Sanctuary

With no escort at all, Wapah and the Prince of Khur rode out of Khuri-Khan before dawn. They reached the Tear of Elir-Sana without incident. Although of no more use in the desert than a mewling babe, Shobbat insisted they press on without rest to reach his goal, the oracle of the high desert.

Wapah paused to sip buttered tea, and Bilath, Adala’s brother by marriage and war chief of the Weya-Lu, asked, “The Hidden One? The keeper of bats?”

Wapah nodded solemnly. On his left, his cousin Etosh poured more tea into his crater.

They reached the oracle at night. No one in Wapah’s memory had gone there, and he didn’t know if the diviner still lived, but the ancient stone spires still stood, and the legendary bats flooded out when disturbed. Wapah, a righteous man, warned the prince he would not enter the sanctuary, so Shobbat went alone and stayed inside until nearly dawn.

Wapah was asleep between the horses when he heard a terrible scream. Rising valiantly, sword in hand, he braced himself to do battle against evil spirits. None appeared. Instead, Prince Shobbat stumbled out of the sanctuary, raving like a madman.

“Tell about his face!” Etosh urged him.

“The breath of the gods had fallen upon the prince,” Wapah declaimed, spreading his arms wide, “stealing the manly color from his beard, brow, and hair! The stain was white as the scarves of the Khan’s dancers!”

Adala looked down her long nose at him. “White is the color of light, of Eldin the Judge.” This was the remote high god of the nomads, seldom spoken of and rarely invoked. “What evil can come from Eldin?”

A murmur went through the group, and Bilath said, “Then you believe it was a judgment, not a curse?”

Wapah did not wish to lose his audience in a theological discussion, so he continued quickly.

The tormented prince was not only ranting like one benighted, he was blind as well! He flailed his arms, crashing into the horses and Wapah. All the while he raved about trees growing in the desert, the coming of the elves, and how they would turn everything green unless stopped.

“I would like to see more green in this land,” Adala commented, and the assembled men stared at her. “But not under the rule of foreigners.”

Wapah had been forced to club Shobbat unconscious. After tying him onto his horse, the nomad started back to Khuri-Khan. When the prince awoke on the return journey, he was still crazed. Wapah questioned him, and Shobbat answered without guile, revealing everything, why he had come, what he’d hoped to gain, and what the oracle had said. But always, his talk returned to the elves and the danger they posed to Khur.

“He sought to depose his father,” said Etosh, with a sage nod. “His madness is the judgment of the gods, punishment for plotting such blood betrayal!”

There was little love for Sahim-Khan among the Weya-Lu, but when sons conspired to murder their fathers, evil was truly loose in the world.

Wapah said it was not the prince’s designs on the throne of Khur that consumed his disordered mind on the journey back to the city, but the oracle’s revelation that the laddad might transform Khur into a green land and rule over it. Wapah’s audience agreed with the maddened prince on that score. If that happened, the tribes of Khur would be lost. Everything they valued-families, traditions, loyalty to the gods-would be forfeit to foreign ways. Even the clean, beautiful emptiness of the land would be choked out by the vines and trees of the elves.

“ ‘If the elves find the Valley of the Blue Sands,’ ”

Wapah said, quoting the prince, “ ‘then the people of Khur are lost!’ ”

Draining his crater of tea, Wapah was silent at last. His audience was thunderstruck. Even Adala had no comeback to this final revelation. Elves looking for the Valley of the Blue Sands? Why would they go there? No one went there. It was haunted by troubled, unholy spirits.

“You should have slit the Khur’s throat,” said Etosh, breaking the somber silence. “Left him in the desert to feed the vultures.”

Several loud voices took issue with this statement. Such a betrayal of his charge would have brought ill hick down upon Wapah and his tribe. A Weya-Lu’s word was a bond not only to the men to whom it had been given, but to Those on High as well.

For a time, they argued the merit of Wapah’s decision to ferry the stricken prince back to Khur. As nothing useful emerged from their dispute, Adala finally Cut them off.

“We must meet this storm and see if it is a true tempest or only the ravings of a sun-maddened prince,” she said.

She stood. Extending her arm, she swept the circle, pointing to each man in turn. “We will go to the City by the Sea. We will see what the laddad are about. If they are quiet, and cleave to the will of the Khan, we will leave them in peace. But if they intend to invade the valley, we must stop them. The oracle said the laddad would not rule if they were kept from the Valley of the Blue Sands. By our blood, it is our duty to keep them out. The sacred land of Khur will endure.”

She completed the circle, adding, “Your oaths on it, as men of Weya-Lu!”

Readily they swore, the burden of the oath light just now. No man present knew how heavy it might prove.

Messengers were sent out right away. Other tribes in the region would be told of this threat. If the elves moved toward the valley, it would mean war.

Some southern tribes freely raided elven caravans, picked off stray laddad riders, even attacked small camps. As a warrior people, they treated all strangers in their land thus. Over the years the elves had grown in number as more arrived in exile, and they showed no signs of leaving. Adala had even heard reports of elves in the Weya-Lu’s ancestral city, Delphon. The city was a sinkhole of iniquity and vice (as all cities were), but it was the font of the Weya-LU tribe. For foreigners not even human ones-to be there, contaminating the tombs and temples of the tribe’s great ancestors, was a bitter draught to swallow. But as long as the laddad remained at Khuri-Khan and other cities, the nomads could ignore them. However, if Sahim-Khan allowed them to spread across the vastness of the open desert, then the people of the desert would rise up and proclaim a new khan.

And not the spoiled Shobbat; he was as wicked and godless as his father. A new dynasty must be established, a house of virtue and strength.

Such were Adala’s thoughts as she crossed the blinding expanse of sand to her tent. Ducking under the flap, she flipped the sun veil back over her head and left such worldly concerns outside with the sun. Chisi had scoured the griddle and hung it from a tent pole to cool. The brass mixing bowl was rinsed clean.

With no more distracting thoughts of elves or cities or immoral monarchs, Adala dipped a hand in a basket of dried lentils. One, two, three handfuls clattered into the bowl. More water from the jug, to soak the stone-hard, brown seeds. Lentils went well with bread. She only hoped she had enough salt to season them properly.

* * * * *

Without fanfare, the Lioness led her small force out of Khurinost before sunrise.

If the Speaker’s expensive map could be trusted, the Inath-Wakenti was more than two hundred miles away. The trip would take them across the High Plateau, some of the worst desert in Khur, with no wells, no oases, and no hospitable life for most of the way. According to Khurish records, rain had not fallen on the High Plateau in a hundred years, so every elf carried water, water, and more water. Spare arms and most armor were left behind, to allow the horses to bear a heavier burden of liquid. In consultation with Sithelbathan, Kerian had sketched out a route north by east, skirting the caravan trail to Kortal, which was rife with Nerakan spies. Each member of the expedition was provided with a copy of the map, so if he became separated from the main body, he would know where to go.

An experienced professional, Kerian completed her own preparations for the journey fairly quickly. This left her a few precious hours to spend as Gilthas’s wife and not as the commander of his army. She puzzled anew over the seeming contradiction of her husband and king. He was both the gentlest person she’d ever known, and the toughest. Gilthas could give his last crust of bread to a hungry person in the street, then in the next breath, sentence a malefactor to death. He did not posture or preen as Speaker of the Sun and Stars, but honestly cared for every soul under his rule and for the long-range welfare of his realm.

Neither of them spoke of the task Kerian faced or her lack of faith in its purpose. Clad only in candlelight, they