* * * * *

Fordus saw the first fires in the crystals.

He woke from another fevered dream, from a reverie of glyph and symbol, to desperate shouts on the wind. Somehow he had circled the rebel camp in his wandering, had strayed into the Tears of Mishakal. Through the gemlike landscape the cries

and screams intermingled with the chiming, then echoed off the facets of the farthest glassy growths.

For a moment he did not know where he was. Blearily he scrambled to his feet, drank the last from his water flask, and looked for Larken, for Storm-light. His swollen foot gave beneath him, and he fell, clutching at the nearest crystal, which broke cleanly in his iron fever grip, its top flat and level like a plateau. The wind rushed from him, and he lay on his back in the dark sand, cursing bad circumstance, the rotten luck of springjaws and falls and poison.

Slowly, amid chime and echo, he recognized the distant cries as the clamor of battle. Shapes milled at the edge of his vision. There were people in the salt flats, cowering, hiding.

Steadying himself against the largest crystal, For-dus regained his footing and hobbled toward the sound, toward the people. On all sides the red moonlight glittered, reflected off the crystals until the rebel chieftain was dazzled and confused, turned about like a wanderer in a house of mirrors.

Through the maze of light and sound Fordus stumbled, his apprehension growing. He recalled the stories about the Tears-the vanished travelers even in this new age of might, the deadly serenades of crystal and wind and evil magic. On the faces of the crystals he saw towering fires, the glint of bronze armor, the flash of steel.

And the soft, ominous sheen of black silk, as a solitary warrior paced through the shifting light.

He heard the sound of Istarian trumpets, the sig shy;naled retreat. For a moment he rejoiced, shifting his weight from his swollen foot and listening for cheers, for the victory cry of the rebel troops.

Instead, it was the smell of smoke that reached him on the wind-of burning wood and straw, and an acrid, unsettling smell he remembered from his youth, when once a raiding band of Irda had ran shy;sacked the camp where he lived.

The burning dead. The smell of pyres and the old, barbaric funerals of the Age of Dreams.

And also on the wind, beneath the crackle of fires, the keening of women, the wailing of men and the moans of the wounded, a solitary voice, no louder than a whisper, came to him as though borne from the crystals themselves.

A whisper on the wind, so soft that he was never sure whether he really had heard it, or if it was only that his thoughts and fears had prompted the words.

Without you, the voice insinuated, dark and seduc shy;tive and denying. They have defeated Mar without you, Fordus.

Dismayed, the rebel lowered himself to the salty sand.

Chapter 9

Stormlight lost the Istarian rider in thc pitch black of thc night.

At one moment, the man was a shape ahead of him, flitting in and out of the gloom like a wraith. Stormlight tried valiantly to keep pace, but the Istar-ian was a seasoned rider, as at home in the night as in the saddle.

Finally, the Istarian vanished entirely. At one moment he was the wraith, the shadow, and then … he was nothing, not even sand. The desolate, scrubby landscape stretched into darkness all around the pursuing elf. Stormlight found himself

in an unknown, bleak terrain, where forked black tree trunks sprouted starkly out of the crusty earth.

"I have followed him too far," he told himself, wrestling with a rising alarm. "I can see the foothills to the north, the mouth of the Central Pass. We're out on the plains somewhere, too close to Istar and its armies …"

Then the horse brushed by one of the dark trees, which crumbled into powder, streaking the animal's flank with a long, black stain.

Not trees. Crystals.

A light wind chimed through the glittering forest.

"The salt flats," Stormlight whispered. "The Tears of Mishakal."

At once he turned his horse about, intent on riding out of the perilous region, out to the safety of the desert, out to the plains. Even the prospect of Istar-ian armies no longer daunted him, faced as he was with night and magic and the dangerous illusions of this crystalline maze.

Slowly the horse weaved between the crystals, and Stormlight scanned the opaque horizon for signs of torchlight, of campfires, of a moon or a for shy;tunate star. He refused to think on the old legends of his people, on how the salt flats would open to swal shy;low the traveler, how they drew you toward their heart and toward your destruction by the serenade of the wind over the crystals-a cruel, cold wind that tumbled suddenly into song and language, against which, the legends said, the listener was powerless.

Amid the mist and the high chiming, amid the shifting dark shapes and the crunch of his horse's hooves through the crusted layers of sand and salt, Stormlight rode in widening circles, looking for light, for clear ground. He breathed a string of memorized prayers-to Shinare and to his patron Branchala, to Gilean the Book for knowledge, and of course to Mishakal herself, the goddess of heal shy;ing whose tears, it was said, had created these flats.

All of his efforts-both strategy and prayer- seemed for naught. As the night wore on, Stormlight found himself moving into a deeper and deeper darkness. Now, though the stars and planets scat shy;tered the flats with a mysterious half-light, the elf could see no more than ten feet ahead of his horse. The pocked and hoof-churned ground told him he had passed this way before.

Instead of widening circles, his path had spiraled inward, turning toward the center of the salt flats, where the darkness was most dense, the country most confusing.

"Stop," he whispered, and reined in the horse. With a rising sense of unease, he scanned the maze around him for some clue, some glimmering-some definable light to guide him anywhere.

In seven hundred years of roaming the desert, it was as close as he had ever come to being lost.

When he reached what appeared to be the center of the salt flats he dismounted slowly, testing the ground beneath his feet and carefully leading his horse toward the centermost crystals.

It would be a long time-four, maybe five hours- until dawn. If the Tears of Mishakal were the leg shy;endary death trap, why, he was already dead. And yet, if they were only confusing and impassable ter shy;rain …

If nothing else, the sunrise would show him reli shy;able east. Stormlight sat at the foot of the crystal, leaning back against the dark surface, which crumbled slightly against his weight. He sat, and waited, and watched for light.

After a while-Stormlight was unsure whether it was an hour, three hours, five hours-the darkness began to lift, and the wind chiming through the crystals calmed in the anticipation of approaching dawn. Now he could make out his face reflected on the facets of crystal.

It was distorted. In the nearest crystal, one eye was magnified, outsized, while in another not three feet away, his face was grotesquely narrowed, as though he had passed through a crack in a wall.

Yet another facet showed him as squat, shorter than he ever remembered. Always sensitive about his height, Stormlight turned quickly away.

And saw yet another, and another, each one bending, twisting, or otherwise translating his form into something bizarre and grotesque, some even reflecting those other reflections in an infinity of confusion.

Like the visions and prophecies that milled through the rebel camp, he thought. Each was a way of looking at the world, of holding the light so that it reflected the beholder as much as what he beheld.