concussion. No sound of explosion followed; there was only a shock wave that made the air and ground vibrate once, very hard. The horses shied violently. Favaronas dropped his charcoal marker. Kerian jumped to her feet.
“The sand beast?” Favaronas quavered.
Kerian was dragging on her boots. “Curse it! Pleasant scenery, clean water, and we start acting like farmers at a fair!” They were in unknown territory, and she hadn’t even posted pickets!
The elves quickly resumed their normal vigilance. Kerian ordered twenty riders to reconnoiter ahead. Another band of twenty she sent back toward the valley mouth, in case the nomads (or anyone else) overcame their fear and decided to follow them. Bow-armed flankers rode out from the main column to watch for danger.
With her warriors fully deployed, the Lioness felt more at ease. Favaronas, however, clutched his map in both hands and stared wildly, expecting any number of unnatural beasts to fall upon them.
“Calm yourself,” she told the scholar. “I don’t think it’s the sand beast this time; look at Eagle Eye.” The griffon was looking around, but didn’t seem particularly excited.
She swung into the saddle of a fresh horse. “It’s probably nothing more than echoes from an avalanche in the mountains.”
He blinked at her in surprise, then nodded slowly. They were all so primed to find something otherworldly in the valley, he’d never considered a simpler explanation. Still, he was glad when she sent Eagle Eye skyward. It wouldn’t hurt to have the griffon’s sharp eyes watching over them.
They forded the newly named Lioness Creek. Scouts met them, reporting they’d found a clearly defined path beyond a field of half-buried boulders. Leaving the archivist with the main body of the army, Kerian trotted forward to see.
Beyond the boulders, three elves sat on horseback in the center of a wide lane thick with alluvial sand. A fourth was on his knees, digging with his hands. As the Lioness arrived, he announced, “Pavement!”
She swung a leg over her horse’s neck and dropped to the ground. Sure enough, beneath four or five inches of blue-green soil, he’d found stone payers. The two blocks was clearly visible. Clearing a larger area revealed more payers and something even more interesting-a deep groove worn into the road. They had seen such ruts before. The grooves were made by wheels, passing over pavement in the same line year after year. This groove followed the slight downslope back toward the creek they’d just forded.
“Someone has called this valley home,” the Lioness said. Question was, was anyone still here?
She remounted and sent the scouts ahead. Her admonition to stay sharp wasn’t really necessary; the very brief respite they’d enjoyed at the stream was over. All were alert. When Favaronas moved up with the main body, he made note of the pavement on his sketch map.
The paved path led northeast, into the heart of the Inath-Wakenti. The elves followed it slowly, cautiously, encountering nothing untoward until after midday, when a scout galloped back with news. They were approaching stone ruins, very old and very big stone ruins.
Ruins dotted the continent, from Balifor to Sancrist Isle. When Kerian was on the run from the Dark Knights who occupied her country, she often sheltered in ruins in the western Kharolis Mountains, relics of a time before the Great Cataclysm. Growing up in the wild, she’d had little knowledge of ancient history. Most of what she knew had been learned from tales traded around the campfire, of the beautiful, doomed Irda race, the twins Sithas and Kith- Kanan, the decadent human empire in Ergoth. Tales stranger still were told of the realm of Istar, where magic reigned until a fiery mountain fell from the sky and destroyed the city. Where glorious, doomed Istar once stood was now the whirling maelstrom of the Blood Sea, not so far away from this place.
The Lioness sent out more flankers to sweep either side of the road. She kept to the path, leading the main column forward. All the reports she received were negative. No quarry had been found, either of the two-legged or the four-legged variety. Not so much as a rabbit or a bird crossed their paths. The widely spaced cedars and pines seemed bare of all life.
Irritated by the lack of progress, the Lioness decided to try a loftier view. She dismounted and walked a few yards ahead, whistling for Eagle Eye. The griffon came skimming in over the low trees to land in front of her. She slipped a strung bow over her head and swung onto the tiny saddle pad.
“Continue down the road,” she told her officers, then elf and griffon bolted skyward.
After years of Khurish heat, the rush of temperate air past her face was like a balm. The climate surely was better here than in Khurinost. Perhaps Gilthas was on to something.
Consternation flooded through her. What was she thinking? Trade her birthright for a little comfort? Never! Yes, this valley was more pleasant than the sweltering sandpit outside Khuri-Khan, but so what? It wasn’t her homeland. Wasn’t, and never would be.
She turned her attention to the terrain unrolling beneath her-clumps of trees, bramble thickets, broad stands of tall, fleshy aloe. No wonder the flankers hadn’t seen anything. She’d forgotten how much real foliage limited sight.
The loftier elements of the ruins rose into view. At this distance they looked to be spires of white or gray stone, jutting above the trees. Not columns in the usual sense, they weren’t fluted or faceted, only simple tapering spires. As she drew nearer, remnants of walls appeared, their dimensions amazing. Each stone block was at least ten feet long and tall as a mounted warrior. In some places the wall reared thirty feet high, massive block fitted neatly atop massive block. The cyclopean stones showed clear evidence of having been smoothed and shaped by intelligent hands.
Eagle Eye spiraled slowly down. He alighted alongside an impressively tall stretch of wall. Elf and griffon contemplated the ruins as the rest of the column arrived.
Conversation died. Everyone stared in awe at the mysterious monuments, wondering who built them, and how long ago. The lack of decoration gave the stones an air of great, indefinable age.
Favaronas noticed something else. The stones were completely free of lichen. All the boulders and rocky outcroppings they’d seen in the valley borne healthy coatings of lichen or moss. The ruins showed none. The stones stood stark and clean against the blue sky and blue-green soil.
“Have you ever seen stonework like this before?” Kerian asked.
Favaronas shook his head. “But judging by the size, perhaps it was the work of ogres.”
She found that difficult to believe. Ogres built their dwellings in a rough fashion; they didn’t waste effort carving or finishing the stones. None of the elves could think of any race, ogre or otherwise, which could move blocks as enormous as these. Two soldiers measured one of the largest stone blocks at the foot of the wall; it was twenty-nine feet long and eleven feet high.
Ahead and on the right, shouts and whistles arose, Qualinesti cattle calls. Many of Kerian’s best scouts were former cow herders. She took flight, leaving Favaronas and the rest gawking at the ruins.
The griffon headed straight for a pair of huge standing stones still capped by a massive lintel. With Kerian leaning low over his neck, the creature sailed through, wingtips brushing the pillars on either side. He warbled low in his throat, sounding so smug she couldn’t help but chuckle.
The road they’d followed to the ruins continued ahead, bound on both sides by a wall. Scouts wove in and out of the trees to Kerian’s right. They were harrying something on foot. All she could see was a patch of pale brown darting through the brush.
The fleeing figure passed briefly into the clear. It was an antelope, the mountain breed with unbranched horns curving back over its head. She swooped down, shouting for it to halt, and it turned to look up. She glimpsed large brown m eyes before the antelope’s legs got tangled in the creeper and it went sprawling in the thick undergrowth. The Qualinesti giving chase converged on the spot.
By the time the Lioness landed and ran to where the beast had crashed, there was nothing but a rat’s nest of torn vines. Two of the scouts, dismounted, were probing the foliage. The creature was gone. She helped them look, but it was obvious an animal that size couldn’t be hiding here. Backtracking out of the bed of vines, they found its tiny hoofprints. Those at least were real.
Other scouts rode up and explained how they originally had flushed the antelope. They’d been riding past a thin line of aloes and stunted pines when the creature suddenly bolted from behind them. Hungry for fresh meat, the elves had given chase.
“It came out
“Upon our oath,” said one of the Kagonesti scouts, knowing it seemed illogical.
No wild creature, having secreted itself and avoided detection, would then squander its coup by dashing out before the hunters were gone. Just as difficult to believe was that savvy scouts would miss a full-grown antelope in
