“The One God be with you until we meet again, Mina,” said Galdar.
He meant to leave. He could yet cover many miles before daylight waned. But he found the leaving difficult. He could not imagine a day going by without seeing her amber eyes, hearing her voice. He felt as bereft as if he were suddenly shorn of all his fur, left in the world shivering and weak as a newborn calf.
Mina laid her hand upon his, upon the hand she had given him. “I will be with you wherever you go, Galdar,” she said.
He fell to one knee, pressed her hand to his forehead. Keeping the memory of her touch an amulet in his mind, he turned and ran from the tent.
Captain Samuval entered next, coming to report that, as he had foreseen, every single soldier in the camp had volunteered to come. He had chosen the five hundred he considered the best.
These soldiers were now the envy of the rest.
“I fear that those left behind may desert to follow you, Mina,”
Captain Samuval said.
“I will speak to them,” she said. “I will explain to them that they must continue to hold Sanction without any expectation of reinforcements. I will explain to them how it can be done. They will see their duty.”
She continued to put the small stones upon the map.
“What is that?” Samuval asked curiously.
“The location of the ogre forces,” Mina replied. “Look, Captain, if we march this way, directly east out of the Khalkhist Mountains, we can make much better time heading southward across the Plains of Khur. We will avoid the largest concentration of their troops, which are down here in the southern end of the mountain range, fighting the Legion of Steel and the forces of the elf-witch, Alhana Starbreeze. We will attempt to steal a march on them by traveling along this route, the Thon-Thalas River. I fear that at some point we must fight the ogres, but if my plan works, we will fight only a diminished force. With the God’s blessing, most of us will reach our destination.”
And what happened when that destination was reached?
How did she intend to break through a magical shield that had thus far baffled all attempts to enter it? Samuval did not ask her.
Nor did he ask how she knew the position of the ogre forces or how she knew they were fighting the Legion of Steel and the dark elves. The Knights of Neraka had sent scouts into ogre lands but none had ever returned alive to tell what they saw.
Captain Samuval did not ask Mina how she intended to hold Silvanesti with such a small force, a force that would be decimated by the time they reached their destination. Samuval asked her none of this.
He had faith. If not necessarily in this One God, he had faith in Mina.
Chapter Thirteen
The Scourge of Ansalon
The odd occurrence that befell Tasslehoff Burrfoot on the fifth night of his journey to Qualinesti in the custody of Sir Gerard can best be explained by the fact that although the days had been sunny and warm and fine for traveling, the nights had been cloudy and overcast, with a drizzly rain. Up until this night. This night the sky was clear, the air was soft and warm and alive with the sounds of the forest, crickets and owls and the occasional wolf howling.
Far north, near Sanction, the minotaur Galdar ran along the road that led to Khur. Far south, in Silvanesti, Silvanoshei entered Silvanost as he had planned, in triumph and with fanfare. The entire population of Silvanost came out to welcome him and stare at him and marvel over him. Silvanoshei was shocked and troubled by how few elves remained in the city. He said nothing to anyone however and was greeted with appropriate ceremony by General Konnal and a white-robed elven wizard whose charming manners endeared him to Silvanoshei at once.
While Silvanoshei dined on elven delicaces off plates of gold and drank sparkling wine from goblets of crystal, and while Galdar munched on dried peas as he marched, Tas and Gerard ate their customary boring and tasteless meal of flatbread and dried beef washed down with nothing more interesting than plain, ordinary water. They had ridden south as far as Gateway, where they passed several inns, whose innkeepers were standing in the doors with pinched faces. These innkeepers would have barred the door against a kender before the roads were closed by the dragon. Now they had come running out to offer them lodging and a meal for the unheard-of price of a single steel.
Sir Gerard had paid no attention to them. He had ridden past without a glance. Tasslehoff had sighed deeply and looked back longingly at the inns dwindling in the distance. When he had hinted that a mug of cold ale and a plate of hot food would be a welcome change, Gerard had said no, the less attention they called to themselves the better for all concerned.
So they continued on south, traveling along a new road that ran near the river, a road Gerard said had been built by the Knights of Neraka to maintain their supply lines into Qualinesti.
Tas wondered at the time why the Knights of Neraka were interested in supplying the elves of Qualinesti, but he assumed that this must be some new project the elven king Gilthas had instituted.
Tas and Gerard had slept outdoors in a drizzling rain for the last four nights. This fifth night was fine. As usual, sleep sneaked up on the kender before he was quite ready for it. He woke up in the night, jolted from his slumbers by a light shining in his eyes.
“Hey! What’s that?” he demanded in a loud voice. Throwing off his blanket, he leaped to his feet and grabbed Gerard by the shoulder, shaking him and pummeling him.
“Sir Gerard! Wake up!” Tasslehoff shouted. “Sir Gerard!”
The Knight was up and awake in an instant, his sword in his hand. “What?” He stared around, alert for danger. “What is it? Did you hear something? See something? What?”
“That! That right there!” Tasslehoff clutched the Knight’s shirt and pointed.
Sir Gerard regarded the kender with an extremely grim look.
“Is this your idea of a joke?”
“Oh, no,” Tas stated. “My idea of a joke is this. I say, ‘Knock, knock,’ and you say, ‘Who’s there?’ and I say, ‘Minotaur,’ and you say ‘Minotaur who,’ and I say, ‘so that’s what you stepped in.’ That’s my idea of a joke. This has to do with that strange light in the sky.”
“That’s the moon,” said Sir Gerard through gritted teeth.
“No!” Tasslehoff was astonished. “Really? The moon?”
He looked back at it. The thing did appear to have certain moonlike qualities: it was orb-shaped, and it was in the sky alongside the stars, and it glowed. But that was where the resemblance ended.
“If that’s Solinari,” Tas said, eyeing the moon skeptically. “Then what happened to him? Is he sick?”
Sir Gerard did not answer. He lay back down on his blanket, placed his sword within hand’s reach, and, grabbing hold of a comer of his blanket rolled himself up in it. “Go to sleep,” he said coldly, “and stay that way until morning.”
“But I want to know about the moon!” Tas persisted, hunkering down beside the Knight nothing daunted by the fact that Gerard’s back was turned and his head covered up by the blanket and that he was still obviously extremely irate at having been violently wakened for nothing. Even his back looked angry. “What happened to make Solinari look so pale and sickly? And where’s lovely red Lunitari? I guess I’d wonder where Nuitari was if I’d been able to see the black moon in the first place, which I couldn’t, so it might be there and I just wouldn’t know it—”
Sir Gerard flipped over quite suddenly. His head emerged from the blanket, revealing a stem and unfriendly eye. “You know perfectly well that Solinari has not been seen in the skies these past thirty-odd years, ever since the end of the Chaos War. Lunitari either. So you can stop this ridiculous nonsense. I am now going to sleep. I am to be awakened for nothing less than an invasion of hobgoblins. Is that clear?”