'My Princess,' said Darl, moving to her side. 'Should we put on the leather boots now? Our dogs are beginning to suffer.'
'Aye, pull them out and see to it, Darl,' she said, pleased that the man had taken the initiative to approach her on the subject.
'And,' spoke up Ziore, 'you might boil some of the olorum root found in the crevices yonder and apply the resulting sediment to the dogs' feet before putting on the boots. It will soothe and heal their torn pads.'
'The olorum root?' asked Moriana. 'One I am unfamiliar with. Thank you, Ziore. It shall be done.' Darl bowed and silently turned to see to it. More and more he seemed his old self. Moriana hoped the change went deeper than his visible actions. It pained her greatly seeing the man suffer so – and all for her.
Several men brewed tea and others tried to ease their nerves with stinging draughts of Grassland brandy. Moriana accepted a cup of steaming tea – a pleasantly bracing Samazant strain, not the resinous amasinj of the steppes – and allowed a grinning Nevrym forester to lace it with colorless liqueur. She sat on a rock and stared back the way they'd come. The mountains fell away in toothlike peaks of gradually diminishing size, becoming foothills, spreading away to the south and west into an open plain. To her right yellow prairie gave way in the distance to the brown and pale green patchwork of cultivation; at the edge of vision the black line of the forests that had sheltered them for the vital first days of their flight swam in heat haze.
Ahead of the princess rose Omizantrim straight and stark from the plain. As always in the last weeks, a plume of smoke grew from its maw, steely gray today. By a fluke of the weather – or something more, a possibility Moriana studiously avoided thinking about – the wind blew from the Throat of the Old Ones straight into the Mystic Mountains. They had been tasting ash on their tongues all morning, and some of the dogs sported reddened, running eyes from it.
To her left, away and southward, the scrubby short-grass plain was abruptly interrupted as the land dropped a thousand feet to the Highgrass Broad below. Far-off smoke spires lifted above the tall grass prairie. The Grasslanders engaged again in their favorite sport, it seemed, which was massacring one another in internecine feuds that kept them honed for mercenary work.
Darl saw that the dogs watered and canteens were refilled from the tiny artesian spring, always making sure that no one got out of sight of the resting place without accompaniment. In more and more ways was Darl returning to his former self.
Moriana was relieved at the precaution. These mountains had a feel about them she disliked, and she knew it went far deeper than mere superstition engendered by cradle fables. The leitmotif of the Mystic Mountains was black: black soil, black-stemmed shrubs, black birds wheeling on spring thermals overhead. The anhak here grew black, more gnarled than in the woods below, and higher up grew black pine, whose very needles were as much black as green.
From the woods upslope came a screeching, a rising-falling unearthly sound. The dogs started and growled. One whined and tucked tail between its legs. The four archers with the party, three Nevrym foresters and an Imperial borderer from Samazant, looked to their bows. Moriana did likewise.
'I don't like this place.' Ziore's subdued voice came from the pouch. Neither she nor Moriana felt her misty presence would do other than aggravate the others' uneasiness over the princess's sorcery. Moriana shrugged, finished her tea and stood. 'Nor do I,' she said simply. 'Let's ride.'
Hissing, the monster lurched from a hidden draw beside the trail. The lead dog reared and leaped back, almost unseating his rider. Moriana drew the nock of her arrow to her ear in a single fluid motion. Her dog growled deep in his chest. The others set up an excited barking as the vast green shape slid across their path.
It was a monstrous lizard, twenty feet long and more. A crest of yard-long spines, yellow and curving, grew down its back, diminishing in size as they approached the tail tip – still out of sight up the gulley. Moriana recognized it as a sprawler, its immense body suspended between its legs rather than supported atop them. It turned a bony triangular head toward them and regarded them dispassionately with a yellow eye the size of a man's head.
Horrific as the creature was, it wasn't the giant lizard that drew muffled exclamations from the travellers. Three iron-hard spines had been removed where the wattled neck flowed into its shoulders. Where they had been sat a rider.
Tall and manlike, the being stared at them from within an elaborate casque of green metal that shimmered in the sun. His helmet and breastplate revealed few details of head and body, except a pair of flat black eyes as emotionless as the lizard's yellow one. On the being's left arm rested a great spiked target shield, whose rough surface suggested construction from the scaled hide of a beast such as the alien warrior rode. The right hand's three black taloned fingers and thumb gripped a lance. The stranger wore no boots; the feet the startled humans saw sported three toes, also tipped with black claws. The largest was hooked in a ring serving as a stirrup.
With reptilian patience, rider and mount gazed upon the travellers. Behind her Moriana heard a low wail, rising into a shrill frightened yapping as a war dog panicked at the smell and nearness of the monstrous lizard – or perhaps of the being who rode it. Easing her bowstring forward, she clipped the arrow in the bowstaff with her thumb and snapped the fingers of her right hand. 'Enough,' she said, and the dog was still.
Her companions looked from the monsters blocking their path to the princess, sitting tall in her saddle, her golden hair thrown fearlessly back. A mixture of fear and confidence radiated from their gazes. Before Mortana said another word, the lizard rider spoke.
'Men.' The word came out oddly protracted, with an almost tubercular wheeze. 'Expected. Come.' With that abbreviated greeting, the lizard man goaded his mount with one knee. The monster lifted its belly from the dirt, turned its head and began crawling laboriously upslope. Moriana paused for a few seconds, considered and then followed, her dog shouldering past the cringing mount of the knight who had taken the lead. She forced herself not to look back. Not a soul of her party might be following her, but at this of all moments she couldn't show fear.
Only the emotion-sampling Ziore knew the princess's true condition.
She concentrated on studying as much of their peculiar guide as possible from the rear. He wore a breastplate and back of the same unfamiliar metal as his casque, and a skirt set with strips of the same stuff. His arms and legs flashed bare. They were dark green, almost black, like the needles of the pines that grew to either side of the wash they followed up the mountainside. From where she sat, the musculature looked human enough and the skin flexed as supplely as any human's. Now and then sunlight broke on the curve of the high muscle in a metallic glint, and Moriana guessed the being – the man, though unlike any she'd ever seen before – was covered in fine scales. The only jarring overt sign of his alienness, aside from his complexion, was his feet and hands. Somehow, Moriana found those small divergencies more unsettling than more obvious ones would have been.
'What do you think?' she said softly, directing her question to Ziore. She felt the genie's puzzlement before the mental answer came.
'I cannot tell. I sense no emotion that I can read. Or none that makes sense. A dark inchoate churning, shot through with – yes, with longing. And a feeling of fulfillment.' 'Fulfillment? How so?' Ziore paused long before answering.
'I can tell no more, she thought. The thoughts and passions of the creature are so… so other. The dog we ride is far more easily accessible than this Zr'gsz.