Winged Magic (15 page)

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 counsellors 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 travelled closer. Last night, though, when they reached the springs, it had been too dark to see details of the great, grey-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 colours 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.”

Sayyed ran a finger along the hilt. Although gryphons were extinct, they were still powerful symbols of loyalty and courage in the Turic faith. “A beautiful knife,” he said.

“A gift from the Shar-Ja,” Hajira replied, unable to completely disguise the ironic bitterness in his voice.

The sorcerer tucked away the knife and took something from his saddlebag. It was a rope as thick as his little finger. “Many years ago magic wards were made of ivory or wood, carved into balls of great beauty,” he explained to Hajira and Tassilio. As he talked he deftly cut a length of the rope and began tying an intricate knot in the middle of the section. “Unfortunately, I do not have time to carve. This will have to do for now.” He laid the knot on the ground and before Tassilio’s fascinated gaze, he touched the knot and spoke the words to a spell he had memorized from the
Book of Matrah
.

The magic glowed red on the rope knot for just a minute before it sank into the twisted fibres. Sayyed picked it up, tied it into a loop, and gave it to Tassilio. “This is not as strong as the old ones, but this magic ward will help protect you against all but the most powerful of spells.”

Tassilio marvelled at the gift. He accepted the knot without his usual blithe smile and hung it gratefully around his neck.

After morning prayers, the four ate a quick breakfast together, saddled the Hunnuli, and made their farewells.

“Watch your back,” Sayyed told his brother. The two men embraced, both thankful for this unexpected meeting after so many years. The clansmen mounted and waved to the lone guardsman and his royal charge. Hajira lifted his arm in salute.

The Hunnuli unhurriedly trotted through the outskirts of the caravan camp toward the settlement. The camp bustled with preparations to leave, and everyone was too busy to pay attention to two tribesmen minding their own business.

Before long the camp and the oasis with its slow bubbling springs were left behind. As soon as they were out of sight of the camp, Rafnir and Sayyed split up, each taking a side of the beaten caravan road. The chances of finding the tracks of one wagon, particularly the right wagon, were very small. On the other hand, the men knew the conveyance had left the caravan somewhere between the Impala Springs and Oasis Three, and they planned to search every square inch of territory along the road until they found some trace of the missing van.

With the help of their stallions’ keen sense of smell and their own knowledge of tracking, the men examined the Spice Road for leagues. It wasn’t easy. The Shar-Ja’s vast caravan had left a huge trail of hoofprints, wheel tracks, boot marks, trash, and dung piles, while subsequent traffic had added its own signs. Well-travelled side roads joined the trail here and there, and the route passed through two tribal settlements, each with its own collection of carts and wagons.

The clansmen asked for information at the tiny villages, and they questioned other travellers, but no one remembered seeing a wagon of that description. They fought a constant struggle between their desire to hurry in case the wagon was somewhere ahead of them on the road and the need for slow, careful scrutiny for tracks in case the wagon had been driven off the road to some remote destination. Through most of the day, the men forced their frustration aside and worked their way slowly northeastward.

The afternoon sun slanted toward evening when Sayyed and Rafnir returned to the road and walked their horses side by side. The caravan route passed through a hump of tall hills, forcing travellers to go through a narrow cut walled with steep slopes and shaded with fragrant cedar and pine. Father and son rode quietly, each occupied with his own thoughts, until they rode out of the hills and came to a long, rolling stretch of road.

There is another track to the left,
Afer told Sayyed. The stallion was right. It was faint and overgrown, but a two-wheeled track split off from the main road wended its way into the barren, brown range. The horses followed the track a short distance and stopped to allow Sayyed and Rafnir to dismount.

“Something heavy has travelled this way very recently,” Sayyed observed. He pointed to wheel marks in the dirt and crushed clumps of grass.

Rafnir bent to look. “But is it our missing wagon?” He looked back the way they had come toward the hump of hills. “If you were planning to leave a caravan with little notice, this would be a good place to do it.”

Sayyed studied the hills and saw what Rafnir meant. A wagon lagging behind could easily veer off the road when the rest of the baggage train turned out of sight into the tree-lined cut. “So, do we continue along the road or try this track?”

“Try the track,” Rafnir suggested. He shaded his eyes with a hand and looked down the course of the trail as far as he could see. If the track continued its apparent direction, it would eventually reach the mountains.

The men mounted again, and the Hunnuli stretched out into a slow, easy canter. There were few places a wagon could leave that track, and the trail wound on, clear and obvious even through the dry vegetation. They had ridden for almost half an hour, one in front of the other, when Tibor veered off the path so abruptly, Rafnir was unseated. Reacting quickly, the sorcerer grabbed the stallion’s mane and hauled himself back into the saddle.

Look!
Tibor sent excitedly before Rafnir could voice any of the words that came to his lips, and the stallion nosed something on the ground.

Rafnir could not see the object over Tibor’s big head, so he slid off and pushed the stallion’s nose aside. All he saw was a thin strip of red dangling from the long, sharp leaves of a dagger plant. His eyes suddenly popped wide, and he whooped with delight. “It’s Kelene’s hair ribbon,” he yelled, waving the trophy in the air.

“Are you sure?” Sayyed’s brow rose dubiously.

I am,
Tibor neighed.
It has her smell.

“They’re just ahead of us!” Rafnir crowed. “She must have left this as a sign.”

The two men grinned at each other. For the first time in five days they had a definite lead, and they did not want to waste it. Rafnir quickly tied the ribbon around his arm and leaped into the saddle. The Hunnuli sprang away.

The wagon had a day’s lead on them, but no living creature could outrun or outlast a Hunnuli. The horses ran for the rest of the daylight hours, until the sun slid behind the mountains and night fell. They saw no more signs of the women, only the wagon track drawing nearer and nearer to the mountains.

As soon as the sun set, the Hunnuli were forced to stop. Although they could have run all night, a high veil of clouds covered the sky and hid the light of the moon and stars. The men were afraid to proceed for fear of missing another sign or losing the faint trail in the darkness. Reluctantly they made a cold camp and bedded down for some much-needed sleep.

Just before dawn the men roused, ate a quick meal, and made their prayers on bended knee. Rafnir felt comfortable now with this morning oblation, and he silently sent his plea to the mother goddess to watch over his wife and her mother. By the time the light was strong enough to see the trail, the men and the Hunnuli were on their way. The path went on before them, like two pale parallel ribbons that led ever westward into the foothills of the Absarotan Mountains.