——— 3 ———

⁠—⁠—⁠— III ⁠—⁠—⁠—

“Guin…”

Five hundred knights advanced in somber silence through the wildlands of Nospherus.

Captain Melem, an illustrious warrior of Gohra, led the vanguard, at the head of the Third Troop of the Fifth Red Knights. Captain Kayn’s Second Troop rode behind him, ranks divided to leave riding-space for the two squads of white knights led by Lindrot and Vlon. Behind them rode the pride of Alvon, the one-hundred and fifty knights of Astrias’s First Troop, acting as rear guard for the host.

Amnelis, the Lady of Mongaul, rode at the heart of the formation, outshining all others in her splendid raiment, her aura of command effortlessly extending to direct the five hundred elite soldiers who surrounded and guarded her.

She had removed her helm, and the sparkling of the white steel of her armor mingled with the golden rush of her long hair, both shining in the light of the afternoon sun that had now begun to slant towards the Marches horizon. Even the hot sandy wind that whipped the dry dirt of Nospherus⁠—the fierce wind that the knights called “Doal’s Breath,” which covered them in sand and drove the dust into every chink of their mail⁠— seemed to part and make way for her.

“Guin… Oh… Guin!”

Towards the rear of the proud Gohran ranks the last scions of the royal line of Parros staggered along, bound like slaves or animals being brought to market, tugged by indifferent horses and prodded by callous knights who rode close after them. The lead-ropes chafed at the skin of their wrists until their clothes were stained red with blood.

“Guin…I can’t go any further…” Rinda’s voice was so hoarse it was hardly recognizable as hers.

“Rinda, be strong…” Remus murmured weakly, trying to encourage his sister, but his weary knees buckled with every step.

“What’s wrong, you two? I didn’t expect the Pearls of Parros to give up so easily,” whispered Guin, not unkindly. Rinda lifted her eyes and looked at him through a haze of fatigue. He strode stoically behind the horses, head held high, showing not a sign of weariness; when their gazes met it seemed as though some of his incredible, wild energy poured into her, and she was able to walk for a while without stumbling.

“Remus,” Rinda said falteringly, “Remus, remember this fatigue, this shame. May the burden of our lord parents’ deaths, and the curse of the people of Parros, and all of our own pain come to pass unto our foes.”

“Don’t talk. Save your strength,” scolded Guin.

Rinda laughed hoarsely. “Somehow, it seems easier when I talk. Oh, Guin! Why did this have to be? Only a week ago we were living in peace in the Crystal Palace… it all changed so suddenly.”

For all her bravery and strength of spirit, Rinda was still a child of fourteen. She moaned softly, a half-cry through lips dried and cracked by the windborne sand. For a whole day she had not had a sip of water, and her throat was parched. Her eyes were dry, too; the tears she had held back had run from the pores of her skin as sweat and evaporated into the desert air.

“We cannot know Jarn’s design. My loss of memory, not even knowing how I came to be who I am, and now this trial that we face⁠—all of these things are part of some grand scheme that only he understands.”

“Oh, Guin⁠—I need water,” Remus moaned. One of the red knights riding ahead of them turned in his saddle to glance at the boy. These were the red knights of Gohra, formidable and feared, but it was not true that all of them were demons.

They were loyal to Amnelis, and so none thought to defy her orders, as cruel as they were. Still, though they had dragged many prisoners behind them, those had been strong fighting men like the leopard-headed warrior. Seeing the two children of Parros stumbling along in the dust was a sight too painful for many of them.

“Don’t speak of water,” Guin rasped. “It will only make it worse.”

“But… but Guin… I can’t walk anymore.”

“Remus, be strong.” Now it was Rinda’s turn to encourage her brother. “Guin?”

“Yes, child?”

“I was thinking, this sand and these rocks, they seem so very hot⁠—and as we walk, my legs are starting to shake… but… is it just the heat?”

“No. I had noticed it myself,” Guin replied. “Can you sense it too? There’s some kind of ill humor in the air, thick and cloying, almost alive⁠—as though one of those jelly-creatures were riding the wind, getting into my throat and itching me…”

“I wonder if the Mongauli have noticed?”

“No talking!” one of the knights riding ahead of them hollered. Then he added in a lower voice, “You’ll only collapse faster, understand?”

The knight had spoken kindly, but hearing her enemy speak was more than Rinda’s noble heart could bear. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she licked her lips and searched for the right words to spit back at him.

Just then, however, there was a commotion towards the front of the host, and for the first time the ranks broke their tight formation.

“Bigeater!”

“In the sand!”

The cry went up from the front lines, followed by the panicked whinnying of horses and the shouting of riders trying to calm their mounts. The air was filled with the shouts of captains bellowing orders, trying to maintain control.

Bigeaters, though denizens of dry land, were closely related to the bigmouths that prowled the Kes. In shape they were much the same as the bigmouths⁠—eerily animated sets of giant jaws filled with sharp teeth⁠—but instead of cruising the dark waters, they lurked in depths of sand. They also tended to be much larger in size.

Without warning, a bigeater had come speeding from some hidden lair, danced up through the dunes and lunged at a young knight in the Melem Troop as he sat upon his horse.

With its first bite, the monster tore the horse in half. The rider was thrown, and fell tumbling and screaming into the hole in the sand from which the bigeater had sprung. Then the fiend ate the horse as though it were a gati grain ball while the fallen knight tried frantically to clamber up the crumbling slope of sand.

“Aggyaaah!”

The young knight screamed suddenly, collapsing on his side in the sandy pit. Just when it seemed that he was about to reach solid ground, the pale white tentacle of some other creature in the pit had lashed up from below and wrapped around him. Slowly he was dragged back down into the darkness. Around the pit, his fellows covered their ears, sickened by his awful cries for help.

“Go, help him! Quickly!” the nearest captain shouted.

“It’s no use!” one of the knights replied frantically. “A mouth-of-the-desert’s got him!”

The men backed away from the pit, not wanting to see or hear their comrade’s death throes. But just before the wretched victim disappeared into the collapsing hole, a few of them saw something at the base of that twisted, pallid tentacle that groped like the living root of some demon-tree: a blood-sucking mouth, belching horrid fumes into the air as it gaped to bite its prey.

There was no saving him⁠—the third man to die since the force had set out from Alvon. Averting their eyes and turning their backs upon the screaming, the knights set with a vengeance upon the bigeater that had just finished its meal of horse. This monster they could reach, and they stuck it through with spears and tore it to bony pieces on the sand. Then they poured oil into the pit of the mouth-of-the-desert and set it on fire.

The rocky ground was littered with blood and flesh and entrails. Nothing recognizable was left of the horse. The knights tossed the remains of the bigeater into the flaming pit, then drew away so as not to be caught by the flailing tentacles of the burning creature as it writhed in its tortured death throes.

A few of the men gagged and retched, unable to contain their nausea at the stench of the mouth burning alive. So different were the cursed denizens of Nospherus from the gentle beasts of the Middle Country, so fearsome and so vile, both in life and in death.

Yet to venture into the wildlands with only five hundred men, and emerge with only three lost after a night and a day, would be close to a miracle.

Not bothering to erect a grave for their fallen comrade, or even to observe a moment of silence before the funeral pyre of burning flesh, the Gohran forces resumed their march at once. They knew that Count Ricard should have constructed a simple fort on the barren side of the Kes by now. Amnelis planned to get there with her three captives by nightfall.

Yet the need to match their pace to that of Guin and the two children, and the encounter with the bigeater and the mouth-of-the-desert, had slowed them down considerably, so that when they finally reached a place where they could look down on the dark sparkle of the Kes, the deep purple cloak of twilight had already fallen around them.

Perhaps it was a trick of the wind, but as darkness enveloped them, the angel hair that had been absent during the day appeared again and in ever increasing quantities. It seemed that the closer they came to the river, the thicker the angel hair became.

The sticky white strands, neither animal nor plant, adhered to their armor and their faces and then just as quickly melted into nothingness. For a while, the knights were able to brush most of it away, and they paid it little heed. Yet, as they proceeded, the angel hair grew thicker still, as though each thin strand were summoning all its brethren. Or perhaps it was that the mass of humans and horses, so rare in the wildlands of Nospherus, acted as a beacon to the angel hair, the living heat that the cavalry radiated stimulating in it some primal thirst for warmth. The drifting strands gathered silently, approaching from all directions until they surrounded the knights like a pale white cloud.

The captains gathered together as they rode and spoke briefly about the matter. It was known that angel hair was harmless, and the force seemed to be proceeding unimpeded through the cloud, so they gave the orders to continue on course. But then, one of the knights happened to gaze upwards…

“Look!” a shocked yell rang out across the ranks. Startled, the men looked up and gasped. The sky was gone. All they could see above them was angel hair!

The Nospherus gloaming had dimmed to dark purple, a color as ominous and oppressive as the clear violet of Rinda’s eyes was pure and promising. So thick and dark were the heavens in Nospherus nearly every night that not a single star shone through. It was always as though a formless, night-colored creature, gelatinous and oozing, were spreading like a membrane to deprive earthly creatures of the comfort of a starry sky. But now, beneath the dreary canopy hung thousands of strands of angel hair!

Even to those who were sure that the strands were harmless, it was a disconcerting sight⁠—one that made dauntless knights tremble. It seemed that Janos had sent a cloud to rain upon them alone, a cloud of white fibers, gathering silently like the thousand cilia of a swalloworm waiting in the deeps to envelop its prey. The entire sky appeared to be covered by the pale angel hair mist. The cloud hung low before the riders and behind them and to all sides, obscuring everything with a ghastly white imbued with the purple of the night beyond.

The Mongauli soldiers began to waver. They would face Sem armies or Cheironia’s fearsome Dragon Knights and Lion Knights without hesitation, but something about the gently swaying pale-white wisps that descended silently upon them plunged their spirits and awakened primal fears that had lain dormant deep within them.

“Gajus!” Amnelis called for the runecaster, and a few of the men thought they heard in her voice the faintest trace of a trembling that not even she could entirely suppress. “What is this? Tell me!”

The aged caster took up the knotted rune-forms of his prayer cords and with his weathered hands wordlessly groped their shapes in a way that was somehow irritating to all who watched him.

“Angel hair is harmless, so it wouldn’t be… attacking us, would it?” the general inquired.

Gajus shook his head. “I have never heard word or story of such a thing, my Lady.”

“You’re a diviner. Divine!”

“Then, I would say that their gathering about is an omen neither for bad, nor for good…”

“Useless!” Amnelis snorted, ending her exchange with the old caster. Few of her troops had been near enough to overhear it, and even those who were nearby were too occupied with wiping away the angel hair that snowed down upon their faces to pay close attention to the old man’s words. Some of the knights had begun chatting to shake off the chill fear the angel hair had brought.

“Ever heard a tale like to this, Marus?”

“No, never. One o’ my cousins is on one of those homesteads on the Marches. He’s been living a long time in the woods near Tauride, and he talked about the angel hair out here. He said it was harmless stuff⁠—creepy, but harmless. That was just before I got transferred to Alvon Keep, come to think of it…”

“Nah, you listen to me. There’s nothing normal about this. I’ve got a feeling in my gut, I have. This bodes ill, brothers.”

“Hold your words, Hendree.”

“No, no, I’ve got a strong spirit-sense, you know.”

“Yurik knows things, let’s ask him. Hey, Yurik! Yurik! You ever heard of this happening? This normal?”

“I’ve heard of no such thing, but it seems to me that out here in Nospherus, anything’s possible.”

“Well, listen!” shouted a man who had been silent until then. “I’ve heard that this angel hair stuff is the spirits that slipped from the mouths of the dead!”

“That’s nothing to be yelling, you!”

“By the face of Janos’ merciful mother!”

“You know, when the crystal city fell, our Mongauli knights, black and white both, rode through the streets and cut down harmless city-folk from horseback.”

“Yaaa! Silence your ill-omened tongue!”

The wind that had died down picked up again slightly, sending ripples through the silky envelope of angel hair that surrounded them. Someone lit a torch and thrust it towards the undulating cloud. Where the flame touched it long enough, the cloud quickly melted and vanished away into nothingness, leaving a window through which the deep purple of the starless night sky could be seen. But moments later, the surrounding strands would slide together to fill the gap, forming an even thicker layer of white.

The five hundred knights had gradually ceased to move forward. Though each strand of angel hair was harmless alone, the quantities that now fell upon their faces and mouths threatened to suffocate them and forced them to devote considerable attention to brushing them away. Furthermore, the impenetrable nature of the white clouds presented an even graver danger by restricting vision in all directions to only a few paces.

Were the knights in the front ranks to recklessly continue onward, they might easily fall upon a mouth-of-the-desert with no one behind them any the wiser.

The three troop captains Melem, Kayn, and Astrias sped their horses to the middle of the formation and approached the general.

“Lady Amnelis, I must inform you that we cannot proceed in these conditions. It is too dangerous!”

“Our men are beginning to fear.”

“We have come to the decision that camping here for the night presents the least danger to the well-being of our men.”

Amnelis glanced aside at the captains of her personal to guard. Vlon and Lindrot met her gaze and nodded.

“Very well,” she said after a moment’s consideration. “We have brought with us rations for three days, and there can only be three leagues or so between us and the River Kes now. Better to make that trip in the daylight. Give the order to prepare camp. Under the circumstances…” Amnelis glanced up at the undulating white cloud, “we will tie the horses in a circle around us for defense, set up a triple patrol on constant rotation, and light a large bonfire in the middle of camp. The men are not to take off their armor, even when resting. We leave at first sign of dawn, and we will be in Alvon Keep by the time the sun has risen to the arch of the sky.”

The three captains nodded their assent and moved to give the orders. Amnelis called out to them as they turned to leave.

“Let us be ready lest, by some ill chante, this angel hair should indeed prove harmful. Order each of your men to carry a torch at his waist and be prepared to light them at the watch fires. A little bit of flame can melt away these strands.”

“As you command.”

“Now, go!”

Amnelis watched the three captains hurry to their duties. Then she spoke again, more to herself than to the three who remained with her⁠—the two captains of the white and Gajus Runecaster.

“Troubling, this. I had made up my mind to push through whatever may come to reach the fortification on the Kes by nightfall.”

“The circumstances dictate another course of action,” whispered the caster.

“The angel hair weighs on my mind. Why have I never heard of this happening? What sort of change might have brought this about?”

“My Lady, this is Nospherus…” was Gajus’s reply.

“Is that your excuse for not having a clue?” Amnelis snapped. But then she bit her rose-colored lip and looked up at the pallid demon-mists swirling above.

“I will raise the pavilion. You must rest, my Lady,” a page said deferentially. But the lady-general showed no sign of dismounting.

The knights hurriedly prepared for a night in the Nospherus wildlands. A giant watchfire was lit, and the men mixed gati balls with water to make gruel for supper.

The straps were removed from the captives’ wrists, and the three companions were each given a thin bedroll on which to lie behind the horses. They fell down upon their hard beds and for a while did not move. Their spirits had been drained to the point that it was all they could do just to keep breathing.

Amnelis for her part gave no orders regarding the captives. It was as though she had entirely forgotten about them. A few knights approached them with canteens of water, grain balls, and oily salve for the cuts on their wrists.

Rinda and Remus drank deeply from the canteen, and for a while could think of nothing else. Even after long draughts of water, they did not touch the gati balls. Their throats were so dry from the day’s march that they feared they would be unable to swallow the hard grains.

Guin took a single sip of water from the canteen, sloshed it back and forth upon his tongue, and spat it out into the sand. He then picked a piece of dried fruit out of one of the grain balls. After softening it in his hands, he put it in his mouth and slowly began to chew.

While Guin worked on restoring his strength, the twins collapsed on the ground and lay there, looking up at the shifting sky above them.

“It… it’s really quite odd,” Rinda said in a tiny voice. “The Mongauli soldiers fear the angel hair so much they’ve stopped, but I’m not afraid of it at all. It’s strange, but I almost feel comforted… like I’ve seen this same thing happen a long, long time ago.”

Remus nodded. “I’m not feeling scared either. It’s even kind of beautiful. It’s like the cloth of spider webs and dew that the maiden Ayin gives you when you die and go up to the halls of Janos.”

“I feel like if it wrapped around me, I could fly, fly through the sky. Don’t you, Remus? I wonder. Maybe angel hair are the spirits of the dead. Maybe these are the souls of all those thousands of people who died when Parros burned…”

Guin glanced warily at the twins, doubtful of their assessment of the angel hair, but he saw that their conversation seemed to be helping them calm down and rest. That was a good thing. He went on chewing bits of his grain ball silently.

The knights on watch had also heard the twins speak, but when they looked at the two children and at the white, living mist that hung above their heads, they were silent and only made the sign of Janos close to their breasts.

The wind had died down, but the angel hair continued to sway, its motion intensifying until it seemed like the knights and their prisoners were at the bottom of a pallid purple sea. The Nospherus night grew deeper, filling the Gohrans with unease. A stealthy, prickling fear began to creep among them⁠— a fear that they would not see the sun rise again.