Tanalasta’s gaze rose involuntarily, and she glimpsed a dark figure streaking over the mountain’s shoulder. She spun in her saddle, looking toward the spire on the next ridge and thrusting her hand into the weathercloak’s escape pocket. Her arm went numb, then there was a sharp crack, and a door-sized rectangle of blackness hissed into existence in front of her.
Cadimus whinnied in alarm and tried to shy back, threatening to pull his reins free of the princess’s grasp.
“Not now, you coward!” Tanalasta jerked the stallion forward and urged her own mount through the doorway.
The world went black, and the princess experienced a strange, timeless sense of falling she thought would last forever. She grew queasy and weak, and a sudden chill bit at her fingers and nose. Her ears filled with a hushed roaring, at once overpowering as a waterfall and as soft as a whisper, and her stomach reverberated as though to the roll of a thousand drums. Then, in less than the instant it had taken her to blink, she was back in the light, her head spinning and the wind whistling around her ears.
Cadimus nickered behind her, sounding as confused as he was alarmed, and Tanalasta recalled with a rush where she was and what she was doing. She kicked her own mount’s flanks urgently, and the poor horse stumbled forward blindly, as dazed and reeling as her rider. The princess let the mare continue on until she felt the ground sloping away beneath them, then dismounted and tethered both glassy-eyed horses to a scraggly hackberry bush.
By the time Tanalasta returned to the ridge, her head had stopped spinning. She lay down beneath the tall spire of granite and peered over the crest. Across the way, the ghazneth was already swooping down the gully toward Vangerdahast.
As the phantom neared him, it suddenly veered and pulled up. For one awful instant, she thought it was coming for her, then it wheeled on a huge black wing and extended its talons to attack the wizard from behind. Vangerdahast whirled, wand in. hand, but the ghazneth was already on him. Tanalasta knew the wizard’s spell would never go off before the creature’s talons tore him gullet to groin. She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing, one hand disappearing into her weathercloak’s escape pocket and the other reaching for her peacemaker’s rod.
Fortunately for both the princess and the royal magician, Tanalasta remained where she was. Like the message-sending throat clasp, her weathercloak’s escape pocket could only be used once a day. She dropped back to the ground, then watched in amazement as the ghazneth ricocheted away from the wizard’s protective star and slammed into the mountainside.
Vangerdahast’s shoulders slumped with relief, then his voice began to echo off the rocky slopes as he bellowed his incantation and tossed his strange assortment of knickknacks into the air. The ghazneth circled the boulder where he stood, hurling itself at him time and again, only to bounce away and crash into the mountain with stone-splitting force. A shimmering spiral of light appeared in the air behind the creature and began to shadow its movements like some strange tail it did not know it had.
When the ghazneth finally grew tired of slamming into the mountainside, it alighted in the gully next to Vangerdahast. It seemed to say something, then squatted down and wrapped its arms around the boulder. The stone began to tremble, and Tanalasta could tell by the sudden tension in the wizard’s shoulders that he had not anticipated the possibility of having his perch ripped out of the very ground.
Vangerdahast’s echoing voice rumbled off the mountains more urgently, and he stooped down to fling his knickknacks directly onto the shoulders of his attacker. The tornado at the ghazneth’s back grew larger and faster, sucking the thing’s leathery wings backward toward the whirlpool’s spiraling depths. The creature glanced nervously over its shoulder, then a small eye appeared in the heart of the tornado. From Vangerdahast’s description, Tanalasta expected to see some sort of flaming hell or blood-drenched wasteland, but the small circle resembled nothing quite so much as the Stonelands themselves.
The ghazneth let out a great roar and gave a tremendous twist. A sharp crack reverberated off the mountainside, then the boulder rose out of the ground and Vangerdahast’s legs went out from under him.
Tanalasta was on her feet again, yelling for the wizard to use his escape pocket, though she knew he would never hear her over the rumble of the cracking stone. As Vangerdahast tumbled from the boulder, he reached out with the dove’s feather and struck the creature on the head.
A terrible shriek reverberated across the slope. The ghazneth vanished into the whirlpool, dragging Vangerdahast’s boulder along with it. The wizard landed facedown in the gully and lay there trembling, then the spell whooshed in on itself and there was silence.
Tanalasta let out a joyful whoop, then saw a familiar shape in the sky and dropped to her belly. Vangerdahast raised his head, and she rose to her knees to point behind him. The wizard stood and turned to face the shoulder of the mountain, where the ghazneth was already streaking down out of the stonemurk.
Vangerdahast stood there looking for what seemed an eternity, but in fact may have been less than a second. Tanalasta started to rise and yell, but she did not even make it to a crouch before the wizard turned and was suddenly beside her, swaying and blinking with teleport daze and blindly reaching out to catch hold of her sleeve.
“Get us out of here!”
7
They were lost in a sea of brown. The sun was hiding behind an overcast of dirty-pearl clouds, and a stiff northerly wind had draped the horizon behind a curtain of tannish stonemurk. The plain was paved in jagged slabs of red-brown basalt, set unevenly into a bed of yellow-brown sand, and the few scraggly salt bushes hardy enough to grow in such a wasteland were a sickly shade of hazel. Even Tanalasta’s riding breeches and Vangerdahast’s glorious beard had turned olive-brown beneath a thick coating of Stonelands dust.
As uncomfortable as the stonemurk made travel, the princess was glad for its foglike veil. After Vangerdahast’s futile attempt to banish the ghazneth, anything that helped conceal them was a great comfort to her. They had glimpsed the thing twice since fleeing the Storm Horns. The first time had been two evenings ago, when its dark form streaked across the horizon between them and the mountains. The second time had been only a few hours ago, when it had appeared in the far north, circling like a hawk searching for its next meal.
The banishment’s failure seemed to have sapped Vangerdahast’s confidence. He would spend long hours deep in silent thought, then suddenly subject Tanalasta to a lengthy hypothesis about why he had failed to exile the ghazneth to its home plane. Having read-some said memorized-every volume in the palace library, the princess was able to debunk most of his theories with a little careful consideration. So far the only notion to stand the test of her scrutiny was that the banishment had not failed at all, that the ghazneth had been sucked back to its home plane. Unfortunately, that plane happened to be Toril.
Vangerdahast dismissed the possibility as a contradiction of itself, simply proclaiming that a demon could not be from Toril, and something from Toril could not be a demon. Tanalasta considered the argument pure semantics. To her mind, anything that looked, acted, and killed like a demon was a demon. Moreover, when she pointed out that the thing had been affected by two spells that affected only demons-the protective star and the banishment itself-Vangerdahast had been unable to refute her argument. Maybe the creature wasn’t a demon by war wizard definitions, but it was close enough for a princess.
Tanalasta wished she had not let Vangerdahast trick her into parting ways with Owden Foley. She had read in the Imaskari Book of War (Alaphondar’s translation, of course) that priests were better suited to dealing with demons than wizards. Priests tended not to let their pride get them killed as often.
For the second time in a quarter hour, Tanalasta found her vision obscured by brown grime. She wiped the gobs from her eyes, then opened her waterskin and washed the grit from her teeth. Either they had drifted off their westerly course or the wind had shifted, and if she remembered one thing from Gaspaeril Gofar’s little Treatise on the Flora of the Barren Wastes, it was that the wind seldom shifted in the Stonelands.
Tanalasta glanced over at the lodestone dangling from the wrist of Vangerdahast’s rein hand. They were still traveling at a right angle to the tiny rod, which meant they should have been facing west. So why was a northerly wind blowing in their faces? And if it was not northerly, why was it still full of Anauroch sand? When the wind
