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and men who d been tending this or that chore, screamed and flattened to the
ground. Giant northern chargers soared out of the darkness, hurtling
campfires. Pack animals brayed in fear, fighting their tethers, their harness
bells ringing. Any man who raised a sword was struck down. Captives, most of
them caravaners and their families, were rounded up and guarded. The freight
was unremarkable, provisions and livestock bound for an army in the field.
The desert men s gabbled responses were barely coherent, the only clear fact
being that they d traveled for many days now.
In the largest of the tents, Springbuck assembled all the documents and maps
he could find. He d learned from Gil MacDonald what a treasure house of
military information captured papers could be. He called in Kalakeet, who d
stayed back with the war-drays and whose knowledge of the area, vague as it
was, was superior to his own. As the Ku-Mor-Mai and the Speaker bent over the
papers, Gabrielle came in, cooling herself with a silken fan.
As best Springbuck could make out, there lay between the northerners and their
way south a mountain range some dozens of leagues long, the Demon s
Breastwork, one of Salamá s great natural defenses, a palisade of jagged,
impassable cliffs. To the west, it descended into a low-lying, searing desert
called Amon s Cauldron. Much farther to the southeast, the Demon s Breastwork
ended, but that circuit was a well-traveled convoy route, much patrolled, on
which the northerners would run a high risk of battle. The caravan had
departed a major fortress somewhere south of the Breastwork, its destination
the northwestern tip of the Masters domain.
You have been south of the Central Sea before, Springbuck said to the
sorceress. Have you any comment?
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I came by a far different path, she replied cryptically, and went by it
too. Yet, that is the terrain as I heard it.
Springbuck was holding a document that, composed of paragraphs and lists and
bordered with official seals, had the look of an orders letter. Neither he nor
Gabrielle could read its southern characters, and Kalakeet s people had been
forbidden literacy, but at Springbuck s urging, Gabrielle labored over the
date of signature, set down in the eccentric lunar reckoning of the
Southwastelands. It was four days previous.
The Ku-Mor-Mai ruminated, There is some discrepancy. The orders would have
come at this fortress we hear mentioned, not somewhere en route. Yet, how
could a shuffling caravan skirt this Demon s Breastwork in so brief a time?
There was once a passage through these mountains, Gabrielle recalled, or so
the story runs in my family. But that was said to have been destroyed, to
further isolate Shardishku-Salamá. Not destroyed, perhaps, but only hidden?
And now, when it is so vital to speed supplies up to their army in the
Crescent Lands, in use once more?
A question for the caravan leader, said the Ku-Mor-Mai.
Hightower brought the man, whose teeth chattered as he refused to give any
information, his terror of the Masters outweighing any threat the northerners
could bring against him. Gabrielle moved the Ku-Mor-Mai and the Warlord apart
with her soft white hands, slipped an arm through the astonished captive s,
and walked him out of the tent.
They watched her draw him aside a short way, fanning herself and speaking in
words too soft to hear. He listened, then shook his head no, violently. She
spoke again, leaning close, holding a palm up. The blue glow of deCourteney
magic came up off it, illuminating both their faces. She let it fade, and
bespoke him again. This time, he seemed to yield. Leading the sweating,
trembling caravaner back as if he were her swain, she smiled. This one has
seen the blue light of reason. There is indeed a way through the Breastwork.
Salamá is using it more and more to hurry troops and materiel to its
campagin.
The caravaners had been taken through a tunnel under the Demon s Breastwork.
What had been a passageway ages ago was now known as the Gauntlet of
Ibn-al-Yed, because Yardiff Bey s mask-slave had converted it into a death
trap. The travelers had been blindfolded and taken through the Gauntlet by two
guides, each of whom knew only half the way. Guidance must be heeded exactly;
the passageway was filled with lethal pitfalls, snares and other deadly
tricks. Each guide had gone blindfolded in that part of the tunnel that wasn t
his to know. Once the caravan was through, the guides had gone back the way
they d come, to the fortress called Condor s Roost, beyond the mountains.
Hightower maintained, Going straightway under those cliffs saved them a week
and more. Can we not do the same, guides or no?
Gabrielle, unperspiring, fanned herself slowly. The traps were engineered by
Ibn-al-Yed. What that son of the Scorpion has worked, I can unwork.
Failure would earn us graves under the mountains, reminded the Warlord.
Time s unsparing, Springbuck argued. The days of the Trailingsword are half
spent. A shortcut is worth any dare.
* * * *
The Ku-Mor-Mai never ceased to marvel at how problems could come up, and amaze
him, in retrospect, because he hadn t foreseen them.
His most immediate difficulty was keeping his prisoners alive. His soldiers
had met the Yalloroon and heard their sad story. Now, they wanted nothing more
than to rip into some Southwastelanders in retribution; some even cried
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