“Where to now?” Kegohr asked.
“We should go to the Steadfast Horn Guild House,” Vesma said.
“No,” I countered. “The last guild we visited was infiltrated by cultists. This one could be the same. I think we need to find Lord Ganyir, and I suspect he’ll be in the temple Mahrai mentioned.”
Vesma seemed unconvinced, but she sighed after a second. “The temple is up the valley. Across the local Vigorous Zone. Only good if we want to fight monsters.”
I smiled. “I wouldn’t mind learning some earth techniques.”
“Look at us all,” Kumi said. “Battered, dirty, exhausted, running low on Vigor. Surely, we should rest first.”
“We’re strangers in a hostile land,” I said. “Our boat left the minute we stepped off at the dock. Right now, we don’t know anywhere that’s safe for us to stay. At least, if we put a Vigorous Zone behind us, that might give our enemies second thoughts about pursuing.”
“So, we’ll just leave the city under the control of the cultists?” Vesma asked.
“Sooner or later, we’re going to have to return to the city and weed them out. But that’s not what Guildmaster Xilarion told us to do. We need to find Lord Ganyir first. Then, we can return to the city and deal with the cultists. The guard captain mentioned someone named Tahlis, too. He seemed to hate that person as much as Lord Ganyir. Maybe we can find them both, gather an army, and take back the city.”
Kegohr shook his head. “It’ll be like the battle with Resplendent Tears all over again.”
“I hope not,” Kumi said. “The price of victory was all too many lives.”
As much as I shared her hopes, the city seemed totally under the control of the Cult of Unswerving Shadows. If we wanted to rid the Gonki Province of cultists, it was going to take a whole lot of bloodshed. Perhaps Lord Ganyir and this ‘Tahlis’ might have other ways of defeating the cultists.
Our next step was the Sunstone Temple. But first, we’d need to cross a perilous Vigorous Zone.
Chapter Three
The road divided not far from the city walls. One branch led toward the docks where we had arrived, while the other turned west, up the valley toward the interior of the province. We walked along that second road, between rows of ramshackle houses that had accumulated outside the city walls. People with lean, sunken faces peered out at us from the safety of their homes but didn’t venture into the street. I couldn’t fault them for remaining indoors when four blood-stained strangers walked outside.
From what I could see of these people, they were dressed in a similar manner to the guards on the walls, their clothes mostly yellow, brown, or orange, often topped off with turbans on both men and women. Their clothes hung loosely, betraying the skinniness of the flesh underneath.
An old man nodded to us as we passed. Beside him, a mongrel dog with its ribs showing through its chest lay listless in the dirt.
“I don’t like this,” Vesma commented.
“Agreed,” I said. “All this hunger, people left to starve outside a functioning city; it’s not right.”
“You’re not wrong,” she said. “But that’s not what I meant. I don’t like that we’re running away from a fight.”
I remembered how Vesma had been back at the guild, goading male students into opportunities for her to prove her strength and skill. And now, I was asking her to back off from someone every bit as arrogant as Hamon and the other stuck-up Wysaro clan initiates.
“Like I said before, we have a mission. Even if we defeated Mahrai and the cultists on the walls, we don’t know what else could be behind them. We need more intel, and we’re likely to get that from Lord Ganyir. If the Sunstone Temple doesn’t provide us with more information, then we’ll see what the local guild house has to offer.”
“Fine. If you always have to be so reasonable about it.” But while there was still bitterness in her voice, she squeezed my hand and offered me something approximating a smile.
“You should console her,” Nydarth whispered. “Take her to your bed.”
I laughed under my breath. “Not now.”
“I would very much enjoy watching the master undulate like the ocean’s waves,” Yono added.
I ignored the two spirits as we walked on into the afternoon, along the road out of the inhabited area and into the wide Gonki valley. The ground all around was parched dry, with only a cacti and clumps of spiky grass adding spots of withered green to the ocher dirt. At first, there were patches of what could have been called soil, but these soon gave way to dusty ground and, finally, to the sands of a desert.
After leaving the last of the city behind, we stopped and ascended a steep hill to one side of the road. It gave us a better view down the valley and a chance to evaluate what lay ahead.
We were about to enter what was clearly the Vigorous Zone. It was an area even more arid and stony than the rest, with strange rock formations, wide patches of sand, and wider stretches of parched earth. Like any Vigorous Zone, it embodied its element so completely that it clearly could not have been natural.
Past that, the valley continued. The bed of the river that had carved this valley was dried up, and judging by the lack of life in it, it had been that way for some time. The road ran beside it, though whether that had been constructed to once give travelers water or just for the lowest, most convenient route I couldn’t tell. There was life out here—vultures and crows circling overhead, lizards basking on rocks, the occasional furry face of a large-eared fox or a mottled cat peering out from the shelter of boulder-strewn slopes—but I couldn’t tell whether any one of them were magical beasts with enchanted cores. I supposed that regular animals lived alongside Vigorous beasts.
What was missing, however,
