Her arrow was embedded in the trunk of a thin tree and one of the lights was impaled on the shaft. The fist-sized green glow was fading fast. By the time she’d freed the arrow and brought it close enough to study, the light was gone. Her gloved hands felt nothing foreign on the shaft.
Shouts from flanking riders told her the other light had been found. She rode toward them. A curving expanse of gray wall loomed. A band of mounted elves waited beside it. Kerian spotted Glanthon in the group.
She hailed him. “How was your crawl underground?” she asked.
“Like a sorcerer’s nightmare, General, but right now, we seem to have an intruder trapped.”
He gestured at the wall behind them. Massively thick, its top was at eye level to the mounted elves. No structures showed beyond it.
Kerian shook her feet free of the stirrups. Crouching on her saddle, she sprang atop the wall. Glanthon and eight other elves joined her on the broad stone barrier.
The wall was a perfect circle, enclosing a paved area forty yards across. In the center of the pavement was a raised platform ten yards across and four feet high. Great wedges of gray stone had been fitted together to make the round platform. Drifting over it, like leaves wafting on an autumn breeze, were four glittering lights: one each of green, red, yellow, and blue.
Kerian dropped to the pavement inside the wall.
“Our quarry has slipped away and left these will-o’-the-wisps to keep us busy,” she said. “I intend to take one back to study.”
“Wait! We don’t know what they are!” Glanthon warned, gathering himself to leap down and follow her.
She told him to stay where he was, and kept going.
When she neared the center of the platform, the lights abandoned their aimless paths and began to circle her. Faster and faster, they whirled in ever-tightening circles. Remembering how the sand beast had disappeared when the lights touched it, Kerian didn’t wait for the inevitable. She threw herself flat on her stomach. The lights crashed together above her and vanished in a silent burst of greenish light.
By the time Glanthon and the others arrived, she was sitting up. “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” she said, accepting Glanthon’s hand to help her stand.
The Lioness thought it likely the lights were responsible for the mysterious disappearances among her warriors. Where the elves had been taken, and why, remained unknown, however, and she couldn’t risk searching any further.
“We’re getting out of this valley. Now.”
The ride to Khuri-Khan would become legend. After Prince Shobbat’s messenger departed, Adala’s people hurriedly broke camp and began the journey south to the city of the Great Khan. Clouds, rarely seen over the high desert, blew in from the sea, piling up like brilliant white dunes in the sky. The heat of the wasteland caused the clouds to writhe and twist, forming fantastic patterns of light and shadow on the ground below. Shade was an experience few nomads ever had while crossing the burning sands. They rode with faces turned skyward, watching the spectacle with a mixture of fascination, awe, and not a little fear.
Adala swayed across the wind-driven wastes on the back of stolid, faithful Little Thorn, dozing when the glare of the sun became too intense. The frowning clouds were to her a portent of things to come. She saw in them the boiling anger and pride of the
Two days away from the Valley of the Blue Sands, just after sunrise, scouts brought word that a large mounted force was approaching from the west. Alarmed, the desert warriors unslung their bows and shields, forming themselves to receive an attack. Adala’s warmasters and clan chiefs gathered around her, drawn swords resting on their shoulders.
Wapah, seated behind Bilath, speculated that the
“Ten thousand pardons, O Weyadan!” said one of the scouts. “Those coming toward us are not
Bilath shifted in his saddle. “Soldiers of Sahim-Khan?”
“They bear the banner of a scorpion on a field of yellow, with three notches in the wind’s edge.”
“The standard of the Mikku,” Wapah supplied. He was widely traveled and knew the standard of every tribe and clan. The Mikku were far from their usual range, but they were nomads, too, brothers of the Weya-Lu, the Khur, the Tondoon, and the rest.
Zaralan, chief of the Black Horse Clan, voiced the prevailing opinion when he said, “They’re invading our territory.”
“We’ll stand them off!” vowed Bindas, young and hot-tempered.
“No. We are not here to shed the blood of our own,” said Adala. She addressed the scouts. “How far away are they?”
“Four miles when we first saw them. Less by now, Maita.”
