The grumbling began. Stormlight heard it first from Gormion, when he returned after the seventh night's vigil, headed for his tent and three hours' sleep before sunrise.
All responsibility had fallen on Stormlight. In the seven days that Fordus had lain silent atop the Red Plateau, he had come to see how unwieldy the sole command of this irregular army could be.
It was sleep, however, that he thought of now, and when he heard the rattle and ring of jewelry approaching from behind, for a moment Stormlight envied Fordus his coma. He turned to face the dark-haired bandit, his expression level and impassive.
"It is time to decide, Stormlight," the bandit cap shy;tain declared, her eyes flashing with impatience and anger.
"What would you have me decide, Gormion?" His voice remained calm, he believed-no hint of the rising irritation he felt as the woman drew near him and raised a solitary, thin finger, pointing and jabbing at him like she wielded a dagger.
"The fate of the rebellion, Stormlight. I would have you decide what is next. Instead of waiting for the … visionary to die."
Stormlight remained impassive.
"While we crouch on our haunches," the bandit continued, "and await the passing, Istar is moving troops to the north."
"You know this for a fact, Gormion?"
He knew that she didn't.
"What would you do if you were Kingpriest, Stormlight?"
"I am not Kingpriest, Gormion."
"You could be. You are resourceful and brave."
Stormlight laughed wearily. Seven days had worn thin his patience, but this was the most ridiculous of Gormion's proddings. Was she foolish enough to believe that an elf whose greatest enemy sat on the Istarian throne .. .
"And you command these armies."
Tanila had spoken the same words a week ago when he first met her at the fireside.
Astonished, Stormlight stared at the bandit leader. Gormion's face, once beautiful, had wrinkled and lined over the years with scheming and anger. Not yet thirty, she looked twice her age.
"What did you say, Gormion?"
With a sniff of disgust, the woman backed away from Stormlight, who continued to stare at her, his dark eyes intent and wide. "I said what I said, elf," she decreed, the menace in her voice brittle and thin.
She wheeled about in a chiming of bracelets and a rattle of beads. "I said what I said," she repeated, calling the words over her shoulder as she fled to the darkness of her tent, to safety and concealment.
"And you, Stormlight of the Lucanesti, had better listen. Or be lost like the rest of your people!"
Back in the Abyss, her female crystalline body abandoned in the fires and eruptions, Takhisis banked in the windless air and laughed exultantly.
Gormion would be easy, when the time came. Hers was a spirit primed for hatred and strife.
Takhisis beat her wings, her laughter settling to a low, contented rumble.
For wherever strife and hatred abounded … there was confusion . . . and confusion was an inroad for her every evil work.
Her defeat was only a temporary one, and not without some satisfaction. For Sargonnas's glowing condor also had crumbled in the air, the bard's song changing the vaunting god into a harmless shower of sparks.
It had been rather beautiful. A bright show of fire shy;works in the desert sun. It had given Takhisis an image as well… an idea how to punish her insolent consort.
When they returned to the abyss, she had set upon him like a hawk on a sparrow, swooping through the bottomless darkness, folding her wings in a sear shy;ing dive through the nothingness, sensing him somewhere below her.
Her thoughts called out to Sargonnas in the black shy;ness, and he answered. Penitently. Fearfully.
He told her of Fordus's weakness-of the man's great desire to discover his origins, his parentage.
Then suddenly she found herself above him, and dove, and he was there, turning his ruddy face, his lidless eyes wide in astonishment and terror as she crashed into him like a merciless black comet.
He exploded from the power of her assault, shat shy;tering into a hundred thousand shards and frag shy;ments, which squeaked and twittered as they scattered in aimless flight through the void.
It would take him a century to reassemble.
Now, as she remembered the moment, her rage subsided. Or rather, it turned back to the world, to the Plainsmen who ranged the fringes of the desert in clear defiance of her Istar, her Kingpriest, her plans for the Cataclysm.
This Fordus had shown himself well nigh indestructible. Neither the desert nor its creatures, the Istarians nor Sargonnas's fire and clumsiness had had enough power to bring down this man.
Yet, he was suggestible. His ancestry weakened him. Which was why Takhisis had come to the man in his dreams, breathing lies and nonsense about his great and far-reaching destiny.
He was ambitious enough to believe anything.
Takhisis purred contentedly.
She had lingered awhile in the Plainsman's dreams, burrowing deeper and deeper into the recesses of his memory, past the layers of adoles shy;cence, of childhood, past the time he was brought to the desert's edge, in secrecy and in night.
His mother was a slave girl, an attendant in the Kingpriest's Tower. She learned that, easily.
Now, more importantly, Takhisis knew his father. And there is great power in knowledge, great free shy;dom. She would use that knowledge to destroy him.
Now the Prophet was rising from sleep. Fordus lay in a pool of sweat, his breathing easy and his fever broken. But his spiked golden tore tightened ever so slightly upon his wasted neck. The ends then welded in a silent, seamless joining, symbol of a new alliance that could never be broken.
Fordus would waken with an altered heart.
She would leave the final, brutal work to her earthly minions, when time and opportunity con shy;verged.
When the moment came, the Prophet would beg for oblivion.
In the evening of the tenth day, when the Water Prophet opened his eyes, only a handful of the faithful were left on the plateau. Kneeling beside him, Northstar offered him water.
"I have dreamt strangely," Fordus announced after a long drink, a new sound in his voice. His eyes were bright and sunk deeply into their sockets from the ten-day fast of his sleep.
Northstar and Stormlight bent over him, and Larken, jubilant, ceased her drumming.
"And I have seen signs and wonders in my dream," he concluded, sitting up painfully. "Assemble the people for a new word."
Larken sounded the gathering call on her drum. Its message echoed from the heights of the Red Plateau, borne on the shouts and calls of the sentries, passed from encampment to encampment, from the white tents of the Que-Nara to the red of Gormion's bandits. They came in throngs, from the battle lead shy;ers and shamans and Namers down to the youngest child, for Larken's drum was a powerful summons.
When the gathering drum sounded, the gods were ready to speak.
Stormlight waited with the rest of the company as Fordus stood weakly in the midst of the jostling crowd. Fathers lifted children onto their shoulders to better see the Prophet, and the rumor circulated among the awestruck Que-Nara that Fordus had passed through the land of the dead and come back with the deepest prophecy of all. Leaning on North-star's shoulder, the blood on his mending side caked and dried as though he might brush away the wound, Fordus trained his sea-blue eyes toward the horizon.
"My dream has spoken to me," the Prophet pro shy;claimed. "Istar is burning. The fire has come, and the world has opened."