— what would they think, what would they understand, if they saw him in the flesh? But what did it matter what they knew or understood? No doubt the Demons would do their best to kill them anyway.
“Be careful,” Zared said, and Faraday jerked out of her thoughts, and nodded.
“Can we take some of this bread with us, Leagh? I do not know if we will find much on our way.”
“Take what you like,” Leagh said, and shared a glance with Zared. “Faraday, what are you doing? None of us understand what —”
Drago leaned forward and touched his fingers briefly to her lips. “Wait,” he said.
Zared, watching, suddenly realised what it was that had been fretting at his mind. Since Axis, Azhure and Caelum had left, command had passed to Drago.
And everyone had accepted it.
None of us wait on what Caelum or Axis might do, Zared thought, but only on Drago. We have all turned to him, even though very few of us realise it yet. We wait for Drago’s word.
“I wish you luck,” Zared said, and stepped forward to grip Drago’s hand and arm in both his hands.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t have accepted Zared’s offer of the horses?” Drago asked, squirming about on the donkey’s ridged back. The forest had completely closed in about them, absorbing even the sounds of the donkeys’ hooves, and it seemed that Zared’s camp was more like a week behind them rather than two or three hours.
Faraday smiled a little to herself. “Uncomfortable, Drago?”
Drago sighed, and patted the donkey’s neck. “I can understand why you like these beasts, Faraday, but for Stars’ sakes! Surely they’d be better left to run free through the forest?”
“They are safe,” Faraday said without thinking, and then wondered why she’d said it. “Safe,” she repeated, half to herself.
Drago turned his head slightly so that he could watch her. A shaft of sunlight filtered through the forest canopy, and touched her hair so that deep red glints shimmered through the chestnut.
Drago’s breath caught in his throat.
She lifted and turned her head to face him fully. “My beauty has never helped me, Drago. Never.”
“And yet you are not bitter?”
She shrugged a little. “I have spent many years consumed by bitterness, Drago — and you of all people should know that bitterness does not help, either.”
Drago let that pass. “Faraday, who do you take me to meet?”
“A … man, I suppose … a man called Noah. Noah exists within the Repositories at the foot of the Sacred Lakes, and he asked me to bring you to him.”
She explained to Drago how, when he’d unleashed the power of the Rainbow Sceptre in the Chamber of the Star Gate, the light from the Sceptre had enveloped the Faraday-doe and wrapped her in vision.
Faraday laughed, a trifle harshly. “And you do not know how I had come to loathe visions, Drago. As a young, naive and stupid girl I first laid hand on the trees of the Silent Woman Woods, and they imparted to me a frightful vision that propelled me into my dreadful service to the Prophecy of the Destroyer. And to WolfStar, that damned Prophet!”
Drago almost asked what had happened to WolfStar, but thought better of it. “But this vision in the Chamber of the Star Gate …?”
“Was better.” Faraday smiled, remembering. “I was in a room — such a strange room, filled with twinkling lights and knobs, and with windows that commanded such a wondrous view of the stars — and a man rose from a deep-backed chair to greet me. He said his name was Noah, and that the room was within one of the Repositories at the foot of the Lakes, and he asked four things of me.”
“And they were?”
“He asked me to be your friend.”
“Ah.” Drago’s mouth twisted cynically. No wonder she walked by his side. She had promised to do so, and the world and every star in the heavens knew Faraday kept to her promises, even though they might be the death of her.
“Drago, why must you find it so hard to believe that people can like you, even love you?”
“Because for forty years I was told over and over that I was totally unlikeable.”
“And yet Zenith liked you, loved you, and believed in you.”
Drago let that hang in the air between them a while before he answered. “Zenith is special.”
Faraday smiled softly. “I think that one day you will find that all of Tencendor, and all of its people and creatures are also special, Drago.”
“Hmm. Well, what else did this Noah ask of you?”
“He asked me to be your trust.”
Drago nodded, knowing that over the past day many had decided to trust him only through their trust of Faraday. “And?”
“Third, he asked me to bring him to you — and that is what I do now.”
“Fourth?”
“Fourth, he asked me to find that which was lost.”
“Am I among the lost, Faraday?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Most definitely.”
Just as Faraday finished speaking, Drago’s donkey snorted and tossed her head in alarm.
Something had seized her from behind.
Above the plains of Tare a black cloud wheeled and whispered. The old speckled blue eagle, now watching from a vantage point under the roof of one of the watchtowers on the walls of the city of Tare, shifted, ruffled its feathers, then opened his beak for a brief, low cry.
It did not like the cloud. During those hours of the day when the eagle had learned it was safe to venture out, it had flown as close as it dared to the cloud.
And that was not very close, for that cloud was dangerous, very dangerous.
It was composed of hundreds of … bird-things. The eagle did not understand them. They had the scent of the Icarii bird-people about them, but that scent was somehow tarnished and warped. They also carried the scent of hunting hawks, a scent the eagle was familiar with, for he had spent many a cold winter’s night huddled safe within a nobleman’s hawk stable murmuring love songs to unresponsive lady-hawks.
But as they were not quite Icarii, then they were also not quite hawks.
They behaved as a flock with one mind — yet that mind was not their’s, for the eagle sensed that the mind that controlled them was far distant.
These bird-things spent many hours of the day hunting and eating. They hunted anything that moved, horses, cattle … people. When they had spotted a target, the bird-things swooped, and tore it to pieces. Once they had fed — and they left nothing uneaten, not even a speck of blood — they rose again as one, and recommenced their whispering patrol of the skies.
There was a brief movement on the streets below, and the eagle glanced down, distracted. A group of three or four people, scurrying from one house to another, baskets of food under their arms. The people of this land had been almost as quick as the eagle to realise that certain hours of the day were … bad … to venture forth. Now they, like the eagle, spent the bad hours huddled inside, or under whatever overhang provided shelter.
Many — thousands — had not been so wise. In his forays over Tencendor, the eagle had seen bands of maniacal men and women, and groups of children, roving the land. Some had been ravaged by despair, some by terror, others by disease; still others by internal tempest so severe some extremities looked as though they had self-destructed.
And still others wandered, so hungry that they consumed everything in their path. For several hours one day