The two Knights-Adamant she had recruited—Brother Farson, who had been arriving in Krondor as she prepared to leave, and Brother Jaliel, who was already in Durban when she arrived—reined in their horses. Her newfound rank gave them no option but to change their current plans and follow her. She indicated they should stay while she slowly urged her horse on.

To a parched, desolate desert fortress she had led them. Abandoned by Great Kesh’s Empire centuries ago, apparently, for almost nothing here looked like a fortification. A few large stones that were once a wall, a single foundation of a gate that was half-buried under dust, and some stairs leading down into a labyrinth of tunnels and storage rooms. So little was left aboveground you could ride past a hundred yards on either side and not notice that once the Empire had thought this pass worth defending.

The two Knights were told only what she felt she needed them to know until they reached this point. Using the documents left her by Creegan, she had followed an ancient trade route out of Durban, south into the Jal-Pur, then southwest into the foothills. Those would eventually rise up in the west as the Trollhome Mountains, but here they were merely a landscape of tablelands and rising hills. Whatever the name of this once proud fortress, it was known to the desert men as the Tomb of the Hopeless. To the south of this position was a valley with the even less appealing name Valley of Lost Men.

Before leaving Krondor, she had gone over the maps in the Order’s keeping of this region, and none showed either the fortress or valley. She took it as a matter of trust that Creegan wouldn’t have insisted she read the report if he hadn’t wanted her to act on it, and she was equally certain that he expected her to do exactly what she was doing, run off and take matters into her own hands. Simply put, there was no one in Krondor besides herself to do so. She knew Creegan had a relationship with Pug and the others on Sorcerer’s Isle, but in rushing off to Rillanon to become the Order’s leader, he neglected to leave her any hint about how to contact them. She suspected there were some others, like whoever gave her the messages in Durban in the first place, who were Kingdom agents of the Conclave, but she had no idea how to identify and contact them, either.

She remembered the young man who had fetched her from Ithra after she had almost died in her first encounter with the Demon Legion’s agents on Midkemia. Zane was his name. But she had no idea how to reach him. Frustrated that Creegan put this on her alone, she pushed down her concerns to deal with the matters at hand.