Alliances

“It is you,” he murmured, amazed.

“What happened? How did you get here?”

“I might ask you the same thing, Commander,” he joked wanly. “Mostly I walked, all the way from Khur.”

He was swaying on his feet. Kerian helped him sit again and sat next to him. He gestured to his emaciated, fever-ravaged companion lying by the fire. “That’s Camaranthas. We two are all that remain of the party the Speaker sent to find you.”

As they turned to look, the elf tending Camaranthas shook his head. Hytanthas’s last comrade had succumbed. Without a word, the surrounding warriors bowed their heads, clapped their hands together twice, paused, and clapped twice again, the ancient salute to the dead from House Protector.

“He never knew we made it.” Hytanthas’s face had the dull, vacant look of one who has mourned too much already.

Kerian sympathized with his loss, but time was pressing. “You must come with me. I must hear your tale. There are important people you must speak with.” Belatedly, she added, “Have you eaten?”

He had. Alhana’s guards had given him food and water. What he needed was sleep. Camaranthas had been wounded in a goblin ambush four days earlier. Hytanthas had sworn he would find a healer and had not dared to rest, lest his comrade perish.

Kerian promised he would sleep soon in the best accommodations to be found in Bianost, but he must hold out just a little longer.

As horses were brought for them, Hytanthas said, “Lady, I have dire news. The Speaker and all our people are in grave peril!”

She suppressed an impatient sigh. “As they were when I left. As they will always be in Khurinost.”

“They’re not in Khurinost any longer!”

He explained the Speaker had begun the great trek to Inath-Wakenti with the entire nation. Swarms of nomads dogged their heels. The last news Hytanthas had gleaned from other travelers was two weeks old. It said that the Speaker and the nation were near the northern mountains. Many had died from nomad attacks. The Speaker intended to make a stand, to hold off the growing threat from the desert tribesmen.

Kerian’s impatience vanished, replaced by disbelief. Make a stand? They’d had a defensible position at Khuri-Khan, but Gilthas had abandoned it. Instead, he’d led their nation into the desert to die!

She took a deep breath, working hard to regain her composure. “Come,” she said, taking his arm and gently propelling him toward his borrowed horse.

They mounted. On the way, she explained about the council being held in the newly freed town, of the presence of Alhana Starbreeze, her guards, and several hundred town elves ready to throw off the bandit occupation.

“They all must hear what you have told me,” she finished.

“Then will we return to Khur? That was my mission, to bring you back to the Speaker.”

She looked away, toward the torchlit town. “If what you heard is true, Hytanthas, there is no Speaker anymore. No elf nation, either.”

Chapter 9

Rising out of the vast expanse of Khur’s northern desert were a series of rocky pinnacles. Before the First Cataclysm they were part of the Khalkist range to the north, connected to those mountains by long ridges that projected into the arid southern plain like great bony fingers. Time and catastrophe had eroded the fingers, leaving only the isolated pinnacles. There were six of them, known to the nomads as the Lion’s Teeth. Individually, from northwest to southeast, they were called Pincer, Ripper, Great Fang, Chisel, Lesser Fang, and Broken Tooth. Great Fang was the tallest; Pincer, the smallest. Broken Tooth covered the largest area and sported a wide, flat top.

Distributed around the bases of these spires were thousands of elves, survivors of the exodus from Khurinost, their tent city under the walls of Khuri-Khan. In six months the ponderous column had progressed barely sixty miles. Apart from the massive logistical problems of moving so many people, their possessions, and their livestock across the inhospitable terrain, the elves had been dogged every step of the way by growing numbers of Khurish nomads.

The desert tribesmen had always resented the presence of outsiders in their sacred land, but they had largely ignored the elves until Adala, female chieftain of the Weya-Lu tribe, awakened to the special danger the elves posed. It was not their trespass (considered a grave sin among nomads), nor their trampling of Khurish traditions that provoked Adala to action. As long as the laddad remained in their squalid tent city, Adala could ignore them. The spur that finally caused her to raise her people against them was their Speaker’s decision to lead his people away from the Khurish capital to settle in a valley on the northern border of Khur. The elves called it Inath-Wakenti, the Vale of Silence. City-dwelling Khurs knew it as the Valley of the Blue Sands and considered it little more than a fable.