Sanctuary

Wapah began his tale. With the same patience she’d learned listening to her sons when they were toddlers, Adala let the colorful torrent of words wash over her and focused on the important bits of information scattered throughout.

Prince Shobbat’s men had come to the Grand Souks, looking for someone to guide their master on a journey through the desert. Wapah was selected because the gods knew him to be a humble man, a generous man, a man in whom the blood of endless generations of Weya-Lu flowed in a mighty, endless circle—

Adala frowned, closing her eyes to concentrate harder.

With no escort at all, Wapah and the Prince of Khur rode out of Khuri-Khan before dawn. They reached the Tear of Elir-Sana without incident. Although of no more use in the desert than a mewling babe, Shobbat insisted they press on without rest to reach his goal, the oracle of the high desert.

Wapah paused to sip buttered tea, and Bilath, Adala’s brother by marriage and war chief of the Weya-Lu, asked, “The Hidden One? The keeper of bats?”

Wapah nodded solemnly. On his left, his cousin Etosh poured more tea into his crater.

They reached the oracle at night. No one in Wapah’s memory had gone there, and he didn’t know if the diviner still lived, but the ancient stone spires still stood, and the legendary bats flooded out when disturbed. Wapah, a righteous man, warned the prince he would not enter the sanctuary, so Shobbat went alone and stayed inside until nearly dawn.

Wapah was asleep between the horses when he heard a terrible scream. Rising valiantly, sword in hand, he braced himself to do battle against evil spirits. None appeared. Instead, Prince Shobbat stumbled out of the sanctuary, raving like a madman.

“Tell about his face!” Etosh urged him.

“The breath of the gods had fallen upon the prince,” Wapah declaimed, spreading his arms wide, “stealing the manly color from his beard, brow, and hair! The stain was white as the scarves of the Khan’s dancers!”

Adala looked down her long nose at him. “White is the color of light, of Eldin the Judge.” This was the remote high god of the nomads, seldom spoken of and rarely invoked. “What evil can come from Eldin?”

A murmur went through the group, and Bilath said, “Then you believe it was a judgment, not a curse?”

Wapah did not wish to lose his audience in a theological discussion, so he continued quickly.

The tormented prince was not only ranting like one benighted, he was blind as well! He flailed his arms, crashing into the horses and Wapah. All the while he raved about trees growing in the desert, the coming of the elves, and how they would turn everything green unless stopped.

“I would like to see more green in this land,” Adala commented, and the assembled men stared at her. “But not under the rule of foreigners.”

Wapah had been forced to club Shobbat unconscious. After tying him onto his horse, the nomad started back to Khuri-Khan. When the prince awoke on the return journey, he was still crazed. Wapah questioned him, and Shobbat answered without guile, revealing everything, why he had come, what he’d hoped to gain, and what the oracle had said. But always, his talk returned to the elves and the danger they posed to Khur.

“He sought to depose his father,” said Etosh, with a sage nod. “His madness is the judgment of the gods, punishment for plotting such blood betrayal!”

There was little love for Sahim-Khan among the Weya-Lu, but when sons conspired to murder their fathers, evil was truly loose in the world.

Wapah said it was not the prince’s designs on the throne of Khur that consumed his disordered mind on the journey back to the city, but the oracle’s revelation that the laddad might transform Khur into a green land and rule over it. Wapah’s audience agreed with the maddened prince on that score. If that happened, the tribes of Khur would be lost. Everything they valued-families, traditions, loyalty to the gods-would be forfeit to foreign ways. Even the clean, beautiful emptiness of the land would be choked out by the vines and trees of the elves.

“ ‘If the elves find the Valley of the Blue Sands,’ ”

Wapah said, quoting the prince, “ ‘then the people of Khur are lost!’ ”

Draining his crater of tea, Wapah was silent at last. His audience was thunderstruck. Even Adala had no comeback to this final revelation. Elves looking for the Valley of the Blue Sands? Why would they go there? No one went there. It was haunted by troubled, unholy spirits.

“You should have slit the Khur’s throat,” said Etosh, breaking the somber silence. “Left him in the desert to feed the vultures.”

Several loud voices took issue with this statement. Such a betrayal of his charge would have brought ill hick down upon Wapah and his tribe. A Weya-Lu’s word was a bond not only to the men to whom it had been given, but to Those on High as well.

For a time, they argued the merit of Wapah’s decision to ferry the stricken prince back to Khur. As nothing useful emerged from their dispute, Adala finally Cut them off.