Silent and still were the wastelands beyond the realm of the ko’aye. Tiny islands of reality lay every few miles, and to a one they were empty of anything but sand-scoured blue rock. The nearby shifts reflected their appearance completely, so that for hours on end the only sound Elenai heard was the clop of hooves on stone.
Kyrkenall seemed uninterested in talking. Though he’d said nothing, Elenai recognized that he feared his course of action meant he was failing N’lahr, Kalandra, or both. Maybe even the present company, despite which he pushed them and their animals to their limits.
Of the three of them, only Ortok made much noise, from time to time mumbling a tuneless chant about the lands and the hardy kobalin who lived within them. Elenai had asked him if he thought he might find an army in this direction, but he’d looked doubtful, saying only that an army might find them if they violated a holy place.
Eventually, evening came to the inhospitable run of fragments and splinters, and with it a chill wind that brought sound at last, as though the emptiness itself were given voice, or that all those who’d been lost in this vast beyond were crying out for warmth and company.
Ortok called them to a halt as they finally came upon an area they recognized from Drusa’s description: a rocky embankment with a little pool of orange water, twisted yellow trees, and scrubby gray grass. Kyrkenall asked Elenai to picket the horses while he started a fire.
The night fell, starless and cold. There was only the blackness, and the mottled corpse of the moon, hanging overhead at the wrong angle. By its light she saw Kyrkenall’s breath as he spoke. His voice was low and somber, as befitted the haunted landscape. She could barely make out his words at first.
“In the halls of Kantolus’ central palace there’s this painting I visit.” He didn’t look at either of them; the fire flickered under a particularly fierce blast of wind. Kyrkenall shrugged his cloak higher on his shoulders. “It’s mostly black, and sort of … representational? Anyway, there are dozens of white ghostly figures streaming away from the viewers, heading deeper into the painting. Every one of them is straining after this floating globe of light that wafts a few feet away from and in front of each, until the lead figures are lost in the distance. I’ve never seen anything so lonely. They don’t seem to notice each other, or the fact that someone else’s light is within closer reach. They’re just after their own.” He looked out into the night. “The painting’s titled Chasing the Dream. I wouldn’t be surprised to spot some ghostly figures chasing light spheres in that landscape out there.”
“You’re afraid that’s what we’re doing,” Elenai guessed.
“Aye. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing for a long while. If I hadn’t been hunting for Kalandra, I might have kept a better eye on the Naor, don’t you think? I got too wrapped up in my own troubles. Maybe that’s what most of us do, our whole lives long. Probably out of sight in that darkness is the cliff we’ll finally fall over.”
“Bah,” Ortok said. “We have joys together, and we will have more. And when we fall, we shall tell our tales to the Gods, and if they are pleased, they will laugh, and send us back in new bodies so we can bring back more stories.”
She liked his spirit, although, in this cheerless place, it was easier to atune with Kyrkenall’s mood than his. Ortok, whose concept of time would forever remain hazy, appeared oblivious to the pressure she and Kyrkenall felt. And it was clear that guilt ate at the archer as well. She felt for him, wondering how she might have chosen in similar circumstances. Would she have raced desperately out on the chance her lost love might finally be recovered? Or would she have turned back to aid her best friend? Either choice would have twisted her up inside.
“There is something I wonder,” Ortok said. “How does an alten find a mate? Is there a ceremony? Or a dance of some kind? Do you trade the heads of your fiercest enemies, or present one another with succulent flesh from animals you hunted?”
Kyrkenall actually laughed. “Not usually. Sometimes there are dances.”
“How did you fall in love with Kalandra?” Elenai asked. “You once told me she tried to get you kicked out of the corps.”
“When I was a squire, aye. I wasn’t good about following orders. And Kalandra went by the book.” Kyrkenall flashed a lopsided smile. “She didn’t have much use for me until the fourth rank, and she came around mostly because she was fond of Rialla and approved of N’lahr and they both stuck by me. But I still didn’t think she liked me much. It was Rialla who brought us together, in the end.” Elenai would have thought that he’d smile at that memory, but Kyrkenall grew darkly sober. “Everyone mourned her, of course, but Kalandra and I knew her best, and we found solace in each other’s arms. Rialla was Kalandra’s squire,” he added for Ortok’s benefit.
“Is that when you danced?” Ortok asked.
Kyrkenall’s head shook slowly from side to side. All humor seemed to have left him. “Maybe we should have. Maybe there should have been a grander declaration. We were friends who sometimes bedded together, and I lied to myself and said it wasn’t much more than that, even though I knew it was. And we were in the middle of the war. We tried not to talk about the future.”
Elenai smiled sadly.
“And then she was gone, and I couldn’t find her to tell her what I should have, all that time, and I didn’t know…” His hand rose as if he physically reached for a word. Finally he got it out: “… until that image of her told me she’d been feeling the same way.”
Elenai considered saying many things, and dismissed them all.
“You know,” Kyrkenall said, meeting Elenai’s eyes, “it was her who got me reading Selana. I used to think her poetry was as old-fashioned as you do.”
“Ah, Selana!” Ortok said with relish. “The great writer of poems and stories.”
Elenai blinked in astonishment that the kobalin knew her work, until he spoke on.
“In the evenings when I kept Kalandra company, she told me many of Selana’s words. They were fine. Sometimes Kalandra would act the part for me, and tell me lines to say in response. What a wonderful thing that was! I was once saying the lines of mighty Alvor of the Black Axe as he readied to smite his enemies!” Ortok sighed wistfully. “I should very much like to see that whole play. Kalandra told me she would take me to see one in Darassus, someday, when the war was all over. But now there is another war, and she is not here.”
“I’ll take you to my father’s playhouse in Vedessus,” Elenai said, astonished she could offer such a thing without consideration. The ancient city had been stunned to hear of a kobalin walking their streets. What would they think of one sitting in the audience beside them? She decided she didn’t care. “He runs the greatest theater in the realm.”
Ortok smiled widely. “Oh, that I would like very much.”
“That,” said Kyrkenall, “is something I’d like to see.” Whether he meant the play, or Ortok watching one, wasn’t clear. Probably he meant both.
“It would be fine for us to see it with Kalandra,” Ortok suggested.
“Yes,” the archer agreed quietly. “Yes, it would.” He reached out with a sturdy branch and stirred their little fire.
Before she turned in, Elenai contemplated the hearthstone once more, her back to the blaze and her companions, reaching into it for some sign of Rialla herself. But she had no greater luck finding her this evening than she had the last. There was power there, of course, fascinating power, and she shut the thing down before she lost herself in its contemplation, disgusted with how hard it was to resist the lure.
“No luck?” Kyrkenall asked.
“I just don’t think she’s there. We’ll have to wait for a dream.”
“I promise not to shake you awake,” Kyrkenall said.
“I appreciate that. But you’d better wake me, because time presses.”
“Aye.” Kyrkenall sighed.
Elenai wrapped the hearthstone and restored it to her satchel, then withdrew a smaller parcel, well aware of Kyrkenall’s regard. She might easily have worked the magics without holding N’lahr’s stone before her, but somehow taking it from the cloth and considering its physical presence felt right and proper. It was like the ritual moment of lighting candles before giving thanks. Soon she was looking down at the smooth side of the crystal, a clean slice made by the great sword Irion.
“He’ll know if the ko’aye are going to help him if they drop by to visit,” Kyrkenall said.
“He’ll want to know where we are,” she said. “And we can see if he’s well.”
Kyrkenall frowned, then turned up a hand. “I’m worried about him, too.”
“I won’t be long about it,” she said, sounding calm and wishing she felt it.
She turned the stone over in her hands, drew a deep breath, and opened it.
And she looked through N’lahr’s eyes. He was upon a small incline somewhere in The Fragments, in evening. The sun was at his back, and a thousand enemies lay before him. To his left a rank of spearmen held fast against a press of sword-bearing Naor warriors. She gasped, for N’lahr leapt in amongst them, reaping a bloody harvest with Irion, his breath in time with his motions, almost like a meditation. And even as he slipped past a thrust and sliced down through an armored shoulder and the muscle beneath she heard the flow of his thoughts and knew the plan for this battle—how N’lahr’s force had pretended to retreat, luring a band of Naor after them. While the enemy outnumbered them, the Naor fought uphill, facing into the sun. The Vedessi spearmen had but to hold here, using the ground to bolster their right flank while a mixed group of foot soldiers from Vedessus and Darassus held the left. It would be a close thing, with the Naor numbers in the thousands—what force was this?
The Snowbird clan.
That was all N’lahr had time to explain. She heard the blare of Kaneshi trumpets and understood from N’lahr’s thoughts that this was Enada’s cavalry striking the Naor force from the rear. If the foot soldiers could hold just a little longer the Naor would be smashed between them and the cavalry.
This was no time to communicate with the commander. Bad enough to distract him in the midst of combat, worse to render him stunned or senseless.
She was readying to shut down the stone when the pain lanced through every muscle in her body. She cried out even as N’lahr writhed, his sword uplifted for a death strike he couldn’t deliver.
You sought to aid him? The voice in her head asked, and she recognized it for Chargan, though she’d only heard it once before. Somehow the blood mage was interrupting her contact.
You may watch him die.
A howling Naor warrior came at the commander and slung his sword for his chest. N’lahr struggled to turn, failed, and she felt the impact against her own body as he went stumbling, felt the air leave his lungs as he tripped backward over a body. His side hurt, but the famed khalat had protected him.
That will not guard him for long. I sought in vain for him until your stone led the way!
As a bearded face loomed over N’lahr, Elenai flipped on the hearthstone at her side and added its power to her own; she sent energies hurtling through the connection to the gloating sorcerer, somewhere far outside the battle. She reflected her own pain at him, felt him recoil.
N’lahr moved, but slowly, oh so slowly, and the large Naor towered over him, his chain shirt dangling. His sword rose and teeth gleamed in a wicked grin through his heavy brown beard.
Elenai shouted out, dimly aware that Kyrkenall’s hand was on her shoulder.
And then another figure interposed herself before N’lahr—someone in a khalat and dark boots, and the Naor fell backward. N’lahr struggled to sit up, the pain fading, and through his eyes Elenai saw her friend Gyldara facing away from the commander, blood streaked sword in one hand, throwing axe in the other. “Hold the line!” she shouted hoarsely to a group of spearmen. “Hold the line!”
A dark winged shape dropped from the sky, a long tail swinging behind it. N’lahr called out to hold fire until his command, and Elenai knew from his thoughts that this, too, had been anticipated, that he had readied a counter for the dragons, so long as they dared fly low.
And then Chargan’s assault resumed, and the spell he sent against Elenai flattened her. Her mouth worked silently, like a fish ashore, for the air itself had been drained from her lungs. She gasped for air and could not pull it in until she rooted herself deeply in the stone.
She longed to fight back, even as Chargan readied new energies. But then the commander climbed to his feet and she remembered he was the battleground. Sooner or later Chargan would return his attack to N’lahr. And so she shut down the commander’s stone, then her own. She hoped that would be enough to keep the Naor sorcerer away from him.
All was dark and still and the moon was crooked overhead. As the pain faded, she realized Kyrkenall was with her, hand to her shoulder, his eyes sharp with worry. Ortok loomed behind him, looking confused.
She slowly pushed herself up from the rocky ground where she’d landed. Her head hurt, probably because she’d bumped it when she was thrown back.
Kyrkenall was asking what had happened and whether she was all right. He’d been asking it repeatedly.
“The Naor blood mage,” she said, surprised at how weary her own voice was. She looked up at the archer. “He used N’lahr’s stone to attack him and me both. And he’s far stronger than I would have imagined.”
“What about N’lahr?”
“I think Chargan could only attack him because the stone was active. So I shut it down.” What kind of power did the man command, to reach through the distance to attack two of them at once, in different places? And with her wielding a hearthstone? She gulped.
“N’lahr was in the midst of a big battle in The Fragments. I think they were winning, but it was a close thing, and there was at least one dragon readying to attack. Maybe two. I didn’t get a chance to tell N’lahr anything.”
“Was Chargan there?”
“Not right in front of him. It’s hard to know where. He must have been monitoring the situation with his magics, looking for some advantage, and sensed the sorcerous opening to N’lahr.” She pushed to her feet, looking down at N’lahr’s pale stone, its faceted sides reflecting the flickering red fire from a dozen angles.
“I should be there,” she said quietly. “We should be there.” She looked up at Kyrkenall and saw the worry stamped on his face. He stepped away and began to pace, as was his habit when he was truly vexed.
Chargan was a frightening foe. She had grown too used to the idea that her hearthstone use would see her through any challenge. But what was that power in comparison to whatever source Chargan wielded? She’d have to start thinking more tactically and stop relying on power alone.
A fine idea. Now how to apply it? She wasn’t sure.
Kyrkenall stopped in front of her. “We’re so close now.” There was a pleading note to his voice. “If the ko’aye get there, he’ll be all right, don’t you think?”
She spoke honestly. “I don’t know, Kyrkenall.”
The archer cursed and stepped away.
He took first watch that night. The chill deepened, but they let the fire die, for they had little wood left. The sun was slow in coming at dawn, and a wordless Kyrkenall gestured Ortok to lead.
A silent Elenai accompanied him, wrapped in both cloak and blanket, hunching in her saddle as she rode and thankful for the warmth of the horse against her legs. Their breaths streamed away in curious little curls.
After midday they hit a little run of land with scintillant skies where long-limbed grazers with oblong heads munched spiraling blue-violet grass. They let their horses eat for a while before mounting up once more. Near evening a storm blew up and cast everything in shadow, changing a few features nearby but requiring little effort to withstand. Elenai was pleased when the raindrops proved oddly warm.
The following two days were drier, but similar in the rising sense that they spent time they did not have wandering the wastes.
The next day they reached a land lined with hundreds of white and yellow objects, carefully spaced a few strides apart. It wasn’t until they drew near that Kyrkenall pointed them out for what they were: skulls.
The nearest were those of horses and oddly proportioned humanoids that were almost certainly kobalin. There were some of other large animals she couldn’t identify, and those of humans as well, though with the skin rotted away there was no knowing if they were Naor or her own people.
“We are very close to a place of power,” Ortok said. “And you should not be here.”
“I don’t see anyone here to stop us,” Kyrkenall said.
Their kobalin companion’s reply was ominous. “They will know.”
“So are these people and creatures that tried to come close and were killed?” Elenai asked.
“No. Each visitor brings a sign of their reverence.” Ortok pulled on his reins to guide Steadyfoot around the skull of some large horned animal.
A few miles after they crossed over the grim border, the skies lightened almost to white and the breeze that rolled over them was cool and laden with moisture, as though it had traveled from some warm, rainy place. Ahead loomed a low hillock upon which a small rounded building rose. The gentle slope was riddled with boulders and detritus.
“This is what we called the Round Stone Home, though none we knew made a home of it, for it was strange. But look now.” Ortok’s voice grew uncharacteristically soft. “A veritable place of numbers.”
Kyrkenall’s response was almost a whisper. “Upward of sixty.”
Elenai didn’t understand what he meant until they drew a little closer and she saw that the slope wasn’t decorated with any kind of rocks, but the remains of kobalin. In the strange light, she hadn’t seen them clearly, nor the long rusted axes, spears, and swords that lay beside them.
“It looks as though they approached the slope from the easiest side, first.” Kyrkenall rode slowly around the hillock. The place had appeared gentle from a distance, but Elenai saw now that all but one side was steep and scattered with small, red-thorned bushes. Even there, around the side of the building, were some skeletons, suggesting that some determined kobalin had climbed around or through the obstacles to meet their death. The majority, though, lay along a single route, the ramp that led to the building.
“What killed them?”
“The god,” Ortok said with grim certainty.
Elenai’s eyes drifted up to where the god presumably dwelt, a small temple with circular portico, supported by gray stone pillars. It was reminiscent of the temple they’d found in Kalandra’s stronghold, though much smaller. While there was luxuriant grass upon the summit of this hill, much like there had been around that other temple, only two or three good strides across the grass would take you from temple to hill edge.
“It’s hard to imagine anyone living here,” she said. Elenai resisted the inclination to seek with the hearthstone, relieved by her own willpower, peering only with aid of her Altenerai ring.
And she sensed no life before them, apart from the tiny creature in the soil. But then she wasn’t yet close enough to sense anything within the temple. As they finished their circle and closed again on the ramp, she detected something at its height.
Elenai felt the hairs rise along the back of her neck and arms. “An Altenerai ring,” she said. But why would it be lying outside the building? And how could such a small building sustain someone in any case? Could it possibly stock enough food and water to keep one person alive for what must be years? Might someone somehow be hidden out of reach of her ring’s senses, or hidden inside a gem? Might that explain it?
Kyrkenall climbed down from Lyria and led the way up the path, arrow nocked. Elenai followed suit, scanning the kobalin bodies. Scraps of clothing still rotted upon some of them, and little bits of rusted armor. Great knotted bones littered the grass, and long rusted weapons lay beside them. Some of the bodies rested upon their side, and a few upon their stomach, but many looked as if they’d been blown on their backs by a mighty force. Spell work.
“This was a brave battle,” Ortok mused behind her.
“Kalandra?” Kyrkenall called as he drew close to the top of the slope. He scanned the shadows of the portico.
There was no answer.
Kyrkenall advanced into that portico, froze, then, very slowly, dropped to one knee, head bowed. Elenai didn’t see the form lying with its back against the pillar until she reached his side.
The body had lain there for a long time. Yet there was no missing the Altenerai khalat, its colors little faded. The pant fabric had rotted away, but some boot leather still wrapped skeletal feet. And a sword lay across the breast, where it had once been clasped by the dying hand since desiccated. A ring circled one weathered fingerbone.
“Hail, Commander,” Kyrkenall said softly.
“Is that Renik?” Elenai asked quietly. She looked down at the eyeless, heat-mummified features. Wavy black hair flecked with gray still clung to the dried, skeletal head.
“Aye.” Kyrkenall was silent for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” Elenai said. “I thought they said a god dwelt here.” Unless, maybe, he’d left a recording of himself? He didn’t appear to have any other belongings.
“Of course the kobalin would think him a god,” Kyrkenall said. “Look at him. He took on almost seventy-five kobalin, and almost half were lords—did you see the size of those bodies? Can you imagine? They must have come up in waves and somehow he took them all.”
“But they left him here,” Elenai said. “Don’t the kobalin take the heads of their defeated enemies?”
“They must not have defeated him,” Ortok said. He had crept up quietly behind them. “If no living warrior delivered his death blow, then no one had claim to him, and they would let him lie. And they would honor him. And who would not come to pay respects to such a warrior as this, and to ask for his blessing in war things? It is all clear to me now. He is the one even N’lahr reveres.”
“He was the greatest of us,” Kyrkenall said, his voice ever so soft.
Elenai had never met Renik, nor even seen him in the flesh, but her eyes welled with tears as she thought of this lone man standing off so many. And she knelt with Kyrkenall. “Hail, Commander.”
Kyrkenall’s voice took on that reflective quality he often used while speaking verse, absent the usual playful note. This time he was deadly serious. “Here was flesh and blood, yet here there rests a grace divine. I would that he yet lived. We shall not see a one like him again, even should our lives stretch on and endless.” He faltered, then directly addressed the corpse. “You were the torch by which we sought the path. You lived the principal by word and deed. You were the model we all strove to meet.” His voice fell to a whisper. “When you were with us, it was easier, somehow, to rise above our own weakness.”
Elenai wasn’t able to place the quote. “What’s that from?”
“That’s me. Just now. Would that I had more.” His words came out in a snarl. “Would that the queen hadn’t wasted the life of this brave man. He didn’t need to die out here. Alone. Honored only by his enemies.” He continued to stare down at his old commanding officer as Elenai climbed to her feet.
Reverently, Kyrkenall slipped the ring from the skeletal hand, then placed it with infinite care in one of his smallest belt pouches.
Elenai gently touched the archer on the shoulder. “Let’s see what he was guarding.”
The temple itself was a round room no more than twelve fair paces across. It had but a single opening. There was no light within, nor wall sconces to hang lanterns had they wished them, so she and Kyrkenall both willed their rings to light. There came an answering glitter from hundreds of mosaic floor and wall tiles inset with sparkling motes. At chest level all about the wall were empty recesses. Elenai counted thirty of them.
“What do you think those are for?” Kyrkenall asked. “Busts of the gods?”
“I think they were for hearthstones,” Elenai said. They were just about the ideal size. “Or maybe those stones that Kalandra was talking about. The remembrance stones.”
“So where are they?”
“A good question.”
“Maybe they’re in some kind of protected spot,” Kyrkenall said, “and we have to find a trigger to release them.”
“Or maybe Renik wasn’t protecting them, he just got caught here at the wrong moment. Maybe they were gone when he showed up.”
“Or maybe the kobalin took them,” Kyrkenall suggested.
“Would they disturb the temple of a god?” Elenai asked.
He nodded shortly and then threw up a hand to stop her before she walked any farther. “I’m an idiot,” he whispered, and bent low to the ground, ring shining. She could tell he searched at random until he halted for a brief moment and bent even lower, before pressing on in a straight line for one of the empty recesses.
“What is it?”
“Tracks in the dust. They’re dusty themselves,” he said, “but they’re more recent.”
“Renik’s tracks?” Maybe he’d taken the hearthstones out and someone had stolen them from him.
“No. Boots, though. Smaller. I think a woman was here, looking around.”
“Kalandra?” Elenai asked.
“I don’t think some random woman could make it here, do you? We’ve walked over some of the tracks,” Kyrkenall said as he moved on. “It seems pretty clear that whoever this was went to each alcove. So she was collecting the stones.”
Elenai fought down a surge of excitement. “So she was here, and got away.”
“It seems so.”
“Friends,” Ortok called from outside, “I have bad news.”
It was only then Elenai noticed he hadn’t entered the space with them. He lingered in the open air just beyond the portico, not daring to set foot within the temple.
Elenai was first through, and there was little need for Ortok’s arm to point downslope, for she saw figures charging toward them across the plains as a great green lightning bolt split the whitened sky behind. She’d seen enough large groups of warriors now to guess troop strengths. At least four hundred were closing on them.
“Mount up.” There was a curiously cold calm to Kyrkenall’s voice.
Elenai needed no urging and was soon in the saddle. Kyrkenall was about to start down slope, then caught sight of Ortok, still looking into the distance.
“As weary as our horses are, we’re going to have a hard time staying ahead of them,” Kyrkenall said.
“You go,” the kobalin said. “I will stay.”
“They’ll kill you,” Elenai objected.
He turned and met her eyes. “I hear the fear in your voice and know that it is for me. But you need not worry. Kobalin are not forbidden from this place. And they will stop to speak with me. It will give you some space. Go. Take Steadyfoot with you.”
“Don’t make this sacrifice, Ortok,” Kyrkenall said. “There’s no need.”
Ortok showed his teeth. “I make no sacrifice. N’lahr wanted me to find an army. Well. There one is. I will challenge its leader, and then I will take them to fight Naor. It is a simple thing.”
Maybe it seemed simple to Ortok, but Elenai shot a nervous glance to the lithe archer. How could the kobalin even know who led the oncoming horde? It could be a greater warrior than he. Might well be, given how many kobalin followed him.
“Then we’ll stay,” she said.
He quickly shook his furry head. “No. You are not welcome here.”
“But we have every right to pay respects to a fallen alten.”
“He died on our lands, and has been honored by us. Not you. Maybe later this can be done. Not now. Go, friends. If I live, I will fight again at your side. Think well of me, and share my name with those you meet.”
Elenai could only stare in astonishment and sorrow. She had seen Ortok challenge and win before, but it had never occurred to her he would leave so soon.
Kyrkenall put hand to chest in salute and addressed him solemnly. “Hail, Ortok. Win glory. I hope to see you again.”
Elenai, wordless, repeated the gesture. As Ortok returned it Kyrkenall was already headed down slope, guiding Steadyfoot by a line. She followed, leading the pack horses, surprised at how much closer the kobalin were already.
Kyrkenall pushed Lyria into a weary canter and circled around the hill before riding off in a straight line. Elenai followed.
She glanced over her shoulder. The hill blotted out sight of their pursuers and the temple blocked sight of Ortok.
She knew she should have been more worried about the kobalin pursuit, but it was the sudden absence of Ortok that disturbed her most. She realized that she never should have supposed he would permanently be in their life, and reminded herself that in the end he was pledged to kill N’lahr or die trying. It was inevitable that he leave them, eventually.
And yet she couldn’t help thinking of a moment from Selana’s play, The Fall of Myralon. She’d often thought Selana stiff and old-fashioned, but that moment in the third act—when the aging queen discovered her young grandson dead upon the stairs—it had remarkable power. She thought of it now, of the woman separated suddenly from the person in whom she had invested hope and love and time, killed not by assassins but by a tumble down steps. Elenai could no longer remember the full lines, but recalled how the queen had cradled the child, complaining that the Gods might at least have warned her his fair days were almost through.
It wasn’t that she equated the queen’s love for her grandson with her affection for Ortok, but her sudden understanding that time with Ortok was finite paralleled the queen’s lament.
Now they rode toward dark hills in a dark land under benighted skies.
It was easy enough to guess Kyrkenall’s plan—ride for the hills, lose their pursuers there, find a way to double back.
She glanced again over her shoulder and this time saw warriors to either side of the hill. The sky, splashed again by lightning, limned them so that she glimpsed their strange hulking outlines and mismatched horns. Those weren’t Naor helms, but the horns of kobalin. And she couldn’t be sure but … she looked back once more to confirm.
“I don’t think they’re following,” she shouted up to Kyrkenall.
He called back to her, his voice shaking as Lyria’s tired hooves pounded over the black soil. “Ortok’s challenge will hold them in place.”
She knew that she would see nothing that might tell her their friend’s fate as she looked back, but she couldn’t help doing so. Ortok might even now be fighting for his life. Or standing victorious. He might be dead.
Less than a mile separated them but he might as well be realms away, or a hundred years apart. What was the difference, she thought darkly, between a memory from a few moments ago, or yesterday, or from decades past? None of them were real, anymore. They were equally gone, every single one, no matter when they’d transpired.
Kyrkenall and Elenai slowed their horses, lest they run them to ruin, but they moved on, and the hills resolved themselves into dark, ruddy shapes. Kyrkenall guided them into a low pass.
Just beyond it, horsemen were waiting.
There were six in all, bareheaded, each a fine figure of a man in their late twenties, their musculature obvious even under loose blue shirts. They wore a uniform of sorts—matching short-sleeved tunics, dark kilts over which a sword belt hung, and strap sandals.
Though imposing, there wasn’t anything immediately challenging in their presentation. The foremost bowed his head respectfully, then pressed a closed fist over his heart. He addressed them in a warm alto. “We bring you greeting. Our lady extends her invitation and welcome to you. You are to accompany us to meet her.”
“Who are you?” Kyrkenall asked. “Where do you want us to go? And who’s your lady?”
“I am Sorak, speaker with the Shift Dwellers. I am here to take you to the lands of our lady, the Alten Cerai, Goddess of the Shifts. Come. She is eager to speak with you.”