The tepid liquid tasted like the skin in which Robien carried it, and Favaronas wished it were wine. On his second swallow, it was-a potent red. Astonished, he choked, dribbling wine down his chest.
“That’s your favorite vintage, isn’t it. Black grapes of Goodlund, two years old?”
Favaronas’s pulse raced. He knew that voice!
From the deep shadow of the westernmost monolith, Faeterus emerged. The sorcerer’s habitual raiment-a heavy brown robe-made him appear huge and hulking. He glided forward, feet invisible beneath the trailing robe but seeming not to touch the ground.
Favaronas darted a glance at Robien, certain the wily Kagonesti must know his quarry was at hand.
“The khan’s hireling cannot help you.”
Faeterus held out a bony hand, and a flame ignited in his palm. Its light revealed Robien to be in no shape to help anyone, not even himself. His eyes were closed, as though he still slept, and the bluish soil was rising up around him, bubbling like thick mud. The growing mound of dirt already reached his waist, immobilizing his legs. Its bottom edge, where the oozing earth met the ground, had hardened to a lapislike stone, and the effect was creeping upward. Soon Robien would be entombed alive.
“When the grains reach his lips and nostrils, they will fill him like a living hourglass,” Faeterus explained. “When the sun rises, the heat of the day will fuse the soil into hardest glass. His agony will be intense… and lingering.” The sorcerer’s cowled head turned back to Favaronas. Favaronas had never seen his face; it was always shadowed by the robe’s deep hood. “But his fate is easy compared to what I have reserved for you.”
Favaronas prostrated himself, begging for mercy, insisting he’d had no choice but to join with Robien. His flailing hand touched the sack of scrolls. Thinking fast, he shoved it forward, spilling the cylinders onto the ground. “Look, master! See what I have found!”
Faeterus uttered a surprised oath. Knobby fingers reached toward a scroll, hovering inches above its surface. “You kept these from me.” That was patently true, but Favaronas denied it anyway. The sorcerer asked if he knew what the scrolls were.
“Yes, master! They’re chronicles written by those who raised the standing stones,” gabbled Favaronas.
Prompted, he went on to relate how he had learned to open the scrolls, and that he could, with difficulty, read some of the text within. A great force grasped the neck of his robe and hoisted him into the air. The sorcerer still had the flame in one hand. The other hand he held aloft, fingers clenched.
“I accept your tribute,” he said. “You will survive this night, wretched fool, if you read to me the Annals of the Lost.”
The invisible hand dropped Favaronas onto his feet. Pale and trembling, he restored the cylinders to the sack and clutched the bundle to his chest.
As he followed the sorcerer, he glanced back once. The receding glow of Faeterus’s light showed Robien encased up to his chest. Like living creatures, grains of sand were racing up to pile themselves one upon the other around his shoulders. Favaronas turned away and trudged on. He was as helpless as the bounty hunter, both of them at the mercy of a pitiless master.
Chapter 4
The Speaker’s day began with a trip to the creek. Gilthas sat on a rock between two small willow trees and drank water from a bowl. Cold, fresh water was one of the valley’s advantages-according to his wife, perhaps its only advantage. The early-morning sun painted the crests of the western mountains in golden light, but the valley itself was still in shadow. Morning mist hovered in the low places. Despite layers of clothing, Gilthas shivered. He just couldn’t seem to get warm anymore.
When the water was gone, he started to rise, to refill the bowl, but before he could do more than shift his weight, the vessel was taken from his hand. Kerian dipped the bowl into the creek and returned it to him.
“Are you warm enough?”
He nodded and used the water to wash his hands and face. “They’re voting now,” he added. “I wonder if I shall be alone by sundown.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the Speaker of the Sun and Stars. Your people won’t abandon you.”
Eagle Eye landed on the other side of the creek. Unlike the wild Golden griffons they’d captured in the Kharolis Mountains, he was of the Royal breed, larger and with white neck plumage. In Kerian’s biased view, he was also far smarter than any of the wild creatures they’d found.
He gave an inquiring trill and flapped his wings. Kerian nodded, lifting an arm. Eagle Eye launched himself skyward and went off to hunt his breakfast.
“Are you sure you can’t read that beast’s mind?”
The querulous tone in Gilthas’s voice brought a faint smile. “I leave that to Alhana,” she replied, drinking a handful of water. “But griffons are uncomplicated creatures.”
Against her better judgment, Kerian had obeyed his order to lead a company to survey Inath-Wakenti’s fitness as a new home for their people. The passage of her expedition through the desert had precipitated violence from the Khurish nomads, and its brief time in the valley had led to wholesale disappearances and a battle with a rare and vicious sand beast. In the end, far more questions had been raised than answered. For Kerian one fact had been made plain: the valley was no fit home for the elf nation.
Then had come her decision to depart the valley alone on Eagle Eye, after she received a vision of danger stalking Gilthas. He had survived, but their marriage nearly did not. He dismissed her as commander of his army for abandoning her warriors in Inath-Wakenti. Only eight were ever seen again. Gilthas’s archivist, Favaronas, was lost, as was Glanthon, brother of Planchet, the Speaker’s late bodyguard and close friend. According to the survivors, the company became lost in the desert, so Glanthon divided it into bands of ten and sent each in a different direction. Eight stumbled into the Khurish town of Kahn Ak-Phan; none of the others was ever seen again.
“What of you? What choice will you make today?” Gilthas asked.
“There is nothing to choose.”
“But you want to go.”
She didn’t answer, only shifted position on the rock and dipped her bare feet in the creek. That put her back to him. She wanted a bit of privacy, time to collect herself. The question of going or staying was one she had preferred not to address until absolutely necessary. The decision wasn’t a matter of head versus heart; that was a battle Kerianseray fought frequently. It was heart versus heart.
For much of her adult life, she had battled for the freedom of Qualinesti. She’d plotted and planned, fought and maneuvered to return home with an army behind her. Only the most extreme events had forced her to leave. Her desire to free their homeland had been the cause of a longstanding disagreement with Gilthas. She wanted to take the army back to Qualinesti. He wouldn’t allow it, saying that while the elves lived in exile in Khuri-Khan, the army could not be spared.
After many complex developments, it was going to happen. The army would march to Qualinesti, and the Lioness would not be with them. She must stay behind, in a place she loathed, carrying out a mission she felt in her heart to be utterly pointless. Yet no amount of railing against fate could change the single most important fact: she would not leave Gilthas while he was riddled with consumption and marooned in the lifeless cemetery of Inath- Wakenti. Strong as her ties to her warriors were, the tie to Gilthas was far more powerful.
“Go if you want.”
His attempt at a careless tone infuriated her, but still she didn’t reply, only looked beyond the wide, slow- flowing creek into the valley. The mist was evaporating, thinning to reveal stunted trees and the standing stones beyond them. Her keen ears detected no sounds at all. Even the noises made by the great mass of elves some distance behind them were swallowed up in the deathly stillness of Inath-Wakenti.
