"Incarnate. Opals."
"Takhisis."
And "opals" again, the last word swallowed by the rising night.
So the stones that protect us will enable her to enter the world? Larken asked.
Stormlight nodded. "And if we deny her the stones, if we destroy them or hide them, we relin shy;quish our protection."
Together they stood in the twilight not a hundred yards from the fire. Overhead, scarlet Lunitari reeled through the night sky, and the landscape, rock and rubble and distant tent, seemed bathed suddenly in dark blood.
What shall we do, Stormlight?
Her hands did not shake, Stormlight noticed. She was awaiting his command, and was not afraid.
His face softened, and for a long time the elf stood silent. "I am not sure, Larken. Nor were the elves who wrote the manuscript. But the text is clear on one thing. Whatever it takes to stop a goddess will demand our utmost. Something perilous and alto shy;gether new.
"Despite our quarrel, Fordus must know of it. I shall warn him this night." Without further word, the elf stalked off into the darkness, his destination the level plain to the east, the largest circle of camp-fires.
Larken watched as Stormlight receded into the night.
"Something perilous," he had said. "And alto shy;gether new."
She was ready. She had changed. She felt it now, with a slow certainty. Danger and novelty no longer
frightened her. Out of a strange solitude, she awaited the approaching change calmly and with a new eagerness.
Stormlight came back at dawn, a great heaviness in his cold eyes.
He had talked to Fordus, the rumors said. He had told the Prophet the news of the discovered text.
But Fordus had stared beyond him, into the noth shy;ingness of desert and night. Had called Stormlight a dead man, said that his words no longer had life.
Fordus had rejected him, and it was Stormlight now who stood at the edge of the sea, a powerless observer.
By midmorning of the next day, Fordus's group had resumed the march, and by late afternoon, they had reached the foothills of the Istarian Mountains. Stormlight's troops still followed at a distance.
Vincus leaned gratefully against an outcropping of rock, making certain that the ground around him was free of willow branches. It was the best of times to camp, he thought, before darkness fell in the midst of rough and treacherous terrain.
A courier came back from the ranks to Fordus's rear guard, to where Vincus waited with Stormlight and two older Plainsmen, Breeze and Messenger.
It was a man Vincus had never met-a young man named Northstar-who brought the word.
"The Prophet Fordus," Northstar said, speaking the name in quiet and reverent tones, "had a dream in which a dead man visited him with a warning."
Stormlight turned away at these words.
"The dead man told him," Northstar continued, "that Takhisis herself-She of the Many Faces-has arrayed her dark powers against the rebellion, against the Prophet Fordus."
"And what else did the. . dead man say, North-star?" Stormlight asked bitterly, his back to the mes shy;senger.
"All the rest was lies, says the Prophet Fordus. For Takhisis sends her minions to deceive, to waylay and destroy. Her army is the living and the dead, and none are to be believed. So says the Prophet For shy;dus.
"But the goddess is afraid now. Her warnings and threats are the words of a beast in flight. For if she thought she could defeat the Prophet Fordus …
"She would not let him know of her presence. She would wait, and hide, waylaying him when he least expected, when he stood at the edge of his greatest victory, rather than now, before the war has even begun."
Stormlight shook his head.
Vincus tried to follow the reasoning of the Water Prophet. Perhaps Northstar had not remembered it right, for it seemed cloudy and formless, a poor and shoddy logic.
Yet Northstar was ardent, rapt, fresh from the presence of his hero, his lord.
"We shall continue the assault on Istar," the mes shy;senger proclaimed. "Her threats are the banner of the Kingpriest's fear. So says the Prophet Fordus.
"We shall march through the night, for speed and surprise are our allies, and the mountains will be ours by morning. Through the Central Pass we will go, and let those who dispute the word of the Prophet Fordus stay in their camps and cower.
"We are bound for Istar, and to us will the city belong!"
Having spoken, Northstar wheeled about and raced back up the column, his long strides eager and jubilant. Stormlight turned, an overwhelming sad shy;ness on his face, and stared at Vincus.
" Tis the wrong pass, is it not?"
Vincus nodded, started to gesture, to explain that it was the Western Pass that was free of the sterint, free of rockslide and shearing and the terrible destructive wind.
But Stormlight rested his hands on Vincus's shoul shy;ders and regarded him openly, honestly.
" 'Tis what I told him last night, when I spoke to him and warned him. Told him that I had a man in my camp who could guide him safely through the mountains if he chose to continue, but that it would be far wiser to return, to go back to the desert. And it was no dream. But he is no longer listening to me. He pulls phrases from the air, words out of their places, and distorts them into what he wants to hear-into what he says those damnable dreams and visions are telling him."
Stormlight turned away. Far ahead, Fordus's ban shy;ners flew aloft in the dying air, red in the sunset light. Already his columns were starting to move again, and somewhere far up in Fordus's ranks, a solitary drum began a slow, stumbling cadence.
The new drummer was no match for Larken.
"He is completely, utterly mad," Stormlight said. "And I have no choice but to go behind him and to fight his enemies. For the time is coming when he will take my people into more than the weather, more than the death of a few in a narrow, storm-swept pass.
"The walls of Istar are coming. And the Sixth Legion. And Takhisis herself. And before Fordus rides out to meet them, someone will have to stop him."
Chapter 20
The Cental Pass through the Istrian mountains was and moonlit, littered with fallen branches, with stones, with smaller, uprooted alder and fir.
Despite Solinari and the clear sky, the rubble in the pass was an ominous prospect to Stormlight.
Vincus had warned Stormlight, who, in turn, had tried to warn the War Prophet. Follow the Western Pass, they had urged. But Fordus had not listened, had stared through Stormlight as if he were water, all the while toying with the enormous golden circle that enclosed his neck. It bristled with spikes that seemed to grow daily with his madness.
Now Fordus marched through the Central Pass at the head of his exhausted troops. Seven hundred had followed him before the Battle of the Plains, and scarcely five hundred survived it. Seventy had fallen to the Istarian ambush, and a dozen to the desert eruptions.
What do you want, old friend, dear madman? Stormlight thought bitterly as Fordus's banner danced out of view. Your forces have been wrecked, and yet you march. You cannot arm a legion with promises.
By sunrise they were midway through the Central Pass, climbing through boulders and downed pine and aeterna. Fordus's new drummer had struck up a song for courage and endurance.
But the going grew slower and slower as dawn crept into midmorning, and by noon, their hands blistered and their limbs bruised and scratched, the trailblazers stopped to rest, and noticed to their astonishment that they had traveled only a hundred yards in the last two hours.
There was no magic, as there had been in Larken's songs, to help.
Aeleth, his leather armor soggy with sweat, wiped his brow and scrambled to the top of a stone out shy;cropping, glaring over the rubblestrewn wasteland.
"What do you see, Aeleth?" Fordus called up to him.