Sanctuary

While the scout and his panting horse quenched their thirsts, she turned to another important task. It was time to apprise Gilthas of their progress. The sun was low in the late afternoon sky, but she didn’t want to wait until morning to dispatch a courier.

She chose a rugged Kagonesti named Redhawk to return to Khurinost with the reports she’d composed. The sealed letters went into a leather pouch, which the Kagonesti looped around his neck. She handed him one last missive, a flat parcel wrapped in oilskin and sealed with wax.

“This,” she said, “is for the Speaker personally. No one else. The other dispatches may be handed to Planchet or Hamaramis, but this goes into no hands but Gilthas Pathfinder’s.”

Redhawk swore to carry out the mission exactly. Laying a blue-tattooed hand on the pouch around his neck, he vowed, “This will not leave me so long as I live.” None knew better than she the seriousness of a Wilder pledge.

When Redhawk had diminished to a smudge of dust on the horizon, she turned her attention back to the Qualinesti scout.

“Lead us to the entrance into the pass. We’ll camp there for the night.”

With the Qualinesti in the lead, the column moved out.

The three mountain peaks loomed ahead, blotting out all sight of the way beyond. Kerian stared in amazement at their snowy tops. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d seen snow.

As the column entered the mouth of the pass, the last fingernail slice of sun vanished below the western range to their left. With the light gone, the temperature plummeted, leaving shivering riders to don long-unused cloaks. It really wasn’t so cold, but compared to the blast furnace of the High Plateau, the air felt frigid indeed.

The pass was a silent place. The wind, which had swirled around the elves since the Khalkist mountains first came in view, died away. Although there were more plants about—scrub pines and gnarled junipers, thorny greasebushes and spiky aloe—the area seemed oddly lifeless. The only sound to be heard was the clink of their horses’ hooves on the pebbly soil. No birds chattered from the trees, no insects buzzed.

Color was returning. To elven eyes, the desert was dull, all tans, browns, and grays surmounted always by a blue sky that, cloudless, seemed oddly flat. At the mouth of the Inath-Wakenti, subtle shadings were restored to the landscape’s palette. The mountainsides were softly washed in purple and blue. Dark green pines stood over dwarf junipers in lighter greens. Moss and lichen mottled the rocks in silvery gray, or a green as bright as the limes popular in Khuri-Khan.

Kerian did not like it. When the valley had been nothing more than a spot on a map, she’d had many reasons for not wanting to come here, much less to live here. Now that it was real, now that she was here, her objections only increased. The very feel of the place was wrong. Tainted somehow.

She wasn’t the only one to notice this. Favaronas had drawn his cape close around his shoulders. “Feels like a graveyard,” he muttered, his eyes darting left and right.

Unconsciously, the elves slowed their pace. They’d come through the fiery crucible of the High Plateau, losing many of their number to nomads, the sand beast, and heat stroke, and they had reached their goal at last, yet no one felt any joy. No one smiled. Like Favaronas, all were looking around uncertainly, not drinking in the sight of their fabled destination, but regarding it with suspicion. Talk ceased. Every face reflected the same thought: What sort of place have we come to?

“General! Tracks!”

Kerian shook off the tomblike mood and urged her mount into a trot. The vanguard riders had found an area of prints. Horses had crossed the elves’ intended path, from left and right. Kerian dismounted and joined one of the scouts, kneeling to study the prints.

“Small hooves. Unshod,” she observed.

“Nomad ponies,” agreed the Wilder scout. “Many.”

“How long ago?”

He put his sun-darkened face scant inches from the prints, then lifted a handful of trampled dirt, crushed it, and let it fall from his fingers. “Half a day or less, but more than an hour,” he reckoned.

So much for having beaten the nomads to the pass, she thought unhappily. Kerian rose. Favaronas arrived leading his horse. He asked what they had found.

“Nomads,” she said. “Probably the same ones we’ve fought twice before.”

“Why? We aren’t in their desert anymore,” the archivist said, exasperated.

“To keep us out of the valley.” Dusk had come and gone. Stars were appearing overhead. Kerian realized that even she, with her keen eyesight, found it difficult to penetrate the shadows ahead. A sudden shiver chased itself down her spine, and she muttered, “I almost wish they would.”

The howl of a wolf pierced the air. Immediately it was answered by others both ahead and behind the elves. Kerian’s gloomy mood shattered.

“Stand to horse!” she cried, drawing her sword.