She scratched her nose and looked at me. “I will call in a favor and get his papers for free. Three hundred will cover the feed for the camels, water for you, and nothing more.” She smiled. “My father will be glad to see you.”

PART FIVE:

THE MOTHER DESERT

Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

The travel was hard. Travel was miserable. My camel was bad tempered, and Sorcha had to charm her and me both in order to get me on her in the mornings. Once in the saddle, I took to smoking more or less constantly to keep the panic at bay. I missed a lot of what was going on around me. In those first few days while we traveled the northern plains of Vilahna, Shayat and her cartographer rode ahead, steeped in private conversation. Shayat’s cartographer, a man named Tamir, was the forger. He was a forger, and therefore a criminal in the eyes of the Exalted, but he regarded Sorcha and me with obvious mistrust and distaste. The day we left, he handed Sorcha a set of forged papers without a word, mounted his camel, and rode off at a gallop ahead of us. His brusqueness left me shaken; it left Sorcha curious.

Tamir was middle-aged and hardened, with skin pale enough silver that it looked like the sun had bleached it. He was on the tall side and gaunt. A series of ragged scars raked across a milky, useless eye; the other eye was an endless black ringed in glowing violet that seemed like it did enough seeing for the both of them. He wore Chalir-style robes that hid the rest of his face from view and cut a very striking figure on camelback. Tamir was the desert incarnate: remote, spare, and uncaring. It was strange to see him in his desert robes on his desert animal among the lush green of Vilahna’s fields. He alone of Shayat’s crew had been eager to return to the Empire.

We rode north for a week. Farms thinned out and the grass went from green to gold. We traveled a main road, one that passed by compounds and small towns, but the farther north we went, the more insular the red elves became. We rode north right up into the mountains. They loomed huge and gray for days before we made it to their base. I am born of flatness, of space; I come from places with few trees, where the horizon stretches endlessly out. I had seen these mountains before, but they had not lost their novelty. They stretched up, imperious, unassailable. The mountain face was sheer and proud, totally unadorned. The camels grunted in passive protest as the land grew steep. The mountain pass was a narrow, winding path cut through the stone by a long-dead river.