The dull, dry shriek of the bird was answered by a call more shrill, and suddenly, miraculously, the sky cleared over Stormlight. He blinked painfully, scrambled to his feet.
Lucas swooped toward the Red Plateau, the con shy;dor glowing and smoldering in pursuit.
Swiftly, gracefully, the little hawk banked in the air, dodging the heavier, clumsier bird with a grace born of a thousand hunts, of a year's reconnaissance in the desert sky. Blindly, furiously the condor fol shy;lowed, the ground beneath the path of its flight blis shy;tering and blazing at its passage.
The hawk flew a wide, looping circle and returned toward the field and Stormlight, the condor picking up speed, swiftly closing the gap until it seemed that Lucas would be caught, ignited, consumed by the fiery monster.
Then Larken, standing on a sloping rise, seeing the danger to her companion, battered her drum loudly, slowly, in the stately Matherian rhythms of high magic. The song began in an incandescence of words, an elvish tralyta that trailed off into a hidden language, into the words that bards speak only in whispers, and only to the gods.
But the little bard gave her song full voice, and at the margins of the lava flow, the red glaze darkened and crusted, cooling so rapidly that the sound of its shattering echoed over the desert.
Still the bard's song rose above the chaos and noise, the words completely unintelligible now, trail shy;ing into birdsong, into distant thunder and the rush of water, into the sound of the wind through^the nearby crystals.
The crystals themselves, at the edge of the Tears of Mishakal, were breaking to shards, crumbling silently to powder.
Lucas soared high above the cooling earth, then dropped five hundred feet through the smoky air, landing roughly on the sand and mantling, his wings spread over him like a tent, a canopy. The condor followed, a trail of flame in its wake, stretch shy;ing its glowing talons to strike.
Then, fifty feet above the floor of the desert, the monster collided with the power of the bard's song. Tanila whirled and shrieked and covered her ears.
For a moment, out of the corner of her eye, Larken saw the dark woman hobble toward the Tears of Mishakal, trailing black dust like a cloud of billow shy;ing smoke.
Then suddenly, spectacularly, the air went incan shy;descent.
The condor splintered into a thousand sparks, slowly raining deadly flame over the parched land shy;scape, the igneous rock, the cowering bird.
Just before the fire shower reached Lucas, Storm-light/ racing over the hot ground, snatched up the hawk and hurled him free of the deadly rain. Lucas tumbled through the air, regained his balance and wings, and soared clear of the fire as Stormlight sprang free of the burning earth, rolling, his clothing on fire. Larken rushed to the elf, but by the time she reached him, the fire was smothered and he lay, dazed and breathless, in the shadow of a huge cac shy;tus.
Shimmering steam rose from the condor's ashes and spread angrily across the fire-ravaged plains.
The bard crouched over the elf-warrior, singing a brief song of healing and gratitude. Groggily, lean shy;ing on Larken's shoulder, Stormlight rose to his feet, looked her level in the eyes, as though he saw her for the first time, past the roughness and dirt, the weathering and the matted, neglected white hair.
Suddenly, Fordus shouted in triumph across the smoldering plain.
The War Prophet stood on the narrow strand of earth, holding aloft a brightly shimmering object, red and golden as the afternoon sun. He danced a victory dance, and Northstar, safely on the other end of the strand, danced with him.
"He's mad!" Stormlight whispered. "Fordus is completely and red-mooned mad!"
Larken remained silent, her hands occupied in gently supporting the injured elf.
Fordus lifted aloft the medallion again, laughing and whistling. But suddenly the dark smoke bundled and rushed toward him at a blinding speed. Trapped on the narrow bridge, he could not elude it, could not outrun it. In an instant it engulfed him, swirled about him like a whirlpool, like a maelstrom, then dissolved into the clear desert daylight, leaving him lifeless on the scored and barren rock.
Stormlight never remembered what happened after that.
He thought he heard Larken singing once, maybe twice, and Northstar shouting, and the distant cry of the bard's hawk. He felt himself being moved, car shy;ried …
And then there was torchlight, and shamans, and medicine women dancing attendance over him, and he felt the pain lift from his arm and legs.
Fordus, he told himself, Fordus is dead.
His sorrow was not pure. In the midst of the mourning, of the weeping, he felt something heavy lifted from him. At last it is over, a voice said or seemed to say, and he felt a strange upsurge of joy, even in the midst of his bereavement.
Later, when he awoke at the foot of the Red Plateau, drenched in rainwater and wrapped in cool hides, he tried to forget that traitorous delight. Northstar stood over him, watching him intently.
"Northstar."
"The commander is alive, Stormlight. Thank the gods he is alive! Twice he has asked for you. Can you stand? Can you walk?"
"I… I think so," the Plainsman replied, pulling himself painfully to a sitting position. "He's. . he's still. ." Something tugged at the edge of his memory-something he should remember but could not, given the fire and smoke and the great raging bird.
"His spirit stands at the edge of this life, where the dusk surrounds him and the shadows stalk. But he is strong, and we hope for his recovery."
Stormlight leaned hard against the younger man, his eyes on the fire, the assembly atop the Red Plateau where Fordus lay injured, perhaps dying. Slowly, with great exertion, he matched pace with Northstar, as the two of them crossed the deserted campground and began the gentle, roundabout ascent to the top of the plateau, where a throng had gathered and the drum beat a mournful rhythm.
The Branchalan mode. The mode of remembrance.
Perhaps he was already too late.
"Hurry, Northstar," he muttered through clenched teeth, and the young man quickened their pace.
"Five sentries are dead," Northstar explained, as the sound of the drum grew louder. "Gormion sur shy;vived, and Larken, and three of the bandits."
The drum droned on, and a clear voice rose on the rhythm, the melody doleful and lonely.
"Poor Larken," Northstar murmured. "A widow's weeds though never wed."
Stormlight stood upright, stepped away from the young man's support. The memory, elusive in fire and battle.
Tanila.
"The woman, Northstar!" he shouted, his strong hands grasping the guide's shoulders. "What hap shy;pened to Tanila?"
Northstar shook his head.
"Vanished. No sign of her at the dunes or amid the slag. There's a chance the eruption swallowed her, or…"
"Or?" Stormlight was insistent, shrill.
"I stepped to the edge of the salt flats, where she was headed when Larken's song began, when the monster descended. There was nothing there but the faint outline of a woman's body, already half-vanished in the shifted sand."
"An outline? No tracks leading away?"
"None. Nothing but a smaller pile of rubble … a heap of black crystal and salt."
Chapter 12
They had been forest at one time, these ranging caverns beneath the city of Istar. A hundred thousand years ago, or two hundred, the volcanoes, now dormant and lying beneath the great Istarian lake, erupted in the last of the great geologic disasters, before the All Saints War of the ancient Age of Dreams. It had buried this landscape beneath lava and ash, and the caverns had formed slowly, inexorably, beneath the rise and fall of a hundred civilizations. The five races stepped forth onto the face of the planet, the House of Silvanos rose in the young forest to the south, the gnomes were born, and the Graystone formed in the divine forges of Reorx. It was then that the strange process of opalescence began in the petrified trunks and limbs of the buried trees, and water from the new lake hollowed passages through the porous volcanic rock.