Prestimion chuckled. “He looks for metals everywhere,” he said quietly to Gialaurys. “It is his obsession now.”
“Only sand, that is,” the Vroon replied. “Those are the blood-red dunes of Minnegara that you see, which border on the scarlet sea of Barbirike. The sand is made up of the myriad shells of the tiny creatures that give the sea its ruddy tint.”
“A scarlet sea,” Prestimion murmured, shaking his head. “Blood-red dunes.”
Which came into clearer view three days later: parallel rows of crescent dunes as sharp along their crests as scimitars, and so vivid in color that the air shimmered red above them; and, farther on, stretching beyond sight, a long narrow body of water that seemed like nothing so much as a great pool of blood. It was a handsome and startling sight, but ominous as well. Abrigant, ever eager for sources of metals, was all for a side journey to explore it; but the Vroon maintained that no iron would be found there, and Prestimion peremptorily told his brother to put the project from his mind. They were on a different quest just now.
In Vrambikat city they interviewed the three citizens who had reported seeing Dantirya Sambail. Commoners, they were, two women and a man, all of them so tongue-tied at finding themselves summoned before people of such obvious high rank that it was almost impossible for them to get their story out. Had they known that they were facing the Coronal and his brother, and the Grand Admiral of the Realm, they very likely would have fallen down fainting. As it was, the best they could do was fumble and stammer.
But again Galielber Dorn proved himself useful. “Allow me,” the Vroon said, and stepped forward, extending his ropy, twining tentacles toward the jabbering trio.
He was a tiny creature, no more than knee-high to the shorter of the women, yet they backed away uncertainly as the Vroon approached them. Three clipped clicking sounds came from his curving golden beak and they halted, shifting their weight uncertainly from leg to leg. Galielber Dorn went from one to the next, reaching out with two delicate, intricately branched tentacles and wrapping them about their wrists, and with each one he maintained his grip for some moments while staring upward into their eyes.
By the time he was done with the last of them, all three were as calm as though they had been given some soothing potion. And when, under further prompting from Prestimion, they began finally to speak, the story came from them in a copious flow.
They had indeed encountered a pair of brusque, disagreeable men who answered well to the descriptions of Dantirya Sambail and his minion Mandralisca. The one man was long-limbed and slim, with an athlete’s wiry grace about him and a dour, hard face, cheekbones like knifeblades, eyes like polished stones. The other, a shorter and sturdier-looking man, had worn a kerchief over his face as though to protect himself from wind and sun, but they had seen his eyes, and they were even more remarkable in their way than those of the other man: lovely violet-hued eyes, as gentle and tender and warm as the taller man’s dark ones had been cold and hostile.
“There can be no doubt, can there?” said Gialaurys. “There are no other eyes in the world like the Procurator’s.”
The fugitives had come riding into Vrambikat city on two plump mounts that looked as if they had been driven to the last extremes of exhaustion. They needed to sell these creatures, they explained, and to purchase new ones with which to continue their journey, and they had no time to waste. “I laughed,” said the man, “and told them that no stableman would pay fifty weights for two half-dead beasts like that, The tall one struck me and knocked me to the ground, and I think would have put an end to me right then, if the other hadn’t stopped him. Then Astakapra here"—he indicated the older of the women—"told him where he could find a stable nearby, and off they went, and good riddance, say I.”
“Where is this stable?” Prestimion asked, “Is it easy to reach from here?”
“Nothing easier, sir,” the man said. “This wide street here, that’s Eremoil Way. Two blocks, corner of Amyntilir, turn right, second building in from the corner on your left, with the bales of hay out front. Can’t miss it.”
“Pay them something,” said Prestimion to Abrigant, and they moved along.
The ostlers at the stable remembered their visitors only too well. It had not been difficult for them to identify the mounts on which Mandralisca and Dantirya Sambail had been traveling as stolen ones, for they bore the markings of a well-known mount-breeder of the foothill city of Megen-thorp on their haunches, and the Megenthorp man had sent word out into the hinterlands not long before that two strangers had broken into his compound and taken a pair of valuable mares. Which were these two beasts before them now, sadly reduced by days of harsh usage; and the two men who had come to the stable, the fierce-looking gaunt one and the other, shorter one with the strange purple eyes, had proceeded at once to draw weapons on the ostlers and relieve them of two fresh animals, leaving the winded ones from Megenthorp in their place.
“So they have swords now too,” said Abrigant. “Supplied by the accomplices in their escape, I wonder, or acquired along the way?”
“Along the way, it would seem,” Prestimion said. “As with the mounts.” To the ostlers he said, “Do you have any idea which direction they were heading in as they went out of town?”
“Oh, yes, my lord, yes. East. They asked us where the main eastward highway could be found; and we told them, oh, yes, we told them truly, as who would not, with a sword’s tip at his throat?”
East.
How far east? As far as the Great Sea? That was untold thousands of miles away. Surely, surely, they weren’t insane enough to be thinking of getting back to Zimroel that way. Where, Prestimion wondered, were they really heading?
“Come,” he said. “Time’s wasting.”
“We’re riding in floaters and they on mounts,” said Gialaurys. “We’re bound to overtake them sooner or later.”
“They can find floaters for themselves the same way they found mounts,” Prestimion said. “Let’s get moving.”
Beyond Vrambikat the countryside grew emptier, only widely scattered little towns now and the occasional camp of imperial troops on maneuvers, and lonely watchtowers along the rim of hills flanking the road. No one had seen two strangers on mounts come riding this way lately, although it would have been easy enough for Dantirya Sam-bail and Mandralisca to slip by these places unnoticed under cover of darkness. And in dreams the next two nights both Prestimion and Gialaurys had a sense of their quarry moving swiftly and steadily through the territory ahead of them. “Dreams must be trusted,” said Gialaurys, and Prestimion did not dispute him.
Eastward, then. What else could be done?
Scenes of extraordinary beauty unfolded before their eyes as they journeyed on. The long scarlet sea became a mere slit in the landscape that lay off to their right, and then it vanished altogether; but now, in the same direction, they saw pale green mountains soft as velvet that ran through the rising spine of the land, and, when they looked down over the other way, into the low country of the north, the travelers beheld a chain of small, perfectly round lakes, black as the darkest onyx and just as glistening, that stretched on and on in a triple row to the limits of their vision. It was as if the hand of a master artist had distributed them in the landscape with the greatest of care.
A lovely sight, but an inhospitable place. “The Thousand Eyes, they are called,” Galielber Dorn told them. “Where those lakes are, that is entirely a barren zone. There are no settlements in the district before us down there. Nor wild animals either, for no living thing can abide that black water. It burns one’s skin like fire, and to drink of it means death.”