Sanctuary

Late in the day, scroungers quartering the Lake of Dreams found a big bay horse, quite unlike the usual nomad ponies. The bay was trapped in the laddad fashion, with a heavy war saddle and mail aprons protecting neck and hindquarters. It lay dead at the edge of a six-foot-wide hole in the sand. The crater was lined with blackish-green glass, remnants of a lightning strike. No rider’s body was found nearby.

Thorough if not reverent, the Khurs stripped the horse of its trappings. To do so, they had to heave the dead animal up. Beneath it they found a thick pile of leaves, still green, though crisp and dry. It seemed a weird discovery, but none of the Khurish scavengers recognized the leaves. They had never seen the ash trees of more temperate climes. Exposed by the removal of the fallen horse, the desiccated leaves whirled away on the wind.

* * * * *

“And the dead?”

The Tondoon chief consulted the tally in his hand. “Four thousand one hundred and sixteen slain or rendered incapable of further fighting,” he said solemnly. Adala thanked him.

She and her champions rode near the head of their warbands, making for the safety of the deep desert. Iron-fisted Hakkam had finally ceased his pursuit, not wanting to risk his cavalry in the deeper sands, but still the nomads kept going, west toward the lowering sun, into the fastness of the desert.

The faces of the chiefs around her were grim. Practical as ever, Adala was noting the cuts and tears in their robes. She’d need an army of seamstresses to mend them all.

“What now, Weyadan?” asked her kinsman Bilath, trying not to sound dispirited.

“We continue the fight,” she answered simply. “This war isn’t finished until one side or the other is undone. We still live. Those who live can continue the fight.”

“But can we defeat the Khan and the laddad?” The new chief of the Tondoon, Othdan, scowled and clenched the reins of his pony. Like Bindas of the Weya-Lu, Othdan was young, only twenty-six. Many of the old faces were gone. Othdan was succeeding two chiefs who had died fighting; one had been forty-four, the next, thirty-seven.

He reminded them of the scouts’ reports. The laddad had at least ten thousand cavalry that had not entered the fray. There were nods and murmurs of agreement. The Weya-Lu fighters remembered how fiercely even a small force of laddad cavalry had fought during the journey to the Valley of the Blue Sands.

“How can we stop such troops?” Othdan said. “They’re too powerful!”

“Too powerful to fight in open battle, yes,” Adala agreed. “But as ants devour the panther, so can we overcome the laddad. It will take patience and skill. We must bind up our wounds and wait for our opportunity.” Her stare burned into each of them, like the blazing sun in the west. “None of us must forget the debt we owe our dishonored dead, to avenge their murders and purify the land of Khur of its foreign taint!”

Wearily the chiefs agreed and turned their mounts to gallop off and see to their men. Only Wapah remained.

Adala was silent for a long time, so long that Wapah thought she dozed. But she wasn’t sleeping. She was thinking hard thoughts.

“Do you still believe in my maita?” she asked. “Many think our defeat by the Khan’s troops means Those on High have abandoned us.”

“I believe,” he said simply. Then, because he was Wapah the philosopher, he added, “Does the herd know the mind of the shepherd, Adala Weyadan? Virtue will triumph. Your maita will triumph.”

For a moment a smile played over one corner of her mouth. Good old Wapah. “How can you be so sure?”

“Your maita must triumph. If we are given the choice between good and evil, it follows there is value to making the choice. Evil means chaos and the end of our lives. Since sane people do not willingly end their lives, we choose good so we may survive. For the world to survive, good must triumph.”

In the face of such confidence, Adala did not mention her own doubts. Sheer power had saved the laddad this time. Such force was itself neither good nor bad. The morality lay in how it was used, as a sword could kill an innocent child or a fiendish enemy. If Adala and her people were to prove victorious, they needed power of their own before they faced the laddad in open battle.

* * * * *

Striding the halls of the Khuri yl Nor, Prince Shobbat stopped every so often and looked back into the shadowed recesses behind him. He kept hearing noises-rustlings and soft scrapings, like the scrabbling of rats. It was not rodents but assassins he feared. Hengriff’s death might stir trouble with the Dark Knights, but the Order had no patience with bunglers. They might blame Hengriff for his own death, for mingling too intimately in Khurish affairs. Either way, their next emissary would have to be a far more clever plotter to get the better of Shobbat.

He smiled at the thought. The expression ended in a wince of pain. His father had a hard fist; Shobbat’s jaw was well bruised.