throne of your father, Sahim-Khan of Khur.”
Shobbat snorted. “What prince doesn’t? Is that the extent of your augury?”
“You need do nothing to achieve your goal, Prince of Khur. Outlive your father, and the throne is yours.”
“Bah! He intends to live forever!” Shobbat’s petulant expression became harder, more resolute, and he added, “He treats with Nerakans, ogres, and minotaurs, seeking to enlarge his realm, and he allows foreigners to enter our country. All he sees is the gold and steel they bring, but his dalliances will destroy Khur. He does not deserve the throne!”
The prince again saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Again, when he looked directly at it, it vanished. He shifted from one foot to the other, gripping the hilt of his dagger nervously.
“My father has granted asylum to the exiled elves,” he said. “He intends to use them as pawns to limit the influence of the Knights of Neraka. I need to know-will he succeed?”
“The Knights will not rule in Khur.”
Shobbat blinked in surprise. He had expected a more cryptic response, but this was welcome clarity.
“Yet your house will not rule long, son of Sahim, if the children of Kith-Kanan are permitted to remain in Khur.”
That too was plain-speaking, yet not so welcome.
Heedless of his audience’s reaction, the oracle continued, “The elder race can win this land. Not with sword and fire, but by greening the desert.” He opened his left hand, revealing a green shoot sprouting from his palm. “It is their peculiar gift to bring life to lifelessness.”
Shobbat’s dark eyes narrowed, a flush of fury mantling his face above his beard. “I will not allow it! Khur does not belong to the
“So it will be, noble prince. For nine and ninety days. That will be the length of your reign.”
Shobbat stalked forward, determined to wring a different fate from the scrawny old prophet. He reached out for the oracle’s neck, then froze in horror. Before his eyes, the sage’s skin became translucent. Muscle, bone, and vein stood out clearly. And the face was no longer human. The jaw had narrowed, grown pointed. The cheeks were hollow, the eye sockets high and arched. The prince recoiled from the ghastly sight, his anger freezing into fear.
“What are you, old seer?” he whispered.
The oracle ignored the question. Empty eye sockets turning to stare directly at the prince, he said, “Life has branches, like the Great Tree, and each choice represents a fork. You have one chance, Prince of Khur. It is vital that you keep the children of Kith-Kanan out of the Valley of the Blue Sands. If you do, their seed will wither in the wasteland.”
Shobbat shook his head, wondering whether he had heard properly. The Valley of the Blue Sands was nothing more than a child’s fable. What could such a myth have to do with the
“The word has been given. Twill say no more,” the oracle told him. “Go.”
The final command echoed through the cavern as the sage vanished in a pulse of white light. When the glare subsided to a bearable level, the half-seen figures in the far edges of the cave solidified, and Shobbat could finally see them for what they were. Horrified, backing hastily away, he stabbed at them with his dagger. It was no use. They crowded in upon him, hands outstretched, claws gleaming, mouths agape. Shobbat screamed.
Outside, seated on the sand, Wapah heard the cry. A cloud of bats poured from one of the black granite towers. The horses snorted and pawed the ground. As the bats chittered overhead, weaving and dodging, debris fell around the nomad, landing lightly on the sand. Wapah picked up one of the fragments.
It was a leaf, dark and supple. Such leaves did not come from any tree Wapah had ever seen growing in Khur, yet the sand below the flying bats was littered with them, and more continued to flutter down like green rain.
Wapah pressed the leaf between his palms and begged Anthor the Hermit to protect him from the fell magic that obviously inhabited this place. A somber and solitary deity, Anthor nonetheless favored his desert children. They lived on the hard edges, where men and gods could see eye to eye.
The task Gilthas had given Kerian was straightforward enough: pay a call on Sa’ida, high priestess of the Temple of Elir-Sana in Khuri-Khan. However, his insistence that she leave Eagle Eye behind precipitated another argument. He didn’t wish his wife to draw unnecessary attention to herself by arriving at the temple door astride a royal Silvanesti griffon. For her part, Kerian believed that the awe Eagle Eye inspired in humans prevented a lot of needless wrangling with guards and petty officials.
The bickering continued until Gilthas flatly ordered her to ride a horse. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately-ending their disagreements by issuing peremptory, royal commands. Tight-lipped, the Lioness obeyed.
She took as her sole companion Captain Hytanthas Ambrodel. Gilthas viewed this as yet another sign of her contrariness. He certainly did not expect her to go without an appropriate escort. Lord Taranath and the balance of the army had not yet returned to Khurinost, but a suitable complement could have been found. The Lioness refused, citing Gilthas’s own stricture about not alarming the Khurs, and he could hardly argue against his own logic. Elves were generally accepted in Khuri-Khan (as was any cash customer). Lone elves sometimes earned glares, especially outside the broad-minded venues of the city markets, but nothing beyond that.
Gilthas had matters of state to attend to, but delayed long enough to watch his wife depart with young Ambrodel at her side. Clad in fresh tunic and trews, Kerian had disdained Khurish attire, preferring her own Wilder garb over the more comfortable local fashion. Captain Ambrodel was more practical. He wore a white geb over fawn-colored Qualinesti trousers, carefully arranging the folds of the desert garment to conceal the hilt of his sword.
The midafternoon sun bathed Kerian’s blonde head in a nimbus of white fire. As always, Gilthas could not help but be struck by her beauty, yet her grim expression was strikingly at odds with her loveliness. Her mood had grown worse since her return. It wasn’t only their clashes that accounted for this. The loss of her command and her humiliation at the hands of the bull-men still gnawed at her. She’d not told anyone else what had happened, and rumors had begun to circulate in camp. The Lioness’s courage was well known, but it could only be seen as odd that she had returned apparently unscathed from a battle in which all of her command had been lost.
Perhaps she was deep in thought, pondering the mission he’d given her, or perhaps she was concentrating on guiding her mount through the perils of the crowded tent city. Whatever the reason, although Gilthas waited, Kerian never glanced back at him. When, at last, she was lost to sight around a bend in the lane, he returned to his tent. Scouts from Taranath’s command had arrived in advance of the main body of the army, and they had much news to impart.
As Kerian and her aide passed through the tumult of the tent city, each noticed very different things. Hytanthas saw courage-common people struggling to live in a hostile, foreign place, and beginning to succeed. The Lioness saw only injustice-the most ancient race in the world forced from their rightful homes and made to suffer ignominiously in this terrible wilderness.
Like the roots of a tree, the environs of Khurinost were tangled, having grown haphazardly according to the lay of the land and the whims of its builders. Sahim-Khan had given the elves permission to set up a camp outside his capital; he had given them little else. Exhausted, sick, sunburned, and parched, the elves cobbled together whatever shelter they could, making tents out of everything from silken cloth to horse blankets to canvas sails formerly used by ships plying the Bay of Balifor.
Desert winds and errant embers from cookfires had taken a steady toll on the makeshift habitations, but as days became months and months grew into years, the elves learned to do better. The flimsy tents acquired wooden doorways, brass fireboxes and chimneys, and carpets to cover the sand. Wide, central streets were left open to the broiling sun, to allow carts and mounted elves to pass and to bring in fresh air, but the rest, the miles of narrow, twisting passages between tents great and small, were roofed with rush mats woven from the knife-edged grass that grew along the seaside below the city. The result was a warren no stranger could hope to navigate, the very antithesis of the elven love of order and beauty. But the confusing maze of streets and passages also served as an effective defense against interlopers.
Ahead, some forty yards beyond the edge of Khurinost, the wall of Khuri-Khan rose, its western face washed
