His shoulder throbbed as each blow and parry rushed back to his blossoming memory.

"I remember it. . ." Rann breathed in wonder. "I remember it all."

Gormion rose and stalked from the firelight.

But the bard was not finished. As Larken contin shy;ued, into the Song of Passing that named and her shy;alded each of the fallen, the Plainsmen fell silent, remembering the battle in its swift and brutal entirety.

Stormlight, listening, recalled the fluttering high grass, the Istarian infantry passing so closely that he could smell the sweaty leather, read the elaborate gold insignia of the Istarian Guard. He recollected his troops, their painted faces and robes swathed with browns, blacks, and yellows, lying still until the sunlight and shadow and grass seemed to swallow them …

Northstar alone summoned to mind no earthly army, no array of spears or line of soldiers. Only the darkness of the sandstorm returned to him, abiding and deep, broken only by the unnatural movement of stars. Within that darkness dwelt the sound of inhuman voices, a clash of energy and movement he could not find the words to describe, and even the songs of Larken could not approach its menace and danger.

When the last note of the Passing sounded and the dead receded into their long, forgetful rest, some shy;thing dark passed over and through the young scout.

He thought he saw a constellation, high in the vault of heaven, scatter and tumble onto the dark shy;ened plain.

The dark woman crouched in the valley of crystal bones. Overhead the red moon reeled crazily into the desert sky, but even that subdued light hurt her eyes.

She must learn to master this body. Learn its heav shy;iness and inelegance in the short time before it dried and crumbled, in order to do the tasks she had set for herself. Already the blank, airless chaos of the Abyss seemed like a nightmare, like a harsh season in another age. Takhisis pushed that time to the back of her memory, breathing the night air, the faint smell of sage, the salt of the surrounding crystals.

Chapter 4

Now was the time to scheme and countermine. Now, while the rebels divided and scattered, uncer shy;tain.

There is great power in knowledge, she told her shy;self again.

Great freedom.

She groaned and practiced again the casual lifting of her incongruously heavy arm, the blinking of her eyes at proper intervals. The red-lit landscape glit shy;tered eerily, as though she watched the world from the heart of a gem. These eyes of crystal reflected an angular moonlight. Nearby, the salt flats, the pillars, seemed massive, disproportionately large. The plateau and arroyo, not a league away, seemed diminished, mysterious, as though glimpsed at the end of a thousand-mile tunnel.

The strange triad of Plainsman, bard, and elf seemed mysterious and distant as well, their thoughts and passions and motives still veiled to her.

Takhisis glanced up at the riding moon. Red Luni-tari passed slowly over the eastern sky, over a gap in the heavens where the black moon rested, still unknown to the worldly astronomers.

A mask for Nuitari. A bright veil over the dark moon.

The girl would be the place to start, the goddess thought.

Slowly, the crystals that housed her spirit began to change, to restructure. To a passerby it would appear that one of the columns of salt-a large one, out in the middle of the flats-was melting, dissolving, reforming at the same time.

Takhisis's body hardened, became more angular. The shoulders broadened and the legs, once long and smooth and tapering, knotted as though an ancient wind had twisted and gnarled them.

It was a man now who walked the cooling sands of the desert. A man handsome and muscular and cold.

As he moved through the moonlight, his skin slowly grew translucent, then transparent. He was a ripple of darkness rising out of the desert night, no more visible than heat wavering over the cooling sands. Silently, he slipped by the outermost circle of Fordus's sentries.

Safe behind rebel lines, the warrior paused and listened, sinking slowly back into view, his skin darker, more opaque. Now the distant sound of a lyre chimed over his brittle hand, as the crystals in his fingers vibrated to the soft sound.

Good. The bard was playing. The music was uncomfortable, even disturbing, but it signaled her whereabouts.

Somewhere in the dry gulch, Takhisis-or rather the dark man who called himself Tamex-would find Larken. And the winnowing would begin.

* * * * *

Larken, too, had spent a sleepless night.

Alone in a weathered arroyo, at any time a place of danger, she waited for the inspiration of song and insight, she touched the three strings of the elven lyre, and she thought of Fordus.

"To the north he went," she began, her low, mel shy;lifluous voice unsteady as she searched for the melody in the darkness.

Lucas turned on his ring perch, head cocked alertly at the sound of the lyre.

"To the north came Fordus in the face of Istar …"

Larken fumbled with the lyre strings, striking a quiet but dissonant chord. Lucas shrieked, raising the feathers on his head into a menacing crest.

"What? I know it was bad. Sorry," she replied to him, and his feathers smoothed over again. For an instant, a chill passed over her. Had she heard human words in the hawk's cry? Forgetting the moment, she dropped the lyre indifferently onto her lap.

Larken was glad her bardic instructors could not see her grope for words and flounder with strings. It would confirm what they had told her all along, about Plainsmen and the bardic calling, about her especially.

About this instrument they had hung upon her, useless and discordant in her hands.

Lucas cocked his head and stood very still on the round perch. His green eyes flashed with unearthly fire.

Larken looked at Lucas questioningly. "What?" she asked, this time wanting an answer.

Suddenly, a coldness overwhelmed her, as though the dry riverbed breathed the memory of violent water, of ice. A shadow passed between her and the moonlight-a cloud, a night bird …

The shadow paused above her.

Lucas covered his head with his wing and made a low, painful cry.

Slowly, Larken turned.

The dark man smiled handsomely, his face framed in moonlight. His tight-lidded amber eyes moved over her, and the black silk tunic rose rhythmically on his shoulders and chest. His legs were long and powerful, and he wore black leather boots-an odd choice for the desert, Larken thought somewhere at the edge of her mind.

He was a strange combination of beauty and eeriness, like a distorted reflection of the moon in water. Larken regarded him suspiciously, her hand drifting slowly and surely to the knife at her belt.

The dark man held her gaze, nodded.

"You are Larken the bard," he said, as though he named her for the first time with his words. With a movement lithe and graceful, he stepped toward her, wrested her hand from her knife . . . and kissed her fingers elegantly, his eyes never leaving hers.

Lucas shrieked from his perch, swelled with cop shy;per light, and tried to fly at the man, but his jesses tangled.

Larken swallowed hard and nodded, recovering her hand and soothing the hawk. "Hush, Lucas. It's all right."

The bird fluttered and hopped, but obediently kept to the perch.

"I am Tamex," the man said. "I come from the south, from the shining foothills."

Larken composed her face into neutrality. The man's hand had been very cold and hard. She started to sign a greeting, but something baffled her hands.

"While your army fought in the grasslands, I… crossed the desert. I searched for the Que-Nara camp, and awaited your return. Will you speak with me?"