“Do you see smoke?”
Kerian and Taranath were taking a short rest, leaning against a low monolith. Hytanthas’s question brought them to their feet. He was returning from filling their water bottles at a nearby spring. All three shaded their eyes and looked high up on the mountainside.
“That’s our target,” Kerian declared.
Taranath was skeptical. “How can you know? Anyone could’ve made that fire.”
“Faeterus thinks he’s killed the khan’s bounty hunter,” she said. Taranath had told her of his patrol’s rescue of Robien, from Faeterus’s magical trap. “He’s finally begun whatever it was he came here to do, so he doesn’t care whether the Speaker’s warriors find him either.”
Her logic was good but not impeccable. The Nerakan soldier they’d found in the tunnels might have comrades, Hytanthas suggested, and the fire might be their doing. The Lioness’s certainty was unshaken. The Nerakan was a professional warrior; if he had comrades, they wouldn’t be so careless with a campfire.
That convinced Hytanthas. He was eager to press on as quickly as possible, but Kerian urged caution.
“You just said he might have begun what he came here to do!” Hytanthas protested. “We have to stop him!”
“We will but not by exhausting ourselves. A steady pace maintained through the night will get us to the source of the smoke by midday tomorrow.”
Hungry and strained as they were, an all-night march was not a pleasant prospect, but Taranath and Hytanthas did not object. What had to be done would be done.
Kerian shouldered her bedroll. “I’ll take the lead.” She strode off among the gaunt trees and standing stones.
The smoke was a beacon rising in clear view of the entire valley. Skulking through the underbrush, Prince Shobbat had come to the same conclusion as Kerian: only Faeterus would be arrogant enough to declare his presence with a bonfire. Since the priestess’s magical hand had thrown him several miles providentially in the right direction, the prince had a lead on the
He broke into a trot, anxious to reach Faeterus first. If Kerianseray caught the sorcerer, Shobbat would never be able to extract the necessary counterspell to undo his transformation. He would spend the rest of his miserable life as a beast. That was not the destiny promised him by the Oracle of the Tree.
He pondered how to convince Faeterus to release him from the spell. The sorcerer was accustomed to life in Khuri-Khan. His sojourn in the lifeless vale would likely make him all the more eager to have his position restored. Shobbat could offer him a place at court, an estate of his own, any amount of money-as soon as Shobbat had taken his rightful place as khan. If that didn’t sway him, Shobbat would dismember him, piece by piece, until he agreed.
His lips curled in a snarl. Maybe he should start with dismemberment and to the Abyss with trying to buy the sorcerer’s aid. Why waste treasure and privilege on an untrustworthy mage? Pain and terror were far better inducements. He would leave just enough of Faeterus alive to remove the curse then rend him to bits.
Another pair of eyes beheld the smoke rising from the side of Mount Rakaris. They were rimmed with tears. Breetan Everride had worked her way up the eastern slope, just south of the broad ledge where the smoke originated. After scaling the heights above the ledge, she carefully made her away across the higher range toward a boat-shaped rock prominence above the Stair. Fatigue, the persistent pain of her broken rib, and the constant presence of the valley ghosts at her heels had clouded her mind and hampered her pace, until finally she made a crucial misstep. She set her foot on a slab of fractured shale and swung her full weight onto it without first testing its stability. The narrow slab shifted abruptly, sending her plunging, feet first, a hundred yards down the mountainside.
Her fall ended only when her left boot wedged in a gap between an oak stump and a sharp-edged boulder. Her body hurtled past until its momentum was arrested with a jerk that snapped her ankle. The pain was horrendous. A sharp scream was torn from her throat, and she shoved her fist in her mouth. Certain she had given herself away, she waited for the inevitable cries of discovery and the hail of elven arrows that would pierce her battered body.
None came. Wracked with agony, her face torn and bleeding, she carefully freed her shattered ankle and lay back, gasping for air and staring at the sky. Through tears, she saw a thick column of smoke rising from the cut in the mountainside below. There was almost no wind. The smoke rose straight as an arrow. Good conditions for her crossbow, if she could still manage it. Her ankle throbbed mercilessly. It was swelling inside her boot. She’d never be able to walk on it, but if she wanted to complete her mission, she had to move. The nearest place that afforded a clear shot at the ledge below was the boat- shaped prominence to which she’d been heading. It was still three hundred feet upslope.
Breetan pushed herself over onto her belly. If she couldn’t walk, then she would crawl.
Twenty feet up the rocky slope, her injured foot snagged on a tree root, and she passed out from the pain. Reviving minutes later in the cool air, she drew a shaky breath, dug her fingers into the stony ground, and resumed her agonizing crawl. Lord Burnond Everride would have expended his last breath carrying out his mission. His daughter could do no less.
Chapter 17
The preparations were lengthy and obscure. After bringing the Speaker back from the brink of death, Sa’ida sequestered herself in a tent on the edge of camp. There she remained for two days, seeing no one, speaking to no one, and ignoring the food and water left outside the tent. They had no victuals to waste, so morning and evening the untouched food and water was taken away and distributed elsewhere.
At dusk on the second day, the priestess finally broke her silence, asking for water. The warrior on guard outside her tent brought her a cup and brought the old general as well.
The tent flap parted a few inches. From within the dark interior, Sa’ida said, “I shall need more water than that. Much more.”
She conveyed her requirements to Hamaramis. His brows lifted, but he agreed without argument. The human priestess had brought the Speaker of the Sun and Stars back from death and promised to free him of the terrible illness. If water she needed, then water she would have.
A motley collection of buckets, jugs, and pots was filled from a nearby spring and gathered outside the priestess’s tent. Several hours after dark had fallen, Sa’ida asked Hamaramis to summon the Speaker. She still had not come out of the shelter.
The Speaker arrived in his palanquin. He had slept much of the day. Between the priestess’s ministrations and Gilthas’s own strength of will, he arrived sitting up in the woven chair rather than lying propped by pillows. Most of his remaining army and a great many ordinary elves were already there, waiting silently. Sa’ida stood just outside her tent, her back to the crowd, her head bowed. The bearers arrived, but they did not lower the palanquin to the chill ground. Hamaramis announced the Speaker’s presence.
“You have brought me to the deepest graveyard in the world, Great Speaker,” Sa’ida murmured.
“It’s our home. Or will be. Can you help us?”
She turned to face him. Those closest in the crowd gasped at the alteration in her appearance. A robust human woman of fifty years with a typically dark Khurish complexion, Sa’ida seemed to have shrunk. Her face was sallow, and her lips were blue as with cold. In her white robe, she seemed a pallid ghost herself. She looked nearly as ill as Gilthas.
