Just before the fire shower reached Lucas, Storm-light/ racing over the hot ground, snatched up the hawk and hurled him free of the deadly rain. Lucas tumbled through the air, regained his balance and wings, and soared clear of the fire as Stormlight sprang free of the burning earth, rolling, his clothing on fire. Larken rushed to the elf, but by the time she reached him, the fire was smothered and he lay, dazed and breathless, in the shadow of a huge cac shy;tus.
Shimmering steam rose from the condor's ashes and spread angrily across the fire-ravaged plains.
The bard crouched over the elf-warrior, singing a brief song of healing and gratitude. Groggily, lean shy;ing on Larken's shoulder, Stormlight rose to his feet, looked her level in the eyes, as though he saw her for the first time, past the roughness and dirt, the weathering and the matted, neglected white hair.
Suddenly, Fordus shouted in triumph across the smoldering plain.
The War Prophet stood on the narrow strand of earth, holding aloft a brightly shimmering object, red and golden as the afternoon sun. He danced a victory dance, and Northstar, safely on the other end of the strand, danced with him.
"He's mad!" Stormlight whispered. "Fordus is completely and red-mooned mad!"
Larken remained silent, her hands occupied in gently supporting the injured elf.
Fordus lifted aloft the medallion again, laughing and whistling. But suddenly the dark smoke bundled and rushed toward him at a blinding speed. Trapped on the narrow bridge, he could not elude it, could not outrun it. In an instant it engulfed him, swirled about him like a whirlpool, like a maelstrom, then dissolved into the clear desert daylight, leaving him lifeless on the scored and barren rock.
Stormlight never remembered what happened after that.
He thought he heard Larken singing once, maybe twice, and Northstar shouting, and the distant cry of the bard's hawk. He felt himself being moved, car shy;ried …
And then there was torchlight, and shamans, and medicine women dancing attendance over him, and he felt the pain lift from his arm and legs.
Fordus, he told himself, Fordus is dead.
His sorrow was not pure. In the midst of the mourning, of the weeping, he felt something heavy lifted from him. At last it is over, a voice said or seemed to say, and he felt a strange upsurge of joy, even in the midst of his bereavement.
Later, when he awoke at the foot of the Red Plateau, drenched in rainwater and wrapped in cool hides, he tried to forget that traitorous delight. Northstar stood over him, watching him intently.
"Northstar."
"The commander is alive, Stormlight. Thank the gods he is alive! Twice he has asked for you. Can you stand? Can you walk?"
"I… I think so," the Plainsman replied, pulling himself painfully to a sitting position. "He's . . . he's still. . ." Something tugged at the edge of his memory-something he should remember but could not, given the fire and smoke and the great raging bird.
"His spirit stands at the edge of this life, where the dusk surrounds him and the shadows stalk. But he is strong, and we hope for his recovery."
Stormlight leaned hard against the younger man, his eyes on the fire, the assembly atop the Red Plateau where Fordus lay injured, perhaps dying. Slowly, with great exertion, he matched pace with Northstar, as the two of them crossed the deserted campground and began the gentle, roundabout ascent to the top of the plateau, where a throng had gathered and the drum beat a mournful rhythm.
The Branchalan mode. The mode of remembrance.
Perhaps he was already too late.
"Hurry, Northstar," he muttered through clenched teeth, and the young man quickened their pace.
"Five sentries are dead," Northstar explained, as the sound of the drum grew louder. "Gormion sur shy;vived, and Larken, and three of the bandits."
The drum droned on, and a clear voice rose on the rhythm, the melody doleful and lonely.
"Poor Larken," Northstar murmured. "A widow's weeds though never wed."
Stormlight stood upright, stepped away from the young man's support. The memory, elusive in fire and battle.
Tanila.
"The woman, Northstar!" he shouted, his strong hands grasping the guide's shoulders. "What hap shy;pened to Tanila?"
Northstar shook his head.
"Vanished. No sign of her at the dunes or amid the slag. There's a chance the eruption swallowed her, or…"
"Or?" Stormlight was insistent, shrill.
"I stepped to the edge of the salt flats, where she was headed when Larken's song began, when the monster descended. There was nothing there but the faint outline of a woman's body, already half-vanished in the shifted sand."
"An outline? No tracks leading away?"
"None. Nothing but a smaller pile of rubble … a heap of black crystal and salt."
Chapter 12
They had been forest at one time, these ranging caverns beneath the city of Istar. A hundred thousand years ago, or two hundred, the volcanoes, now dormant and lying beneath the great Istarian lake, erupted in the last of the great geologic disasters, before the All Saints War of the ancient Age of Dreams. It had buried this landscape beneath lava and ash, and the caverns had formed slowly, inexorably, beneath the rise and fall of a hundred civilizations. The five races stepped forth onto the face of the planet, the House of Silvanos rose in the young forest to the south, the gnomes were born, and the Graystone formed in the divine forges of Reorx. It was then that the strange process of opalescence began in the petrified trunks and limbs of the buried trees, and water from the new lake hollowed passages through the porous volcanic rock.
Now, after thousands of years, living eyes mar shy;veled at the immemorial forest, and twenty years of pick and shovel had not yet spoiled its eerie, unearthly beauty. In the smokeless torches of the elven miners, the fossilized landscape glittered as though touched with an ancient, frozen dew.
Three elves descended the long, narrow passage between petrified oaks, glowing amber lamps in their hands. They were masked against the dust, and their green eyes flashed like stars in their ash-blackened faces.
This night, they were not searching for opals. Despite the Kingpriest's orders, all mining had been set aside to search for the child.
They had imagined her dead, along with her mother and three other elves, when this part of the cavern collapsed two nights earlier. They had sent out runners and scouts into the midst of the rubble, clambering and crawling back into the darkness until they could clamber and crawl no more, calling the names of the five missing miners.
Tessera and Parian. Gleam. Cabuchon.
Little Taglio. Only a child, but old enough to hold a lamp while the others worked.
Just this afternoon they had heard her crying. Now, having combed the most accessible regions of the mines, the Lucanesti had secretly sent several of their strongest and best into more perilous depths, the realm of cave-in and rockslide, and of the spirit naga-the serpentine monsters with the tranquil human faces, whose spellcraft dried the opalescent bodies of the Lucanesti and left them dust and brittle bone in the deep, forgotten corridors.
Dangerous territory indeed, and the sound of the elf-child's crying had haunted them for hours, as the three gaunt miners dug and scrabbled toward the source of the sound.
The oldest of the searchers, Spinel, held the lamp above the younger, stronger elves. Seventeen hun shy;dred years had dulled the sharpness of his eyes, the power and resilience of his arms, but the old elf was shrewd, tunnelwise, just as aligned to the dark shift of corridor and passage as the dwarves he had fought for centuries under the earth.