Arcing outward in the perpetual blackness, fluttering her pennons, she dropped straight down ten thousand fathoms, plummeting, falling, dreaming, until at length she floated amid a wild, universal hubbub of stunning sounds, a cloud of confused, disembodied voices, drift shy;ing through the hollow dark.

Through that negative plane of terror and chaos, borne on the nightwinds that whirled about her, buoying and buffeting her, indifferent to the contin shy;ual whining and whirring of voices at the edge of nothingness, murmured the hysterical gnatsong of the damned.

She spread her wings and turned in a hot dry ther shy;mal, rising to the lip of the Abyss, to the glazed and dividing firmament beyond which she could not travel. It looked forbidding, mysterious, like thick ice on a bottomless pool.

Like the black face of the raw glain opal.

There, in the heart of nothing, Takhisis banked and glided, aloft on the current of her own dark strategies.

* * * * *

Behind her another shadow glided relentlessly at a safe distance, its own black wings extended like those of a giant scavenger, an enormous predatory bird.

Takhisis's consort, Sargonnas, banished into the Abyss along with his powerful mistress, had hidden in the deepest shadows to observe the same vision billowing out of the darkness. He saw the same burning city, the collapsing tower, and the elf and the girl and the blue-eyed man whom they followed.

And the armies-the irresistible armies-at the outskirts of Istar.

Oh, what Takhisis would not give to destroy this Plainsman hero and his few hundred followers! The upstart rebel was little more than a gifted escape artist now-eluding and fighting the slavers in a desert that his advisors, his oracles, and his own

common sense told him not to leave.

But five years from now, when his strength and judgment had matured, when his numbers had increased by thousands and he stood at the gates of Istar, liberating the countless slaves and conquered peoples, his power would be grown so mighty that not even a goddess could stop him.

The salt flats of the southern desert lay a mile from the boundaries of the Que-Nara's firelight. Called the Tears of Mishakal since the Age of Light, it was an alien landscape to Plainsmen, to barbarians, even to the nomadic desert bandits who skirted its edges with muttered prayers to Sargonnas or Shinare.

Legends had it that those who strayed onto the salt flats rarely found their way back, but wandered the faceless landscape forever. Those same legends claimed that often the unwary traveler was drawn there by the song of the crystals, the contorted, glassy growths that rose from the heart of the flats, through which the desert wind chimed a faint, bizarre music.

None of the Plainsmen camped close to the salt flats, nor did the sentries patrol its borders. Its landscape extended to the blank horizon, as original and pure as it had lain during the Age of Dreams, and the eyes of the Que-Nara, turned north toward the grasslands and the distant Istarian threat, failed to notice a stir shy;ring in a nearby cluster of crystals, a twisted, sparkling tree of salt that began to sway and turn.

In the blended light of the three moons-the white, the red, and the unseen black moon, Nuitari- the crystals boiled and blackened, as though an unbearable heat passed through them, welding facet to adjoining facet until the branching facets melded and slowly took on a new shape.

As faceless as the salt flat, anonymous and half formed, it was nonetheless human …

Or humanlike.

For a moment it hovered between mineral and life, between salt and flesh, as though something in it warred between sleep and waking, stasis and movement. Then hands and fingers branched from the glossy arms, and the features of the face took sudden shape, as though an unseen sculptor had drawn them from the stone.

The woman moved, and the desert shuddered.

She was beautiful, dark and curiously angular, and naked in the black moonlight.

The woman knelt and scooped up a handful of salt. It poured black through her fingers, shimmer shy;ing thin like silk, and she wrapped herself in the new, cascading cloth. Magically, her features soft shy;ened, her skin grew supple and pale, and her amber eyes glittered under heavy, sensuous lashes.

But the hearts of those eyes were black, slitted ver shy;tically like a reptile's.

For a moment the woman stood still and practiced breathing as though it were a new and odd sensa shy;tion. Then she stretched lazily, the silk riding soft and translucent up her pale, perfect legs.

"Oh, too long away," she murmured, and there was a chiming echo trapped in the depths of her voice. "Too long away from Ansalon and from the little world …

"If I cannot be opal yet, I shall be salt."

She walked out of the Abyss, out of the dead val shy;ley and into the pathless desert, the massive weight of her delicate feet crushing the sunbaked mosaic and parting the winds in her passage.

Chapter 2

Six hundred and more of thc sack-robed rebels crossed the northern stretch of sand, the horizon shimmering purple and green in the midday heat.

Twice the scouts shouted forth a warning, sending a nervous flurry through their column. The miscalls were forgivable. After all, the lads were young, mas shy;terful on horseback but new to reconnaissance. Mirages they would have ignored a week ago boldly deceived them now.

Towers, they told Stormlight. Towers made of water at the northern edge of sight.

The elf smiled at their rashness, their excitability.

On horseback, hooded against the desert winds, he shielded his eyes and looked to the horizon, where the scouts beckoned and pointed.

"Illusion," he told them. "False light."

He sent them back in the column for refreshment, for shade.

They complied unwillingly, insisting that they had seen the great colored spires of Istar.

Stormlight knew better. The city was thirty miles away, across mountains and the expanse of Lake Istar. Furthermore, Fordus the Prophet had no plan to go there.

Not until he could walk through those gates in tri shy;umph.

That would be years and many followers in the future. For now, there was the Kingpriest's army to reckon with.

Stormlight stared across the tawny grassland, toward the north where the bright red star of Chislev rode low over the bunched backs of the mountains.

It was easy in the desert, where he and Fordus read the faceless terrain much like deep-sea naviga shy;tors decoded the swell and tilt of the waves. It was Stormlight's nature to do so-the sympathy with water and rock that was his inheritance.

However, the fancy, soft generals of Istar had had little chance in the shifting sand and merciless heat.

Remembering it gave Stormlight a savage plea shy;sure.

In late autumn, the Kingpriest had sent an irri shy;tated legion south into the desert, with orders to uproot the bandit, Fordus. That expedition had lasted two weeks in the blowing sand, with never a clear sighting of the quarry. Led by a few old fire pits and wisps of hope, the Istarians trudged south to the borders of Balifor where, short of water and exhausted by a dozen nights of fruitless searching, they were easy prey for Fordus's rebel force, which was half their size.

Twenty-seven Istarian soldiers were still miss shy;ing-their helmets, shields, and bones scattered for miles among the dried, branching riverbeds the Lucanesti knew as the Tine. The rest of the unit had returned to the city with tales of a wolfish, wraith-like commander who could be in three places at once, who moved over sand like the wind and car shy;ried a thousand throwing axes on a belt at his waist, all designed by a mage who had vowed that never would a cast miss its target.