Return of the Guardian-King (41 page)

Now the wind had died, and he was trapped. Panic surged in him and he flailed his arms in desperation—they came free easily, and he found he was able to push himself up onto hands and knees, sand streaming off of him. Twisting around, he sat down, feeling silly for having transformed a couple of inches of covering sand into the sensation of being buried alive.

He squinted up at the pale salmon-tan crest of sand looming above him. Dust still choked the sky beyond it. Below him, scalloped, knife-edged dunes tiered down the great dune’s face to his left and right, a frozen storm-tossed sea of sand plunging away as far as he could see before the haze of dust swallowed all. Dense silence enveloped him, broken only by a trickle of sand disturbed by his movement and the rasp of his own breathing.

He saw no sign of his companions. Had they all been buried alive, as he had? Might some of them lie nearby, unseen? He felt through the sand near where he’d fallen but found only his walking staff and his water bags, one still full of fresh oasis water, the other halfway so. His rucksack was still on his back with its flint, socks, mittens, speaking stone, knife, and the packet of flatbread, figs, and dried mutton Janner had supplied them with—all of it coated in sand. At least he wouldn’t die of thirst or hunger right away.

He stood and looked around again but saw nothing that even hinted of his former companions: no movement, no bulges in the sand, not even the corner of someone’s robe or the strap of a waterbag. A shouted “Halloooo” produced only a fit of heavy coughing, though he tried several times before working his way up to the dune’s crest, probing the sand with his staff as he went. As before, he found nothing. Nor did the higher vantage show him anything new. It was as if the storm had blown his friends off the face of the land. Or perhaps it had blown Abramm himself into some alternate desert world.

For an immeasurable period of time, he walked about probing the sand with his staff and shouting until his throat was raw and his chest ached. Intermittent loud bugles on his reed pipe did no more than trigger brief falls of sand down the slopes around him, and finally he gave up, desperation simmering in his belly. How could they be so completely gone? And the road as well? Surely there would be
something
. . . .

But there was nothing. And he couldn’t search the entire desert. He drew a long, calming breath.

“Well, my Lord Eidon,” he said aloud, “I don’t believe you’ve brought me all this way just to kill me in this barren place.” Memory of Marta’s prediction he’d return encouraged him. “You’ve promised to guide yours who ask, and we both know I am yours. So, please show me what to do. Which way I should go.”

He squinted across the mounds and gullies, searching for a flare of light, an anomaly in the sameness, a distinct path, a variation of color or brightness. . . . But there was nothing. Perhaps that meant he should stay where he was for now, wait for the haze to settle out of the sky and show the sun’s position. Maybe while he did, someone would happen by. He couldn’t be that far off the road. . . . Then he grimaced at the realization that the road could be anywhere. And that wherever it was, it could be somewhere else tomorrow.

He might be days waiting for the dust to settle, and even then he wasn’t sure what good knowing the sun’s position would do him. It might keep him going in the same direction, but it wouldn’t tell him which direction was the right one. And impatience rebelled at the notion of loitering atop this dune using up precious stores of food and water while getting nowhere.

He frowned. “My Lord . . . I have no idea what you want me to do.”

But still nothing came. Sighing, he sat down and drank from his water bag. Like everything else, he was covered with sand—his beard, his mouth, his nose, his eyebrows, his hair, his ears. A thick crust gummed his eyelashes, and his eyes still burned from the assault they’d endured under the wind. Grit lodged between his fingers and toes, chafed in his armpits, and had worked its way into every other crack and crevice on his body. And shaking out his robes did little to help.

As hunger gnawed his belly, he dug the flatbread from his bag, brushed it off, and grimaced as his teeth crunched sand with the wheat. The fig was worse. Washing it all down with a couple gulps of water, he decided to walk along the crest of this massive dune and see if its far edge blocked anything significant from his present line of sight.

Sometime later, he was still walking, as the first crest had led to a second and then a third. So much for his plan to sit and wait. He’d prayed for direction, so perhaps his current action was part of the answer to that prayer, even if he didn’t have any idea where he was going. Even if he couldn’t sense the Light he hoped was guiding him.

The haze did not lighten, the scenery did not vary, and when evening finally came, he felt as if he’d walked in place for hours. With the dust in the sky blotting out the stars, the night was like a dense black fog that even his keen night vision could not penetrate. Eventually it forced him to stop lest he tumble off the edge of an especially steep dune crest and hurt himself.

After the first day he lost all track of time and knew that it passed only because eventually his food ran out and he started on his second water bag. As that, too, grew ominously lighter, he spent hours as he walked debating whether to drink the bag dry and have done with it or continue to ration himself. He was always hungry now, his mouth was always dry, his lips increasingly cracked. The water in his second bag was reduced to a mere mouthful, and every time he drank, he thought he’d come to the end of it. Yet, inevitably the next time he brought the bag to his lips there was just another mouthful. Sooner or later, though, he knew even that would give out.

He’d begun to second-guess himself, wishing he’d stayed where he was in the first place. In retrospect, all the reasons he’d listed for doing so seemed far superior to the path he had chosen. It sure didn’t seem that Eidon had any part in the process, though he prayed constantly for answers, for direction, for reassurance . . . for something.

And then, one morning, when his desperation had reached a new low and he was seriously asking himself why he bothered to keep on walking, he saw the pigeon. He nearly stepped on it, in fact, for it was white and almost invisible against the pale sand. It flapped out from under his feet, then returned to the ground a little ahead of him, its beak open and panting, its wings held out from its body and dragging a little as if it were tired. Its feathers were tattered and it looked hard used. Probably a homing pigeon, blown off course by the storm. He strode to pick it up, thinking that he would carry it a bit, but it flew up into the sky when he reached for it and flapped away, disappearing beyond the tops of the dunes. After it was gone, he stood waiting, wishing it would come back, suddenly aware of how alone he felt.

When it didn’t come back, he trudged on, half hoping he might find it again on the ground beyond the next dune. But it wasn’t there. He fell again into his mindless slogging, so he had no idea how long it had been when suddenly the bird returned, circling over his head and then flapping away over the dunes. He thought little of it, until the bird was back a third time, flying the same pattern, almost as if it were trying to guide him.

Well, why not follow it? He was in the middle of the desert, without water, with no idea where he was going. The bird could see what he could not, might even have already found an oasis. In fact, its presence probably meant he was near to one—or else the edge of the dunes—for even a bird blown off course would not likely be blown that far into the desert. It just might lead him out of the desert. Or at the very least to a source of water.

And so he turned in the direction it had flown and followed it. Every now and then he saw it circling overhead, a tiny white mote, almost indistinguishable from the overcast that hid the sky. It circled and then flew off again, always in the same direction. He doubted it was thinking anything of him, for he knew pigeons often circled when they were trying to get their bearings. But he made his way through the dunes, feeling a rebirth of hope, half expecting at any moment to round a dune and see a cluster of palms around the inviting gleam of water.

Instead he stepped out between two dunes to find a sandy expanse at the midst of which stood the vast ruin of an ancient, mist-hung city. Domes and spires and rectangular buildings peeked tantalizingly above a massive outer wall in which a wide gateway stood atop a broad entrance ramp. A pair of pillars surmounted by winged dragons flanked the opening. Gold gleamed in places on their wings, and overhead the mist hung so low it brushed the building tops.

The pigeon flew another circle over his head, then flapped straight for the city, gliding in under the arch and disappearing.

He stood where he was, staring gape-jawed. Might this be the fabled dragon city of Chena’ag Tor? The one no man had seen and lived to tell about? The one legend said held the treasures of a thousand years of dragon thievery, and their coveted secrets of time and eternity?

At first he didn’t even want to approach the place, but curiosity got the best of him and he crossed the sandy flat to the base of the ramp. The height of the walls was immense. Had anyone suggested walls could soar that high, he would have laughed at them. The gateway, which had looked almost normal from a distance, was enlarged in proportion to the walls—wide enough to admit twenty horses abreast and as tall as the Grand Kirikhal in Fannath Rill, the tallest building Abramm had ever seen.

Again he stood and stared, and only gradually began to wonder if he was meant to go inside. He had no doubt he’d been brought here. He just wasn’t sure who had brought him. Yes, he’d been asking for Eidon’s guidance all along, and had believed, at least some of the time, that he had received it. Had the pigeon been part of that guidance?

If so, it had flown before him into the city, which seemed a strong indication he was supposed to follow it. He knew that sometimes Eidon deliberately led his people into situations they did not understand for reasons they could not comprehend, precisely so they would have the opportunity to trust him for who he was.

“My Lord Eidon, you know my uncertainty. If this is not the way you would have me go, make it evident. I do not mistrust you, only my ability to understand what you would have me to do.”

Barely had his words died away than a bright luminescence ribboned out from his feet, up the ramp and past the gargantuan statues. It lay there, bright and clear for only a moment, then faded away.

Well, that was clear enough
.

But as he started walking, a tremendous roar echoed out of the city, so loud it shook little bits of sand off the dragons on their pillars. He stopped, listening to its dying echoes, all the hairs on his body standing upright. Whatever that was, it was big. And all he had was a staff. Did he really want to go inside this city? A city of dragons . . . That one had sounded far bigger than little Tapheina. . . .

He drew a long, deep breath and let it out, then started up the ramp.

It felt more like jumping off a cliff.

Maddie jerked awake, heart pounding. The bedchamber lay silent and dark around her, the kelistar on the bed table having gone out. She had dreamt of the desert again, of the form lying prostrate in the storm, slowly being covered with sand. This time it hadn’t been Abramm’s form she’d seen there, but her own.

She smelled the dust again now. Always the dust. She couldn’t seem to rid herself of it. Just like the dreams, which returned almost every night. At first it had been Abramm, then a couple of times now she’d found Ronesca, faceup instead of down, eyes wide and full of darkness. Once she’d even discovered little Simon, grown to manhood. The last few days, though, every time she’d stumbled over the body, she’d known it was her own. The shock of it always awakened her.

Looking into Tiris’s amber had been the stupidest thing she had ever done. Especially when Tiris wasn’t there to help explain away what she had seen. And he wasn’t, still occupied with whatever had arisen at his villa in Ropolis. Now, over a month later, she was paying dearly for her mistake.

Repeatedly she reminded herself that the amber wasn’t something Eidon had sent and that what it had shown her might not even be real. Or not the whole picture . . . or . . . It was all visions and imagination, things seen with the mind and heart, not flesh and blood and bone she could feel. Certainly it was no proof he was dead. No proof at all!

Yet, ever since that night, something vital had gone out of her. Whatever spark of belief and confidence and hope she’d nurtured in her heart had died, and she’d been unable to resurrect it. Now she felt cut loose and floating, all she’d thought she knew and understood brought into question, her confidence in Eidon’s goodness deeply rattled.

To have believed so completely and to be so wrong . . . If Abramm was never to return, why had Eidon allowed her to be with him that night after Abby’s birth? Or had he no more to do with that than with the amber? Maybe it really was just a hallucination born of the combined stresses of her pain and grief—and the spore and what all the midwives agreed was a tooclose brush with death.