King Haimeric shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was certainly a magnificent knight, but there was nothing about him that should inspire frightening stories.”
Dominic read another sentence. “My wizard and I are both gravely wounded and ill from the same fever.” He stopped again and looked up. “I thought my father was killed in battle.”
“Wounded in battle,” said the king soberly, “so badly he might not have recovered anyway, but his servant said it was the fever that finished him.”
I glanced at Joachim out of the corner of my eye and said nothing.
“But we have learned of something wonderful,” Dominic continued, “something marvelous, so special that I dare not mention it even in this secret letter.”
“So we’re still not getting any answers,” said Ascelin, half under his breath.
“It is hidden far to the south of the Holy Land, in the Wadi Harhammi. I can’t even tell you how we found out, but you will know it when you find it.”
Dominic lifted his eyes. “That’s the entire message.” He handed me the parchment. “Does it make any sense?”
“What’s a wadi?” asked the king.
“It’s a dry watercourse,” answered Ascelin.
“The Wadi Harhammi,” said Hugo, “south of the Holy Land. This message is fifty years old. Other people must have learned about it by now. I’m sure it’s what my father was looking for when he disappeared.”
“We have to go there,” said Dominic. He spoke slowly, with dignity and determination. “Wherever this Wadi Harhammi may be, whether or not the marvelous object is still there, we must go in search of it. I cannot ask the rest of you to accompany me against your wills, but I myself have no choice. My father wished me to go.”
We all looked toward King Haimeric. This was still his quest, no matter what messages from the dead we might receive. The king nodded thoughtfully. “After fifty years, whatever he’d found or heard of is unlikely still to be there. But you’re quite right: we have to look. Besides, the stories of the blue rose say it’s being cultivated south of the Holy Land.”
Dominic handed me the parchment. “Since this is a magical message, Wizard, you should carry it.”
Ascelin stood up. “Whatever your brother had heard of, Haimeric, someone thought it important enough to break into the tomb to try to find the secret. If they’re looking for the snake ring, and they know we have it, we could be in constant danger.”
King Haimeric smiled. “I appreciate your concern, Ascelin, but this enemy of which you speak must already know the secret’s not in the tomb, and will think we don’t have it either or we wouldn’t have come here to look for it.”
“Could I have my ring back?” Dominic asked me.
I had almost forgotten I was holding it. Even if all of us still seemed more willing to follow the king in search of his brother than Dominic in search of his father, the burly prince certainly had a right to his own ring. I reattached the ruby and reapplied the binding spell to keep it in place, and handed him the ring, but the piece of parchment I slipped inside my jacket.
We traveled southeast through the eastern kingdoms while summer advanced rapidly around us. The king had been right, back in the mountains, that we soon wouldn’t need our heavy clothes. Ascelin kept us to back roads and away from the cities. If we were being followed, neither his hunter’s instincts nor my magic could find anyone behind us. But we became lost ourselves on the narrow roads at least once a day, so someone else might have had even more trouble.
Although the border guards of the first kingdom beneath the mountains had said their kingdom was not at war, the other countries apparently all were. We became lost most commonly when trying to dodge the lines of soldiers we saw approaching in the distance, or to get away from the main road when a long line of carts, carrying heavily-guarded supplies, appeared before us.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the eastern kingdoms for anything,” said Hugo in my ear, as he and I lay in the underbrush near the main road, watching horses pass by, waiting until the road was clear so we could get the others and follow it ourselves. Harnesses jingled, and dust rose from hundreds of shod feet. Spear points glinted in the sun, but the faces of the riders were hidden by their helmets. “It’s like the hiding games I used to play when I was little, but it’s deadly earnest,” he added cheerfully.
Hugo might think it an exciting game, and Joachim might think there would be great merit in dying on this pilgrimage. But if we ended up as six fresh heads on poles, like the ones we had seen last night, I doubted we would appreciate it.
I felt a new respect for the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, who I kept hoping to meet at some point, although about the only people we had met so far were frightened farmers from whom we bought food. Ending war in the western kingdoms, it appeared, had not made the western aristocracy any less interested in fighting, only more likely to go help the wars continue east of the mountains.
“That’s the end of the troops,” I said, rising cautiously to my feet. “Let’s get the others.”
We followed the main road a short distance, back in the direction from which the troops had come, and were just looking for a good place to leave the road again when Hugo, in the lead, reined in abruptly. “Look at this! They aren’t- They’re not real, are they?”
“I’m afraid they are,” said Ascelin grimly.
Before us rose a pyramid made entirely of human skulls. An inscription carved in stone at the base told us proudly that these were the enemies that the local king had had killed within a single year. Amazed, I tried to calculate how many skulls might be in the pyramid and gave up. It towered at least twenty feet above the road. The skulls, all clean of flesh and hair or any identifying mark, were very neatly arranged to stare at us.
Hugo made no more comments about games; indeed, he said nothing more for the rest of the day. For that matter, the rest of us scarcely spoke either. We hurried on, but the shadow of that pyramid seemed still to fall between us and the sun.
“I have to apologize, Haimeric,” said Ascelin as we sat around our fire that evening. We had taken lately to making very small fires. “I had no idea the eastern kingdoms would be this dangerous. Even though the main pilgrimage route is at least half again as long, we should have stayed with it. Although I’d never been east of the mountains myself, I know a number of men who have. They’ve spoken of battles, of course, but nothing this widespread. I don’t know if it’s the season of the year-I realize that they’ve mostly been here in the fall and winter-or if whatever ‘strange’ stories are coming out of the East are stirring up trouble here.”
“The Bible tells us,” commented the chaplain, “that in spring kings ride to war.”
“Sir Hugo and his party came this way in the spring a year ago,” said Ascelin, “and I’m sure they didn’t have anyone with them as good as I am in finding the way and hiding tracks. And yet, from everything we know, they had no problems until they left the Holy Land. If I didn’t know better, I’d think something we ourselves had done was responsible for all this.”
In the next few days, however, we saw fewer troops, and slowly we began to hope that we had put the worst of the wars behind us. Ascelin still spoke darkly of how everything from the bandits to these wars seemed to be managed for our maximum peril, but he couldn’t decide if Arnulf was behind it, King Warin, or perhaps someone else we did not even know.
One afternoon, tired from weeks of travel and from a long day’s ride under a sun which had grown more and more intense, we came around a corner and found our path barred by a wall of flame.
Whirlwind reared up, but the rest of our horses, as tired as we, only stopped. I dismounted and approached cautiously. This was magic, but I wasn’t yet sure what kind.
But just as I started probing with magic, the flames disappeared. The ground was not scorched, not even warm. Illusion, then, but those illusory flames had had a solidity my best dragons always lacked.