Planchet carefully wiped the blood from his sovereign’s lips. “Planchet, I must continue,” Gilthas whispered.
“No, sire.”
His tone and firm grip on Gilthas’s shoulder brooked no argument. Gilthas smiled weakly. “Mutiny.”
“Yes, sire.”
A chill seized Gilthas. His teeth chattered and cold sweat beaded his forehead. Planchet laid him on the ancient rugs that covered the floor of the small tent and pulled a thinner rug over his shivering body. The carpets once had graced the halls of Yesillanath’s mansion in Silvanost. Four hundred years old, they were the work of a master and worth a fortune. Gilthas commented on that, and Yesillanath shrugged.
“Out here, a rug is a rug, sire,” he said. “And it is better to sleep on a rug than a rock.”
Gilthas became delirious soon after, drifting in and out of consciousness. He mumbled, spoke nonsense to Planchet, conversed with friends long dead, and more than once said his wife’s name, his tone hopeless and sad.
Planchet chafed at the delay, asking Hamaramis why it was taking so long to find the healer. Broken Tooth wasn’t that large an area to search.
As if in answer, the rush of footfalls sounded outside the tent, but the relief of those within was short-lived. Hamaramis’s warriors had returned alone.
“General, we bring strange news,” panted one. “A nomad claiming to be related to the leader of all the tribes has surrendered himself to us!”
Not wanting to disturb the Speaker’s troubled rest, Hamaramis kept his voice low, but fury throbbed in every syllable. “Where is the healer, fools? He’d better be on your heels, or by Chaos, I’ll throw the lot of you off this cursed mountain myself!”
The second soldier assured him their comrades were bringing the healer. “But this human, my lord, he insists he can lead us off the peak and away from the nomads!”
Silence descended in the small tent. Gilthas plucked at Planchet’s arm, and the valet helped him sit up. “What is this human’s name?” he rasped.
“Wapah, Great Speaker.”
“It’s a trick, sire. They seek to tease us off our summit.”
“The nomads are not so sly, General. I will speak with this nomad.”
Two more soldiers arrived, bringing the Silvanesti healer, Truthanar. “Who sends soldiers to fetch me? I was treating branding victims!” the aged Silvanesti grumbled.
Gilthas cleared his throat. “I apologize, good healer. It was not my order, although Jam the patient you have been brought to see.”
Truthanar bowed and commenced his examination immediately. He peered in the Speaker’s eyes and mouth, listened to his chest, and applied oiled mitrum leaves to Gilthas’s forehead. By calculating the time it took for the leaves to dry and fall off, Truthanar could determine his patient’s temperature. The diagnosis did not take long.
“Consumption, without a doubt. Aggravated by exhaustion, privation, and I dare say heartache. Your fever is high, sire, but as yet your lungs are not too greatly affected. A month from now, unless things change, it will be much worse.”
“Don’t worry, Master Truthanar. A month from now we shall all be in a better place.”
Hamaramis feared the Speaker meant they’d all be dead, but Planchet knew his liege better. He wasn’t surprised when Gilthas added, “Bring me the human Wapah. His help may be the difference between life and extinction for our entire nation.”
Favaronas squatted on the west bank of the wide, shallow stream he knew as Lioness Creek and dipped a hand in the water. In his other hand, he held a bunch of wild watercress. The greens were bitter, but starvation was worse. If he was going to cross the haunted valley, he would need all the strength he could get.
A librarian by training, Favaronas had accompanied the Lioness’s survey expedition to the mysterious Valley of the Blue· Sands, hoping to find a new home for the elf nation. Although the valley was indeed a mild clime and green, they quickly discovered all was not well. The place known in Elvish chronicles as Inath-Wakenti, the Vale of Silence, contained no animal life at all, not even insects. Its only occupants were massive stone ruins and strange globes of light that roamed the valley by night and whose touch caused warriors to vanish. Beneath the ruins they found a network of fantastically painted tunnels and chambers.
After the Lioness had a vision of danger stalking her husband, she departed for Khurinost on her griffon, leaving the remaining soldiers to follow on horseback. Before leaving the valley, Favaronas had made an astounding discovery: the odd stone cylinders he’d found in a tunnel beneath the valley were actually scrolls. A brief glimpse of the knowledge they contained convinced him that tremendous power lay untapped within the valley, power unknown in the world since the Age of Light. If he could learn to use it, he could save his people and vanquish those who had invaded their homelands. At the first opportunity, he sneaked away from the warriors and returned to Inath-Wakenti.
For many fruitless months, he had dwelt in the valley, learning frustratingly little. The phantom lights, so numerous while Lady Kerianseray and her warriors were present, suddenly were nowhere to be seen. The entrance to the underground chambers was lost. Favaronas was certain of its location, at the base of an overturned sarsen, but although the huge stone remained, nothing marked the hole but a shallow pit. He dug down a ways but found only the blue-tinted soil for which the valley was named.
His efforts to map the extensive stone ruins likewise had been fruitless. The ruins were maddeningly irregular. Up close, the progression of wall, column, and monolith made superficial sense but, considered as a whole, added up to nothing. There were no traces of lesser structures between the cyclopean stones. If they were the remains of a city, then the city had no plan he could discern. It was as if an enormous ceremonial site had been begun and never finished.
Just the night before, when Favaronas had begun to fear he’d traded his old life for an unobtainable dream, he had a revelation. As he idled by the creek, using small pebbles to model some of the stone ruins he’d mapped that day, he suddenly realized the ruins were not ruins at all. The monoliths weren’t the remains of larger structures. They were, taken all together, some sort of code or symbol. The problem wasn’t recognizing what they had been, but what they were supposed to represent. The only way to do that was to see the whole, rather than the scattered parts. He needed an eagle’s eye view of the field of stones.
The eastern mountains were the only accessible high point. To the west, the peaks rose sheer from the valley floor, like the walls of a forbidden fortress. The slopes of the eastern mountains were more gradual. Getting there posed a severe problem, though. He would have to leave the relative safety of Lioness Creek. The nightly apparitions and will-o’-the-wisps never came beyond the creek, so Favaronas made certain he returned each evening to its western shore. To reach the eastern mountains, he would have to travel several days on foot across the widest part of the valley.
With much trepidation, he resolved to do it. He had little choice. His habit of remaining within a day’s walk of the creek meant he was stripping the land thereabouts of its meager provender. If he was going to discover the secret of Inath-Wakenti before he starved, he had to forsake safety and go to the eastern mountains.
He ate raw watercress and pondered how to carry the water he would need for his journey. It was a cool day, with a bright blue sky quartered by white cloudbanks. As he watched the clouds sail in stately fashion from east to west, he became aware of movement nearby. He’d spent so much time alone, he was very sensitive to the slightest motion. Lowering his eyes, he saw someone standing on the eastern shore of the stream. Favaronas recoiled so hard he fell backward.
The morning sun was brilliant behind a figure wrapped head to toe in layers of dusty dark cloth. The robes were so bulky, the stranger hidden so completely by them, he could be elf, human, or draconian.
“Who are you?” Favaronas called out.
He hadn’t spoken in so long, his own voice sounded strange to him. When he’d first come to the valley, he’d talked to himself, as much for company as anything, but he’d soon stopped. Somehow it seemed wrong to disturb the silence.
