Abramm frowned. “You’re taking all those out of context. If we had the books here, I could show you where you’re wrong.”
A pity we don’t have the books, then,” Trap said, turning his gaze back to the road.
“What you’re saying can’t be right. It’s … it just makes it all too easy.”
“Yes. It does.”
“Well, that’s not right. It’s not supposed to be-” A cold aura washed around him from behind, stopping his words as it stopped his horse, the mare’s head coming up with a snort, her eyes rolling in alarm. Beside him Trap fought to control his own mount, the creature sidestepping, prancing, backing round into Abramm’s horse. A brief, rhythmic hiss of wingbeats stirred the air and rustled the ratweed while the horses snorted and Abramm pulled the mare’s nose almost to her neck to keep her from bolting. Part of him wanted to let her run, even as he knew they would never escape.
But the coldness faded without incident, the horses’ frenzy waning with it, leaving them sweat-drenched and blowing as if from a hard run. The men on their backs exchanged a grim glance-the veren had found them and flown on by. Which could only mean it had more important tasks elsewhere.
Like aiding in the assault on the SaHal.
If Beltha’adi destroyed the Dorsaddi, the Deliverer would have no one to deliver.
C H A P T E R
30
They rode the rest of the day in silence, reaching another way station by midafternoon. This one was truly deserted, its spring long dried up. They passed it by without a word and stopped for the night leagues later.
Trap offered to take the first watch, and Abramm was weary enough that he did not argue. Not long after they had settled, however, he was jolted awake by the sight of Trap’s right hand glowing eerily with the white light of his Terstan power, his grizzled face washed with its luminance. His eyes were closed, his features still with concentration, and for a moment the glow spread out from his hand, forming a saucer shape roughly the diameter of his forearm. Then it vanished, and Trap sighed as if he were disappointed.
“What are you doing?” Abramm asked, half suspecting him of trying some sort of persuasive demonstration to follow up their earlier conversation.
Some of us are able to fashion a shield with the light,” Meridon explained. “I thought it might come in handy if I could learn how.”
Abramm couldn’t begrudge him for trying. If they were attacked, they’d need all the help they could get. Abramm just didn’t think they would be. At least, not by the veren.
They crossed the upper reaches of the Eranay Valley the next day. The road cut through the rumpled foothills of a great mountain whose dark slopes rose into the mist on their right. After centuries of drought, the river was dry, just another steep-walled channel cut into the gray-and-brown hills. An easy crossing today, but in a few more weeks it would be a raging torrent, rushing toward the vast network of cisterns and reservoirs waiting to be replenished downstream.
Beyond the river the road deteriorated further, its crumbling pavement often buried under sand or thick, dead grass. It was in such bad shape they worried they’d lost the route, until finally they crested a ridge and found the barren hillocks tumbling down to the lip of a vast, geologic cauldron, boiling with mist. A thin ribbon of road looped and twisted between them and the ruin of Sedouhn, crumbling at the cauldron’s edge, the last of the Dorsaddi cities to fall.
They reached the city by midmorning and discovered that it supported its own complement of poverty-stricken settlers, carving out their living along its fringes. A small orchard, the pathetic patches of dead cornstalks and squash, the rock cairns with their onion wreaths and tattered prayer flags-all gave evidence of occupation, though they saw no one.
They rode through the slag-edged hole that was once the main gate and along an avenue of gutted buildings. Dark lines scored the pavement and ground amid deep blast pits. Arrowheads and weathered shafts by the hundreds lay in the sparse grass alongside rusting pieces of armor and decomposing bones.
The city spring, once delivered in an elegant, stone-walled pool, now bubbled up around broken and fallen blocks. Still, it was the most vigorous wellspring they’d yet encountered, and they filled all their bags, noting as they did the roil of tracks left in the drifted sand by the soldiers who had preceded them. Riding on, they passed through the inner wall, whose throne-wood gates had also felt the explosive powers of Broho magic. From there it was a straight shot to the final gates, which guarded egress into the SaHal itself. Remarkably intact, they stood at the end of a grisly gauntlet of throne-wood poles bearing the tattered skeletons of long-dead criminals.
All except the last four.
These sported fresh corpses, one pair mere hours dead. Though the four wore Dorsaddi robes, all were northerners-two blonds and two redheads. Their eyes had been put out, their hands cut off, their throats slit-but it was the red-fletched arrows protruding from their chests that had killed them.
Abramm was not aware of pulling his horse to a halt, but somehow he found himself stopped at the last post, staring up at the dead man’s face. From the Dorsaddi perspective, it must look a good deal like his own.
Apparently Sheleft’Ai did not make a way for them,” Trap said.
Abramm let out a long, low breath. They had known the Dorsaddi killed intruders, but seeing it in the flesh was more unnerving than he expected.
At least we don’t look as obviously northern as these fellows,” Trap said. “I’ll wager neither of the blonds had your eyes, either.”
Abramm snorted. “You really think they’ll let us get close enough to see my eyes?”
‘At least we know they’re still fighting.”
Neither of them suggested turning back.
An iron grate and railing had been constructed immediately outside the slumping gate, extending over empty space to the narrow trail carved into the cliffside of the SaHal. When the horses refused to walk over it, the men had to dismount, cover the animals’ eyes with their headcloths, and lead them across. From there, the road angled gently downward along the cliff, protected by a three-foot-high wall of Ophiran construction.
As they descended, the temperature plunged and the mist thickened, cutting visibility to a mere five strides. The wall stopped at the first switchback, and the trail deteriorated. Many of the paving stones were loose or missing. Deep ruts, exposed roots, and huge rectangular stones laid crossways to prevent erosion made the going rough. It probably helped that they could see nothing but mist. The dry, thick dust and scatterings of manure confirmed Trap’s guess that the troop of Esurhites was at least a day ahead of them.
Time seemed to stand still as they rounded one switchback after another, steadily descending. The cliff walls loomed forbiddingly barren, home to only small grasses and occasional spiny cacti. Even when the switchbacks leveled off to a meandering, downsloping trail, the surrounding rock remained bare and dry.
Small crunches and crackles and whispers of movement sounded continuously around them, sounds Abramm repeatedly assured himself were just echoes of his and Trap’s own passage. But with the mist making it impossible to confirm that, the back of his neck crawled again and again. Though there was a good chance the Dorsaddi had fallen to Beltha’adi’s two-sided attack or were at least heavily occupied with fighting it off, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were out there, watching him. That at any moment a redfletched arrow would zing out of the mist and bury itself in his back.
A more reasonable fear would be that they would round a bend in the rock and find themselves suddenly in the midst of the Esurhite patrol they knew had preceded them, but he could not shake the sense that it was Dorsaddi who watched them.
The road dropped onto a barren, rocky shelf, then into a narrow, redwalled canyon. Swarms of blackand gray-striped staffid disguised as rocks erupted to life before Trap’s horse, scuttling off into the cracks in the rock around them. The clop and rustle of their passing echoed loudly off smooth vertical walls clo
se enough to touch, and Abramm’s feelings of claustrophobia mounted.
They found the first body at the canyon’s end, sprawled facedown on the sand and attended by a pair of ravens. Clad in the gray tunic of the soldiers of the Black Moon, the man was weaponless, armorless, and bootless. Though his throat had been cut, it was the hole in his back that killed him-a bloody, torn-up mess, most likely the result of an arrow. The arrow itself was nowhere to be found.
Another body, similarly disposed, lay alongside the road farther up, the third in another excruciatingly narrow ravine, the horses forced to step over it. And the one after that.
In the mist it was difficult to judge distance or even time, but it seemed the Dorsaddi were giving their visitors lots of opportunity to watch and worry before they picked their next victim.
The fifth casualty lay at the point where the trail crossed a cactus-dotted shelf and dropped into a narrow canyon. “Well,” Abramm said as they left the body behind, “it seems the Dorsaddi are everything their reputation claims them to be.”
The Terstan glanced back at him, the grizzle on his jaw showing distinctly red, despite the dirt and lard that stained his skin. “Yet you’ll note we’re still alive.”
“They’re playing with us.”
Trap cocked a brow. “Maybe they see we’re weaponless, bedraggled, and riding obviously stolen horses. With no tack.”
“We don’t have the right coloring.”
“We don’t exactly look Esurhite, either.” He turned to nudge his horse onward. “Maybe we’re just enough of an enigma to stay their hands.”
`And here I thought it was Eidon’s doing.”
“Oh, it is, my friend.” Trap grinned back at him.
They emerged from the second cleft and started across a mist-bound flat. The trail climbed up over a rocky shelf, then descended around an old, dead thronetree, long since toppled on its side. It was the first sign of real vegetation they’d seen, and there was a crow-sized red bird hidden in the depths of its crown, obscured, but for its bright colors, by the gnarled tangle of dead branches.
As they rode past, Abramm’s neck suddenly crawled with a fierce, sixthsense knowledge of impending attack, and he whirled to find the bird-a small red heron?-launching itself out of the tree at him. Arena-bred instincts had him kicking his horse forward half a heartbeat before the realization that it was only a bird caught up with him. But as he knocked the creature aside with his free arm, something struck the other arm, jerking at his sleeve and pulling him off balance, even as his mount staggered and threw up her head with a snort. He glimpsed a red-fletched arrow bouncing on the stone beside her, and his alarm resurged with a vengeance. Moving with the momentum the arrow had imparted, he was sliding off the horse when she shuddered and collapsed with a groan, dead of the arrow in her heart. Crouched behind her now, Abramm frantically scanned the mist for signs of his assailants and wondered if the bird was coming back and why it had attacked at all. Then he saw it, lying where he’d knocked it, a third arrow buried in is breast. And it was not a heron, but a needle-beaked, long-necked feyna.
Which confused him more than ever.
Trap had wheeled his own mount back, still unaware they were under attack, when the Dorsaddi emerged from the mist, ghosts in salmon- and ochre-tinged robes, too numerous to count. They held longbows, raised and drawn, their gleaming broadheads all aimed at the northerners.
C H A P T E R
31
They were seized and stripped of robes and tunics, the dragon brands on their arms and the holes in their ears seemingly something the Dorsaddi expected. They exclaimed over the talisman Abramm wore about his neck, however, and the golden shield on Trap’s chest brought them to a standstill. They all had to examine it, fingering it as they exchanged soft urgent murmurs in oddly accented Tahg, but their interest did not stop them from binding both captives and loading them belly down across the backs of their horses.
Undignified and uncomfortable as the position was, Abramm counted it better than being shot and endured the subsequent passage of time stoically, trying not to think of what lay ahead. By the time they stopped, it was dark and his legs were so numb they wouldn’t support him unaided. He had to lean dizzily against the horse that had borne him here until the blood flowed back into them. When he was recovered enough to walk again, he found himself in a narrow, steep-walled canyon, facing a huge-pillared edifice carved out of the red stone walls. A crowd of dark-faced, pale-robed Dorsaddi stood shoulder to shoulder around the newcomers, watching in ominous silenceuntil Trap straightened and his shieldmark flashed in the torchlight. Those nearest flinched back and began muttering among themselves, the tone angry and questioning all at once.
Hands still bound behind them, the prisoners were guided up the stairs and through the tall doorway into a massive torchlit chamber thick with smoke and packed with more hostile figures. Originally a natural formation, the chamber’s floor had been paved with small square tiles of lapis lazuli and red agate. Two tiers of iron-railed balconies protruded from the walls above, their railings lined with silent, watching Dorsaddi.
The crowd on the floor parted before the new arrivals like water before a ship’s bow. A good head taller than any of them, Abramm could easily see the dais at the chamber’s far end, where a group of men waited. Two wore white turbans and white robes twined with purple-and-gold embroidery, gold medallions gleaming on their chests. The rest wore salmon- or ochre-tinted robes that were no different from any others, though Abramm figured one of them must be the Dorsaddi king, Shemm, Shettai’s brother.
As Abramm approached and climbed the low stair to meet them, their hard, lean faces acquired detail. The white-turbaned men were clean-shaven, almond eyed, and grim lipped, and the medallions of each were different. One was a jeweled shield of solid gold with Tahg symbols engraved upon its face; the other was a glass sphere as big as a man’s palm. Seeing them, Abramm understood why their captors had been so intrigued by Trap’s shieldmark and his own Terstan orb.
The other men sported close-clipped black beards and dark hair pulled back into warrior’s knots. Several wore the gold rings of fighting prowess up the sides of their ears, and one wore the wide gold neckband of royalty.
It was this one that drew Abramm’s immediate attention, but not because of the gold band. Dark bushy brows met over the bridge of a long, strong nose, sheltering dark, almond-shaped eyes, his features a masculine image of Shettai’s. The resemblance was so strong Abramm couldn’t help but stare, a sudden catch in his throat. No question this was King Shemm.
He had no sooner reached that conclusion than he was jerked to a stop and shoved to his knees. Trap was forced down likewise as the patrol’s leader slid the orb and it’s chain over Abramm’s head and stepped forward. He bowed deeply to the king, then handed him the talisman. Shemm glanced at it expressionlessly and passed it to one of the priests, who received it with a scowl. Slowly then, the king circled his prisoners, pausing to stroke the brands on their arms, to inspect the holes in their ears, finger the dust from their hair, and rub at the edges of Trap’s shieldmark.
Finally he drew back and addressed the patrol leader. “How is it you bring them to us alive, Japheth?”
The man straightened. “I believe they may be the ones foretold, my Lord King.”
“That is not for you to say?” snapped the priest who wore the shield medallion. A stout, thick-bodied man, he crackled with latent energy, a coiled spring ready to explode. “You know no outlander may violate the sanctity of the SaHal and live.”
“We had them in our hands, Holy One,” Japheth protested. “Three of us shot-none more than ten strides away-yet here he stands, unscathed.”
An excited mutter spread out through the crowd, and the second priest, the one who wore the glass sphere, was staring at them with a sort of wondrous joy. “Sheleft’Ai made them a way,” he said, turning to his cohort. “It truly is them, Mephid!”
“Bah!” Mephid slashed the air. “It was chance an
d no more. Save perhaps the delaying influence of wishful thinking.”
All three of them?” the second priest demanded. At the same moment?”
“We treated these no differently than the others, Holy One,” Japheth said.
“Aye, we shot the tall one’s horse right out from under him?” one of the other men added.
Mephid was not convinced. “They are imposters?” He turned to the king. “More of Beltha’adi’s tricks, Great One. I say kill them at once, and post their bodies with the others?”
“But, Mephid,” said his fellow priest, “the others did not come with orb and shield. And that one’s eyes-blue as Andolen silk, just like the Pretender’s.” He, too, turned to the king. “I say it is them, Great One, brought to us by Sheleft’Ai himself”
“The Pretender was lost in the warrens outside Xorofin?” Mephid exclaimed, glaring at his cohort. “Was that not how Chael reported it?”
They turned to one of the men standing at the back of the dais, and the king spoke. “Chael, is it so? Are these the men?”
Chael stepped forward, regarded them closely, then shrugged. “I cannot say. I saw them only from a distance.”
“But you saw them go in.” Mephid turned back to the king. “We all know no one comes out of the warrens alive.”
“That is true, Holy One,” Chael said. “But it is also true that no one can kill the Horror with a sword, yet the two I saw did.”
“Nor stand against the Broho and live,” the second priest said, “yet they did that as well.”
Mephid slashed the air again. Ast! You do not know that, Nahal! It is only a tale-and likely untrue.”
King Shemm, who had watched all this without comment, now turned to his prisoners. For a long moment he studied them thoughtfully, wearing that same stony look Shettai had been so good at. Finally he spoke. “So who do you say you are?”