“Thank you,” he said gravely. “I was sure I was done for out there.”
“You’re not done until I’m through with you. I’ve too much invested in you to let the Khan kill you out of pique.”
Hengriff did not ask the priest to sit down. Papers and open scrolls covered the tabletop. A fresh sheet of foolscap lay under Hengriff’s hand, with lines of black script neatly printed down half the page. Unlike most nomads, Minok could read, but Hengriff’s writing made little sense to him. It was some sort of cipher, written for his superiors, no doubt.
“The attack today went well,” Minok opined.
Hengriff’s black eyes narrowed. “It did not. I told you to seek out elves, not the soukats of the Fabazz. No one in Khuri-Khan will blame the elves for what happened today. They know your nomads are responsible!”
Minok spread his hands. “My people are poor wanderers of the desert. When they saw the riches of the Lesser Souk spread before them, they lost their heads.”
“You’ll lose yours if you bungle again!”
Minok promised he would not fail a second time.
“Too late for that,” Hengriff reminded him dryly. “Your assassins also failed to slay the Lioness outside the Temple of Elir-Sana.”
Cautiously, Minok said, “Permit me to ask, Excellency, why you don’t kill these
“I’m trying to school a nation.” Minok’s look indicated he did not understand, so Hengriff added, “All your people, not just the followers of Torghan, need to learn how to deal with elves. If I kill them, it’s foreign intervention. If Khurs kill them, it’s a patriotic act.”
Minok bowed. “You are most wise, Excellency.” A sly expression crossed his narrow face. “It also discomfits the Khan, does it not?”
Hengriff made a fist. “There are lessons he must learn too.”
He rang a small brass bell, summoning the servant who waited just outside the shaft of sunlight. A few words to the servant and the fellow scurried away, returning moments later with two large men. Hengriff gave orders that the men, two of his personal bodyguards, escort Minok back to the Temple of Torghan. He warned the priest not to show his face for a while, to give Sahim-Khan time to forget he’d sought Minok’s death.
Minok did not thank him, only turned, head high, and started out. He and his protectors had gone only a few steps, when be staggered suddenly and clapped his hands over his ears.
“That ringing!” he cried. “Mercy, do you hear a great bell?”
The only bell in sight was the small brass instrument on Hengriff’s table. But it sat silent. Neither Hengriff nor his bodyguards heard anything, as they stared in surprise at the priest of Torghan. Minok was in obvious pain.
“Something is being summoned! Something great and terrible!”
Minok’s eyes rolled back in his head, his knees folded, and he dropped to the floor, unconscious. A thin stream of blood trickled from each ear.
Hengriff gestured at his men. The priest was not dead, but could not be revived. They covered him with a cloth to conceal him, and departed, carrying him back to his temple.
The Knight stared after them with a frown on his face.
Although he’d heard and felt nothing, he could not dismiss the sensations of an initiated priest. He made careful note of what Minok said, and when he said it, appending this to his next dispatch to the Order.
The report would soon be on its way to Jelek. Before the War of Souls, the Order’s leader, Morham Targonne, had moved the knighthood’s headquarters from Neraka to Jelek, some thirty miles northwest. Hengriff, himself from Neraka, had thought the move a singularly stupid one. Jelek was nothing more than a squalid little backwater, and the only reason Targonne had chosen it was because it carried the dubious (to Hengriff’s mind) distinction of having birthed him.
Lord of the Night Targonne had been dead five years now, and the Order had been weakened by the events of the War of Souls: a great defeat at the Battle of Sanction and the disappearance of Targonne’s successor, Mina, the self-proclaimed prophet of the One God. The Order’s current leader, Lord Baltasar Rennold, was determined to restore its honor and sense of holy purpose. Rennold was nothing like Targonne, who had been a distinctly dishonorable man with the soul of a bookkeeper, yet Hengriff was uncertain what Rennold would make of this latest news. Rennold did not much care for him, holding against Hengriff the excesses and failures of his superiors, Lord Liveskill and Vytrad Redlance.
The Lord of the Night had set Hengriff three goals-the annexation of Khur, the final destruction of elven power, and the seizure of any remaining elven treasure. If he wanted these goals accomplished, he’d best heed every word in Hengriff’s report.
The flat desert below the Pillars of Heaven rang with the clashing of swords and the pounding of many hooves. Dust swirled around maneuvering companies of riders. Over all, the sun shone down from a perfectly cloudless sky.
The enemy had fallen upon the elves just after dawn, before all the Lioness’s warriors were in the saddle. A hundred nomads appeared out of the south, shouting tribal war cries and brandishing swords. The elves who were mounted rode straight at the oncoming horde, holding them off while their comrades readied themselves for battle. The Lioness led that first small force against fearful odds.
The nomads certainly were brave and bloodthirsty, but they had no formal training in arms. Once their initial surprise rush was spent, they found themselves at a severe disadvantage. They lacked any protective armor and most bore only a single weapon, a straight sword without a crossguard. Nomad archers used a short bow of cow horn and wicker laminated together. Deadly at short range, its effectiveness fell off sharply with distance. At two hundred yards-where elf bows were commonly used-nomad arrows merely bounced off elven armor. The iron- headed Silvanesti arrows went right through a nomad’s chest at that range.
The Lioness organized her band into three sections: two hundred, two hundred, and one hundred riders. One of the companies of two hundred, armed with swords, held off fierce rushes by the nomads while the group of one hundred emptied Khurish saddles with precisely aimed arrows. The remaining two hundred riders circled northward, trying to surround the enemy, but the nomads would not be caught. They regrouped and charged at any vulnerable point that they saw. The desert around the tribesmen was littered with the fallen. Many were elves, but mixed in with them were the bodies of desert dwellers and their ponies.
After an hour of fruitless slaughter, the nomads began to lose heart. They had expected to stampede the elves, and when the Lioness’s troops stood firm, nomad ardor waned. Without the discipline to carry on fighting all day, as the desert heat rose to its most incandescent the tribesmen rode away. The dust-caked elves gladly let them go. Kerian had no wish to pursue the foe. She didn’t have the resources for a long chase across the desert, and more hostile nomads might be lurking beyond the horizon.
Fewer than twenty of her warriors had been killed; half that many more had notable injuries. The desert was dotted with a dozen slain nomads. As elves moved among the fallen, scavenging food and precious water, they noticed many of the humans bore the mark of the Leaping Spider clan, the dominant clan in the Weya-Lu tribe.
“We’re foreigners in their land,” Kerian replied grimly. It was a philosophy she understood. If armed Khurs had ridden through Qualinesti, her instinct would have been exactly the same: drive them out.
The scholar did not share her outlook. Shaking his head, he mumbled something about “live and let live.” She had no patience with such feeble notions, but held her tongue. Since finding his assistant lying dead beside him, Favaronas had been somewhat shaken. He took to keeping as close to Kerian as possible. Still, he did not complain and did not hamper her or her warriors.
They buried the dead, elf and human, to discourage scavengers, with the Lioness urging speed and taking a turn at the digging herself. Their second day on the High Plateau was waning, and she wanted to put as much distance between her people and the scene of battle as possible.
The Khalkist range bulked larger on the horizon. The gray peaks resembled low-lying clouds at this distance. The terrain began to change. The thick layer of sand gave way to sand and rocks, then broken gravel. Animal life
