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  “Like a prophet … or a player in some low drama.”

  He smiled. “Being Speaker requires a sense of drama.”

  Their walk back to camp was accomplished amid a happy mob of the Speaker’s loyal and confident subjects. They knew firsthand their king had spared himself none of the hardships of their exile. When the danger from the nomads was greatest, Gilthas Pathfinder led his people onward with no thought of his own safety. Although he wore the mantle of legendary rulers such as Silvanos and Kith-Kanan, Gilthas had proven himself their equal in valor and majesty.

  Their faith was so heartbreakingly profound, Kerian couldn’t bear it. “Do you have any plan for those who remain, Gil? What are you going to do?”

  He squeezed her hand. “The day after tomorrow, I will cross Lioness Creek and lead our nation into Inath-Wakenti.”

  Hamaramis, walking next to them, exclaimed, “Great Speaker, is that wise?”

  “Yes. We’ve lingered on the doorstep long enough. It’s time to take possession of our new home.”

  “If it doesn’t take possession of us,” Kerian said darkly.

  * * * * *

  Wind blew out of Alya-Alash like a great exhalation. Breath of the Gods indeed! The gusty wind rattled the threadbare tents pitched in the center of the pass. Fifteen cone-shaped shelters woven from dark wool were arranged in a semicircle. They were the last remnants of the once-mighty force that had dogged the elves’ every step from Khuri-Khan. The nomads had fought with great courage and ferocity, but the laddad outlasted them. Griffons had soared down from the sky, one of them ridden by a hideous demon. When he ordered the nomads to depart, most of them did. It was easy to justify the retreat. So many had died battling the laddad, some of the tribes would require years to recover.

  Adala Fahim dipped her hands in a dented copper basin. The tepid water stung her scratched fingers as she washed away a thick layer of grime. Known as the Weyadan, the “Mother of the Weya-Lu” tribe, she later had come to be called Maita for the divine, inescapable fate that guided her in the war against the laddad. Little of the divine remained; there was only endless, back-breaking labor. The day the laddad entered Alya-Alash, Adala had begun the wall across the pass. Some of her former followers returned to help. A few were warriors, but most were older folk who still believed in her godly mission. From sunrise to sundown, they dragged stones from the surrounding slopes. Lacking mortar or tools, they piled the stones in a long cairn, its base wider than its top. Thus far, the wall was head high and about a hundred yards long. The pass was a mile wide. A great deal of work remained.

  Adala toiled without complaint, her faith undiminished. The very falling away of the tribes’ support convinced her she was in the right. Everyone knew the path to truth was narrow and hard, while the road to error was easy. Her only regret was the betrayal of her cousin Wapah. He had turned his back on her, his people, and his homeland by helping the foreign killers escape justice. His actions were unforgivable.

  A few days after he’d led the laddad into the valley, Wapah had returned. He rode straight out of the pass, in broad daylight, with his head uncovered for all to see. Outraged warriors wanted to slay him as a traitor, but Adala showed them he was not worth even that. She turned her back on him. The rest followed her example, and Wapah passed through the camp and out into the high desert with no eye upon him. His image diminished to a silhouette, then softened in the heat, wavered, and vanished. Since then, no one else had entered or left the forbidden valley.

  Finished with her ablutions, Adala shook her hands carefully over the bowl, allowing every drop to run back inside. Water was plentiful here, but the habits of a lifetime in the desert were unbreakable. She looked up as the thud of hoofbeats announced the arrival of a rider. It was Tamid, a Weya-Lu from the Cloudbender clan.

  “Maita! Our hunting party was attacked!”

  She stood quickly. “Laddad?”

  “No. A beast!”

  Unlike the deep desert, the foothills abounded in game. Tamid and a party of three hunters had flushed a stag and a wild sow in a rocky ravine east of camp. On their way back with the dressed carcasses, the hunters were set upon. Two men were unhorsed, and the creature had carried off the game. Few animals were bold enough to attack armed and mounted men. Fewer still were strong enough to carry off two carcasses at the same time.

  Adala asked if the creature was a desert panther. The long-legged cat, large as a donkey, was nearly extinct in the deep desert but might still prowl in the shadow of the mountains. Tamid vowed the beast was no panther, although it walked on four feet. None in his party had ever seen its like before. He had left the others to trail the beast while he came back to report to Adala.

  Such a creature was too dangerous to be allowed to remain so near their camp. Adala sent Tamid to round up more men. The creature must be killed.

  When Tamid returned with eleven mounted men, he was surprised to see Adala herself mounted on Little Thorn, her tireless gray donkey. She was going with them, and as usual she was unarmed. The men did not waste time protesting. She was the Maita, and she would do what she would do.

  Tamid led them southeast along the edge of the lower range of hills. The ground was stony. Cacti and bone-colored spear bushes were thick on the ground, forcing the horses to pick their way carefully. Adala’s sharp nose detected the strong scent of soter. She noted a small stand of the evergreen shrub and marked the spot for a later return. From soter she could make a natural wound cleanser, and her store was sorely depleted after the recent battles.

  When the nomads reached the spot where Tamid had parted company with his fellows, they halted. One man raised a short, curled ram’s horn to his lips and sounded a long note.

  In less than a minute, an answering bleat came from ahead and above. The slope was steep. Adala’s donkey was more surefooted than the horses and outpaced them, but soon all of them were struggling upward, leaning forward to keep their balance. Loose stones rolled down the hill behind them. The distant horn blew again, twice, sounding more urgent.

  A mile passed before they spied two riders waving swords over their heads. The slender blades, bare of crossguards, caught the setting sun and flashed like beacons. Adala tapped Little Thorn’s rump with her stick. The stalwart donkey increased its pace, leaving the horses behind.

  “Where is it?” she called.

  One of the riders pointed with his sword to the sun-washed crest at his back. “Beyond the ridge yonder, Maita.”

  At the end of another steep climb, the group came to a plateau perhaps a hundred yards long and forty yards wide. The last member of Tamid’s hunting party awaited them at the far end. He was mounted, his bow at full draw. His target was hidden by intervening rocks, but its presence was obvious. The archer’s horse, trained to stand quietly in the face of nearly any danger, stamped and shied, shaking its blunt head.

  “Keep back, Maita!” called the archer, never shifting his gaze. “It can leap far!”

  She acknowledged his warning but tapped Little Thorn urging him forward. The donkey snorted and balked. Stolid even in the presence of griffons, Little Thorn did not like whatever was ahead. Adala chided him as though he were a naughty child and tapped his flank with her stick. He shuffled forward, obedient but unhappy.

  Adala knew every beast that roamed the desert, but she’d never seen anything like the animal perched on a low pinnacle at the extreme end of the ledge. It was fully six feet long and covered with dark reddish-brown fur. The upright ears of a cat were oddly mixed with the muzzle, brow, and liquid-brown eyes of a canine. Its forelegs were half again as long as its stubby rear legs. Adala’s approach set it to snarling, revealing long, yellow teeth.

  “Kill it,” Adala commanded.

  The archer loosed. The arrow was tipped with a hunting point, shaped like two miniature swords crossed. It flew straight and true at the creature’s chest. The beast held its place until the arrow was an arm’s length away then snatched the shaft from midair. Shocked by its uncan
ny speed, the nomads only then saw that its front paws were articulated like fingers.

  The men uttered oaths. Adala did not. “Spears!” she ordered. “Spit that monster!”

  Riders crowded forward. Half a dozen iron spear points bored in. The creature dropped the arrow and lowered its chin to the stone.

  “Do … not …” it rasped.

  The attackers halted in shock.

  “Did you speak?” Adala demanded.

  Black tongue lolling, the beast nodded, a bizarrely human gesture. “Do … not … kill … me,” it said, brown eyes never leaving Adala’s face.

  The Mother of the Weya-Lu was not known for indecision. Summoning the strength of her maita, she ordered the men to fall back. Tamid protested, but she cut him off.

  “Withdraw, I say. Those on High will not allow me to be hurt.”

  Grumbling all the while, the men turned their horses and moved to the far end of the ledge. There they halted. Despite her urging, they would go no farther. Several kept bows in hand, arrows nocked, just in case.

  “You have faith,” the beast said. It spoke slowly, each word seeming to require great effort.

  “Who are you?”

  The creature slunk off the pinnacle. Crawling on its belly, it halted five feet from Adala. Little Thorn trembled violently but did not bolt. Adala heard bowstrings creak to full draw behind her, but she kept her attention fixed on the creature. She repeated her question.

  The creature answered, and Adala’s mouth fell open. “How did this come about?” she demanded.

  The beast stared at her for a long moment then rubbed its head on the ground. Its frustration was pathetic. Clearly its speaking abilities were not up to answering her question. Once more she made a swift decision.

  “You will come with us. If you behave as the person you claim to be, all will be well. But if I find out you’re lying, I’ll have you skinned alive.”

  The nomads at the other end of the ledge stared in amazement as she approached, passed, and descended the steep hill with the weird monster tamely loping at Little Thorn’s heels. Despite all they’d been through with her, Adala Fahim still had the power to amaze. Her maita was indeed more powerful than any wicked spell. They trailed her back to camp under a sky aflame with sunset. High clouds covered the western third of the sky, and they blazed ruby and gold, strange to nomad eyes accustomed to the pristinely clear vault over the deep desert.

  None of them could know the whirlwind of questions that raged behind the serene face Adala allowed the world to see. The new wonder had set her mind spinning. Why had Those on High delivered into her hands a monster claiming to be Shobbat, Crown Prince of Khur?

  3

  Far into the night, Gilthas listened to scribes reading from ancient chronicles of the elf kingdoms. He couldn’t yet make out the whole story of Inath-Wakenti. Like a mosaic viewed from too close, those fragments of truth he had wouldn’t resolve into a pattern. Every time a pattern seemed to be emerging, it fell apart when examined too rigorously.

  He lay on his pallet, back propped against a rolled rug, listening to the Leaves of the Sacred Grove of E’li. Although Silvanesti, not Qualinesti, was the first of the elf nations, the clerics of E’li in Qualinost had in their archive some of the oldest records of the elf race. They had been carried out of Silvanost at the end of the Kinslayer War, when Kith-Kanan led his followers westward to found Qualinesti. Kith-Kanan’s brother, Speaker of the Stars Sithas, was furious when he learned the ancient scrolls had left his realm. Wars had been started over less, but Kith-Kanan, newly anointed Speaker of the Sun, sent back the documents to appease Sithas’s anger. As Kith-Kanan had hoped, his twin never noticed the returned scrolls were copies. Kith-Kanan had kept the originals in a special archive. The yellowed parchment scrolls were a thousand miles from either country, being read to the first king of the combined elf nations. The Speaker of the Sun and Stars had abandoned much on the march to Inath-Wakenti, but not the ancient annals of his race.

  Gilthas had charged one scribe with the sole duty of keeping a list of the Speaker’s ideas on the subject. Eventually, Gilthas was sure, answers would appear.

  “Varanas,” he said to that scribe, “read back my list of questions.”

  The elf held the scroll up to the wavering lamplight. “ ‘First: Inath-Wakenti has a connection to the gods. Is it where some of them first set foot in the world? Is it where they dwelt? Second: The Chronicles of Silvanos say the five dragonstones were buried in the Pit of Nemith-Otham in the northern mountains. Is Inath-Wakenti the location of this pit, and might residual magic remain, though the stones themselves are gone?’ ”

  The dragonstones, containing the essences of the five original evil dragons, had been buried after the First Dragon War. Dwarves dug them up, inadvertently releasing the dragons and starting the Second Dragon War. The scribe Varanas swallowed hard. The notion that even the dregs of such evil might lie beneath their feet was extremely unsettling.

  Gilthas prompted him to continue.

  “ ‘Third: Neither the first nor second proposition explains the valley’s hostility to animal life or the identities of its ghosts. Fourth: Are the will-o’-the-wisps the valley’s defenders or its last inhabitants, and is there a way to nullify or eliminate them?’ ”

  Gilthas lifted a hand, and Varanas paused, allowing him to ponder what he had heard.

  None of the old histories mentioned the strange will-o’-the-wisps. But other annals recounting past ages of elf greatness did contain references to spirits set to guard enemies of the state, enemies too well connected to kill. Speaker Silvanos would exile them to distant points in his realm, and they would be watched over by ever-vigilant sentinels created and maintained by magic.

  Two of the most famous exiles in Silvanos’s time were Balif and the wizard Vedvedsica. A dark scandal had rocked the latter days of the Speaker’s reign. Vedvedsica, a retainer of Lord Balif, the commander of the Speaker’s armies, had been tied to unnatural and horrifying doings and was sent away to a northern outpost—perhaps Inath-Wakenti? After Sithel succeeded to the throne, Lord Balif left Silvanesti under a cloud and Vedvedsica returned. His presence was kept secret, but Sithel consulted him on matters of the gravest import, such as when the queen gave birth to twin sons.

  Many questions remained unanswered. Gilthas had no one among his followers with the skill and power of a sorcerer such as Vedvedsica. After the fall of Qualinost, the Knights of Neraka had made a special point of eliminating priests and sages of the highest rank. Assassins from the Black Hall had roamed occupied Qualinesti, killing elves who had magical knowledge and ability. The only sages remaining in Gilthas’s service were lesser clerics, natural healers (such as Truthanar), and a handful of learned scholars. And the very best of those, the royal archivist Favaronas, had vanished with the rest of Kerian’s original expedition to the valley.

  A different cause denied Gilthas any sages from Silvanesti. The occupying minotaurs suppressed them but took no special pains to root them out. Long before the bull-men landed on the sacred shores, Silvanesti priests and magicians had been driven underground by the Chaos War. As far as was known, they remained underground, hidden in the green fastness of the woodlands.

  As the silence lengthened, Varanas looked up, expecting to be told to continue, but the Speaker had fallen asleep. Signaling to the other scribes, Varanas rose quietly. As he withdrew, he saw Lady Kerianseray standing at the edge of the light cast by the lamp. He bowed and left her alone with her husband.

  Kerian drew the blanket up to Gilthas’s chin. The blanket was actually her own warrior’s mantle, the crimson cloth softer than the horse blanket that had formerly been his night wrap. How far they had fallen when the king of two realms must use horse tack to keep out the night’s chill.

  She gave the scattered scrolls only a cursory glance. Gilthas continued to seek answers in moldering documents, convinced he eventually could fathom the valley’s mysteries. Yet they knew no more now than they did about t
he far side of the world.

  Truthanar had advised her not to sleep by her husband. Elves were resistant to consumption, but repeated close exposure would be tempting fate, and once the sickness took root, it was fiendishly hard to cure. In Qualinost, with excellent care and the finest medicines, Gilthas would have had a decent chance at recovery. Here he had virtually none. She brushed a strand of lank hair from his forehead and left him.

  She slept on a bedroll on the west side of the pass. She hiked up to the spot, so weary she fully expected to be asleep as soon as she lay down. Before she could do more than unbuckle her sword belt, however, a black silhouette appeared atop the hill a few yards away. No tents were pitched there. There was no reason for anyone to be wandering about. She called out a challenge.

  A low voice answered. Porthios.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” she grumbled.

  “I’ll be brief. Are you coming with us to Qualinesti?”

  “I thought the answer to that would be obvious.” She turned away.

  “He will be dead before we reach the New Sea, you know.”

  Whipping back around, she snapped, “You go too far, Scarecrow.” That was the derisive nickname given him by his human captives in Qualinesti. At times Kerian found the coarse human word particularly apt.

  He trod carefully over the loose stones until he was close enough for her to see his masked face.

  “You’re a fighter, Kerianseray. We march to free our homeland. Isn’t that what you want more than anything?”

  “Yes!” Then: “No. Not more than anything.”

  “You cannot stand by and watch us march away. If you miss this fight, you will always regret it.” His voice was inexorable. “Anyone who doesn’t fight for the freedom of Qualinesti cannot claim it after the victory’s won.”

  Appeals to her fighting pride had failed, so he was threatening her? Join me, or never come back to Qualinesti? How dared he! Her hand closed around the hilt of her sword.

  “Get away from me, Porthios. Get away before I finish what the dragon’s breath started!”