It was glorious news.

What he had found was better than water.

He was the Prophet and he was the prophecy.

Above him, the hawk banked and rushed on a high wind back to the rebel camp. At his mistress's orders, Lucas was searching for the commander, guided by faint, barely comprehensible voices on the edge of the wind. The hawk heard a dozen lan shy;guages breathed into the air: the sleepy muttering of an elf-child somewhere in the darkness beneath Istar, the last gurgled sigh of a merchant murdered on the edge of the desert, the quiet sermons of the high grass and the ancient vallenwoods far, far to the south in Silvanost.

Among these sounds arose at last the murmur of the Water Prophet, strange, distracted talk of runes and water and the fall of cities.

Lucas found him on a flat stretch of desert south of the Tears. Sharp-eyed and vigilant, the hawk saw Fordus crawling and babbling, coming to rest at last on a rise midway between the salt flats and the standing stone from which he had been returning.

He seemed to be talking to someone, but there was nobody there.

Chapter 8

The hawk swooped through the firelight, and the smoke, and rising cinders scattered in his path.

With a shrill, whistling cry, glowing red and amber in the midst of his nightfire, Lucas swept over the rebel campsite like a meteor, startling sentries, rousing the bandits from talk of discontent and sullen conspiracy. Gormion, crouched at dice in a circle of her followers, looked up sullenly and made a warding sign with a flash of silver bracelets, while Rann and Aeleth reached instinctively for their weapons.

Larken was standing by Northstar and Stormlight at the arroyo's edge. She heard Lucas's cry, lifted her padded glove, and braced to receive the bird. With a sudden, graceful dive and an upsweep, the hawk struck hard on the underside of the glove, bells jin shy;gling while his talons fastened in the layered wool and leather. Then he murmured and pulled himself upright, Larken adjusting his jesses until he perched comfortably on her arm.

Despite her strength and preparation, Larken had staggered this time when the hawk landed. Her arm still shocked a bit, Larken began to look the bird over, spreading his feathers with her ashy fingers, making sure Lucas had not been attacked by a larger raptor. Northstar and Stormlight stepped back apprehensively.

The hawk leaned against his mistress, crying softly like a waking child into her coarse, matted hair. Larken stopped her inspection and listened.

Fordus is approaching, she signed, translating Lucas's cry. He is near, but there is a cloud above him. Lucas saw no more of the Prophet.

"But he saw other things."

The bird's eyes glittered greenly.

"Then sing us that sight, Larken," Northstar urged.

The bard glanced uncomfortably at her younger cousin. For Northstar, the solutions were easy: he read the stars, the paths of the desert, and his desti shy;nation was mapped. He did not understand the wild moment in which the singer gives her heart to the bird, when the light expands, when the hawk's cry becomes words and the words become song.

When you sing because you cannot choose other shy;wise.

Almost unwillingly, in a soft voice unaccompa shy;nied by her drum, Larken began the hawk's song.

The music was an old sea chantey from Balifor- somehow she remembered the music-but the words, as always, were new and fresh, gaining power as they came to her in the firelit dark of the campsite.

The dark man in the desert The dark man on the plain The dark man in the gap of the sky Is no dark man.

His home is not in moonlight His home is not in sun The dark man on the grassy hill Is no dark man.

O his arms are stone and water O his blood is stone and sand The dark man in the circled camp Is no dark man.

As swiftly as they had come, the words ceased. Lucas fluffed contentedly, the last of his ruddy light sprinkling onto the desert floor, and the fires them shy;selves seemed to contract once more around the huddled campsites. Larken placed the bird on his perch and sat down, resting her face in her hands. Already she could barely remember what she had sung, for the words had risen unbidden, had passed through her like light through a faceted glass.

The eyes of the listeners turned to Stormlight, who stared silently into the fire.

This time the elf was not sure of the meanings. This was an exotic musing of bard and bird. It was like a foreign language he almost knew.

Stormlight cleared his throat, the white lucerna lifting from his golden eyes./'There is a spy come in the midst of us," he declared. "Someone who is not what he seems. That's what the hawk was saying, as I follow it. Yes. That is what the bird said."

Larken and Northstar exchanged an uncomfort shy;able glance.

"A spy," Stormlight repeated, this time with more certainty.

Tamex stepped into the firelight.

The hawk cried out, and raised his wings high, his hooked beak open and threatening.

At one moment, the firelit margins of air seemed to waver and glimmer, and then Tamex was among them, visible, tangible. Silently he moved into full view, his black silk tunic shimmering. He shook the dust from the tops of his boots and scanned the circle of rebels indifferently. The firelight glowed through his skin, and for a moment, the sharp-eyed Northstar thought that the warrior's fingers seemed crooked and arched, like talons.

Who was this man, born of the midnight desert?

"The dark man," Stormlight breathed. "Who is not what he seems."

Larken shot him a sullen look. And then she flushed, uncertain why she wanted to defend this man.

Tamex turned to meet them, black eyes angry and glittering like polished onyx. Gormion, Rann, and Aeleth, never true loyalists to Fordus or his officers, rose to stand beside Tamex, their hands already on the hilts of their weapons.

"Where have you been, warrior?" Stormlight asked, his voice cold and low.

Tamex shrugged. The bandits closed behind him.

At a nearby campfire, three Plainsmen rose and, clutching their spears, walked slowly, menacingly, toward Gormion, casting wavering shadows over the warring lights.

Something brushed Stormlight's shoulder. North-star had appeared beside him. Though more scout than warrior, the young man was ready to do his part-knife drawn and keen eyes shifting alertly over the dark man and his bandit following.

Larken watched with rising alarm, and Lucas whistled uneasily.

The two warriors-the elf and the pale, mysteri shy;ous Tamex-were locked in a stare that could end only in combat.

Then the cry of a sentry fractured the tense silence, and nearly all eyes whipped toward the sound. The young Plainsman atop the Red Plateau pointed north and shouted.

"Cavalry! Two hundred from the north!"

Tamex broke off the stare with Stormlight and smiled wickedly. So they had come, after all.

Trained by the Solamnics over the three centuries of their alliance, the Istarian cavalry were almost as brilliant, as swift and effective as their teachers. Accomplished swordsmen and deadly bowmen, they fought from horseback, frequently tied to the saddle to keep them astride their mounts in close combat. They were also much more ruthless than the Solamnics. A Solamnic Knight stayed his hand in occasional mercy against the enemy, whether man or elf or dwarf or even ogre, for his Oath told him "Est Sularus oth Mithas"-"My Honor is My Life."

Istarians, on the other hand, followed neither Oath nor Measure. The stories of their raids were horrible.

Stormlight's heart sank at the sentry's alarm. For a brief moment he struggled for a plan, for the words to express it.

When Tamex seized that moment to begin shout shy;ing, the rebels jumped at his words.