The hot, dusty wind blew stronger, and the fog, as insubstantial as the thought that had raised it from the earth, dissolved, and the morning sun broke through to bathe the field in golden light.

"Polgara!" Durnik cried in sudden alarm.

Ce'Nedra whirled in time to see Polgara, her face drained deathly white, slowly toppling to the earth.

Chapter Seventeen

LELLDORIN OF WILDANTOR had been nervously pacing back and forth along the ranks of his bowmen, stopping often to listen for any sound coming out of the fog from the field lying in front of the massed infantry. "Can you hear anything?" he asked urgently of a Tolnedran legionnaire standing nearby.

The Tolnedran shook his head.

That same whisper came out of the fog from a dozen different places.

"Can you hear anything?"

"Can you hear anything?"

"What are they doing?"

Somewhere to the front, there was a faint clink.

"There!" everyone cried almost in unison.

"Not yet!" Lelldorin snapped to one of his countrymen who was raising his bow. "It could be just a wounded Thull out there. Save your arrows."

"Is that a breeze?" a Drasnian pikeman asked. "Please, Belar, let it be a breeze."

Lelldorin stared into the fog, nervously fingering his bowstring. Then he felt a faint touch of air on his cheek.

"A breeze," someone exulted.

"A breeze." The phrase raced through the massed army.

Then the faint breath of air died, and the fog settled again, seeming thicker than ever.

Someone groaned bitterly.

The fog stirred then and began to eddy sluggishly. It was a breeze! Lelldorin held his breath.

The fog began to move, flowing gray over the ground like water.

"There's something moving out there!" a Tolnedran barked. "Get ready!"

The flowing fog moved faster, thinning, melting in the hot, dusty breeze blowing down the valley. Lelldorin strained his eyes to the front. There were moving shapes out there, no more than seventy paces from the infantry.

Then, as if all its stubborn resistance had broken at once, the fog shimmered and dissolved, and the sun broke through. The entire field before them was filled with Malloreans. Their stealthy forward pace froze momentarily as they flinched in the sudden light of the sun.

"Now!" Lelldorin shouted, raising his bow. Behind him, his archers with one universal motion followed his action, and the sudden release of a thousand bowstrings all at once was like some vast, thrumming note. A whistling sheet of arrows soared over the heads of the solidly standing infantry, seemed to hang motionless in the air for a moment, then hurtled into the close-packed Mallorean ranks.

The creeping attack of the Malloreans did not waver or falter; it simply dissolved. With a vast, sighing groan, entire regiments fell in their tracks under the Asturian arrow storm.