Return of the Guardian-King (39 page)

He stared at her still, struggling to believe what eyes and ears told him was obvious. “I wasn’t?”

“Of course not.” She looked at him again and something in her expression changed, as if a wall had gone up between them. “The others don’t want to see it. I guess I didn’t, either. Admitting it would be too . . . charged with destiny. It is no accident we have fallen in with you.” She hesitated, then whispered, “Sire.”

Chills rushed madly up his neck now. He shook his head. “I am not a king, my lady. I am only a man you’ve traveled with along the road.”

But she was resolute. “You were always that. And you were never that. And you will not be that much longer.”

The chill reached down into his gut and transformed itself to a quiver of something he couldn’t name. “No man knows what tomorrow brings,” he chided.

“I didn’t say tomorrow, sir. Only that you will return. And when you do, all will know who you are.”

He cocked a brow. “You are a prophetess now, Marta?”

A moment more she held his gaze, then lowered her eyes. “I’ve only told you what I believe.”

He had nothing to say to that, and so returned to business. “You will take the book?”

“Of course.”

“Do not tell anyone you are going to see her. No one—do you understand?”

“You fear the ells will try to prevent me?”

He smiled slightly. “As always you are one step ahead of me. Just like Maddie. You and she should get along well. This”—he tapped the book in her hands—“will give her hope. The ells would try very hard to stop you if they knew.”

She nodded and tucked the parcel into her sash. When next she looked up at him, she was almost wistful. “I wish your destiny was otherwise. That your wife . . .” She trailed off. Shook her head. “But that is silly. You and she were made for each other, and everyone knows it.”

“Aye. We are.” He grinned, recalling his night with her in the cell at Caerna’tha. The quiver in his middle became a tremor of anticipation.
Soon . . .

“You will be back, sir.”

He gave her a solemn nod and they were off. At the ancient city’s edge, he took Janner aside and made him promise to transport Marta, and whoever else wished to go, all the way to Deveren Dol and there arrange them reliable passage to Fannath Rill. In exchange, Abramm promised he would be well compensated and had given him a folded parchment with instructions not to lose it. “It will be your proof of identity to my friend who will see you paid.”

The river man had unfolded the crinkled parchment and scowled at the foreign symbols scrawled across its face. “What kind of gibberish is this?”

“You’re a reader, are you?” Abramm asked.

“I read a bit. But these aren’t even rightful letters.”

“It’s the Old Tongue. My friend will be able to read it, and hopefully few others.”

Janner studied the missive a moment longer, then looked up at him narrowly. “This friend of yours in Fannath Rill? She is the queen of Kiriath?”

Well, plainly he heard Marta’s outburst,
Abramm thought wryly. “Exiled queen,” he corrected.

Janner refolded the note. “You told me your friend was Chesedhan.”

Abramm grinned. “She is.”

And that gave Janner a start. He left the man gazing thoughtfully after him.

There was indeed a slave depot at the midst of Janner’s second city, as well as the start of the Road of the Unchained. When they arrived at dawn, the wooden pens and barred carts stood empty, the Fermikians already herding their captives along the ancient road. Fortunately, they did not travel at night, which gave Abramm and his cohorts a chance to catch up, though it still took them three days of sorting through the hundred-odd captives to find their friends, and by then they’d entered the sand sea.

Now, a week later, they were reaching the point of no return. The captives were not doing well. Galen Gault, slight as he was, had suffered most from the sun and the aridity, and this last day had been especially bad. He had stopped beside the road repeatedly to vomit until he had collapsed altogether. From then on his friends had taken turns carrying him, and Abramm had no doubt their masters would force them to leave the young man behind at the oasis tomorrow.

They had to act tonight, and they had to use the road if they hoped ever to return to Trakas. Fortunately, he had a plan. . . .

The air was finally cooling, and shadows had completely engulfed their little gully between the dunes when Abramm and Rolland struck their flimsy shelter and returned to their overlook of the main encampment. A slight breeze stirred the air as the sun dropped completely behind the horizon in a fast-fading blaze of salmon, and twilight deepened over the encampment. The Fermikians remained stupefied at their pipes, but the slaves had gathered in the center of the oasis, clustering around four dung-fed fires. Already many of them were nervously eyeing the surrounding dunes, dreading the new terror evening would bring. Abramm would see they were not disappointed.

The road had laid the foundation for their paranoia, and over the past two nights Abramm had stoked it to a fever pitch. Tonight he hoped to push them into outright panic.

Cedric stood nonchalantly against one of the palms near the camels bedded down by the pool. As they watched, he shifted against the tree trunk and scratched his forehead under the edge of his turban, signaling that he had seen Abramm and all was ready. Four of their friends had been assigned to the dung-fires, one per blaze. The remaining seven clustered closest to Abramm’s position, sitting with arms encircling their bent knees—except for Galen, who leaned against his uncle as if he were unconscious.

As the pond frogs began their nightly chorus and darkness gathered around them, Abramm and Rolland withdrew down the side of the dune. At the bottom of the trough, they brought out their staves, laid Cedric’s on the sand between them, and began beating it with their own, their small rapid strokes creating a loud
cak-cak-cak
that echoed through the desert silence. The frogs broke off their singing at once.

They stopped beating their sticks, and Rolland snatched up Cedric’s staff as Abramm brought along the extra robe. Moving to a new position, they repeated the process until they had circumscribed the entire camp.

The past two nights Fermikians had crept up to the top of the dunes to investigate the disturbance. Tonight not one braved the darkness. After making another half-circuit of the camp and returning to the start, beating their sticks sporadically as they went, Abramm pulled out the hollow reed he had cut on the banks of the Ankrill. He’d practiced with it then, and now he took a deep breath and blew into it.

At first it was only air. Then he got the right feel and the sound rattled out of it, a deep, ululating tone that, when he blew harder at the end, shrieked up the scale to a high-pitched squeal. The sound had not even faded when the first of the shouts from the encampment rang out. From their tones he knew they wouldn’t be coming to investigate.

Stretching the extra robe between their two staves so that it fluttered as they ran, Abramm and Rolland burst over the crest of the dune. As they ran down toward the startled slaves, Abramm sent a flare of Light across the rippling fabric and simultaneously up the length of his staff, where it exploded in a gout of flame off the staff’s end.

It was a plan that in all respects should have failed when their theatrics were seen immediately for what they were. But, as Abramm had hoped, the road had laid the base of terror they needed. Now, as the campfires all went out together, smothered by the sand his Kiriathan friends had been assigned to dump on them, and when their voices raised in wild yells, the camp erupted into pandemonium. Torchbearers raced to and fro. The camels spooked and ran off when Cedric cut the ropes that should have held them. Tents collapsed as men blundered into them in their attempt to escape the desert monstrosity that had come over the hill for them.

Abramm had instructed his people to meet him at the place where the road cut through the dunes to the west, heading back the way they’d come, but he half expected they’d be swept away by the others’ panic. Thus, he was profoundly gratified to find awaiting him over twenty man—at least half again the number he’d sought to rescue.

They fled along the road only until he could no longer hear or see any sign of their camp, and then stepped off it, passing the word for the others to do likewise. A grumbling arose at that, but they complied and he led them swiftly alongside the road. Inevitably his charges began to complain of the difficulties of slogging through loose sand, and when the talk finally turned to how much easier it would be to walk the road again, he stopped and announced they’d rest there for the night and head out at first light.

As reluctantly as they settled down, Abramm was astonished by how fast they fell asleep.

Rolland came up to him as the snores started to echo around them and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Ye did it, Alaric.”

Abramm turned to grin at him in the night. “
We
did it.”

“I confess when we first reached that city beyond Obla and I saw all that mass of slaves, I didna see how we’d free ’em. An’ that trick with the reed? Brilliant.”

“Well, we still have to get out of these dunes.”

Rolland shrugged. “Ye’ve got line of sight. What more do we need?”

Abramm took the first watch, which he spent stargazing, thanking Eidon for their victory and dreaming about Maddie.

When dawn gilded the sky and they’d seen nor heard no sound of pursuit, Abramm’s optimism mounted. He’d hoped the Fermikians would account for their missing slaves as the result of the panic and leave them to the desert. It seemed that was precisely what had happened.

But when he slogged to the top of a dune to confirm their position, what he found shocked him so badly he could hardly breathe. His mountains on the wrong side! And the bank of cloud that had lain on the horizon yesterday afternoon, and should have been behind him now, instead loomed directly ahead, closer, higher, and darker than before, the sun rising in a great orange orb from behind it.

Somehow they had gotten completely turned around. They had gathered on the west side of the oasis, had headed west on the road away from it, and had ended up well east of it.

Grimly he slid back down the dune and slogged through the sand toward where the others were gathering in preparation for moving out. As expected, his news was not well received. But after he repeatedly assured them they had merely gotten turned around—however it had occurred—and after he had accepted the full range of abuse that Trinley in particular heaped upon him for it, he got them going again in the right direction. They passed the morning in silence, the temperature rising with the wind coming out of the north, which from the sculpting of the dunes, appeared to be its prevailing flow.

By noon, Abramm was deeply alarmed that they had not yet reached the oasis. Even accounting for the fact that they were no longer fueled by fear and excitement, they should have reached it.

When at length he called a halt and scrambled up yet another dune to check the lay of things, hoping desperately to find everything where it was supposed to be, he trembled at what he saw: The moutains were, impossibly, still on the wrong side, and the brown cloud still loomed before them, higher than ever, and revealed now in its proximity as a great churning mass of dust. Hot wind rushed into his face, tearing at the turban and fluttering his robes, stinging his cheeks with fine particles of dust.

He stared at it, disbelieving, for he knew he had not been too hasty earlier when he had chosen this way. He knew when he had stood on the dune crest this morning exactly where everything was—where the road was, and his men and their camp and the wall of dust.

It’s the road,
he thought.
It has been moving. It has to have been
.

Fear clenched his vitals, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.
Oh, my
Lord Eidon! Where are you?

“Whatdoye see?” Rolland called up at him.

Abramm glanced down at him. “Dust storm. Heading straight for us. We’ll have to ride it out. Get everyone together in the lee of that dune.”

With a storm this bad, the dune will surely move. . . . Could it bury us?
He didn’t know. In all his life he’d heard only vague references to storms like these.
What am I to do, my Lord? They’re looking to me.

“I say we go to the road,” Trinley bellowed. And immediately he acted upon his suggestion, the others standing where they were, looking northward.

What do I tell them, Father?

He looked over his shoulder again and saw there was only one thing to say.

“Hurry!” he bellowed at them, turning from the crest and sliding down the scarp as the leading edge of the storm swooped around him.

Maddie had been requesting audience with the queen ever since Trap had been arrested and imprisoned—almost three months now. She’d been denied, put off, and turned down so many times that when Ronesca agreed to see her one day, she hardly knew what to say. Worse, she’d long since stopped arriving at the queen’s apartments prepared, so when she was immediately ushered into the queen’s private study, she had to think quickly.