"What's he saying?" Skiver asked.

  Ernst shrugged. "He says this far west there are too many monsters. Lamias, basilisks. Cruel falcon-headed hieracosphinxes. Djinn and ifrits and even dragons."

  "Maybe one of those will eat Kormak," Skiver said.

  "The captain is threatening to abandon us soon," Ernst said. "Put us out on the bank and sail back downriver."

  Skiver yawned. "He won't. He's been paid to take us all the way to the Slave Trenches."

  "Nevertheless, he says his men are fearful, and he is unwilling—"

  "Let me talk to him alone for a moment," Skiver said.

  "But he speaks barely any Taldane—"

  "I think he'll understand me," Skiver said, and sat with the captain for a few moments at the far end of the boat. Alaeron strained to hear, but Skiver didn't say much. He held up a sack of jangling coins in one hand, and pointed west. Then he held up his most vicious-looking knife, one with a curve at the end, serrated teeth on one side, and a razor gleam on the other. Using that knife, he pointed east.

  After a moment, the captain nodded. That night, the adventurers took turns sleeping in shifts, with one watching guard over the others, and over the captain and his two crewmen. The next morning they ate breakfast from their own packs, too, just in case the captain decided to poison his unwelcome passengers.

  "I know I said I was sick of bean cakes and pickles," Skiver said, "but what I meant was, I wanted biscuits and honey and butter and bacon, not strips of salted meat."

  "Perhaps we can hunt in the mountains," Ernst said. "Jaya is handy enough with a bow. Fresh game would do us good." He patted his belly, which, Alaeron noted nastily, was ample enough that he could miss a few meals without doing himself any harm.

  "I am a hunter of men and monsters, mostly," Jaya said. "Less often meat. But we'll see."

  "Do you really think they'd poison us?" Alaeron asked. "They're boatmen. Why would they even have poison?"

  "There are scorpions everywhere in this country," Skiver said. "A few of those crushed up in our mashed peas probably wouldn't do us much good, eh? Anyway, I've got a rule: when you make a bargain with a knife, you don't eat the loser's food."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The captain drove the ship hard, clearly eager to be rid of his passengers. Alaeron asked Skiver how much he'd promised to pay the man if he continued carrying them. "Most of what I have left," Skiver said, shrugging. "It's not like we'll have much use for money after this anyway, will we? And Ernst still has some jingling coin purses courtesy of Chuma. We'll be able to buy passage back, assuming we come out of Kho alive. I could have just threatened the captain, but men take these sort of things better when you offer an open hand as well as a closed fist. Just wave a knife at him, and his pride might be pricked, push him to do something rash. Offer coin, and he can tell himself he's making the sensible choice, as a businessman, and not a craven."

  "You're a great deal smarter than I took you for, the first time I met you," Alaeron said.

  Skiver nodded. "And you're more useful in a fight. Or at least a pirate attack. I imagine we're both fairly useless at great swaths of things, though, fear not."

  The captain called out and pointed. Alaeron shaded his eyes. After days of green banks and distant dunes and the smear of mountains on the horizon, there was finally something new, ranks of dark columns stretching as far as he could see. "Is that a petrified forest?" he said.

  "Obelisks," Ernst said. "The Slave Trenches of Hakotep are home to hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, most in poor repair, each said to imprison an elemental spirit. The whole area is a massive set of earthworks built by Pharaoh Hakotep I."

  "Why?" Alaeron said.

  Ernst shrugged. "If anyone knows, they've never told me. You're sure the pass is this way?"

  "So Jaya says."

  "My mother told me about this field of obelisks," Jaya said. "She traveled among them when she left her village. The pass is this way. Perhaps a week's travel from the river's source."

  "A week? We have to spend a week trudging through this sort of landscape?"

  "Not at all. The obelisks are quite interesting. Most of the journey will be far more dull."

  "A week? That's nothing. It's a piece of piss." Skiver spat into the sand.

  "You've marched through desert before?" Ernst said, amused.

  Skiver shrugged. "I walked the city for Ralen Vadim, doing collections. All I did was walk, mostly, with breaks to ...encourage people who were reluctant to pay in a timely fashion. This is nothing."

  "We should walk at night," Ernst said. "It will be cooler."

  "What about the lamias and giant scorpions and all that?" Skiver said.

  "We're ferocious adventurers," Ernst said. "We'll chop them to pieces!"

  "Then we could eat the pieces at least," Skiver said thoughtfully.

  "We walk soon," Jaya said. "Unless you propose making camp here in the reeds, where the crocodiles might creep up on us?"

  "Hmm," Ernst said. "You are as wise as you are beautiful."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The captain shooed them off his boat with swearing and cursing—or so Alaeron gathered from the general tone—but Skiver jangled the coins at the captain, and he consented to answer a few of Ernst's questions. The wizard joined them, smiling. "He says no one lives near the obelisks, but on the far side, we may find nomads or hermits or other settlers who can point us in the right direction, or even guide us into the mountains. I'm fairly certain he's not directing us to certain death in a snake-pit."

  The Crook was essentially marsh and sandbars here, and broke off into dozens of tributaries—some small enough to step across—that snaked toward the west. "There must be a great monster of a lake in those mountains somewhere," Ernst said thoughtfully. "Waterfalls too. A river as mighty as the Crook, which flows into the even mightier Sphinx, must have a truly impressive source. It would be so interesting to find that source ..."

  Alaeron was annoyed to find that he agreed. That would be quite an expedition.

  "Unless it's a lake of gold, it's not much use to us," Skiver said, and spat. "Best start walking. Do we try to skirt around the obelisks, or just barge on through?"

  "My mother said they extend for miles in all directions," Jaya said. "We'd best try our luck and hope the elementals are bound."

  "Or merely legendary," Alaeron said.

  They spent the rest of that day trudging across the earthworks of the long-dead pharaoh. Great walls of rock rose and fell on all sides, curving sinuously and then turning at sharp angles, making strange geometries. The obelisks were arrayed in odd patterns, too, some in neat rows, some in circles, some standing alone. They were mostly broken, but almost all still stood taller than a man, and there were faint signs of old carvings on their sides. Alaeron wondered what the Slave Trenches would look like from above—would the ramparts and walls and obelisks form some mystic sigil? Had Hakotep I been intent on some great magic, powered by enslaved elementals? If so, its effects were indistinguishable.

  It was astonishing, really, how quickly a giant esoteric building project could become just another dull part of the scenery.

  Ernst paused and looked through a spyglass periodically, until finally Alaeron asked what he was looking for. "Not looking for," the wizard said. "Looking at. This glass is ensorcelled with a spell that detects magic, and ...see for yourself."

  Alaeron peered through the glass, at the field of obelisks to the right, and let out a long, low whistle. Each broken finger of stone pulsed with hidden light, blue and yellow and red and ochre. "The bound elementals," Ernst said. "Spirits of air, earth, fire, and water, trapped by an ancient god-king's magic, for purposes unremembered."

  "I wouldn't mind some of those water elementals," Skiver said, taking advantage of the pause to remove his boots and shake out a few stones. "They'd make purer drink than this muddy warm mess in my canteen."

  "Time and the weather are eroding those obelisks," Ernst said. "The ancient seals are loosening. But the god-kings made their magic to last. It may be centuries yet before the last of the protective sigils is worn away and the enslaved elementals are released." The wizard shivered. "Their fury will be terrible."

  "Then we'd best move along!" Jaya called. "And leave them in peace. We'll take a week to reach the pass at this rate."

  As it happened, they didn't make it out of the Slave Trenches before nightfall, and despite Ernst's halfhearted suggestion that they carry on by starlight, they were all exhausted.

  "We made perhaps ten miles," Jaya said as Ernst used his magic to kindle a fire against the rapidly descending chill. "We must do better tomorrow. Perhaps it would be better if Alaeron's Kellid assassin were in back of us. That might encourage us to speed up."

  "Are you so eager to see Kho?" Skiver said.

  "To see my mother's family," Jaya said. "There are uncles and aunts and cousins I've never met. I only know their names. I wish one of you spoke the Uomoto tongue. I learned it, of course, but I've had no one to speak it with in a long time. I only hope I can make myself understood when we arrive."

  "You do not speak the language with your brother?" Alaeron said.

  Jaya shrugged. "He was younger, when our parents passed on. He never learned as well as I did, and doesn't enjoy trying to communicate that way. I'm sure there are those among my people who speak Taldane or Osiriani or some other language one of us can manage—they deal with adventurers from time to time, after all, some even seeking Kho. But I want to return to them as a daughter of the village, not an outsider." She sighed.

  After their modest meal, Ernst studied his spellbook. Jaya checked her bowstrings. Skiver rolled dice to amuse himself. Alaeron stared up at the great clear sky and thought about his artifacts, and about the disc. Ernst eventually announced that he would take first watch, and Jaya said she would take second. Alaeron and Skiver shrugged and rolled out their bedding and went to sleep on the chill sand.

  Alaeron was dreaming of an endless pit leading into the darkness when something made him snap awake. He tensed by the fading fire, expecting a desert beast—Ernst had laid wards, but who knew how effective they'd be? But instead he heard ...soft laughter. Cooing. A gasp. Another gasp.

  "They've woken you, too," Skiver whispered, his bedroll next to Alaeron's. "At least now my misery is shared. They've been at it half an hour."

  "Who? What?" Alaeron whispered, though of course, he knew, both who and what. Ernst and Jaya had moved their blankets some distance away and behind a rock for privacy, but it was clear enough what they were doing. Alaeron gritted his teeth. He'd never been able to so much as hold her hand through a night, and now Ernst—

  "We could cough," Skiver whispered. "Loudly. Or one of us could get up to take a piss. Except, on the one hand, I hate to deprive anyone of a bit of pleasure. But, on the other hand, if she wants me to march twenty bloody miles tomorrow, she'd best keep her and her man quiet."

  Her man. Alaeron clenched his hands into fists. Ernst and his easy laugh. Ernst and his courage in the face of danger. Ernst and his charm. Alaeron had never been charming. But that didn't mean he wasn't a good man, or that Ernst was.

  "So?" Skiver said. "Wait it out, or make a noise? But what if I go for a piss and they don't stop, or don't stop soon enough, and I can't pretend I don't know what they were doing, and then it's just a lot of awkwardness over breakfast? I mean, I like the chance to leer a bit, but—"

  "RUNAWAY." The word was spoken as if by thunder, a great boom that came from all sides: from the stones, from the air, from the sand. Alaeron hadn't needed to piss, particularly, but that voice nearly made him wet himself anyway. Not just from being startled. Because, impossible volume aside, Alaeron knew the voice.

  "What ...!" Ernst shouted.

  "...in Hell ...!" Skiver yelled.

  "...was that?" Jaya cried.

  Alaeron whispered: "Kormak."

  Chapter Eighteen

  A Great Bloody Lot of Mountains

  When the voice next spoke, it was less booming, but no less pervasive, seeming to come from everywhere at once.

  "Alaeron. Place the relics you stole in this sack." Something fell from the sky, seemingly straight down, thrown in a high arc from who knew what direction. The sack landed at the foot of Alaeron's bedroll, glittering in the firelight: one of the warded metal bags used by the Technic League to house dangerous artifacts. "Then remove your clothes and walk east, naked and unarmed, from your camp. Do this, and I will spare the lives of your companions. You have three minutes to comply."

  "What spell is this?" Ernst said. He, Skiver, and Jaya drew close around Alaeron, all peering into the darkness around them. "There are magics to make the commands of an officer heard over the din of a battlefield, but ..." He looked through his spyglass, sweeping it in a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn. "I don't see any magic out there, except for the obelisks, though I suppose a clever man might hide a spell among them ..."

  "Some trick of the Technic League," Alaeron said. "Not magic. Technology from the stars." He looked at his friends. Ernst seemed curious, Jaya determined, and Skiver was, unsurprisingly, grinning. "Should I give myself up? It would keep him from—"

  "Stop talking garbage." Skiver said, and went loping into the darkness, a knife in each hand. Jaya ran off in a separate direction, clutching her bow, quiver on her back.

  "Ha," Ernst said. "Yes, spreading out, probably a good idea. Any idea what sort of weapons he has?"

  Alaeron shook his head. "Something that makes a very hot, very controlled fire. An armored coat. The League has weapons that can shatter bones inside a body, or boil metal in moments, or reduce armor to foul-smelling smoke. Kormak could have anything."

  "Reassuring," Ernst said. "Time is running out. Pretend to obey him, perhaps?" And then he, too, ran off into the dark.

  Alaeron cleared his throat. "My friends have deserted me!" he called. "I will do as you ask!"

  "Your friends are trying to find me, but I can see them, and they cannot see me," Kormak's voice said. "You'd best hope they don't find me, or they won't live. The artifacts!"

  Alaeron opened up his bag, hunching over it, and slipped a few items into the sack Kormak had left him: a dried old apple, a heel of bread, a hard-boiled egg, a coil of wire, a bit of frayed rope, and a bundle of leather laces. "There!" he called, hoping Kormak wouldn't know he'd lied: surely he could only track the artifacts when they were in use?

  "Now your clothes," Kormak said, and as Alaeron slowly began to undress, the Kellid continued talking. "I knew you'd gone to Osirion, but I chose the wrong port, and made for Totra. When I found no sign of you there, I made my way to Sothis. A scorpion the size of a cart attacked me on the way. In Sothis I found a man named Chuma, who finally told me where you'd gone. It was the last thing he will tell anyone."

  Oh, Alaeron thought, numb. Chuma must have died soon after dispatching Ernst to spy on them. The wizard's final letter full of lies had been unnecessary, then—Chuma would not trouble them. Alaeron should have realized that, without the artifacts, Kormak would fall back on other methods to track them—he'd proven that by burning the Dagger and the Coin to the ground after questioning the patrons. Alaeron finished unbuttoning his shirt and let it drop to the ground, shivering in the desert cold.

  "I took a felucca up the river," Kormak went on. "Boats, boats, always boats. Boats and heat, that's what you've given me. I hate this foul country. I hail from the Realm of the Mammoth Lords, boy. Give me frozen lakes and fields of ice. But I found you. You never realized I could track your artifacts, fool? You've used them these past days, and the knowledge that you were so close spurred me onward. I stole one of the magic boats from the soldiers at Ipeq, and it carried me swiftly ...until it vanished only a day after I found it."

  "That's the nature of magic!" Ernst shouted from somewhere in the darkness, off to the north. "Best used only by those who understand it, not savage northmen!"

  "I sank in the water," the Kellid said. "And do you know what found me there? A black lizard the size of my boat itself, with jaws so wide they could swallow a man of your size, my faithless apprentice. It tried to swallow me. It choked on me instead. I left its carcass in a thousand pieces in the water." The timbre of the voice roughened, though it was no less loud. "But it took my right hand. Bit it off. I will take your hands before I return you to Starfall, apprentice."

  Alaeron stood up, naked except for his boots. "I'm sorry for your—"

  "Boots off too!" Kormak snarled. "I'll have none of your tricks! You must—agh!"

  The Kellid screamed as a bright light flared among the obelisks to the north. Alaeron spun and saw a huge figure writhing atop a ten-foot-high earthen wall, momentarily visible in a flare of light. Struck by a fireball, or some other magic of Ernst's? Whatever it was, it provided enough light for Jaya to fire a few arrows from her own position, crouched by a low wall in the east. Alaeron snatched up his pants and his coat, shrugging on the latter while hopping into the former, and ran off into the dark on his own. He hid behind a boulder and began preparing a bomb, though he was loath to throw it without knowing where exactly Ernst and Skiver were. The light from Ernst's attack had faded, and all was darkness again. He had an extract that would enable him to see in the dark, in one of his pockets, but his vials were a jumble after his ungainly flight from the camp.

  "I went the wrong way," Skiver said, slipping up beside him. "Wizard and huntress get all the luck." He set off loping in Jaya's direction, and after a moment, Alaeron followed.

  Light flared up on the earthworks again, a long stone's throw away. Ernst was there, standing on the wall, raising aloft his crooked walking stick, the end of which shone like a miniature sun, casting false daylight for fifty feet or so in all directions. A slumped body lay at his feet, seemingly big as a bear, head dangling down, and one arm that ended in a stump wrapped in bloody rags.