Sadira shrugged. “I don’t know what I’ll find. All I can say for certain is that Dhojakt is going to a lot of trouble to keep me from looking.
“Is going? Does that mean he’s still alive?” Rhayn asked, rummaging through the pile of bird parts. “Huyar said you pushed him off the cliff.”
“I did, but I don’t think he hit bottom,” the sorceress answered. “And even if he did, that doesn’t mean he died.”
“I wonder what he doesn’t want you to find,” said Rhayn, pulling a long sinew off one of the leg bones.
“Or to become,” Sadira said. “Faenaeyon raised an interesting point before banishing us. If this is where the New Races are born, who’s to say the magic can’t be used to give me what I want? Perhaps that’s how Dhojakt became half-man and half-cilops.”
Rhayn looked at the transfigured remains of the erdlu. “It doesn’t strike me as something that can be controlled.”
“Maybe not out here, but I’ve seen someone undergo a similar change,” she said. “When we killed Kalak, he was in the process of changing himself into a dragon. I think he would have succeeded.”
“And you believe something similar can happen in the Pristine Tower?”
Sadira shrugged. “I’ve heard that the original Dragon was created there,” she said. “From what we’ve seen so far, I believe it.”
“That’s why I coming with you,” said Rhayn. “If that can be done, then I should be able to find what I want in the tower.”
Sadira raised her brow. “What’s that?”
“The power to win Faenaeyon’s place as chief of the tribe,” Rhayn said. She looked westward, toward Cleft Rock.
“The Sun Runners will never take you back,” Sadira replied. “No matter what we find.”
“Don’t be so sure. Elves are a practical people,” said Rhayn. “They’ll follow a strong chief-especially if they have no other choice.”
“You wouldn’t tyrannize your own tribe!” Sadira gasped.
“What I won’t do is allow my children to grow up without me,” said Rhayn. “They’ll be treated no better than slaves in another woman’s camp.”
“Meredyd won’t let that happen,” Sadira objected. “After what you did for her-”
“By now, Meredyd has already forgotten that my gold bought her child’s freedom,” Rhayn spat. She sat down and, using a shard of bone for a needle, began sewing shut the bottom of the erdlu’s stomach.
Sadira shook her head. “Meredyd is your friend.”
Rhayn laughed. “Friendship is based on mutual need,” she said. “Now that Meredyd stands to gain nothing from me, she’s no longer my friend. She won’t look out for my children-any more than I’d watch after hers if she had been banished.”
Magnus’s dulcet voice drifted across the field. Sadira looked in the direction from which it came and saw the windsinger almost a hundred yards away. He stood beneath the floater, his black eyes fixed on the thing’s pulsating body. His ears twitched back and forth slowly, as if listening to some sound the sorceress could not hear, and his snout was curled into an expression of utter rapture.
“What’s Magnus doing?” Sadira asked, alarmed.
The floater lowered its ribbonlike arms and allowed them to dangle a few yards above the ground. A soft warble began to play in the wind, so gentle and faint that the sorceress sensed it only as an uncertain tingle in the back of her skull.
“It looks like he’s talking to it,” Rhayn answered, continuing to work. “I’d leave him alone-you wouldn’t want to startle the thing.”
A few minutes later, the elf tied off the thread and laid the new waterskin aside. After stripping more sinew from the legs, she motioned for Sadira to sit down beside her. The two women busied themselves with making a pair of weapons, trying razor-sharp claws to the ends of the bird’s thigh bones.
They were almost finished when Sadira noticed more than a dozen shadows surrounding her and Rhayn. They had vaguely human shapes, with ropey limbs, serpentine torsos, and blue embers where their eyes should have been. The sorceress looked around, searching for the beings who were casting the shadows, but found no one-even when she looked into the sky.
One of the shadows reached for the stomach Rhayn had just sewn shut. When its finger touched the waterskin, the vessel turned black and became part of the shadow itself.
“What are they?” Rhayn demanded, also staring at the dark figures surrounding them.
“Shadow people,” Sadira answered, recalling Rikus’s description of Umbra. She also remembered Er’Stali’s account of the two dwarves who had gone to the Pristine Tower, then used obsidian to bribe the shadow people. “I think they’re from the tower.”
Rhayn stood, apparently less interested in where they were from than what they were doing. “Tell them to give us the waterskin back!” she said, motioning at the creatures with the lance she had been making.
“How?” Sadira asked.
When several shadows began to close around Rhayn, the elf cast a simple spell and a beam of light sprang from her hand. She aimed it at the ground before her, trying to fend off the dark figures at her feet. If anything, her efforts only made the silhouettes grow blacker and more substantial.
One shadow stopped harassing Rhayn. Its body began to thicken and assume a solid form, then it moved into a kneeling position. When it had assumed a full, three-dimensional form, it rose to its feet. The thing stood as tall as a half-giant, towering over the elf as she towered over Sadira.
“By what right do you hunt on our lands?” it demanded, black fumes rising from the blue gash that had opened to serve as its mouth.
Instead of answering, Rhayn backed away and looked toward Magnus. When she saw that he and the floater were still singing to each other, she called, “Magnus, leave that thing alone and come here!”
When he did not seem to hear her, the shadow looked down at its fellows on the ground, then waved its hand toward the windsinger. Several of the silhouettes rushed toward Magnus, swimming through the grass like a person would swim through an oasis pond. Upon reaching the windsinger, they began circling him in a mad dance. After a few moments, they stopped and, assuming solid form, rose to a standing position.
The floater’s shrill warble ceased, and it shot its ribbonlike arms down to grasp Magnus. The windsinger’s song came to a strangled halt, and he cried out in pain. The beast’s limbs began to retract, though instead of lifting the heavy windsinger into the air, it descended toward him. The shadow people surrounding Magnus melted back into the ground, shooting away from him as quickly as they had approached.
Rhayn screamed in alarm, then sprinted toward the windsinger. Sadira started to follow, but found her way blocked by the shadow that had been talking to her sister.
“The game on this land belongs to us,” the silhouette hissed, taking Sadria’s wrist. A black stain slowly spread up her arm, accompanied by a cold, numbing pain that seemed to draw the very heat from her body. “How are you going to pay for it?”
“Forgive us. We didn’t know the birds belonged to anyone.” Sadira pulled her arm away, but the shadow blocked her path and would not allow her to go forward. She waved a hand at the pile of erdlu flesh. “Does it look like we-”
She was interrupted as Magnus’s thunderous voice rumbled across the heath, intoning a single bass note. So deep and full was the tone that Sadira could hear nothing else. She even felt the sound in her bones, a resonate vibration that made her joints rasp and her abdomen tremble.
Across the meadow, Sadira saw her sister reach Magnus’s side and begin slashing at the ribbons holding him prisoner. Rhayn accomplished little, except to cover herself with slime. The windsinger shoved her away, raising his voice still louder. A searing whirlwind, full of burning sand and flying stones, roared in from the desert and entwined the windsinger and his attacker. Wild undulations rolled through the floater’s body, then its blue entrails began to writhe madly about.
In the next instant, the whirlwind ripped the beast apart, flinging slimy tendrils and masses of viscid flesh in all directions. The largest part of the floater’s body sailed far over the heath, where it was snatched from the air by the flick of some unseen creature’s barb-covered tongue. Magnus closed his mouth and collapsed to the ground, allowing the whirlwind to dissipate as quickly as it had appeared.