Aeleth thought before he answered. Suffering from shortness of breath, muttering at the thin mountainous air and the countless obstructions in the path, the War Prophet had become an impossible commander, short with his lieutenants and merciless
in his quest to reach the other side of the pass by the evening.
Two men had fallen over dead from exertion, and despite the urgings of the Namers, Fordus had left the bodies where they lay.
"It's.. it's downhill from here, sir!" Aeleth called down.
Heartened, Fordus turned to face his followers.
"Another vision has come to me!" he proclaimed, his bony hands clutching his golden collar, fingering the dark glain opals. "If we march through the night, we cover ourselves with the mantle of surprise. When we reach the shore of Lake Istar, there will be nothing the Kingpriest can do to stop our advances!"
The storm charged upon them suddenly, rolling out of the south in a rumbling chaos like a herd of horses.
For a moment the air was still, and the hardy mountain birds-raptor and thrush, the loud purple jays of northern Ansalon-fell quiet in anticipation of the rising wind.
Then it surged through the pass behind them like a flash flood through a dry arroyo, the wind picking up velocity and force as it barreled over the felled trees, over the rocks and boulders, scattering sand and gravel and branches as it shrieked through the pass.
Stormlight turned around in astonishment as the wind roared past and over him, knocking him to the ground and thundering through the back of his followers.
Children were swept up and dashed against the rockface. Terrified, their mothers screamed for them, their words lost and useless. Stormlight covered his ears in the fierce, deafening wail, and a wave of sand broke over them, stinging and abrading.
Up ahead, a felled vallenwood launched into the air and crashed into Gormion and a handful of her followers. The bandit captain shrieked and rolled from the path of the hurtling limbs, scattering ear shy;rings and bracelets as the wind took her up, buoyed her, and hurled her, alive, into a stand of aeterna.
The rest of the bandits fared even less well. The vallenwood branches exploded with screams as the heavy tree crushed the hapless men against the rocks.
Clinging to Stormlight and Breeze, Vincus rode out the storm with his head in his hood. The pass vanished in a whirl of sand, and from the murky cyclone ahead he could hear wail and outcry. Occa shy;sionally a dark, unrecognizable shape rocketed past, and from somewhere back up the pass came the skidding, too-human sound of frightened horses.
Then, as suddenly as it had rushed over them, the storm was gone. The sand settled lazily over the mountain rocks-the desert transported by the fierce and merciless weather-and slowly, almost imperceptibly, a few moving shapes emerged from rock and sand and thicket.
When they all had gathered, they were sixty less.
A new wailing began, the ancient funerary call of the Que-Nara rising like another wind, echoing from the mountainsides. Plaintively, eerily, the cry spread through the Central Pass, until even'the returning birds began to sing in response-thrush and jay in full cry from the ravaged, wind-blasted trees.
But Fordus scrambled up the rockface, clinging like a grotesque spider, and waved his hand for silence.
It was a long time coming. The rebels were griev shy;ing, swept away by the dark river of their own sor shy;row.
"It is the vengeance of Takhisis," Fordus rasped, his breath shallow and panting. But nobody was lis shy;tening.
"Hear the word of the Prophet!" he cried. A hun shy;dred pairs of eyes looked up at him, new fear flicker shy;ing alongside their old devotion. The rest of the survivors milled aimlessly, combing the rubble for the injured and the dead.
"There are a thousand roads to Istar," Fordus pro shy;claimed, his voice gaining power and authority as the words rushed from him. "Each of those roads is guarded, with torment and danger and hardship.
"But we have passed through the first of these hardships, my people. And though there are some we must leave behind …"
His gesture toward the gathered bodies of the dead was quick and casual, as though he brushed away a fly.
"Let them be remembered, and let their names be sung, at the time when we will remember all the fallen, commemorate all those who spilled their blood in my glorious cause."
Still clinging to the rockface, Fordus pointed north, the collar at his neck afire in the reflected light of the sunset.
"Their names will be sung around the throne of Istar, when I ascend to the lordship of the great Imperial City. We will sing them in glory when I am Kingpriest, set to the music of drum and passing bell. For the glyphs and the signs and my own dreams have told me that the rule of Istar is mine.
"You have followed my dream through four hard seasons. We have sown seed in the bitter ground of the desert, in obscurity and distance and sand, where all ambition was water. We have watered the plains with our blood, and tilled in the storm-furrowed mountain passes. Now Istar stands open to bandit and Plainsmen. My worthy rival-the kin shy;dred warrior and prophet in the Kingpriest's Tower-has met his adversary in the southern fields! The season has come! Set your hand to the harvest!"
For a moment the rebels fell into complete, aston shy;ished silence. All eyes were riveted on the Water Prophet, all ears turned to his feverish, wild pro shy;nouncements.
"Hear the word of the Prophet!" Northstar shouted.
A pathetic tap-tap, late and halfhearted, accompa shy;nied his cry.
"The word of the Prophet King!" the young man continued, unfazed and triumphant, and to the sur shy;prise of the elders and the Namers, a voice deep in the milling rebels took up the call-a dark voice, nei shy;ther masculine nor feminine, but a voice that seemed to rise up within the hearts of all assembled. Another cried in response, and another, and soon the young men, chanting "The Prophet King! The Prophet King!" lifted Fordus atop their shoulders and bore him through the wreckage, through the wide path that the wind had cut over rock and rubble and undergrowth.
At the mouth of the pass, Larken, Vincus, and a score of Que-Nara remained, as Fordus's compan shy;ions hastened toward the lakeside road and the plains and city beyond. Her dark eyes distant and mournful, Larken watched as the Prophet's banner was hoisted into the air, and the walls of the moun shy;tain pass resounded with this new and alien cheer.
"The Prophet King!"
As the cry carried down the column, Fordus's rebels picked up their pace. The weary trudge became a brisk, revitalized march, as a strange, per shy;fumed wind rolled through the pass, bearing upon it the smell of jasmine and juniper, of attar of roses and spice and old wine.
Istar the temptress was calling them. Soft and fem shy;inine, conniving and poisonous, at sunset she cast her nets of beguilement.
As Fordus and his followers ranged through the treacherous passes, the seeds of another insurrection were being sown in the depths of the mines.
Deep below the city, their dead mourned and placed reverently in porous pockets of volcanic rock, the elves resumed their digging.
Exhausted, the sounds of little Taglio's cries still echoing in his thoughts, Spinel guided his work-numbed crew into the dark recesses beneath the shores of Lake Istar.
These were the newest mines. No sooner had the mourning ceased than word came down from the Kingpriest's tower to open them. Obviously, some event above had changed the nature of the labor, brought a new urgency to this mysterious need for the glain opals.
By lamplight, Spinel examined the most recently discovered stones. Judging from the veins of opal the diggers had found, the glain themselves were young-younger by far than any he had mined in his thousand years of subterranean labor.
The stones looked oddly familiar-as though in a shape-a formation-the old elf should recognize.