Liandra shaded her eyes against the horizon-glare. For a moment she didn’t believe it – just another mirage on the baking world’s edge, a false hope born from desperation.
Then it didn’t go away. She looked closer, squinting into the distance. It stayed put, tantalisingly so.
A city. The city. One she had never visited but had known must be close: Oeragor, Imladrik’s own, thrust out into the utter margins of asur territory in Elthin Arvan and raised from the choking desert in defiance of all reason.
Drutheira didn’t say anything. It would have been hard for her to do so with a gag ripped from her own robes wrapped tightly around her jaw. The druchii’s eyes were red-rimmed, her stance slumped in the heat.
Every so often on the long trek east she had fallen, no doubt from genuine fatigue. On those occasions Liandra had waited patiently for her to get up, neither helping nor hindering. The druchii witch didn’t like to show weakness and would struggle to her feet again when she could. With her arms bound tightly, her tongue clamped and her staff shattered she was no longer a threat, just an encumbrance.
Killing her would have given a modicum of satisfaction. Over the past two days Liandra had come close. Once, in the middle of the night as the campfire burned low, she had reached over to the witch’s slumbering form, knife in hand, just a hair’s breadth away from plunging the point into her throat.
It had not been mercy that had held her back. In a strange, shadowy way Liandra felt like the dark elf had been part of her life for a long time, an integral part of the struggling tale of the colonies. Drutheira was a dark mirror to her, a spectral counterpart of Liandra’s own fiery presence.
When she had first come round from her deep unconsciousness, the witch had smiled thinly.
‘So you won,’ she had said, as if that was all there was to it.
It had been unutterably eerie to look into the violet eyes of her quarry. The hatred Liandra felt for her was too intense to generate even a token response. She stayed her dagger-hand, though.
Perhaps she had learned something from Imladrik after all, and saw the larger canvas spread out before her. The witch knew things: she knew why the druchii had been active, why they had been sent, how many were still in Elthin Arvan. Her very existence was the proof Imladrik needed. If Liandra could bring her back to Tor Alessi alive then the dream of a settlement was not yet dead.
All of which, though, meant nothing if she failed to keep her alive.
Liandra hauled Drutheira along behind her on a length of cord taken from her belt. The witch was in a far worse state than her, ravaged by what must have been months out in the wild. Liandra never untied her and never let her speak again, but soon stopped fearing her powers.
The first day was the worst. Plagued by terrible headaches from the sun, progress amounted to little more than putting one foot in front of the other. All Liandra had to guide her was old memories and a vague sense of rightness – like all the asur mageborn she could sense the echoes and resonances of her kind even from immense distances, shimmering amid the aethyr like the whispers of overheard conversations. Many times on that trek she stood still, eyes closed, letting her mind rove ahead of her, seeking out the source of the faint aura of familiarity.
Such work was easier in the absence of Vranesh’s huge influence. With the dragon gone, Liandra’s mind seemed to work more surely. Once the worst of the grief had subsided she found her moods calming down, settling into the analytical patterns required for survival. She still missed the drake’s voice – unbearably so, at times – but it was impossible not to also notice how much freer she felt once out of its shadow.
It wasn’t until the third day that she began to give up hope. The hard land yawned away from her in every direction, a semi-desert of scree, dust and thorny bushes that gave neither shelter nor moisture. Both of them suffered. Drutheira’s eyes were permanently half-closed and puffy, her breathing little more than a soft rattle. They spent most of the morning struggling down a winding defile and having to clamber over boulders twice their size. Only at the end of it, after miles of solid torture, did the landscape finally open up again.
Liandra looked east, and her heart sank: the land was as featureless and barren as the rest. But then she saw them, hard on the edge of her vision: spires, hazy in the distance, glinting like ivory in the sun.
‘Oeragor,’ she breathed. It was the first word she had spoken aloud for three days.
Drutheira stood beside her, swaying, looking like she had barely any awareness of where she was. Liandra glanced coldly at her. ‘They will welcome you there, witch. Always a chamber to be found for the druchii.’
They started to walk again. After the initial euphoria wore off the precariousness of their position reasserted itself. Liandra went steadily, trying not to breathe too heavily, feeling the solid heat hammer at her back and shoulders. She had wound fabric from her cloak over her head, but though it protected her skin from the worst of the sun, it made her feel claustrophobic and stuffy. Every time she looked up the spires seemed to be just where they had been the last time – too far away.
After several hours of trudging she realised she wouldn’t make it. Her
