“I have this feeling that we’ve made it,” he said. “This is it.”

“You can’t be serious, Johnis. There’s way too many. There’s no way we came here to be killed by Shataiki bats.”

The horizon had started to gray. Dawn was coming.

“I don’t think we’ll have to kill any of them.”

Johnis walked to his horse, took a drink of water, his eyes still fixed on the beasts, and then mounted. “Drink, Silvie. We’re going to need it.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking with my heart,” he said. “Thomas insisted.”

“Nonsense.” But she already had her canteen out. “I don’t like this, Johnis. Please don’t tell me you’re going up there.”

“Do you want to wait here?”

“No! I’m not staying alone.”

“Then mount up.”

She did, but not without more objections, all of which he ignored. They turned the horses due west toward the line of Shataiki. The dull morning light now revealed something else. The ground beyond the line of black bats was dark. There was more to this than met their eyes at the moment.

“Ready?”

“No,” she said.

But Johnis was already moving. Forward. Toward whatever destiny awaited him two hundred yards ahead.

Slowly the shapes of the Shataiki came into focus. Vampire bats half Johnis’s height, wings draping, jaws open, drooling. Like hounds fixed on their prey, unconcerned. Squatting in a line on the sand.

But Johnis was now more concerned with what lay beyond the bats than the Shataiki themselves. If they wanted to kill him and Silvie, they could have done it while they slept. Something else was happening here.

“That’s a valley,” Silvie whispered. “It’s black.”

She was right. The desert floor fell away into some kind of valley beyond the Shataiki. The bats were actually perched on the lip of a huge black bowl, extending as far as Johnis could see.

“What do you think it is?”

Surprisingly, Johnis knew what it was. “It’s where the Dark One lives.”

“Then it’s where we’ll die,” Silvie said. “I wasn’t quite this serious when I said I’d follow you to hell.”

Johnis stopped twenty paces from the line of bats. They still stared at him, making no threats. But the fact that they sat unblinking while flies crawled on their faces seemed to be its own kind of threat.

Gray dawn now showed them what lay in the valley behind. It was a forest. Black trees. A black forest.

The legends of old crashed through Johnis’s mind. How Teeleh had led the Shataiki from the Black Forest into the unspoiled colored forest, turning it to ash as he passed. That was how the desert had been formed, how evil had ravaged the land and turned a once loving, peaceful people into the Horde.

This valley was the original Black Forest?