out a balky ram with horns so curled they obscured its eyes. Jedit thanked the shepherds, raised a paw big as an axe, and slashed. One swipe severed the ram's head. Jedit lifted the carcass by its back legs to drink blood spurting from the gory neck. Nomads skittered away like a flock of starlings. Johan started walking. Northwest.
For days the odd couple trekked from well to well. They slept under the stars, awaking under frost thick as blankets. Jedit subsisted on jerboas, a big-eared fox, a dead vulture, a hyena, a covey of hedgehogs, dead sheep, snakes, and any other creature that crossed his path. Johan ate nothing but cactus pulp and water.
Once, topping a rise, Jedit saw long furrows of dark sand. Something had stirred the ground from below. Curious as ever about this new world, he asked, 'Is there danger of sand wurms?'
'There may be.' Johan walked steady and unhurried. 'The wurms never ventured this far east before, for they can't burrow easily through the pebble desert. But in past months a titanic sandstorm smothered the region and gave the wurms new inlets. The wind blows, as always, so sand sifts back east and south, but some stretches linger. As must some wurms.'
Once before dusk, as their shadows stretched like skinny giants, Johan mounted a pebbly hill with a short stone tower, obviously a lookout post, now deserted. At the summit, setting sun glared in their eyes. Johan nodded at distant cubes on a knoll. Silver winked and flashed as the sun dropped.
'Palmyra.' Johan ground his teeth.
'Palmyra?' asked Jedit. 'Ah, the village waystation! Didn't they oppose the army of your lord, Lance Truthseeker? And my father?'
'That's correct,' lied Johan. 'A city of degenerates, thieves, and traitors. But we must swim amid the sewage, for I need supplies.'
'Supplies?' Jedit glanced at the bony mage who for weeks had subsisted in the desert with no more equipment than a tortoise.
'And other things,' hedged Johan. 'Come.'
Jedit Ojanen tripped along, eager as a cub after weeks of boring desert. Even in an enemy city, he might learn about his father.
So dusk claimed the desert, and stars came to life while the odd couple marched on, over the cooling sands.
'Stand still. I must disguise you.'
'Why?' asked Jedit.
The towering tiger and the bony mage stood in darkness behind rambling stone corrals on the outskirts of Palmyra. Midnight was past.
'How would townspeople react if a tiger strode into their midst?' Johan worked as he talked, pacing around the cat man and sketching in the air.
'Oh, yes. I forgot my father would have been a celebrity, always in the forefront of the battle against Palmyra. None of those goatherds feared me. Will you adopt a disguise?'
'My face is unremarkable.' Johan didn't explain he already wore a guise and had for months. 'Now hush.'
Shapeshifting and transmutation were out of the question, for such drastic spells would warp the tiger's body cruelly and cause immense pain. Picturing what he wished to project, Johan laid bony hands on the tiger's tufted mane. Running his hands out and down, over rounded ears, then whiskers, then the thick neck and down the soft pelt, Johan chanted softly under his breath, 'Dru-in-bolik, dru-in-va-te. Dru-in-bolik…'
Taking care to stroke every inch, Johan finished between the tiger's furry toes, making the cat dance from tickling. Carefully, as if poising an egg on end, Johan drew away his fingers.
He almost smiled.
Standing before him was not a tiger but a hulking barbarian from Jamuraa's far north. Ugly as a broken rock was the creature, but Johan was pleased. The clever disguise mimicked the tiger's natural height and weight, those hardest features to mask, leaving only skin to be cloaked. Barbarians even bore broad noses and short tusks that matched the tiger's snub muzzle and fangs. Standing under starlight, Jedit loomed like a suntanned giant of a man with red-blonde haystack hair and long dangling arms roped with muscle. Johan had even tricked the skimpy goathide loincloth to mimic a leather vest and kilt, though they were stretched tight over the massive frame.
'Twill do.'
Bemused, Jedit held up his hands, staring with the dull eyes of a barbarian at human skin and fingernails. 'It's foul ugly. How long must I wear this sham?'
Johan frowned. The voice was still a tiger's, a droning purr in a queer antique accent. 'Don't talk. The spell will cling until I disenchant you. It shan't be for long. Now come.'
Yet the new man's first step made Johan curse under his breath. Jedit's natural tread was the lithe loping glide of a tiger, not the brutish stumping of a barbarian. Still, night should cloak the flaw, and the tiger was just a tool to be used and discarded anyway. Though Johan was plagued by superstition, he nonetheless possessed the keen mind of a general who always planned conquests at two levels. Thus, while Johan hatched long-range plans with a thousand tiny components, he could still diverge from a plan to snap up promising opportunities that popped up.
He muttered, 'He who thinks both longest and quickest prospers first and last.'
'Eh?' The barbarian turned beady dark eyes on the mage.
'Nothing. Don't talk.'
Leaving desert and corrals behind, the pair took the dusty road that led to twin watchtowers and the city wall of Palmyra.
For four centuries since the Ice Age glaciers vanished overnight, Palmyra had occupied an oxbow bend in the River Toloron. Originally tiny, the village clung to a shelf of bedrock the river could not erode so instead partly circled. The hostile Sukurvia resented permanent dwellings, but Palmyra stuck because the river protected and nourished it. It was the only real town within the vast desert. Far to the north, where the river rushed from the mountains, crouched a craggy city like a condor. Tirras was the dark heart of rich and fertile northlands where wealth and populace had exploded of late. Its iron-fisted ruler was Johan, Tyrant of Tirras and Emperor of the Northern Realms. Far to the south, where the river lost itself in the Sea of Serenity, sat the seaport Bryce. The River Toloron spanned the desert and linked the two cities, and it was down this river that Johan had launched his invasion of the southlands.
His invasion foundered on the rock called Palmyra. Adira Strongheart, erstwhile mayor of Palmyra and leader of the cutthroat Robaran Mercenaries, called Palmyra home and defended it tooth and nail. To Palmyra's defense had come an alliance of southern city-states led by the governor of Bryce, Hazezon Tamar. Johan's invasion ran square into a new-built dam blocking the river, then a newly fortified village, then a nimble and unflagging patchwork army, and finally hearty doses of magic. The river itself had been magically spirited away by merfolk. Weeks of thirsty fighting ground Johan's forces down. Finally had come phalanxes of ensorcelled sandmen and a withering sandstorm that smothered the invading army. Only remnants had escaped to crawl back to Tirras.
Thus Johan's face was slashed by a frown deep as a knife wound as he padded into Palmyra with a hulking barbarian alongside. Everything in Palmyra seemed calculated to gall the would-be conqueror. Palmyra's town wall was again strong, showing no traces of the Tirran siege. The twin towers were manned by militia soldiers with spears and horns ready to sound an alert. Guards demanded the strangers state their business, but Johan's powers of persuasion got them past. The town had never been much more than adobe huts, dusty wells, and a few scraggly trees, but the citizens had taken new pride in digging out from under the fabulous sandstorm six months past. Though some cellar holes were still choked with sand, many flat-roofed houses were freshly painted. Wells were dredged and dressed with stone, for suffering without water for weeks had reminded townsfolk of the precious commodity's worth.
Sleeping away the afternoon heat, Palmyra came awake at night. The swirling populace sang and laughed and called to friends. The town felt festive, the air still sweet with victory. A chain of giggling girls danced and wove through columns framing one street. A man played a flute, and his dog yipped along. Two women shared gossip and grapes leaning from the second stories of their homes. Young lovers cooed and kissed in shadows where starlight didn't fall.
Fuming, Johan strode along, the only busy man in the village, but time and again he had to catch Jedit's hand
