Varaile, though, was a little unwell, and begged off attending. Even the short trip down to Muldemar seemed a little too much for her to deal with just now, she told him, and she certainly had no eagerness to take part in a lavish dinner where rich food and strong wines would be served far into the night. She asked Prestimion to bring Septach Melayn along as his companion instead. Prestimion was reluctant to go without her; but he was even more reluctant to disappoint Abrigant, who would be deeply hurt if he failed to appear. And so it happened that when the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand arrived at the Coronal’s residence with word that a young knight-initiate named Dekkeret had just returned to the Castle after a long absence overseas and was seeking an audience with Lord Prestimion on a matter of extremely great importance, it was to Varaile and not the Coronal to whom he delivered the message.
“Dekkeret?” Varaile said. “I don’t think I know that name.”
“No, milady. He has been away since before the time you came to live here.”
“It isn’t usual for knight-initiates to request audiences with the Coronal, is it? How extreme is the importance of this extremely important matter, anyway? Important enough for you to send him down to Prestimion at Muldemar, do you think?”
“I have no idea. He said it was quite urgent, but that he must deliver his report to the Coronal himself, or else to the High Counsellor, or, if neither of them is here, to Prince Akbalik. However, the Coronal is in Muldemar today, as you know, and the High Counsellor is down there with him, and Prince Akbalik has not yet returned from his own travels—he is in Stoienzar, I think. I hesitate to disturb Lord Prestimion’s holiday in Muldemar without your permission, milady.”
“No. Quite right, Nilgir Sumanand.” And then, somewhat to her own surprise, for she had been feeling queasy all morning: “Send him here to me. I’ll find out from him myself whether it’s something worth bothering the Coronal about.”
There was something generous and open-spirited about Dekkeret’s features and the straightforward gaze of his eyes that made Varaile take an immediate intuitive liking to him. He was obviously highly intelligent, but there did not seem to be anything sly or scheming or crafty about him. He was a big, ruggedly built young man, perhaps twenty years old or a year or two more, with wide, powerful shoulders and a general look of tremendous physical strength held under careful control. The skin of his face and hands had a tanned, almost leathery look, as though he had spent a great deal of time outdoors lately in some hot, harsh climate.
The Coronal, she told him, would be away from the Castle for several days more. She made it quite clear that she would not intrude on her husband’s visit to Muldemar except for very good cause. And asked him what it was, exactly, that Knight-Initiate Dekkeret wished to bring to the Coronal’s attention.
Dekkeret was hesitant at first in his reply. Perhaps he was disconcerted at finding himself in the company of Lord Prestimion’s consort instead of Lord Prestimion, or perhaps it was the fact that Lord Prestimion’s consort was so very close to his own age. Or else he was simply unwilling to reveal the information to someone he did not know: a woman, moreover, who was not even a member of the Council. He made no attempt, at any rate, to disguise his uncertainty about how to proceed.
But then he appeared to decide that it was safe to tell her the tale. After some awkward false starts he began to offer her a long, rambling prologue. Prince Akbalik, he said, had taken him with him some time back on a diplomatic mission to Zimroel. He had not been entrusted with any important responsibilities himself, but was brought along only to gain a little seasoning, since he had only a short while before joined the Coronal’s staff. After spending some time in Ni-moya he had arranged, for reasons that he did not seem to be able to make very clear, to be transferred temporarily to the service of the Pontifex, and had gone off to Suvrael to investigate a problem involving cattle exports.
“Suvrael?” Varaile said. “How awful to be sent there, of all places!”
“It was at my own request, milady. Yes, I know, it is an unpleasant land. But I felt a need to go someplace unpleasant for a time. It would be very complicated to explain.” It sounded to Varaile almost as though he had deliberately been looking to experience great physical discomfort: as a sort of purgation, perhaps, a penitential act. That was hard for her to comprehend. But she let the point pass without attempting to question him on it.
His task in Suvrael, Dekkeret said, had been to visit a place called Ghyzyn Kor, the capital of the cattle-ranch country, and make inquiries there about the reasons for the recent decline in beef production. Ghyzyn Kor lay at the heart of a mountain-sheltered zone of fertile grazing lands, six or seven hundred miles deep in the torrid continent’s interior, that was entirely surrounded by the bleakest of deserts. But upon his arrival at the port of Tolaghai on Suvrael’s northwest coast, he quickly learned that getting there was not going to be any easy matter.
There were, he was told, three main routes inland. But one of these was currently being ravaged by fierce sandstorms that made it impassable. A second was closed to travelers on account of marauding Shapeshifter bandits. And the third, an arduous desert road that ran across the mountains by way of a place called Khulag Pass, had fallen into disuse in recent years and was in a bad state of repair. No one went that way any more, his informant said, because the route was haunted.
“Haunted?”
“Yes, milady. By ghosts, so I was told, that would enter your mind at night as you slept and steal your dreams, and replace them with the most ghastly terrifying fantasies. Some travelers in that desert had died of their own nightmares, I heard. And by day the ghosts would sing in the distance, confusing you, leading you from the proper path with strange songs and eerie sounds, until you drifted off into some sandy wasteland and were lost forever.”
“Ghosts who steal your dreams,” said Varaile, marveling. Her innate skepticism bridled at the whole idea. “Surely you aren’t the sort to let yourself be frightened by nonsense like that.”
“Indeed I’m not. But setting off by myself into that miserable desert, ghosts or no ghosts, was a different matter. I began to think my mission was doomed to end in complete failure. But then I came across someone who claimed that he often went inland by way of Khulag Pass and had never had any problems with the ghosts. He didn’t say that the ghosts weren’t there, only that he had ways of withstanding their powers. I hired him to serve as my guide.”
His name, Dekkeret said, was Venghenar Barjazid: a sly, disreputable little man, very likely a smuggler of some sort, who extorted a formidable price from him for the job. The plan was to reverse the usual patterns of wakefulness, traveling by night and making camp during the burning heat of the day. They were accompanied by Barjazid’s son, an adolescent boy named Dinitak, along with a Skandar woman to serve as porter and a Vroon who was familiar with all the desert roads. A dilapidated old floater would be the vehicle in which they traveled.
The journey out of Tolaghai and up into the hills leading to Khulag Pass was uneventful. Dekkeret found the landscape startling in its ugliness—dry rocky washes, sandy pockmarked ground, spiky twisted plants—and it grew even more forbidding once they had gone through the pass and began their descent into the Desert of Stolen Dreams beyond. He had never imagined that the world held any such fearsome place, so stark and grim and inhospitable. But, he said, he simply took that cruel, barren wasteland as it came, without feeling a flicker of dismay. Perhaps he even liked it in some perverse way, Varaile supposed, considering that he had gone to Suvrael in the first place in search of whatever gratification there might be in hardship and suffering.