" Tis the wrong pass, is it not?"

Vincus nodded, started to gesture, to explain that it was the Western Pass that was free of the sterint, free of rockslide and shearing and the terrible destructive wind.

But Stormlight rested his hands on Vincus's shoul shy;ders and regarded him openly, honestly.

" 'Tis what I told him last night, when I spoke to him and warned him. Told him that I had a man in my camp who could guide him safely through the mountains if he chose to continue, but that it would be far wiser to return, to go back to the desert. And it was no dream. But he is no longer listening to me. He pulls phrases from the air, words out of their places, and distorts them into what he wants to hear-into what he says those damnable dreams and visions are telling him."

Stormlight turned away. Far ahead, Fordus's ban shy;ners flew aloft in the dying air, red in the sunset light. Already his columns were starting to move again, and somewhere far up in Fordus's ranks, a solitary drum began a slow, stumbling cadence.

The new drummer was no match for Larken.

"He is completely, utterly mad," Stormlight said. "And I have no choice but to go behind him and to fight his enemies. For the time is coming when he will take my people into more than the weather, more than the death of a few in a narrow, storm-swept pass.

"The walls of Istar are coming. And the Sixth Legion. And Takhisis herself. And before Fordus rides out to meet them, someone will have to stop him."

Chapter 20

The Cental Pass through the Istrian mountains was and moonlit, littered with fallen branches, with stones, with smaller, uprooted alder and fir.

Despite Solinari and the clear sky, the rubble in the pass was an ominous prospect to Stormlight.

Vincus had warned Stormlight, who, in turn, had tried to warn the War Prophet. Follow the Western Pass, they had urged. But Fordus had not listened, had stared through Stormlight as if he were water, all the while toying with the enormous golden circle that enclosed his neck. It bristled with spikes that seemed to grow daily with his madness.

Now Fordus marched through the Central Pass at the head of his exhausted troops. Seven hundred had followed him before the Battle of the Plains, and scarcely five hundred survived it. Seventy had fallen to the Istarian ambush, and a dozen to the desert eruptions.

What do you want, old friend, dear madman? Stormlight thought bitterly as Fordus's banner danced out of view. Your forces have been wrecked, and yet you march. You cannot arm a legion with promises.

By sunrise they were midway through the Central Pass, climbing through boulders and downed pine and aeterna. Fordus's new drummer had struck up a song for courage and endurance.

But the going grew slower and slower as dawn crept into midmorning, and by noon, their hands blistered and their limbs bruised and scratched, the trailblazers stopped to rest, and noticed to their astonishment that they had traveled only a hundred yards in the last two hours.

There was no magic, as there had been in Larken's songs, to help.

Aeleth, his leather armor soggy with sweat, wiped his brow and scrambled to the top of a stone out shy;cropping, glaring over the rubblestrewn wasteland.

"What do you see, Aeleth?" Fordus called up to him.

Aeleth thought before he answered. Suffering from shortness of breath, muttering at the thin mountainous air and the countless obstructions in the path, the War Prophet had become an impossible commander, short with his lieutenants and merciless

in his quest to reach the other side of the pass by the evening.

Two men had fallen over dead from exertion, and despite the urgings of the Namers, Fordus had left the bodies where they lay.

"It's .. . it's downhill from here, sir!" Aeleth called down.

Heartened, Fordus turned to face his followers.

"Another vision has come to me!" he proclaimed, his bony hands clutching his golden collar, fingering the dark glain opals. "If we march through the night, we cover ourselves with the mantle of surprise. When we reach the shore of Lake Istar, there will be nothing the Kingpriest can do to stop our advances!"

The storm charged upon them suddenly, rolling out of the south in a rumbling chaos like a herd of horses.

For a moment the air was still, and the hardy mountain birds-raptor and thrush, the loud purple jays of northern Ansalon-fell quiet in anticipation of the rising wind.

Then it surged through the pass behind them like a flash flood through a dry arroyo, the wind picking up velocity and force as it barreled over the felled trees, over the rocks and boulders, scattering sand and gravel and branches as it shrieked through the pass.

Stormlight turned around in astonishment as the wind roared past and over him, knocking him to the ground and thundering through the back of his followers.

Children were swept up and dashed against the rockface. Terrified, their mothers screamed for them, their words lost and useless. Stormlight covered his ears in the fierce, deafening wail, and a wave of sand broke over them, stinging and abrading.

Up ahead, a felled vallenwood launched into the air and crashed into Gormion and a handful of her followers. The bandit captain shrieked and rolled from the path of the hurtling limbs, scattering ear shy;rings and bracelets as the wind took her up, buoyed her, and hurled her, alive, into a stand of aeterna.

The rest of the bandits fared even less well. The vallenwood branches exploded with screams as the heavy tree crushed the hapless men against the rocks.

Clinging to Stormlight and Breeze, Vincus rode out the storm with his head in his hood. The pass vanished in a whirl of sand, and from the murky cyclone ahead he could hear wail and outcry. Occa shy;sionally a dark, unrecognizable shape rocketed past, and from somewhere back up the pass came the skidding, too-human sound of frightened horses.

Then, as suddenly as it had rushed over them, the storm was gone. The sand settled lazily over the mountain rocks-the desert transported by the fierce and merciless weather-and slowly, almost imperceptibly, a few moving shapes emerged from rock and sand and thicket.

When they all had gathered, they were sixty less.

A new wailing began, the ancient funerary call of the Que-Nara rising like another wind, echoing from the mountainsides. Plaintively, eerily, the cry spread through the Central Pass, until even'the returning birds began to sing in response-thrush and jay in full cry from the ravaged, wind-blasted trees.

But Fordus scrambled up the rockface, clinging like a grotesque spider, and waved his hand for silence.

It was a long time coming. The rebels were griev shy;ing, swept away by the dark river of their own sor shy;row.

"It is the vengeance of Takhisis," Fordus rasped, his breath shallow and panting. But nobody was lis shy;tening.

"Hear the word of the Prophet!" he cried. A hun shy;dred pairs of eyes looked up at him, new fear flicker shy;ing alongside their old devotion. The rest of the survivors milled aimlessly, combing the rubble for the injured and the dead.

"There are a thousand roads to Istar," Fordus pro shy;claimed, his voice gaining power and authority as the words rushed from him. "Each of those roads is guarded, with torment and danger and hardship.

"But we have passed through the first of these hardships, my people. And though there are some we must leave behind …"

His gesture toward the gathered bodies of the dead was quick and casual, as though he brushed away a fly.

"Let them be remembered, and let their names be sung, at the time when we will remember all the fallen, commemorate all those who spilled their blood in my glorious cause."

Still clinging to the rockface, Fordus pointed north, the collar at his neck afire in the reflected light of the sunset.