The elf's name was Stormlight. He was a lieu shy;tenant of the War Prophet, but had fallen from favor in some recent dispute of policy.
After he seized Vineus near Fordus's fire and tents, Stormlight had taken his captive to the other side of the encampment entirely-to quiet quarters, where a half dozen veteran Plainsmen waited in silence.
Stormlight had questioned Vincus, and when he failed to understand the sign language, had reluc shy;tantly sent for the woman, the one with the yellow hair, whose name was Larken. With her odd, alien gestures, she translated Vincus's signs in her own silence.
"What proof have you that you were a slave in Istar?" Stormlight asked finally, regarding Vincus with a stare that was melancholy but not unkind.
Vincus showed him the collar, how the pieces fit together, how they spelled his name. Stormlight nodded, placed the pieces around Vincus's neck, and was satisfied they fit. He started to ask another question, then fell silent.
"How did you find us?" he asked finally, and Vin shy;cus told of his journey, of the pass through the mountains and his guidance by the benevolent hawk.
It was a god, he signed. / am sure it was a god taking the bird's form to guide me. He camps with you? I saw him perched by your fire.
Larken smiled as she translated his gestures for Stormlight.
The elf's expression softened.
"And why have you found us?" he asked. "What do you ask of us? Or what do you bring us?"
Vincus gestured excitedly, knelt on the ground. Stormlight dropped beside him, and the Plainsmen, Larken, and Gormion stood above them, watching curiously and intently.
Though he had mistrusted Fordus from the start, Vincus felt surprisingly safe in the company of the elf. He knew that Vaananen's glyphs were meant for this man, for Stormlight was one who asked instead of commanded.
To Vincus, that was a sign of wisdom and discern shy;ment. He had heard enough of command in his servitude.
Confidently, he drew the five glyphs on the ground before Stormlight. After he was finished, he looked up.
Stormlight stared at the glyphs intently.
"Desert's Edge," he said. "Sixth Day of Lunitari. No Wind."
It seemed to be nothing new to him until he reached the fourth glyph.
"The Leopard? And … there is a fifth one that fol shy;lows. Something dreadfully important here."
I shall bring Fordus, Larken signed, but Stormlight waved the thought away.
"Not this time."
Larken frowned, a question forming in her thoughts.
Stormlight stared at Vincus, and a long moment passed in which the camp lay silent.
"Is the Sixth Legion in Istar, Vincus?" Stormlight asked.
Elatedly, Vincus nodded, gesturing excitedly as Larken struggled to translate his account of his own discoveries, of conveying the news to Vaananen, of the whole series of events that boded danger for For shy;dus and the rebels.
Stormlight leaned back, his face lost for a moment in the shadow. Then, craning toward the fifth glyph, he read it and proclaimed: "Beware the dark man."
He looked up at Vincus, then at Larken. A crooked, bemused smile played at the corner of his mouth.
"Hear the word of the Prophet," he whispered, with a laugh.
"Beware the lady," he said flatly. For a while he knelt before the fifth glyph, tracing its outline with a callused finger.
"I see," he murmured. "I should have known by the amber eyes. Tamex. . Tanila. . They looked alike. Reptilian.
"And then … the dragon tracks through the Tears of Mishakal!"
"One will ask for it soon," Vaananen had said. "And you will know it is right to give the book to that person."
So Vincus gave the book to Stormlight, trusting the same instinct that had guided him through the desert and steered him from Fordus at the last moment.
After all, the book was written in Lucanesti. What other sign could a man expect?
Together, the elf and the bard puzzled over the ancient text, Larken frowning at the complexities of the scattered, angular script, but Stormlight nod shy;ding, reading…
Until he came to the lost passages. Gray dust eddied in the hands of the elf as he knelt at the campsite, spreading the opened book before him.
Stormlight bowed over the page and inspected it for a long time. "Perhaps," he murmured, "it is in my language, and it is prophecy as well."
"The Anlage …" he murmured. "The oldest see shy;ing."
Long before the first migrations of the Lucanesti across the Istarian desert, before the first discoveries of glain opal, and perhaps even before the time when the elders of that dwindling people had dis shy;covered the powers of the lucerna, another deeper way of seeing had been encoded in their thoughts and memory.
The Anlage. The great mine of elventhought. The shared memory of the race.
In its depths lay the earliest recollections of the mining elves: their wanderings, their departure from Silvanesti. Some even said that, in the hands of a wise and anointed elf, the Anlage could reveal the earliest days-in the Age of Dreams, when the First shy;born of the world opened their eyes to moonlight upon a newly awakened planet.
It was all there. All memory and all imagining.
So the elders had told Stormlight in his childhood and youth, in the long years of wandering before the ambush, his wounding, and his adoption by the Plainsmen. The elders had told him how to draw upon that power as well, and of the danger therein- the risk that the visionary might not return to the waking world, but sleep and sleep until the opales-cence of age covered and swallowed him entirely.
Yet without fear or misgiving, Stormlight sank into these meditations, tunneling deeper and deeper until he reached a level where he knew the thoughts and recollections were no longer his own, and he sank into a cloudy vein of mutual remembrance.
Around him, his Plainsmen companions, Larken, and Vincus watched helplessly, expectantly, as though they stood on the shores of a great ocean, waiting for a distant sail.
But Stormlight was calm, preternaturally alert. No fear, he told himself. No fear is very good.
Mindfully, he explored the shadowy dream, a shifting landscape bedazzled with the light of both. . no, of three moons. The five elements enfolded him: the fire of the stars, the water in the heart of the earth, the desert and stone, the parched and wander shy;ing air.
And memory. The fifth oi the ancient elements.
Dancing, as the elders said it did, as a gray absorbent light on the margins of vision. Stormlight directed his thought toward that grayness, and it parted before him.
For a moment there were grasslands, the pale face of someone he neither remembered nor knew …
Then forest.
The book, he told himself. Keep your mind on the book.
Briefly, a great darkness yawned to his left, full of flashing color and a strange, seductive beckoning. For a while he stood at the borders of that darkness, which seemed to call to him, promising sleep, an easeful rest.
But that way was dangerous. He would be lost if he entered it.
The book, he told himself. Nothing but the book.
And then it appeared before him, its pages crisp and sharp and entirely intact. Eagerly, he opened the pages with his mind.
He read and remembered.
Finally, Stormlight looked up, and Vincus saw the transformation.
For a moment the elf looked blind, his pale eyes milky and unfocused. Vincus started, believing the book had struck Stormlight sightless, but then the eyes of the elf changed again, a white shell or a pale film dropping out of his gaze and receding beneath his eyelids.
"Come with me, Larken," Stormlight urged. He shot to his feet as though at a call for battle. Grab shy;bing the bard by the arm, he ushered her into the night, whispering a warning or strategy that reached Vincus only in snatches, in fragments.
"Against us" he heard.