“Yes,” she said. “So I thought. There is a great fleet gathered on the coast of Zimroel, Prestimion. An armada, in truth. Scores of ships, perhaps more than a hundred, waiting at sea off Piliplok for Dantirya Sambail to give them the order to sail.”
“So that’s it! He’s quietly been assembling an invasion force all this time, and now it’s on the way! But how strange, mother, that it was able to come together unobserved, unreported—”
“I had the greatest difficulty in detecting it. It moves as though under cover of perpetual night, even in daytime.”
“Of course. The cloud of unknowingness again! Which has hidden not just the Procurator from us, but an entire navy!” Prestimion rose. To his great surprise he felt a curious kind of tranquility stealing over him. The news was bad, most of it, but at least he had heard the worst of it now. “So be it,” he said. “We know what kind of enemy we face, at any rate. We’d better get down to the job of dealing with him, eh, mother?”
“Darkness is coming on,” Navigorn said. “Shall we make camp here, do you think?”
“Why not?” said Septach Melayn. “It’s as bad a place as any, isn’t it?”
And worse than some, he thought. It was a pity that young Dekkeret was not along on this expedition: if he still had the taste for penitence and punishment that had driven him to undertake his journey to Suvrael, he would find these jungles ideal for additional self-flagellation purposes. There could be few regions in the world less hospitable than the southern Stoienzar.
They had seen an endless procession of hideosities in their westward journey through the peninsula. Trees that sprouted and grew and died all in one day—springing out of the ground at dawn, rising to a height of thirty feet by noon, unfolding ugly black flowers then that gave off pungent noxious fumes, within another hour producing swollen ripe fruit of the most intensely lethal sort, and finally perishing of their own miserable poisonous nature by sunset. Purple crabs as big as houses that came rumbling up out their hiding-places in the sandy ground right under your nose, clacking murderous claws sharp as scimitars. Black snails that spit red acid at your ankles. And the damnable vile sawpalms everywhere, the foul manganozas, gleefully waving their savage fronds at you as though daring you to come near their impenetrable and impassable thickets.
This campsite of Navigorn’s, now: a broad, dusty gray beach of sharp-edged gravel along the banks of a dry gravelly river. That was perfect, thought Septach Melayn. A river that seemed to be altogether without water, that offered the eye nothing but a long barren expanse of small broken stones. There had to be water somewhere beneath its rocky bed, though, for if one stood and watched for a time one could see that the pebbles were in steady slow movement, as though they were being dragged sluggishly along the river’s course by the force of an underground stream flowing deep down below. To while away the time, he thought, you could stand beside it and fish for precious stones, trying to spy the occasional emerald or ruby or whatever, borne along like a brightly glittering fish through all the dreary slow-moving debris. But he suspected you could wait here for fifty thousand years before you found anything worth finding. Or forever, perhaps.
Gialaurys stepped from his floater and came toward them. “Are we going to make our camp in this place?”
“Have you seen any better site?”
“There’s no water here.”
“But also no manganozas and no swamp-crabs,” Navigorn said. “I could do with a night’s respite from those. And in the morning we can go straight on toward the Procurator’s camp.”
Gialaurys laughed harshly and spat.
“No,” said Navigorn. “This time we’re actually going to find it. I have a feeling that we will.”
“Yes,” Septach Melayn said. “Of course we will.”
He sauntered away from them and found a seat on a saddle-shaped boulder by the river’s edge. Scaly many-legged things the size of his hand were rummaging for provender through the topmost level of the gravel, burrowing down to seize smaller creatures lurking below, then coming up to feed at the surface: bugs of some sort, he thought, or crustaceans, or maybe they were the air-breathing fishes of this dry river. Fishes with legs would fit well with a river that had no water. One of them clambered up atop the gravel and peered at him out of half a dozen bright, beady eyes as though it might be contemplating making a run at his ankle to sample his flavor. Everything wanted to bite you in the Stoienzar, even the plants. Septach Melayn shied a rock at the thing, not making any serious attempt to hit it, and it scrabbled out of sight.
For all the buoyancy of his resilient nature, this place was a severe test even for him. As for the others, they must be suffering intensely. The unremittingly hostile nature of the peninsula was so excessive that it was almost funny; but one could find amusement only so long in the challenges of a district where every moment brought some new discomfort or danger. And they were swiftly growing weary of the entire adventure. It was beginning to seem to everyone that they had been chasing after Dantirya Sambail all their lives: first in the east-country, then in Ketheron and Arvyanda and Sippulgar, and now on this interminable trek through the Stoienzar.
How long had they been in here, actually? Weeks? Months? One day flowed unaccountably into the next. It seemed like centuries since they had entered this monstrous place.
Three times, now, scouts had gone forward and returned with reports of having found the Procurator’s camp. A lively, bustling place, hundreds of men, tents, floaters and mounts, stockpiles of provisions—but everything vanished like a phantom in the night when they brought the army forward and made ready for an attack. Was what the scouts had found merely an illusion? Or was it the absence of the camp, when they went back for a second look, that was the illusion?
Whatever it was, Septach Melayn was sure, sorcery had to be at work. The abracadabra of the mages operating on their minds, some devilish conjuration. Dantirya Sambail was playing with them. And doubtless getting things ready, all the while, for the long-planned stroke of violence by which he meant to take his revenge on Prestimion for having thwarted his hunger for power in so many ways.
Another of the scaly little creatures of the river was staring at him, perhaps a dozen feet away. It stood half erect, weaving a busy pattern in the air with its multitude of little legs.
“Are you one of the Procurator’s spies?” Septach Melayn asked it. “Well, tell him Septach Melayn sends him this gift!”
Once again he tossed a rock, aiming this time to hit. But somehow the little thing succeeded in dodging the missile, deftly moving just a few inches to one side. It continued to peer at him as though defying him to try again.
“Nicely done,” he said. “There aren’t many who sidestep the thrusts of Septach Melayn!”
He let the small creature be. Sudden drowsiness was coming over him, though it was only the twilight hour. For a moment or two he fought it, fearing that the creatures of the river would swarm up over him as he slept; and then he recognized the telltale signs of a sending from the Lady, and let the spell take possession of him.
The dream-state came over him within instants, there by the shore of the gravelly river. No longer was he in vile Stoienzar, but rather in some green and leafy glade of Lord Havilbove’s wonderful park on the slopes of Castle Mount, and the Lady of the Isle was with him, Prestimion’s mother, the beautiful Princess Therissa, telling him to fear nothing, to move ahead and strike boldly.
To which he replied, “Fear is not the issue, milady. But how can I strike at something I can’t see?”
“We will help you to see,” she told him. “We will show you the face of the enemy. And then, Septach Melayn, it will be your time to act.”