Sanctuary

The midafternoon sun bathed Kerian’s blonde head in a nimbus of white fire. As always, Gilthas could not help but be struck by her beauty, yet her grim expression was strikingly at odds with her loveliness. Her mood had grown worse since her return. It wasn’t only their clashes that accounted for this. The loss of her command and her humiliation at the hands of the bull-men still gnawed at her. She’d not told anyone else what had happened, and rumors had begun to circulate in camp. The Lioness’s courage was well known, but it could only be seen as odd that she had returned apparently unscathed from a battle in which all of her command had been lost.

Perhaps she was deep in thought, pondering the mission he’d given her, or perhaps she was concentrating on guiding her mount through the perils of the crowded tent city. Whatever the reason, although Gilthas waited, Kerian never glanced back at him. When, at last, she was lost to sight around a bend in the lane, he returned to his tent. Scouts from Taranath’s command had arrived in advance of the main body of the army, and they had much news to impart.

As Kerian and her aide passed through the tumult of the tent city, each noticed very different things. Hytanthas saw courage-common people struggling to live in a hostile, foreign place, and beginning to succeed. The Lioness saw only injustice—the most ancient race in the world forced from their rightful homes and made to suffer ignominiously in this terrible wilderness.

Like the roots of a tree, the environs of Khurinost were tangled, having grown haphazardly according to the lay of the land and the whims of its builders. Sahim-Khan had given the elves permission to set up a camp outside his capital; he had given them little else. Exhausted, sick, sunburned, and parched, the elves cobbled together whatever shelter they could, making tents out of everything from silken cloth to horse blankets to canvas sails formerly used by ships plying the Bay of Balifor.

Desert winds and errant embers from cookfires had taken a steady toll on the makeshift habitations, but as days became months and months grew into years, the elves learned to do better. The flimsy tents acquired wooden doorways, brass fireboxes and chimneys, and carpets to cover the sand. Wide, central streets were left open to the broiling sun, to allow carts and mounted elves to pass and to bring in fresh air, but the rest, the miles of narrow, twisting passages between tents great and small, were roofed with rush mats woven from the knife-edged grass that grew along the seaside below the city. The result was a warren no stranger could hope to navigate, the very antithesis of the elven love of order and beauty. But the confusing maze of streets and passages also served as an effective defense against interlopers.

Ahead, some forty yards beyond the edge of Khurinost, the wall of Khuri-Khan rose, its western face washed by the afternoon sun. Kerian lifted her gaze from the tent-city and studied the wall.

Sahim-Khan’s first priority after the fall of Malystryx was to rebuild his city’s defenses. Until these were complete his capital was vulnerable. The northern and western sectors had been repaired first. In those directions lay the greatest threats: the Knights of Neraka and the ogres of Kern. The elves lived under Sahim’s watchful eye, penned in by the city wall on one side and the pitiless desert on the other. The Lioness recognized Sahim-Khan’s sanctuary as both a gift and a trap. If the elves’ enemies moved against them now, there would be no escape for the Firstborn.

“Trapped,” she muttered.

“General?” Hytanthas asked, but she only shook her head.

A sextet of heavily armed humans guarded the west gate. They wore broad-brimmed helmets styled after the sun hats worn by nomads, but wrought in iron. Their cuirasses, cuisses, and greaves were of Nerakan pattern. For many years, Khurish soldiers had hired themselves out as mercenaries to the Knights. The soldiers also wore a coiled dragon device on their breastplates, marking them as members of the Khur tribe.

Although the Khurs had given their name to the country, they were only one of the Seven Tribes of the desert, named for the seven sons of Keja, who had first united the desert-dwellers into a single nation. Centered on the natural fortress of Khuri-Khan, the Khur tribe had come to dominate the others both in war and trade. All the khans of Khur had begun as princes of the Khur tribe.