comprehend a foe who would take on a mage with only a small hand weapon. No one was that insane.
Another thing occurred to him as he readied himself for the worst. He knew time had passed, for the sun was bright in the sky. Yet Dru could not recall either sleeping or eating. He was, however, fully rested and not the least bit hungry. The sorcerer thanked the guardians for small favors; maybe they had wanted him to be at his best when he died.
“What did they tell you in there?” she suddenly asked, the blade still poised for immediate use.
He almost laughed. Questions at a time like this? He would have expected such from himself had his mind not still been at least partly back with the very creatures she asked about. “They told me about this place… and about Nimth.”
“It is all falling apart, is it not? Nimth, that is.”
His gaze shifted briefly from her green, almond-shaped eyes to the knife and then back again. “Yes, it is.”
“You destroyed Nimth. You destroyed it the way you destroyed everything else on it other than yourselves.”
“Yes.”
Confusion spread onto her face, lessening the anger a bit. “You admit it? You are very cooperative. Why is that? What are you planning?”
“I have no quarrel with you, elf. If I have a quarrel with anyone, it is our former hosts.”
“Do you think I am a fool because I use a knife against a Vraad? I know how chancy your spells are, but I also know how devious you are said to be. We went through the same difficulty with our own magic, for a short time, when we first came here. I can easily kill you before you take another breath.”
Dru believed her. The grace with which she moved, even seemed to breathe, spoke of skill surpassing his. Still, if it came to a battle, he had a few tricks she could not know about. “The guardians put us together to survive.”
“Or kill one another and save them the problem of dealing with two more who know about this place.”
The sorcerer had considered that but had chosen not to mention it. He had not even dared to ask what had actually been done with the Seekers. The elf was no one’s fool. “Do we do it, then? Would you like to kill me?”
She hesitated. “A trick?”
“Hardly. I would rather form an alliance than fight.” A gust of wind blew his hair in his eyes. He pushed it aside, wondering if this breeze meant that some of the guardians remained, shielded from his senses. That might have been the true reason they had ejected Darkhorse from their world; he represented a potential threat to their security-to their legacy.
“You are Vraad.” Was there just a hint of uncertainty in her tone? Dru wondered.
“A chance of birth,” he replied.
She smiled at his poor attempt at humor, an effect that nearly dazzled him. So used to the unreal and exceedingly arrogant beauty of his kind, he was unprepared for the beauty that nature itself could offer. Dru forgot himself and simply stared. Only Sharissa could claim similar beauty.
Sharissa and her mother…
The knife was suddenly at his throat. “I could have killed you now. You didn’t even bother to move.”
He had been too engrossed in admiring her… something that had to be the work of this land and not his own doing. Dru had not survived all these centuries by letting his mind wander to pleasant things in times of crisis. No, it had to be the land playing with his thoughts. Yet, Dru realized that his adversary did remind him of his wife and daughter, too, so perhaps…
When her enemy continued to pay no heed to the death tickling his neck, the elf withdrew her blade and, after what must have been a tremendous debate with herself, sheathed it. “If you would desire an alliance, I can see no reason to turn you down. Not for the time being. You can call me Xiri. Not my birth name.”
“Xiri.” The Vraad did not ask what she meant by it not being her birth name. Elfin ways were mystery to his kind, who could only go by what little had been passed down over the millennia. Even Serkadion Manee, who seemed to want to chronicle everything, had been sparse in his details of the one other significant race in Nimth history. “Call me Dru, Xiri. My birth name, if you are interested. How did you know I was a Vraad?”
“It is not because I am so old that I remember your arrogant race,” she bit back, though again with a touch of humor. “Those who passed to this place made certain we would remember the forms of our foes.” She sized him up. “You do not seem exceptionally sinister. Merely tall and a touch too confident in yourself.”
“You’ll find enough of my kind that fit your darkest fears. Overall, we are probably everything your ancestors claimed we were, which is why we ourselves have been trying to escape Nimth.” It was peculiar, he thought, how easy it was to talk to her even though she had come close to slitting his throat only a breath or two earlier.
“How terrible is it?”
Gazing around at the remnants of a civilization far older than his own, Dru pictured Nimth in a few thousand years. “These ruins will look picturesque in comparison to what we have left as a legacy.”
“And now you’ve come here to spread your poison.” The hostility had returned to Xiri’s voice, but it was not meant for Dru personally. “The land will not permit it.”
The sorcerer shivered as she said the last. “Why do you say that?”
Xiri began walking, if only, it seemed, to burn off nervous energy. Without thinking, Dru moved beside her, keeping pace. He was taller than she by nearly two feet and his stride was nearly double her own, but the Vraad was still forced to walk faster to keep up with his new companion.
“You mean you cannot feel it? You cannot feel the presence that is the land itself?”
He had. More than once. He also believed it was the same force that had guided him into this world and then used his horse to lead him here. If what he supposed had truth in it, then there was a purpose for his being in the shrouded realm. Dru was not certain whether he should be pleased or worried.
“I see you have.” Xiri had used Dru’s musings as an opportunity to study his face, reading there the answer he had not given to her in words.
“Do the… the guardians know of it?”
She shrugged. “I am as much of a newcomer to this continent as you. Maybe. It could be that what we feel is like them, though you would know that better than I. Another ‘guardian,’ as you called them.” Xiri mulled over his term. “Guardians. I suppose that describes them better than anything else.”
They were taking a path that would more or less lead them back to where Dru, as a prisoner of the avians, had entered the city. The sorcerer did not ask if there was a reason for this particular direction; he was learning too much to be concerned with anything else. He found he also enjoyed Xiri’s company, she being a more pleasant, straightforward companion than most Vraad… when she was not trying to kill him, that is.
“How long have the elves been here?”
“Thousands of years. We really do not keep track of time as precisely as you do.”
He took a breath before asking his next question. They were on fair terms at the moment, but he knew that there were areas that she might not wish to talk about. Her skill with the blade had been impressed upon him quite sufficiently. Still, he had a question that had to be asked. “How did you escape Nimth?”
To his amazement and relief, she appeared undisturbed by what he had asked. “There is debate as to that. Some claim we found a hole in the fabric of Nimth that led us to here. Some claim the hole was opened for us.
“I think they made a mistake, whoever created all this. I think we were not supposed to be in the same place as your kind, but it took them time to correct that mistake.”
That was likely close to the truth, the overwhelmed spellcaster thought. “How much did the guardians tell you? They’d indicated that they chose to speak to me because I resembled their ancient masters. I thought that I was the only one they spoke with because of that.”
“Enough.” Xiri, her eyes closing to little more than slits, related a tale much like that which Dru had suffered through, but less informative. She knew about the old race and how, for reasons she found insulting, her kind had been judged lacking and left to live out their existence in a place where others were to rule, such as the Seekers and, before them, the Quel. The guardians had said no more, not even telling her that they were leaving her with a Vraad. That the Vraad had been left to face eventual destruction at their own hands had long satisfied the elves. To find herself with Dru had come as a great shock to her. His presence meant that the elves had not left the evil behind them as they had hoped.
When she was finished, Dru told her his own story, including events leading up to the city itself. For reasons
