until the other does, and so they are both stuck." Satisfied by this, the sentry lowered his spear. "Why are you here?"

  "To speak to your elders."

  "Who have you brought with you?"

  "Shain and Nod," Shain declared into the wind. "Marshals of the No-Clan."

  The man gave the witch a pained look. "The Meddlers? You bring them on us?"

  The dwarf shrugged. "When you've been cursed, how else do you get rid of it but to pass it on to someone else?"

  He sighed. "Wait here."

  He turned and vanished.

  Shain turned on the dwarf. "Was that business with the red eye a ritual greeting? You didn't tell me they had ritual greetings."

  "They have ritual greetings."

  "Well what did it mean?"

  "A friend of the Daryar wouldn't have to ask."

  "I'm not their friend. That's the entire reason why we need you."

  "Oh." The witch shifted her weight to her other foot. "You see, only their friends get to know."

  "They were describing the cliffs," Joti said.

  Shain turned with a whirl of her cloak. "Which cliffs?"

  "The ones right in front of us. See that red stain there? And the lighter stain around it? It looks like an eye. Its 'quarry' is the other rock wall across from it. And neither of them are budging an inch."

  "How did you figure that out?"

  He frowned, troubled by the sudden notion he was talking about things that weren't his to talk about. "I saw what the witch was looking at when she and the sentry stopped making sense."

  Shain took off her cap and whacked the snow from it. "Is this true, dwarf?"

  The witch wore her typical deadpan expression, then shrugged to herself. "The Daryar and several other tribes around these parts think the desert's infested with demons and tricksters. The kind that like to show a mirage to a man dying of thirst. They deceive you, you see, and once you're in their illusion, they use it to kill you.

  "So when the Daryar meet somebody after an absence, or come across a stranger they'd like to treat with, they make some small comment about something the both of you can see. If the other person replies in a way that tells you that you're seeing the same thing, that proves neither of you is being deceived by a demon—or that you're at least occupying the same illusion together."

  Shain spent the next several minutes arguing about the foolishness of this proposition. Just as she was getting her dudgeon worked up, the sentry appeared ahead of them in the gap between the cliffs. He was long-limbed and wore a garment of snake skins stitched together so neatly that Joti couldn't see the seams.

  "The elders have agreed," he said, "to let me test you."

  "Test?" Shain set her hands on her hips. "We represent the No-Clan. We have less than no interest in trying to seize your lands or swindle you of your property. Our only purpose here is to investigate a potential threat to you."

  "Those who refuse the test prove that they fear having their true motives exposed."

  "Yes, you've discovered the only possible reason that people dislike wasting their time." She pinched her temples, then made a spinning gesture with her other hand. "Very well, let's get on with it."

  The man nodded in satisfaction. "First, you must give the Daryar a gift."

  "A gift? Like gold?"

  "Gold is not so interesting."

  "This could be a problem. We're traveling light. We're not exactly laden down with incense and antique tables."

  The man watched them blankly.

  "Here." Nod opened her pack, withdrew a lacquered wooden box, and took a small jar from it.

  The man unscrewed the lid and lifted a dried mushroom cap. "The spore of illusions. We have these already. Demons use them to give us false visions."

  "Isn't that. This numbs you to pain. Give them to your warriors before battle. They won't quit fighting till their bodies drop dead."

  Shain nodded. "Also works wonders when a woman's giving birth and your enemies are close enough to hear her screams."

  The man lifted a cap to his nose and sniffed it. "This could save Daryar lives. Your gift is good." He pocketed the jar and squared his shoulders. "Next, you must give the Daryar wisdom."

  "Wisdom?"

  "If you don't understand the word, I fear for your chances of passing the test."

  "Wisdom. Right. Well, among the No-Clan, we hold that there is no higher virtue than service to your cause."

  "Bah. Everyone knows that."

  "Good news, I suppose." Shain paced side to side, crunching through the snow. "We once had a chieftain by name of Brog the Watcher. When he grew older, and passed his command down to his successor, he retired to a small island on the Peak to contemplate the currents of life. In the end, he concluded that one truth held above all others: the act of thought is all that matters, but thought is a delicate flower. If it's to sprout, we must protect the peace it needs to flourish."

  The Summite man laughed, crossing his snakeskin-wrapped arms. "So you Meddlers praise weakness? Everyone knows the gods made us strong so that we could test ourselves against each other by fighting."

  "A notion can be wise even if you disagree with it."

  "False. Just as rock is rock and sky is sky, dumb is dumb. So are your words."

  Shain pursed her lips. "Perhaps dumbness has less to do with the quality of the words and more to do with the quality of the recipient's mind."

  The man stood taller, whacking the butt of his spear into the snow. "The arrogance of you Meddlers! Your insults have cost you. You have one last chance to show me you know what wisdom is."

  Shain closed her teeth with a click.

  Joti met the man's eyes. "I'm not from the No-Clan. I'm just a pig-herder a long way from home. I don't know where he is now, but my father used to say that the gods are too high in the sky to tell how tall a man walks."

  The ma
n frowned. "He thought the gods are too far away to judge us?"

  "And if it's true that even the gods can't properly judge us, then we can't let our fears of being judged stop us from doing what we need to do."

  The sentry considered the snowy ground, then the gray sky. "This, at last, tastes like wisdom. Thank you. Only one test remains. We must have a sign that you possess the desert's favor. Many think that the desert is always hot, but as you can see, the winter comes here, too. Yet how can you use the cold to restore the desert's heat?"

  Shain sighed loudly, breath carried away by the wind. Joti turned the riddle over in his head, but he couldn't see how any of it made sense.

  Nod crunched away from them, moving purposefully toward the foot of the nearest cliff. She kneeled and swept snow away from the ground. After a few moments, she stopped, got out a sturdy knife, and started chipping at a patch of ice. After working for a while, she extracted a round hunk of ice and began shaving its edges.

  Another minute, and she returned to the others. She extended a round and slightly convex hunk of ice to the sentry.

  The sentry raised his eyebrows. "Is it so cold on your mountain top that you think our ice is warm?"

  Nod held the lens mostly flat to the ground, tipping it this way and that by small degrees. "Too many clouds. Even so, you can see its function."

  As she tipped the ice, light flowed over the snow. It was dim, but there was no denying that the lens was focusing it into something brighter—and that if the sky had been cloudless and sunny, the lens' power would be far greater.

  The man crouched and passed his hand back and forth beneath the light. He looked up and smiled. "Now I will take you to see Chief Ganyo."

  ~

  Considering her duties and hence their bargain fulfilled, the witch left them, returning to her corner of glass in a sea of crumbling stone.

  The four others trekked with the sentry through miles of snow and rock. The storm dwindled, only to come back in a thick flurry that turned the horizons gray and indistinct. Joti raised his hood and lowered his face to avoid the stinging flakes. And so it was that he didn't see the Daryar's winter home until they were upon it.

  Inside a canyon sheltered from the winds, round beige tents stood in a tight circle, snow collecting on their tops. People looked up from their work, their faces shades of white and blue. A low mound of dirt rose from the center of the tents, crowned by a round sandstone structure that looked like its doors and windows had been carved out by centuries of wind-driven grit.

  The sentry delivered them to a chamber whose ceiling hung twelve feet over their heads. Four of the five walls were covered with etched icons. The oldest were so time-worn as to be barely recognizable while the newest looked like they might have been carved that morning.

  A hearth burned with dense dark logs that smelled like sage. Beside it, a man wrapped in a cape of wolf skins sat on cushions and drew from a long pipe. He regarded them with the pale eyes of the desert people and exhaled a stream of green smoke.

  "I am Ganyo," he said. "You are visitors."

  Shain seated herself on a rug across from him. "Afraid we'd forgotten that?"

  "It reminds you that you can make requests—but not demands. And it reminds me that I owe you nothing."

  "Well, Chief Ganyo, as your guest, I'd like to thank you for receiving us. I hope that we wind up wasting your time."

  The chief snorted smoke from his nose. "For every minute of my life you waste, I will take an ounce of your blood."

  "That's a risk I'll have to take—but once I tell you what we're investigating, I think you'll hope that it turns out to be a mere waste of time rather than what I fear it could reveal." She explained in moderate detail about the Faval Rusk war party that had been sighted in the area and their history of raids in other lands before. She didn't mention that Joti and Brakk had had personal run-ins with the raiders. "We heard that your people spotted them just a few days ago. Any truth to that?"

  Ganyo lowered his pipe across his knees. "What is the No-Clan's interest in these raiders?"

  "We suspect they're here to seize control of the mithril strike. They're dangerous enough already. With the wealth of a good strike behind them, they could claim the entire Duk Mak—and wage war on the Alliance."

  "If you find these invaders, what do you intend to do about them?"

  "Why, I suspect that we'd thwart them."

  The chieftain tapped his finger on his pipe. "Two weeks ago, our people stumbled into a raiding party from the Freygar, another Summite tribe like ourselves. After the first skirmish, they sought to pick up their dead and retreat, but we pushed them back too fast for them to bring their corpses with them. When we inspected their dead, we found that they had painted their faces in shades of blue to resemble the people of the desert: but beneath the paint, their skin was green. And beneath their Freygar dress, they wore strange clothes."

  "Can you tell what clan they were with?"

  "Outside clans don't concern me. They were green, both light and dark. You know more of them than you are telling me, so tell me this. Why would outsiders disguise themselves as Sum?"

  "Speculating here. They mean to cause trouble between you. Pit you against the Freygar. If they could have gotten the two of you to beat the shit out of each other, it would have made it much easier for them to seize control of the region despite their present lack of manpower."

  Ganyo's face darkened. "Their manpower will soon be strengthened. Reinforcements come from the south. Our scouts have seen it."

  "You're certain they're allies of the tribe you fought?"

  "On the dead, we found blue cords wrapped around their waists. The warriors from the south wear the same cords."

  "How many are coming?"

  The chieftain stood and moved to the hearth, jabbing its contents with an iron poker. "Many hundreds. But not enough to conquer the valley nor the hills above."

  "Perhaps not by itself. But do not underestimate the danger these people pose. Nor their intelligence. They wouldn't be coming here if they didn't believe they could achieve their objectives."

  "Let them come for the Daryar again. We will break them like a stick over the knee."

  Shain clasped her hands, flexing them. "One of the reasons these people are so effective is that they have different clans working together. To combat them, we may wish to do the same."

  "You wish to fight together?" Ganyo turned away from the hearth, his expression a mix of humored befuddlement and distaste. "Do you spit on the gods on purpose? Or through ignorance?"

  "If you think the gods want you to be crushed by your enemies, I suggest choosing some new gods."

  "The five lords of the sun battle for the sands one against each other. So must we. If we must recruit outsiders to win, that proves to the gods that we don't have the strength to deserve to win."

  "Or the intelligence."

  The chief thrust out his heavy lower jaw. Shain stood her ground. Recognizing what was about to happen, and that it would result in them being tossed into one of two places—out of the camp, or into a mass grave—Joti stepped forward.

  "Chief Ganyo," he said. "These raiders took my family from me. I want my vengeance against them. Can you tell me where they went after you made them retreat in dishonor?"

  The man gazed at Shain for a long moment, then turned his gaze on Joti. "If you have a claim of vengeance, I must help you seek it. Your enemies traveled northeast. Toward the River of Warring Frogs. But my scouts tell me that they crossed it two days ago. I don't know where they went from there."

  "Then if we want to find out, I suppose we'd better start running."

  Ganyo bared his fangs. "You have the spirit of what is right. As you pursue your quest, I grant you permission to travel through Daryar lands."

  Shain requested to speak with the tribe's scouts, who provided them a basic map to the river and advice on the best way to get there. Ganyo offered to let them stay for one night, but to Joti's relief, Shain insis
ted they press on. The four of them headed northeast as fast as the snows allowed.

  "If nothing slows us down, we'll reach the river in three days." Shain adjusted her pack's weight on her back. "According to Ganyo's scouts, the only nearby ferry crossing is at The Place Where We Ate All Those Herons. That's where the Orange Lady would have crossed. The villagers will have seen which direction she took her army from there."

  "What happens when we find them?" Joti said. "Because I've taken a look at our forces and determined there's only four of us."

  "We observe them. See if we can feel out their plans. Once we have that, we'll be in position to mount our resistance."

  "The No-Clan will fight?"

  "The No-Clan will fight."

  They made camp. The night was quiet. In the morning, there was little new snow. The canyons and sands fell away, replaced by empty fields of snow-covered dirt punctured by gray, leafless shrubs. Nod stopped a few times to point out the tracks left by the recent passing of a force much too large for the snows to hide. The next day took them into low, rolling hills.

  On the third day, a few trees cropped up here and there, boughs sagging with the weight of the snow. A frozen wind slashed down from the mountains to the northwest. Snowflakes whipped them on all sides, obliging them to wrap their faces.

  The top of a high hill gave them a glimpse of the long gray river bordered by trees. It lay less than two miles away.

  "That'd be the River of Warring Frogs." Shain pointed to a settlement on the near bank. "Which means that must be The Place Where We Ate All Those Herons. And it looks large enough to field an inn. I can feel my spirits rising already."

  She tramped down the hill. As they reached the bottom and started up the next rise, Joti thought he heard a yell. He kept his ears cocked, but he didn't hear it repeat.

  They crested the final hill and stopped in their tracks. Beneath them, a swarm of warriors was assaulting the town, which was already mustering its defense.