him to alight. She tumbled off, rolling across the trackless sand. Loyal Eagle Eye clawed at her bonds until she could break free. In turn she tore off his restraints. They had little choice but to fly on. After midnight, they came to an oasis near the coast. Four of Taranath’s warriors lay in the sand a hundred paces from the well. Wounded, they’d died of thirst within sight of water.
Kerian replenished her arms and armor from the fallen, rested Eagle Eye briefly at the oasis, and took wing once more. By the time day broke, she and her mount were within sight of Khurinost.
Gilthas’s eyes closed in pain. Yet the litany of horror was not, quite, done.
“For a moment, I considered flying on,” she said. “Past this stinking pile of tents, away from Khur, our pitiful people, and even you. I thought I would fly to the homeland of the minotaurs, find the palace of their king, and challenge him to single combat.”
“You couldn’t do that.”
He meant she would never leave him or her people, but she misunderstood.
“No, his guards would cut me down long before I reached the king.”
Burying his face in her hair, Gilthas said, “I’m glad you came back, wife.”
She surprised him then. Breaking free of his loving embrace, she whirled to face him. “I should have died with my warriors!” she declared, voice trembling. “The bull-men shamed me! I wasn’t even worth killing. They let me live just to spread their message of fear!”
He reminded her that while dead heroes were inspiring, only living leaders could save the elven race, could lead them to a new home. He tried to soothe her, whispering that Inath-Wakenti would be their sanctuary, a place where they could heal and grow strong against the day when they would again make their presence known in the world.
Once more his words had an unintended effect. Kerian made a sound of disgust and stomped away. “That damned valley again! Better to water the forests of Silvanesti in minotaur blood than chase your myth! Better to die as my brave archers did than flee yet again from our enemies!”
“Battering your head against a stone wall is foolish!” he snapped, then stopped, consciously mastering his anger. Seating himself on the edge of the bed, he said, “If fate is kind, our people will return to Silvanost and Qualinost. One day. But not today, and not tomorrow.”
Gilthas had spies among Sahim-Khan’s retainers, men with contacts in Delphon and other, smaller towns along the coast. Their reports told him that a day did not pass without minotaur ships rounding Habbakuk’s Necklace, bound for the Silvanesti coast. Their holds groaned under the weight of armored troops, sent to reinforce the army already occupying the elves’ homeland fl a grip of steel. The Speaker could not hope to vanquish such foes, not now.
He told Kerian all these things, adding, “To all things there is an appointed time. The time to liberate our lost lands is not yet.”
She circled the end of the bed and sank onto the other side of the mattress. “Instead, I go to the high priestess of the Temple of Elir-Safla and ask for her help in finding your mythical valley. Don’t you ever tire of asking humans for favors? ‘Give us land. Give us food. Give us water.’ Is elven honor extinct?”
Seated back to back, their bed so narrow they were nearly touching, husband and wife stared in opposite directions. They might as well have been miles apart. The Lioness was flushed with fury, her hands clenched into fists; Gilthas’s face, blurred by tiredness, was pale, his jaw stiff with tension.
He finally said, “No, lady, elven honor is not dead, merely stored, like the great archive of Qualinost, against the day when we can afford to display it again.”
Both of them lay down. After a moment, Gilthas reached a hand out, but she edged away, curling up on the side of the bed, as far away as possible.
That was how they fell asleep-Kerian curled in on herself, facing away from her husband, and Gilthas, face up, one hand outstretched toward her stiff back.
Chapter 2
Hard edges, that’s where things is clearest. Where land and sky come together cleanly, with nothing in between. A man can see what’s what, and who’s who. Good and evil are obvious. They say the sea is like that. The desert is, too.”
The guide, the very opposite of the usual taciturn nomad, folded his hands across his horse’s neck and continued to expound his philosophy. His audience of one, riding a few steps behind, made no reply. Prince Shobbat of Khur was only half listening. Sunrise was an hour past and already the heat was intense. Shobbat adjusted the brim of his broad felt hat and told himself, for the hundredth time, that his goal was worth this suffering.
As far as Shobbat could see in all directions was sand, broken rock, and scattered boulders bleached to a uniform shade of tan by the unflinching sun. No color at all relieved the trail northwest from Khuri-Khan into the trackless wastes that made up most of the realm of Khur. No shade either. Only hard light by day and perfect, starry blackness at night.
Surveying the desolation around him, Shobbat wondered if there wasn’t something to the windbag nomad’s notions after all. Devoid of trees and buildings, the vista certainly was pristine.
“In green lands, there’s trees, grass, and the like, sprouting out of the dirt to tie air and land together,” his guide was saying. “Clouds in the sky are the breath of growing things, fogging the air. Underfoot there’s nothing but corruption, worms, beetles, and rot, spreading over the land like a mantle of decay.”
Shobbat grunted, eyes squinted nearly closed against the glare. “You’re a poet.”
“No, my lord. A nomad. I’ve known the hard edges all my life.”
The guide’s name was Wapah. So dry and leather-like was his face that he might have been any age from thirty to sixty His beard was long, and the same flat brown color as the sand. Plaited into the hair on his head were thin reed staves that supported the light, cloth shade protecting his head and neck. Spiders were embroidered around the hem of the dirty linen cloth. The black-and-orange leaping sand spider was the symbol of Wapah’s clan. A single bite from the creature could kill a man in minutes, or rot the leg off a healthy horse in a day.
Under brows so thick they were plaited into tiny braids, Wapah’s eyes were pale gray. This was an unusual hue among Khurs, but not unknown in Wapah’s clan. Gray-eyed nomads did not wear the perpetual squint of other desert-dwellers. Wide-eyed in a land of killing glare, the people of the Leaping Spider Clan seemed more intensely aware of their surroundings. Many were seers and given to visions, and for this reason nomads like Wapah were called “mirror-eyed.”
Prince Shobbat, eldest son of Sahim, Khan of Khur, was not nearly so prepossessing. Past thirty, he was (as a court wit once said) “bearded and bland.” He wore a loose linen tunic tucked into riding trousers of the same material, and tall, dark leather boots. The yellow and red sash at his middle did not, as he intended, hide his princely paunch but merely accentuated it. In the same vein, the beginnings of jowls were poorly concealed by his short black beard. When his father was Shobbat’s age, he’d already been khan for ten years. All the prince had accomplished thus far was to eat a great deal, drink a great deal, and pursue a great many comely women. This journey represented his first significant foray beyond the walls of Khuri-Khan. It had been prompted by a broken wall and a cryptic stone tablet.
After the Vanishing of the Moons, the dragon Malystryx claimed and occupied Khur. Repeated attacks by the Red Overlord had left the Khuri yl Nor heavily damaged. After Malys was overthrown, Sahim-Khan gave his eldest son the task of overseeing repairs on the palace. It was a dull, thankless job until, one day, the laborers demolishing a cracked wall in the south wing had come upon a stone tablet hidden in a niche inside the blocks.
Shobbat immediately set a team of scholars to translating the tablet. It wasn’t easy. The text was written in hieratic Istarian, a difficult, priestly script reserved for the theocratic elite of that lost land, but working in three teams of two, the six scholars completed the translation in a dozen days. Shobbat collected the translations, found they agreed, then had the scholars slain.
He regretted having to order their deaths, as he respected learning, but he could not risk anyone finding out what they had discovered. He’d seen to it their deaths were quick and painless- Scholars were always thirsty. To
