Concentrating on the face of the young man, he allowed his spirit to drift down, drawn by the pull of Talisman’s personality. Opening the eyes of his spirit, Nosta Khan saw the young Nadir warrior breasting the last rise before the valley. Behind him came the Chiatze woman, Zhusai. Then a third rider came in sight, leading two ponies. Nosta was surprised. Floating above this stranger he reached down, his spirit fingers touching the man’s neck. The rider shivered and drew his heavy coat more closely about his powerful frame.
Satisfied, Nosta drew back. In the one instant of contact he had witnessed the attempted attack on Talisman and the girl, and Gorkai’s conversion to the cause of the Uniter. It was good; the boy had performed well. The Gods of Stone and Water would be pleased.
Nosta flew on, hovering over the Shrine. Once it had been a small supply fort, its walls boasting wooden parapets but no towers. Less than twenty feet high, they had been constructed to keep out marauding tribesmen – not two thousand trained soldiers. The west-facing gates were rotting upon their hinges of bronze, while the west wall had crumbled at the centre, leaving a pile of rubble below a V-shaped crack.
Fear touched Nosta Khan with fingers of dread.
Could they hold against Gothir Guards?
And what of Druss? What role would the axeman play? It was galling to see so much, and yet know so little. Was his purpose to stand, axe in hand, upon the walls? In that moment a fleeting vision flickered in his mind: a white-haired warrior standing upon a colossal wall, his axe raised in defiance. As suddenly as it had come, it faded away.
Returning to his body Nosta took a deep, shuddering breath.
By the pool the poet was sleeping alongside the giant axeman.
Nosta sighed, and walked away into the east.
Talisman sat on the highest wall staring out over the Valley of Shul-sen’s Tears. The sun was bright, and yet here a light breeze was blowing, robbing the heat of its withering power. In the distance the mountains looked like banks of dark storm-clouds hugging the horizon, and overhead two eagles were circling on the thermals. Talisman’s dark eyes scanned the valley. From this southern wall of Oshikai’s resting-place he could see two camps. At the first a long horse-hair standard, bearing the skull and horns of a wild ox, was planted before the largest tent. The thirty warriors of the Curved Horn tribe were sitting in the fading sunshine cooking their evening meals. Three hundred paces to the west was a second series of goat-hide tents; the standard of the Fleet Ponies was pitched there.
Out of sight on the northern side of the Shrine were two more camps, of the Lone Wolves and the Sky Riders, each guarding a compass point near the resting-place of the greatest Nadir warrior. The breeze died away and Talisman strolled down the rickety wooden steps to the courtyard, making his way to a table near the well. From here he could see where the west wall had crumbled away at the centre. Through the jagged hole he could just make out the distant tree line of the western hills.
This place is rotting away, he thought, just like the dreams of the man whose bones lie here. Talisman was fighting to control a cold, gnawing anger deep in his belly. They had arrived last night just in time to witness a sword duel between two Nadir warriors, which ended in the sudden and bloody disembowelling of a young man from the Fleet Ponies tribe. The victor, a lean warrior wearing the white fur wrist-ring of the Sky Riders, leapt upon the dying man, plunging his sword into his victim’s neck, see-sawing the blade through the vertebrae, tearing the head from the shoulders. Blood-drenched, he had surged to his feet, screaming his triumph.
Talisman had heeled his pony on through the gates. Leaving Gorkai to tend the mounts, he had walked across the courtyard to stand before the Shrine entrance.
But he did not enter, he could not enter. Talisman’s mouth was dry, his stomach knotted with fear. Out here in the bright moonlight his dreams were solid, his confidence unshakeable. Once through that door, however, they could disappear like wood-smoke.