“You’re not listening!”
Hengriff fixed the impatient prince with a baleful eye. “No, I’m not. When you calm down and speak rationally, I’ll listen, Your Highness.”
Shobbat quivered. He wasn’t used to such insolence, any more than he was used to standing in the heat. Sweat stood out on his forehead. Tiny red veins webbed the whites of his eyes. He had dyed his hair its usual dark shade, but in strong sunlight, the black carried a faint greenish tinge.
“I need to know what’s happening,” he said, striving for a calmer tone. “Are the nomads coming?”
“Who can say, Highness? Your desert folk are like wolves, fierce and wild. I’ve lived here two years and I don’t begin to understand them.”
Shobbat, Khur born and bred, didn’t understand the nomads either, but he wasn’t about to admit that to Hengriff.
Changing the subject, the Knight told him of his father’s agreement to clear all the city gates of troublemakers.
“Really? All the gates, you say?” The prince pressed a fist to his lower lip. If soldiers of the Household Guard had been sent to all nine gates of Khuri-Khan, there couldn’t be many left in the palace.
“Careful, Highness. Your thoughts leap from your face.”
Shobbat forced a careless laugh and palmed sweat from his forehead. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m simply suffering from the heat. I should retire indoors and escape the warmth.”
Hengriff bowed to the heir of Khur. “To Your Highness’s continued good health.”
The prince withdrew. Once he had seemed a ridiculous figure but Hengriff was beginning to wonder if he had underestimated him. The situation was coming to a head, and quickly. Hengriff’s dispatches to Jelek stressed this urgency. He felt the Order must be ready to move on a moment’s notice. When the crisis came, the fate of the elves would fall not to him who struck first, but him who struck the most decisively.
Six lengthy dispatches, carefully enciphered, he had sent to Jelek via the border town of Kortal. Six dispatches in as many weeks, yet no answer had come back. If Hengriff had been the suspicious type, he might think his messages weren’t getting through. Worse still, could Rennold be ignoring him?
Odd sounds reached the citadel courtyard. Distorted by the brick canyons of Khuri-Khan, the tumult sounded like the crash of waves on a rocky shore. Hengriff knew better. They were the sounds of conflict.
His four bodyguards arrived, already mounted, leading his horse. “My lord!” cried his man Goldorf. “There is fighting at the city gates!”
Hengriff swung into the saddle. “Sahim-Khan ordered his troops to clear the gates. Who are his guards fighting?”
“Torghanists.”
Hengriff betrayed surprise. The priests of Torghan were taking Nerakan pay, and he hadn’t asked them to blockade the city. So who had? His dark eyes narrowed. He suspected the meddling hand of Prince Shobbat in this development.
“Well, let’s see how Sahim’s men fight,” he said, grasping his reins in one large fist.
He and his bodyguards galloped straight to the west gate, which faced the elves’ camp. They scattered Khurs left and right. The Lesser Souk was emptying rapidly as the sound of swordplay rang over the market. The sight of the Nerakans on horseback only hastened the process.
This gate was known to city-dwellers as “Malys’s Anvil” because the red dragon had crushed so many foes against the stout iron portcullises. When Sahim-Khan’s guards arrived the gatehouse had appeared undefended, but as they broke ranks to open it, stones and timbers rained down, thrown by Khurs concealed inside. A squad was sent up each side of the battlement, to storm the gate in unison and trap the attackers inside. Unfortunately, the fanatics proved to be armed with more than brickbats; they produced swords and spears and, in the narrow confines of the parapet, Sahim’s guards had a real fight on their hands. Soon the ground around the gatehouse was littered with bodies. Most wore nomad gebs, but more than a few wore the scale armor of the khan’s royal guard.
Hengriff halted his horse some distance away to watch the unexpected fight. His men pulled up respectfully behind him. Silent at first, the bodyguards soon were offering a running commentary on the progress of the battle and bellowing advice to the outmaneuvered guards.
“Cut at their legs! Civilians are terrified of that—keeps ‘em from running away!”
“Look at those shields, dangling from their wrists like a lady’s nosegay. Get your shields up, you goatherds! Watch those spearpoints!”
“I’ll bet you wish you had a score of archers just now, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” Hengriff growled and the bodyguards subsided, merely shaking their heads at the display before them.
Below, the guards breached the flimsy barricade around the gate. Leaping over baskets filled with brickbats, they quickly routed the Torghanists on the ground. In hours, the remaining eight portals were likewise free of “malcontents.”
Long before that, Hengriff had led his men back into the city. The Knight had other falcons to fly during the coming night.
Hytanthas arched his back, stretching. He was tucked inside an angle of broken wall, on the grounds of a once-beautiful villa. Through a chink in the wall he’d been watching the ruined house for half a day He’d begun to think he was on a kender’s errand.
Disguised again as a human, he had lurked in wine shops and low inns seeking clues to the whereabouts of the elusive sorcerer Faeterus. He’d learned nothing of note until he overheard a merchant complaining to his fellows about a peculiar order he’d received.
“I am a poulterer,” the merchant declaimed proudly, “not a trapper. Who orders a dozen live pigeons? Nobody eats those filthy birds!”
His colleagues mocked him mercilessly. Apparently this was not the first time he’d received such an order, nor the first time he’d complained about it.
“Then why didn’t you refuse?” taunted one of his colleagues.
“Because of the money!” put in another.
There were guffaws around the table, and the poulterer joined in. The money was indeed good, good enough to convince him not only to procure the despised pigeons, but to deliver them to the city’s ruined northern district. He’d stopped here for a refresher before venturing into that cursed area. His comrades agreed the Harbalah was home to ghosts—and worse.
At this point Hytanthas insinuated himself into the conversation. Posing as a Delphonian down on his luck, he offered to deliver the pigeons. The chicken merchant was eager to shift the duty to another. He paid Hytanthas two silvers-insulting wages, which the elf accepted with fawning gratitude—then gave him directions, and a warning.
“Remember, leave the cages outside the old garden wall. Don’t go any closer to the house.”
“Why so much fuss? It’s a ruin, isn’t it?”
“Just don’t, if you value your life’s blood!”
Hytanthas heeded the warning. He had placed the caged birds where he’d been told, then took up a position in one of the wrecked outbuildings to see who claimed them. He was certain it would be Faeterus. The shattered mansion was the perfect setting for a renegade wage. And Hytanthas had heard unsavory stories about dark magical rites involving the sacrifice of animals, like pigeons.
The land rose slightly from Hytanthas’s position up to the villa proper. As the sun set, the shadows swelled like a dark sea, claiming first the grounds, then the decrepit house. Blocks warmed all day gave up their heat by night, so Hytanthas had a snug place from which to watch the pigeon basket. Too snug, in fact. After so many hours of inactivity, he began to nod.