stopped her inspection and listened.
Fordus is approaching, she signed, translating Lucas's cry. He is near, but there is a cloud above him. Lucas saw no more of the Prophet.
'But he saw other things.'
The bird's eyes glittered greenly.
'Then sing us that sight, Larken,' Northstar urged.
The bard glanced uncomfortably at her younger cousin. For Northstar, the solutions were easy: he read the stars, the paths of the desert, and his desti shy;nation was mapped. He did not understand the wild moment in which the singer gives her heart to the bird, when the light expands, when the hawk's cry becomes words and the words become song.
When you sing because you cannot choose other shy;wise.
Almost unwillingly, in a soft voice unaccompa shy;nied by her drum, Larken began the hawk's song.
The music was an old sea chantey from Balifor- somehow she remembered the music-but the words, as always, were new and fresh, gaining power as they came to her in the firelit dark of the campsite.
The dark man in the desert The dark man on the plain The dark man in the gap of the sky Is no dark man.
His home is not in moonlight His home is not in sun The dark man on the grassy hill Is no dark man.
O his arms are stone and water O his blood is stone and sand The dark man in the circled camp Is no dark man.
As swiftly as they had come, the words ceased. Lucas fluffed contentedly, the last of his ruddy light sprinkling onto the desert floor, and the fires them shy;selves seemed to contract once more around the huddled campsites. Larken placed the bird on his perch and sat down, resting her face in her hands. Already she could barely remember what she had sung, for the words had risen unbidden, had passed through her like light through a faceted glass.
The eyes of the listeners turned to Stormlight, who stared silently into the fire.
This time the elf was not sure of the meanings. This was an exotic musing of bard and bird. It was like a foreign language he almost knew.
Stormlight cleared his throat, the white lucerna lifting from his golden eyes./'There is a spy come in the midst of us,' he declared. 'Someone who is not what he seems. That's what the hawk was saying, as I follow it. Yes. That is what the bird said.'
Larken and Northstar exchanged an uncomfort shy;able glance.
'A spy,' Stormlight repeated, this time with more certainty.
Tamex stepped into the firelight.
The hawk cried out, and raised his wings high, his hooked beak open and threatening.
At one moment, the firelit margins of air seemed to waver and glimmer, and then Tamex was among them, visible, tangible. Silently he moved into full view, his black silk tunic shimmering. He shook the dust from the tops of his boots and scanned the circle of rebels indifferently. The firelight glowed through his skin, and for a moment, the sharp-eyed Northstar thought that the warrior's fingers seemed crooked and arched, like talons.
Who was this man, born of the midnight desert?
'The dark man,' Stormlight breathed. 'Who is not what he seems.'
Larken shot him a sullen look. And then she flushed, uncertain why she wanted to defend this man.
Tamex turned to meet them, black eyes angry and glittering like polished onyx. Gormion, Rann, and Aeleth, never true loyalists to Fordus or his officers, rose to stand beside Tamex, their hands already on the hilts of their weapons.
'Where have you been, warrior?' Stormlight asked, his voice cold and low.
Tamex shrugged. The bandits closed behind him.
At a nearby campfire, three Plainsmen rose and, clutching their spears, walked slowly, menacingly, toward Gormion, casting wavering shadows over the warring lights.
Something brushed Stormlight's shoulder. North-star had appeared beside him. Though more scout than warrior, the young man was ready to do his part-knife drawn and keen eyes shifting alertly over the dark man and his bandit following.
Larken watched with rising alarm, and Lucas whistled uneasily.
The two warriors-the elf and the pale, mysteri shy;ous Tamex-were locked in a stare that could end only in combat.
Then the cry of a sentry fractured the tense silence, and nearly all eyes whipped toward the sound. The young Plainsman atop the Red Plateau pointed north and shouted.
'Cavalry! Two hundred from the north!'
Tamex broke off the stare with Stormlight and smiled wickedly. So they had come, after all.
Trained by the Solamnics over the three centuries of their alliance, the Istarian cavalry were almost as brilliant, as swift and effective as their teachers. Accomplished swordsmen and deadly bowmen, they fought from horseback, frequently tied to the saddle to keep them astride their mounts in close combat. They were also much more ruthless than the Solamnics. A Solamnic Knight stayed his hand in occasional mercy against the enemy, whether man or elf or dwarf or even ogre, for his Oath told him 'Est Sularus oth Mithas'-'My Honor is My Life.'
Istarians, on the other hand, followed neither Oath nor Measure. The stories of their raids were horrible.
Stormlight's heart sank at the sentry's alarm. For a brief moment he struggled for a plan, for the words to express it.
When Tamex seized that moment to begin shout shy;ing, the rebels jumped at his words.
'Smother the campfires!' the black-cloaked man ordered. Quickly Rann kicked sand over Gormion's banked fire, and throughout the campsite, the smoke disappeared from the night air.
'To the Plateau!' Stormlight ordered, but his words were lost in Tamex's bellowing cry-a voice inhumanly loud.
'Back to the Tears!' the dark man ordered. 'We'll fight them from the rocks!' The old and the young abandoned their campfires and did what they were told, hurrying to the safe maze of standing crystal.
Stormlight called to the surrounding Plainsmen, but they were already moving, following Tamex and Gormion toward the eerie field. It was five hundred yards from the campsite to the rocks, over level and open ground, but Tamex led the way, gathering bar shy;barians and bandits as he skirted the edge of the salt flats. More campfires winked out to darkness, and then, at the edge of the camp, a column of Istarian torches wavered and bobbed and advanced.
'Plume! Stardancer!' Stormlight shouted, but the two young men lingered foolishly, ardent to shed Istarian blood. Desperately Stormlight grabbed for Stardancer, but the lad was too quick as he brushed past. A group of young Plainsmen and younger ban shy;dits, whooping and beckoning to the approaching torches, girded themselves for battle.
'You fools!' Stormlight shouted.
Then the sound of hoofbeats, distant at first, became deafening, inevitable. The first horse breasted into view, the bronze Istarian armor glistening in the torchlight. With a cry, Northstar wrestled the rider from his saddle, but the ropes that tied the Istarian in place tightened and held, and the startled horse galloped through the ashes of a smothered fire, dragging both men over the hard ground.
Stormlight crouched in his fighting stance as a dozen cavalry took shape in the darkness. Bursting into the camp, swords drawn and spears readied, the riders tore into their quarry like leopards into a helpless herd of sheep. Young Plume fell with a scream, impaled on an Istarian spear, and an even younger boy, an orphan named Lightfoot, fell beside him. Indifferent as a storm or a desert wind, the horsemen hurdled the dying bodies on their way toward a handful of bandits clustered around Aeleth at the edge of the Tears of Mishakal.
'No!' Stormlight shouted, as the rebel resistance broke into rout and panic. Plainsman and barbar shy;ian- women, old men, and children, exposed in the open country between the campsite and the salt flats-fell before the swords of the Istarians as they scrambled through ash and sand and rubble.
Their swords blooded with threescore innocents, the cavalry closed with Aeleth's bandits in a racket of war cries and clashing metal. The Tears echoed dolefully with the screams of the wounded and dying.
Where are you, Fordus? Stormlight thought, rac shy;ing toward Mishakal's Tears. You would know what to … what to …
