“We will attack the Red Hounds. Perhaps, once Inyene sees how powerful we can be—and what a dangerous sort of enemy we are—then she will think twice about traipsing over the Plains to get to her precious trinket!”
Inyene won’t hesitate at all, I thought, but said nothing, as I knew that Naroba needed to at least keep face amongst the other Souda. “Good idea,” I said, and wondered if I would have been this easy to manipulate if I had become the Imanu instead of Naroba.
“When you become your Imanu,” Ymmen breathed his warmth into the back of my mind, “you will be far wiser than this one. You are brave, but there is also a courage of the heart—to do the right thing, even when it is hard. That is why you will make a good Imanu.”
Thank you, I sent the thought to the dragon, my friend.
Chapter 18
The Shifting Sands
“You have to say it for your, uh, friend,” Abioye said to me as we stood on the Plains, looking out over a landscape that was banded yellows and oranges. It was the beginning of the Shifting Sands—a huge area in the middle of the Plains where the ground could be treacherous and deceptive.
“My friend?” I looked across to the young man, wondering who he meant. Ymmen? Tamin? Montfre?
“Naroba. She knows how to plan a battle,” he said seriously as he looked down at the advancing rivers of Daza fighters as they picked their way into the deserts. The forward scouts were using poles, as we had done in the Sea of Mists, but they traveled quickly, electing a path for the others to follow as they tracked our target: The company of the Red Hounds.
“I’m not sure I would have ever called Naroba a friend,” I muttered, perhaps a little harshly. But every time I thought about Naroba, I felt a slew of complicated feelings that hadn’t really changed in all the years I had known her. There had been times when we WERE friends, I had to admit to myself. Times in the communal hut, listing to the Elders’ stories—or down by the river, washing and preparing the hides.
But she would always find a way to sour it. I sighed, as I remembered the barbed looks or the petty comments whenever the Elders had started asking me for advice on herbs and what have you—they knew that I was receiving training at my mother’s knee, I guessed.
“She was always jealous of me,” I mumbled, watching the small figure of the distant Naroba as she directed and helped the line of Daza fighters up a particularly treacherous slope. She loved her people and her land though—that much was plain for anyone to see.
“It’s hard, when you live in someone else’s shadow,” Abioye mumbled, and although he was looking out at the Daza below us, his voice was far away, and I knew that he wasn’t talking about Naroba at all.
He was thinking about Inyene; I understood that. But it didn’t stop his comment from stinging a little, all the same. “I never wanted to cast a shadow!” I said, kicking some of the sand in front of me.
“If you fly, you spread your shadow on the ground,” Ymmen breathed into my mind, but I was resolutely not going to riddle words of dragon wisdom right now! What was it with these two? Perhaps I was being a little ungrateful—but I found I was unable to stop myself.
It’s the anticipation and the worry of what is about to come, I thought. I had asked Ymmen to scout the Plains for the Red Hounds, which he had done—sensing them while they were still many leagues away and unable to see him observing their position.
And now, Naroba was leading us to the place that Ymmen had described through me, and we were planning to put a stop to them once and for all. It was going to be a battle, and there was tension in my jaw as I tightened my hand on the pommel of the sword that was now strapped to my side.
Ahead of us were the Shifting Sands, and beyond that—the dunes, I recognized. This was close to where the vault of the Stone Crown was supposed to be, I reminded myself, and the thought at once filled me with excitement as well as dread. We were close to our goal—but so were the Red Hounds—and Naroba was sickeningly right that we had to deal with them first, lest they attack us when we had retrieved the Stone Crown ourselves…
What did I know of battles? What did the Daza know of pitch battles? All of the tribes of the Daza had their conflicts and disagreements in their histories of course—with some of the tribes like the Aloui to the far north making raiding and fighting a specialty.
But for the rest of us tribal people of the Plains? Fighting was an unavoidable part of life—but we didn’t have standing armies or guards and soldiers like the Three Kingdomers did. We formed warbands when we needed to, I knew. They were almost always made up of the most experienced hunters of the village, and we would venture out to drive off invaders into our traditional territories.
But no one practiced formations and tactics, I thought in alarm. We Daza had never needed them before—or so I had believed.
But it was clear to see how Naroba had risen to the challenge of the last few years, and the hardened hunters around her responded to her suggestions and commands with even greater obedience and dedication than the contracted guards of Inyene. The hunters like Benassa and Modu whom I had known as being skilled and expert even when I was a kid, now bore the scars of multiple battles and defensive actions.
It made me sad, to see how much my people had to change because of Inyene.
“Everything changes, Little Sister. Even the stars grow old and fade, if you watch for long enough,” Ymmen informed me. Again, I idly wondered just how old Ymmen really was, if he had even seen the course of the heavens change. But we were both too preoccupied with the coming battle to worry over such things now.
“But maybe you’re right,” I sighed heavily, answering both the dragon in my mind and Abioye at my side. “Maybe Naroba is exactly what the Souda needs right now,” I admitted. It had, after all, been her call to keep well back from the advancing company of mercenaries, always shadowing them by having great stretches of sand dunes between us over the last couple of days. Even though we could have attacked them in the middle of the night—just as they had done to us, I remembered the night-time storm attack the Red Hounds had performed against the expedition—Naroba insisted that we wait until the Red Hounds were entering the most dangerous part of the Shifting Sands proper.
Yeah, Naroba has a gift for this kind of stuff, I had to finally agree. I would have rushed on the Red Hounds as soon as we were within range. Everyone always said that I was too hotheaded, and I guessed there was truth to that charge.
But, right now our scouts informed us that the Red Hounds had reached the really ‘shifting’ part of the shifting sands. The dunes were much lower where they were and were cast in a deeper crimson hue as they were mixed with the clays and wetter soils below. These dunes were also more tightly packed, forming a warren of sometimes steep-sided valley-ways between the dunes.
And at least half of those gullies between the dunes had the sinking sands in them. It was traditional Souda wisdom that some underground river ran through that place, but that its watercourse was troubled and confused, and sometimes the water would come up almost to the surface, creating pockets and flats and rills where the sand might look solid from the surface, but was in fact a clinging, muddy soup. A person or an animal could easily become stuck in the quicksand and, even if they didn’t sink and drown, they could starve to death or be picked off by predators as they became stuck.