Amber stifled a whimper. As if their predicament weren't perilous enough, they were captured by an ogre mage, a master of light and darkness. The brute could even bend light around itself and become invisible, as Reiver had learned earlier in the 'empty' alley. Better both her friends remained unconscious, thought Amber, lest they fret about their ultimate fate. In The Tales of Terror, ogres were always painted as cannibals.
More argument flowed in an arcane gobble, and then Amber heard two words in the common tongue accented by Chultan: 'White Flame.' Whatever this invocation meant, it got the leader his way.
Hakiim and Reiver were kicked repeatedly by feet like dragon claws. Hakiim revived, so he and Amber walked. The thongs that cut into their wrists were tied to the ogres' belts, close enough that their stench filled the captives' nostrils. Reiver was hung like a dead deer on a spear haft between the big brother and sister.
The hunting party and its captives turned toward the cobbled road that switchbacked to the valley rim. Amber avoided Hakiim's eyes, not wanting to show her despair. As they crossed a small bridge, the ogres stopped and pointed, grunting in amazement. Amber squinted against the dawn.
Rings of stone marked where round buildings had once stood; corn cribs, Amber decided, like those in Memnon's Grain Market. In the market's center stood a raised well. Around and around the well, ancient bones shining yellow-white in the early morning light, marched the skeletons of two mules.
'Are they cursed?' asked Hakiim.
'Cursed to work,' breathed Amber. 'This dead city gives up its ghosts…'
The prisoners were marched across the desert for two days without stopping. The tireless ogres tramped over sand, cactus, salt flats, and stone, even bulled through thorn bushes as they towed their captives behind them. Amber's trousers were shredded, her skin scratched and torn, her feet blistered and pierced by thorns. Onward she trudged, mile after mile after mile. The sun sank, and for hours Amber froze in the chill desert air. Then, too soon, the sun burst high and sizzled her chafed skin. There was no world left, neither Faerun nor Calimshan, just a brassy bowl of sand ruled by a tyrant sun, and miles to march, and a White Flame-whatever that was-hot as the sun, waiting at the end.
We'll die out here, Amber thought a thousand times. Our parents will never know what happened to us. We'll never learn the secret of Cursrah's destruction.
The last notion pained Amber especially, as she stumbled blindly and swiftly behind the stinking ogre, because she'd gained a personal and emotional stake in the legend. Amber, Hakiim, and Reiver were not random travelers who'd blundered into empty ruins. Fate, or the will of the gods, or perhaps the breath of Great Calim himself had drawn the three adventurers to the site as sure as iron filings leaped to a lodestone.
Clearly they'd been chosen, but for what purpose? To uncover a truth, or right a wrong, or finish an undone task? Or just to visit and learn from their former lives?
That was the first fact Amber had withheld from her friends. Hakiim was Gheqet, Reiver was Tafir, and Amber was the reincarnation of the princess Amenstar.
Poor Hakiim. Amber heard him cry with pain. City-soft, Hakiim had been the first to collapse. The tall ogre had dragged him for a while, until the dark man's trousers were ripped away below the knee, but dragging a carcass was hard work, so the lead ogre called a halt. The two ogres kicked and pinched Hakiim until he came to, then looped his wrist bonds over the end of a spear. When the ogre rose, spear on its shoulder, Hakiim was yanked up like a pike on a fishing line. To save his wrists Hakiim had to walk, so he did. That had been-Amber had no idea how far back. Five miles? Twenty-five?
Poor Gheqet and Tafir and Amenstar, recalled Amber. Together, those ancient friends had come to terrible grief. Amber knew this fact as a certainty. The mummy's touch, that brief mental communion, had been familiar. The undead sufferer was someone Amber knew intimately.
The mummy was one of Amenstar's friends, either Gheqet or Tafir.
How or why, Amber couldn't guess, and not knowing tormented her like the burning thirst of this miserable march through the scorching desert. What could Gheqet or Tafir have done to deserve such an awful fate? To be trapped, condemned to a dark limbo, a horrid state between life and death, for an eternity? Why was one of Amenstar's companions chosen? Simply because they'd helped the princess disobey her parents? Had Amenstar suffered to see a friend so tragically punished? What had become of the other man? What had been his fate? What became of Amenstar when her city was destroyed?
Blind with sweat and fatigue, Amber's foot struck a rock, and she crumpled. Dead tired, she never felt herself strike, though her forehead lay on pebbles. The she-ogre jerked her rawhide bonds, scouring red raw skin from Amber's bleeding wrists. Weak, the daughter of pirates pushed to rise, but couldn't.
'Kill me,' she whispered. 'Get it over with. I can't go on.'
The elder ogre called another halt. After a short time Amber was kicked upright. Hakiim had blacked out again, and not even knife pricks would rouse him, so he was carried.
I'll break next, Amber thought, and die next.
Amber stumbled through a fog of pain and thirst. Eventually, miles on, she crumpled again. She too was kicked and pinched. Rousing, she begged for water and was surprised to be given a drink. The life giving liquid let her march another few miles. Again the world dimmed and she dropped. A knife pricked her thighs and rump, but despite the vicious stings Amber spiraled downward into a void.
Water splashed Amber's face, then filled her nose and mouth and threatened to drown her. Stabbing blindly, fumbling with bound hands, she groped against a pebbly bottom and pushed herself free of dark water, emerging into dark air.
She lay facedown in a stream, the babbling water only three inches deep. Thirstier than she'd ever been, Amber gulped great mouthfuls of water, vomited it up, and drank more. A giant hand snagged her hair and wrenched her upright. She was too exhausted even to scream, but she could see.
Grass dotted with rocks ran alongside the stream and up into steep foothills verging on low, weatherworn mountains. Trees, spring-quickening aspens and brushy cedars, dotted the foothills in clumps. Even this tiny bit of green seemed alien, as if Amber had lived her whole life in the desert, and the color hurt her eyes. The sun blazed at the western horizon, out over the desert where the gentle brook was swallowed up. These must be the Marching Mountains, Amber sorted out groggily, a dangerous place and home to the White Flame?
The three breed-ogres pulled Reiver and Hakiim from the stream. At least they were alive, Amber thought, for now. Dimly she recalled fainting from thirst, fatigue, and heat. She must have been dragged farther, for her trousers hung about her bloody calves in shreds, and her boots were scuffed white. She must have been carried, for a vast stink had made her gag.
'We go. Move! Up!' barked the lead ogre, and shoved Amber from behind.
Amber stumbled but kept her feet. These hillsides were rocky, and dragging would mean death. Bleary-eyed, she looked at her friends. Steeped in their own misery, they stared at nothing, blank-eyed. Pushed again, all three concentrated on their footing. A winding goat trail trickled up a hill. Upward they trudged as dusk blackened the mountains.
Half the night they marched, Amber reckoned, though she couldn't be sure. Her limbs shook from hunger, and wet clothes from the dunking chilled her in the gusting wind. She trembled with new fear, for the Marching Mountains had always been a frightening place. Called the Dragon Peaks in olden times, as well as the Spine of Empires and the Shield of the South, these craggy and jumbled mounts were home to austere monks, escaped slaves, and madmen; lost races of strange humanoids and giantkin; dangerous animals such as panthers and pegasi; and monsters of every kind, from beholders to formorian giants and hideous deepspawn, a place of hidden valleys, talking rocks, and mysterious lights.
Finally, having climbed so high that farther peaks wore snow that glowed by starlight, they halted at the remnants of a dwarven causeway. Once, its precise dry stones had bridged two mountains, but soldiers in some war, or else the dwarves themselves, had broken the bridge's back. The lead ogre sent his sister ahead to scout. She croaked a signal, and the three humans were shoved into a cleft in a mountain. Amber hoped they didn't meet a whole tribe of ogres, for that would end their journey. They'd be eaten like cattle prodded into a slaughterhouse.
A human guarded the shadows of a pass, a female with blue- and white-striped robes and an intricately carved crossbow. A desert nomad, Amber recognized, from the southern wastes they called 'Land of the Lions.' These were cautious people, for the Syl-Pasha of Calimshan had sworn to rule or eradicate them. The nomad
