celebrate the completion of their work, he sent each of them a special vintage, doctored with arsenic. It slaked their thirsts, permanently. The deaths were attributed to cultists and soon forgotten.
In secrecy, the prince made plans. He sent trusted men to the Grand Souks to find a desert guide. Wapah was the result. Mirror-eyed nomads had a reputation as peerless navigators of the sands.
The nomad did not question why a pampered prince wished to travel to an obscure point more than two days’ ride northwest of the city. For ten fine steel swords and a like number of stallions, handpicked from the Khan’s own herd, Wapah would have guided Prince Shobbat to the bottom of the Blood Sea.
“Hard edges,” the guide repeated. “They make men strong and straight, allow them to see clear and to know what dwellers in green lands never know.”
Shobbat obligingly asked what that might be.
“The will of Those on High.”
Shobbat hid a smile, not wanting to antagonize a man on whom his life depended. Alone among all the peoples of the world, the desert nomads had never stopped worshiping their old gods. Sahim-Khan always said this was because the unfettered sun boiled away their few wits. Shobbat’s father sneered at the nomads because he feared them. Nine times in the violent history of Khur the reigning khan had been slain in battles against his own desert-dwelling subjects. Sahim-Khan had no intention of being the tenth.
“The
“They do not make this land green.”
Wapah’s phrasing was ambiguous, but Shobbat did not ask him to explain. Their horses had topped a long, high dune sculpted by wind into the shape of a great curling wave, and a blast of southwesterly air flung grit in their faces. The prince coughed and spat, but his saliva never reached the ground. The dry air swallowed it.
Wapah cautioned him not to waste precious water. The nomad kicked the flanks of his short-legged pony and started down the windward face of the dune. Shobbat glared after him. He reached back and gave a reassuring pat to the skins of water lashed to the saddle under his gauzy cloak. The old nomad was just trying to frighten him. If they reached their destination in the time promised, they had plenty of water.
Wind rapidly erased Wapah’s tracks in the soft sand. Shobbat urged his mount on. If he lost his guide, he was doomed.
The desert would swallow him as completely as it had his spit.
They had entered an area of sand dunes broken at intervals by intrusions of ancient rock. The rock was layered horizontally in shades of brown and tan. Shobbat grimaced. What a harsh, ugly land. He missed the teeming streets of Khuri-Khan, thick with the scents of cinnamon and cardamom, of sandalwood, and yes, of unwashed humanity. The emptiness of the desert made him feel small and unimportant. He was unaccustomed to such thoughts, and they frightened him. Fear made him angry.
Wapah had drawn a loosely woven scrap of cloth across his face to keep out the blowing dust. He returned to his earlier theme, explaining how the hard edges of the desert taught his people about truth and made them spiritually superior to outsiders. It was unclear whether he meant only those from outside Khur, or city-dwellers like the prince as well.
“We did not fear when the Vanishing came,” the nomad declared. “Our gods were not points of light in the sky, but beings immortal and unchanging. They never left us. They guard us still.”
Blown sand stung the exposed flesh of Shobbat’s cheeks like a thousand shards of glass. He turned his face away. “Was everyone else in the world wrong when they thought the gods departed?” he asked testily.
Wapah shrugged one shoulder. “Who knows what godless barbarians think?”
On they rode, the nomad talking, the prince of Khur riding in uncomfortable silence. In spite of Wapah’s talk of the desert’s hard edges, the land had begun to look molten and soft to Shobbat. The terrific heat smelted the air itself, causing everything to shimmer and blur. Both horses grunted deep in their chests, resenting the task they were obliged to perform. Every two hundred steps, the duo paused for water. Two swallows for each beast and one for each man, as Wapah prescribed.
Once the sun climbed to its zenith, even the nomad fell silent. The air was too dry for speech. Shobbat’s narrow, dark lips, so like his mother’s, cracked. Smears of blood stained the gauze scarf covering his nose and mouth.
Just after midday they reached the first landmark on Wapah’s itinerary, a shelf of stone rising out of the sand to a height greater than the mounted men. Pointed at one end and rounded at the other, the prominence was known as the Tear of Elir-Sana, named for the divine healer.
Unlike the monotonous sand or the unvarying hues of other rocks, the Tear of Elir-Sana presented a bold, colorful sight. It was composed of multicolored layers of rock; some were as orange as a sunset, others ash gray, blue-black, or creamy yellow. The eastern face was deeply grooved by generations of wind-borne sand. From tip to rounded end, the perfect teardrop was thirty feet in length. A spring bubbled from a cleft on the west side of the Tear. According to legend, the spring had been born from the tears of the goddess Elir-Sana, when she had collapsed here, half-dead from exhaustion.
Wapah announced they would refill their waterskins here. The water was said to have healing powers. Although it certainly slaked Shobbat’s thirst, he found the taste nothing out of the ordinary.
After filling his two empty skins, the prince struggled back to his horse through the fine, drifted sand. His booted toe caught on something hidden just beneath the surface, and he fell forward. The full skins slung around his neck dragged him down. Cursing, he sat up and glared at the object that had tripped him. It was a skull. Clean, dry, and yellowed, it was not human.
“What unholy thing is this?”
Wapah leaned down from his saddle and peered at the find. “Dragon-man.”
A draconian skull? Shobbat’s annoyance vanished as he studied it more closely. The cranium was wide and triangular.
Fangs as long as Shobbat’s thumb sprouted from the upper jaw, and there was a horny beak like that of a monstrous bird. The skull was half again as big as a human head, and on its rear were several parallel gouges-cuts from a blade, most likely.
“A warrior,” the prince said, standing and dusting sand from his long coat.
“A scout in search of water. He found it, but never left. The desert takes no prisoners.” Shobbat did not point out this draconian appeared to have died by the sword, not from exposure.
Mounted once more, Shobbat spotted something imbedded in a stratum of the Tear. He drew the dagger from his sash and jabbed at the rock. Fragments cascaded around his horse’s hooves.
Wapah frowned at this wanton destruction but kept silent.
The prince had uncovered a yellow stone protruding from a layer of similarly colored sandstone. “Is this a shell?” he exclaimed. The object looked very like the top half of a clam.
Wapah shook his head. “Only a stone, shaped by chance. A jest of the gods.”
The prince disagreed. He speculated the sea might once have covered this part of Khur. Wapah immediately dismissed this notion.
“It is told in the Song: the land of Khur is the oldest of the world, the first solid ground created by the gods,” the nomad said flatly. “It has never been under water.”
The Song was sacred to the nomads. A collection of legends from the distant past, it contained thousands of verses, too many for anyone to memorize entirely, so it was divided into eight cantos, each named for one of the great gods of the nomads: Kargath the Warrior, Rakaris the Hunter, Torghan the Avenger, Elir-Sana the Healer, Anthor the Hermit, Hab’rar the Messenger, Soro the Firemaker, and Ayyan the Deceiver. Wapah was a singer of the Anthor Canto.
The two men rode on. Progress became more difficult, as the horses had to plow through belly-deep sand. Wapah’s short-legged gray animal, more accustomed to such terrain, kept a steady pace. Shobbat’s elegant chestnut, its long legs meant for speed, floundered. As a result, sundown had come and gone by the time they reached their destination.
Like the Tear of Elir-Sana, Shobbat’s goal was an island of stone in an ocean of moving sand. Rather than a single formation, it comprised a thick column of gray stone forty feet in height, ringed close around by four black granite towers only half as tall. The four angled inward, their tops touching the central column. Pale starlight gave the formation an eerie feel, like an ancient and forgotten temple.
