Hajira’s face lost its friendliness, and his eyes turned hot and frustrated. “Have you seen others coming into the caravan?”
“Several groups,” the sorcerer confirmed. “They were heavily armed and arrived at dusk.”
The warrior frowned. “I was right!” he said fiercely. “Someone is fattening the tribal levies with mercenaries and fanatics. I have tried to warn the counselors, but no one will listen to me. I am dishonored!” he spat. “And other men are too afraid to talk. The Gryphon has sworn to call a holy war, and no one wants to get in his way.”
Sayyed sucked in his breath. A holy war was a call to battle in the name of the Living God, a call that few Turics would ignore. Usually the holy war was used in times of invasion or war with other nations. Never had a holy war been called to incite rebellion within the Turic nation itself. “The God forbid,” he murmured.
“Indeed. The Gryphon may be planning a coup before we reach Cangora in nine days.” He turned on his heel and strode down the rise away from the wagons. Sayyed followed. “We’d better find your women and get them out. We certainly do not need two magic-wielders caught in the middle of a civil war.”
Sayyed couldn’t agree more.
They split up after that, Hajira taking his charge to the front of the caravan near the funeral wagon and Sayyed and Rafnir riding in the midst of the tribal escorts. For fear of attracting attention, they all kept their distance from the wagon train that brought up the rear.
The ride that day was long and hard, over a rolling, twisting road that reached to the rising Absarotan foothills. It was dark by the time the caravan stopped at the next oasis, the Impala Springs. The people were too tired to set up a full camp, so they put out crude shelters, ate cold food, and went thankfully to bed. Only the Shar-Ja and his counselors had their tents erected for the night.
Hajira waited only until the camp was settled before he sought out the clansmen. Ignoring Tassilio’s protests, he left the boy with the Hunnuli and led Rafnir and Sayyed back to the parked wagons and vans. They did not have to search long before they made an alarming discovery.
The large wooden van with the red emblem on its side was gone.
Almost frantically the three men checked the baggage wagons again, from one end of the field of parked vehicles to the other. There was no brown van and no guards, only a few drivers tending to their wagons. Sayyed asked several about the van, but no one had paid much attention to one brown vehicle among so many, and no one had noticed it leave. The men then looked everywhere in the oasis village, around the stone-walled springs, in other areas of the camp, even in some outlying gullies, hollows, and dry valleys. All to no avail. The unremarkable brown wagon had vanished from the caravan.
Frustrated and upset, Sayyed and Rafnir returned with Hajira to the Hunnuli. The night was well advanced, but the men were too agitated to sleep. The allotted four days was gone, and their only possible lead had disappeared somewhere along the leagues of the Spice Road.
“We have several choices,” declared Sayyed, his arms crossed and his face grim. “We can go back to the Altai and find the Fel Azureth, to learn if they have Gabria and Kelene. We can continue to search the caravan, or we can abandon both ideas and go in search of an unknown wagon that may or may not be holding the women.”
“The road forks three ways,” Hajira said softly. “Which way does the heart go?”
Tassilio put his hand on Sayyed’s sleeve. “The Fel Azureth would not take them. They believe too firmly in their own righteousness. They would not stoop to coercing a power they believe to be heretical.”
All three men gazed at Tassilio, astonished at the boy’s astute observation. His earnest, eager face brightened under their stare, and he pushed a foot forward, crossed his arms, and lifted an imperious chin in such an excellent imitation of his father, Hajira nearly choked.
“He’s right,” the guardsman conceded. “The core of the Fel Azureth are extreme fanatics who despise any religion or power not their own. Of course, that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t kidnap the sorceresses to make trouble for the fanatics.” He lapsed into silence and brooded over their lack of tangible results, his fingers drumming on the hilt of his sword.
Rafnir, too young and intense to bear his patience stoically, began to pace step after angry step between the men and the Hunnuli. “So where does that leave us, Father?” he demanded. “There’s nowhere to go forward and too many places to go back!”
The older sorcerer rubbed his neck against the throbbing pain in his head. It had been a very long day and night, and he was still suffering from the aftereffects of the blow to his head. He closed his eyes and drew a long, filling breath. “I wish to sleep on this decision,” he said. “I will decide in the morning which fork in the road we’ll take.”
The other men did not argue. There was little point wasting more time or effort on discussion when there was nothing they could do about it until daylight anyway. With Tassilio between them and the Hunnuli keeping guard, they rolled themselves in their blankets to wait for morning.
Deep in the night, Sayyed’s dreams fled to the Ramtharin Plains. He rode frantically on a desert horse after a golden cloaked woman on a cantering Hunnuli. He chased her, shouting, until she slowed and waited for him. He expected to see Tam, but when he neared and the woman turned around, she pulled off her hood and revealed Gabria’s face as she had been twenty-six years ago when he first saw her that spring day and fell instantly in love with her. Sayyed’s heart ached at her loveliness. She smiled at him with all the warmth and love he remembered, and without a word she lifted her arm to point to a range of mountains. Abruptly she disappeared, and Sayyed found himself in a stifling darkness. He cried out, more at her loss than at the blackness that covered him, and he tried to lunge away from the constricting dark. He discovered he could not move his arms or legs. Something pinioned him from head to foot, something that groaned and creaked close to his head. Then he heard her voice, no more than a faint whisper in his head, “Sayyed.”
“Gabria!” he shouted, and his own voice jolted him awake. He jumped to his feet and saw morning had already lit the skies with apricot and gold. Afer nudged him with his muzzle, and Sayyed leaned gratefully into the stallion’s powerful shoulder.
Rafnir, with five days’ growth of beard on his face, yawned and clambered out of his blankets. His eyes met his father’s, and they locked in a long, considering stare.
“I think we should look for the wagon,” Rafnir said quietly. “I don’t believe they are here.”
Sayyed said nothing, for he had looked over Rafnir’s shoulder to the mountains northwest of the oasis. He had seen the peaks in the days before as the caravan slowly traveled closer. Last night, though, when they reached the springs, it had been too dark to see details of the great, gray-green chain of mountains that still lay perhaps ten or twenty leagues away. Now he saw them clearly, bathed in the morning light, and he recognized their rugged crowns as surely as he had known Gabria. She had pointed west to those same mountains in his dream. He pondered, too, the other elements: the meaning of the darkness, the creaking noise, and Gabria’s voice.
Was a dream any more of a clue than a hunch or a guess or an idea? Was it a sign sent by Amara or just his tired mind furnishing a solution to his dilemma? Perhaps Gabria’s talent was reaching out to him. Whatever its meaning or its source, he decided to follow its lead, for lack of any other evidence. “The wagon it is,” he said.
Hajira, who had awakened with Tassilio, drew a small knife from a sheath hidden in his boot. Thin and slender as a reed, the blade fit easily into his palm. The handle was a tiny gryphon’s head carved from a flat slice of opal so the beast’s face shone with rainbow colors in the sun. Hajira handed the blade to Sayyed. “Keep this when you go. If you need me for anything, send the knife with your message and I will come.” He put his arm around Tassilio’s shoulders, a fatherly gesture the boy accepted gladly. “We will keep our ears alert. If anyone has the women close by, we will learn of it.”