The enemy had fallen upon the elves just after dawn, before all the Lioness’s warriors were in the saddle. A hundred nomads appeared out of the south, shouting tribal war cries and brandishing swords. The elves who were mounted rode straight at the oncoming horde, holding them off while their comrades readied themselves for battle. The Lioness led that first small force against fearful odds.
The nomads certainly were brave and bloodthirsty, but they had no formal training in arms. Once their initial surprise rush was spent, they found themselves at a severe disadvantage. They lacked any protective armor and most bore only a single weapon, a straight sword without a crossguard. Nomad archers used a short bow of cow horn and wicker laminated together. Deadly at short range, its effectiveness fell off sharply with distance. At two hundred yards—where elf bows were commonly used—nomad arrows merely bounced off elven armor. The iron-headed Silvanesti arrows went right through a nomad’s chest at that range.
The Lioness organized her band into three sections: two hundred, two hundred, and one hundred riders. One of the companies of two hundred, armed with swords, held off fierce rushes by the nomads while the group of one hundred emptied Khurish saddles with precisely aimed arrows. The remaining two hundred riders circled northward, trying to surround the enemy, but the nomads would not be caught. They regrouped and charged at any vulnerable point that they saw. The desert around the tribesmen was littered with the fallen. Many were elves, but mixed in with them were the bodies of desert dwellers and their ponies.
After an hour of fruitless slaughter, the nomads began to lose heart. They had expected to stampede the elves, and when the Lioness’s troops stood firm, nomad ardor waned. Without the discipline to carry on fighting all day, as the desert heat rose to its most incandescent the tribesmen rode away. The dust-caked elves gladly let them go. Kerian had no wish to pursue the foe. She didn’t have the resources for a long chase across the desert, and more hostile nomads might be lurking beyond the horizon.
Fewer than twenty of her warriors had been killed; half that many more had notable injuries. The desert was dotted with a dozen slain nomads. As elves moved among the fallen, scavenging food and precious water, they noticed many of the humans bore the mark of the Leaping Spider clan, the dominant clan in the Weya-Lu tribe.
“Why did they fight us?” Favaronas wondered. “We’ve done nothing to them.”
“We’re foreigners in their land,” Kerian replied grimly. It was a philosophy she understood. If armed Khurs had ridden through Qualinesti, her instinct would have been exactly the same: drive them out.
The scholar did not share her outlook. Shaking his head, he mumbled something about “live and let live.” She had no patience with such feeble notions, but held her tongue. Since finding his assistant lying dead beside him, Favaronas had been somewhat shaken. He took to keeping as close to Kerian as possible. Still, he did not complain and did not hamper her or her warriors.
They buried the dead, elf and human, to discourage scavengers, with the Lioness urging speed and taking a turn at the digging herself. Their second day on the High Plateau was waning, and she wanted to put as much distance between her people and the scene of battle as possible.
The Khalkist range bulked larger on the horizon. The gray peaks resembled low-lying clouds at this distance. The terrain began to change. The thick layer of sand gave way to sand and rocks, then broken gravel. Animal life was seen, even if they were only small creatures, easily frightened lizards sunning themselves on the rocks, their emerald green and burnished gold hides sparkling in the bright light. Foliage reappeared: stunted cedars, creosote bushes, thorny creepers, and a type of grass so wiry that even their hungry horses wouldn’t eat it. Still, the presence of plant life was a welcome change from the unrelieved sand of the High Plateau. They had passed out of the deep desert into the only slightly less hostile lowlands of the mountains.
Kerian sent an advance party forward to reconnoiter the way to the valley mouth. According to Gilthas’s map, the lone entrance to the Inath-Wakenti was a nondescript pass that gave no hint of its importance. They had to find the right one, the exact one, or their journey would be in vain.
The troop topped a small rise, carpeted with shards of gray slate. A startlingly cool breeze struck their faces. The wind coming down the mountains hadn’t yet acquired the desert’s desiccating heat. The Lioness gave word to halt.
Water was dispensed. Kerian removed the bowl-like bottom from the gourd, poured water into it, and let her horse drink. Then she squatted in the shade cast by her mount and drank from the leather-wrapped gourd herself. The water inside was so warm that she could have brewed tea with it.
A distant, loud cracking sound rent the air. Everyone paused and looked to the mountains, the apparent source of the sound. Thunder? It had been a long time since any of them had seen rain.
Favaronas, resting like the Lioness in the shadow of his horse, asked, “Will we get a shower, do you think?”
It seemed wishful thinking; there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. “Probably just a rockfall,” she muttered.
Another boom echoed down from the gray peaks. Hearing it more clearly this time, the Lioness stood quickly, facing the desert. The sound actually was coming from the direction of the desert and echoing off the mountains. Yet all any of them could see was a stony landscape dotted with twisted cedars and spiky brown grass, and beyond that, a shimmering expanse of sand and mirage water.
When a third peal of thunder broke over the slate hill, Kerian ordered everyone to horse. The cooling wind had died away, and to the south a plume of dust rose straight into the air. The cloud was sizable and compact, indicating a tightly knit group of riders. The nomads were following them.
The Lioness sent Favaronas out of harm’s way, over the crest of the hill, then distributed her weary warriors in a wide, crescent formation, with the tips facing the approaching dust cloud. From her place in the center of the formation, she shaded her eyes with one hand and stared south. The column of dust dispersed in the wind as it rose higher into the air.
The elves glimpsed movement at the bottom of the hill. Something burnished and bright flashed between the bushes. The Lioness squinted. It was a single object, larger than a man on horseback, and not a group of hard-riding nomads. She wondered what it could be.
The answer appeared the next second. In a blur of preternatural motion, the approaching creature leaped from the foot of the hill and landed in front of the elves, barely a dozen yards away. Its rapid motion generated a sound like thunder. Horses reared, neighing shrilly in fright. Elves throughout the formation shouted with shock and dismay.
Standing before them was a terrifying apparition. It had four short powerful legs, a long tail studded with ivory barbs, a compact body four times larger than a bull, and a thick, upright neck. The creature’s head caught every elf’s attention. Long, angular, and covered with burnished green-gold scales, it was the head of a monstrous reptile.
“Dragon!” someone cried, but Kerian didn’t think so. Squat and wingless, this was an earthbound creature. A crown of vertical horns encircled the monster’s head from one earhole to the other, and a single thick horn erupted from its nose. Except for its unnatural size, it could have been a desert lizard.
“Archers!” the Lioness called. “Aim for its head!”
A hundred bowstrings twanged, and a hundred arrows arced through the air. The beast’s eyelids slid over its slanting green eyes with an audible click, and the missiles bounced off its metallic hide. Eyes opening, the monster launched itself into the center of the elf formation.