Travis sensed all their gazes on him; it wasn’t a good feeling. “So how do the Scirathi plan to control the city?” he said, trying to deflect attention from himself. “If they intended for me to be dead when they reached it, they must have had some other plan for raising Morindu.”

“Nim?” Larad said.

Farr shook his head. “Powerful blood runs in her veins, but it is not the blood of Orú. They could not use her to raise the city.”

“Yet, if what you say is true, if she is a nexus,” Vani said, “then fate is changed by her very presence.”

“The throne room,” Avhir said. The tall assassin approached Vani. “Where Orú was shackled, and where he slept. Was it not said that only the Seven Fateless could enter?”

Vani nodded. “For anyone but the A’narai, entering the throne room was certain death. Orú’s power was so terrible that the very threads of fate were twisted in his presence.”

“You mean like a nexus?” Grace said, her regal visage pale with dust.

Travis gazed at the city. “Nim.”

“They mean to use her to enter the throne room,” Farr said. “To find the god-king Orú. And to take his blood.”

Larad stopped shaking sand from his robe. “But Orú cannot possibly still be alive after three thousand years.”

“Perhaps not,” Farr said, his dark eyes on the city. “But it may not matter. If even a small amount of his blood remains, in scarabs or vials . . .”

The others gazed again at Travis. He knew what they were thinking; they had all seen the transformation that a single drop of Orú’s blood had wrought in him. What would the Scirathi do with such blood?

Maybe not anything, Travis. Magic is weakening. Maybe the Scirathi are too late.

Or maybe they weren’t. Magic was losing its strenth, yes, but not the Imsari; they seemed as powerful as ever. And so did Travis’s blood—how else could it have reversed the spell of destruction cast upon Morindu the Dark over three eons ago? Orú’s blood might yet have power the Scirathi could wield.

And even if it didn’t, the Scirathi still had Nim.

When the city had risen, great clouds of dust had billowed into the sky, masking the glare of the sun. Now the dust had begun to settle, and the sun broke through. Once again heat rose in a choking miasma from the desert floor.

“Come on,” Travis said. “One way or another, we have to go in there.”

Avhir found steps hewn into the side of the pinnacle. People from Morindu must have climbed to this place thousands of years ago, perhaps to gaze at their dark city. Or perhaps to watch for the armies of their enemies approaching. In minutes they reached the bottom.

“The gate must be there,” Vani said, pointing to a pair of delicate spires set into the wall that ringed the city.

Master Larad turned his shattered face toward her. “Will we be able to open them?”

No one answered the Runelord. It was a half mile from the base of the pinnacle to the city, and there was no shade or shelter anywhere in between. A parched wind dispersed the last of the haze on the air, and the sun glared down from the sky like a furious eye.

They ran. The T’golsurged ahead, hardly leaving prints in the sand. The others lumbered behind. In moments they were sweating, and after a minute Grace, Larad, and Farr all began to grimace in pain.

You can’t feel it, Travis, but the sand is burning them. Any hotter, and it would melt into glass. If you don’t do something, they won’t make it.

“Larad, the Stones.”

The Runelord could not manage words, but he held out the iron box in trembling hands. This time Travis took only Gelthisar, the Stone of Ice.

“ Hadath,” he murmured. Again he spoke the rune of frost, and again.

The sand remained cool only for moments before the sun baked it again, but each time he spoke the rune of frost Travis directed the force of the runespell just ahead of them. Grace, Farr, and Larad were no longer limping, and they were able to make rapid progress. They reached the wall of the city. Vani and Avhir were already there.

Travis looked up, awestruck again. The wall was a hundred feet high, fashioned of the same glassy black stone as the spire. No crack or crevice marred it, and there was no sign of any gate or doorway.

He glanced at Vani. “I thought you said the gate would be here.”

“It is here.” She reached toward the wall, but her hand seemed to spring back before she could touch it.

Travis understood. It was like the door in the tower. It was a spell woven in lines of fate. One fate was that there was no gate in the wall; that was the possibility they saw now. But there was another possibility. . . .

Travis approached the wall and reached out a hand. As it drew close to the black stone he felt resistance. He gathered his will, pushing his hand forward, as if through thick mud.

The resistance parted. His hand touched smooth stone.

The surface of the wall rippled, like dark water disturbed by a cast pebble. Then the ripples vanished, and Travis was no longer touching solid stone. He looked up. Where before there had been only blank wall, there was now an arched opening wide enough for five men to pass.

“Interesting,” Larad said. “How did you do that?”

Travis lowered his arm. He was not a nexus, a center around which threads of fate spun; not like Nim. He was the opposite of that. Lines of fate were not drawn to him, but rather repulsed. Twice he had died, and twice he had been reborn.

“ A’narai,” Vani murmured.

“Fateless,” Travis said, and stepped through the gate.

37.

It was like a garden.

Travis walked down a broad avenue, shaded from the sun by date palms arching overhead. Lindaravines, lush with yellow blooms, cascaded down walls and coiled above arched gates through which the music of falling water drifted. Beyond they glimpsed cool, dim, green spaces.

“This is impossible,” Grace said, gazing around. “This place has been buried for three thousand years. How can there be trees?”

Larad reached out, brushing an orange flower that grew from a niche in a wall. “I half expect the people to start coming out of their doors. It’s as if the city is just as they left it eons ago.”

“Just as they left it,” Farr repeated the words, casting back the hood of his robe. “You may be right, Runelord. This may indeed be how Morindu looked when it was abandoned.”

As Grace had said, that was impossible. All the same, Travis was certain Farr was right. He had expected to find a desolate ruin; instead, here was Morindu at the height of its power and splendor.

Except its people are gone. They turned to dust three thousand years ago, while these walls, even these flowers, remain.

A sleek black form moved past Travis, gold eyes seeking, hands at the ready. He was wrong; Morindu’s people weren’t gone. They had endured over the years in exile, their blood passing from father to daughter, from mother to son. And now, after all this time, they had returned.

“I will scout ahead,” Vani said to Avhir. “Watch behind us, but do not stray far. There is no telling what remains here.”

Travis studied Vani’s face, trying to see what she was feeling. All the Mournish were descended from the exiled people of Morindu the Dark. But she was a scion of the royal line of Morindu, heir to its ruling class of sorcerer-priests. This was her city.

He touched her shoulder, meeting her eyes. “You’re home, Vani.”

For a moment, it seemed her gold eyes shone with wonder. Then they narrowed. “Be on your guard,” she said, and kept moving.

They came to a square where two broad avenues intersected. In the center of the square, water droplets sprayed up from a fountain, bright as jewels, and fell back into a pool green with water lilies.