At dusk, her guides offered her a white robe like theirs. “The night will be cold, and tomorrow we can offer no shelter from the day’s sun. In this you may rest.”
The robe felt strange over her clothes—not as harsh as most wool nor yet as smooth as silk. They walked through the night under brilliant stars, pausing once to eat. As the stars faded near dawn, Dorrin looked back; the mountain range stood dark against the paling sky, but as she watched, sunlight picked out one peak after another as if a flame were skipping along the crest.
They walked on until the stifling heat slowed them. Dorrin had water to drink, but the glare and heat made her dizzy. They crouched in the meager shade of waist-high rocks scattered across the slope, each with the robe’s hood pulled across the face. Dorrin tried to doze but found it impossible.
As soon as the sun was down, the air cooled again, and once more they set out. Day after day the same routine—walk at night, try to sleep by day. The mountains receded behind them to a line on the sky visible only at dawn and dusk.
Finally, she saw ahead of them a cluster of white stone huts and three broken towers surrounded by looming dunes of red sand, the place of her earlier vision. When they came to it, more white-robed figures came out, bowing to her and gesturing that she should enter one of the huts. Inside it was cooler, and she slept awhile, grateful for the protection of the walls and roof. In early morning, they took her from the village to see the rim of a vast bowl.
“Here,” said one who named himself a Guardian. “Here is where it will be. We will guide you.”
For the rest of that day she stayed in the hut, out of the burning sun, while the people made some preparation she did not understand, chanting in a strange tongue near one of the broken towers. She felt no anxiety, as she had felt none since she had come to the deck of the galley. Whatever was meant to happen would happen.
Before dawn, the white-robed Guardians woke her. Overhead the stars were bright, giving enough light so that the Guardians made vague shadows. The trail the Guardians led her on was steep and rough, but the jewels fashioned steps for her and she did not slip. Nor did she peer over the side into the darkness below. What she had seen from the rim was frightening enough. If she slipped—
You are safe.
For now. As they descended, the night seemed darker, with the dark walls rising around and cutting off most of the starry sky. Then a soft glow rose from beneath her, as if water reflected the starlight. One of the Guardians muttered; the two in front turned to look. Both bowed low but said nothing and turned away from that glow, tapping with their sticks as they had before.
Through the rest of the night, Dorrin walked in that light, never slipping.
As night faded into predawn, they were on the last slope down to the floor of the vast bowl, its rim black against the lightening sky. Here the path’s zigzag way showed pale, worn by many years of travel, less rough than on the harder rocks above. By the time the sky was a clear blue and sun touched the rim behind them, they had reached the floor—not a level plain, as it had looked from above, but humped and hummocked with drifts of sand caught in heaps of fallen rock, threaded by ancient channels of running water.
But shortly before midday, with the sun beating down and glaring off the white sand and clay, they came to the place the Guardians insisted was ordained: a circle of bare white clay, hard as bone. Now the Guardians formed their own circle around it and motioned to Dorrin where she should stand. They began a low chant; she could not understand the words.
The Guardian of Guardians stepped forward, followed by two who each held small stone jars. He held out his hand; one poured something into it. He crouched, holding his hand low over the center of the circle.
Dorrin watched carefully. Whatever it was flowed like water or … sand, she realized, as with a movement of his hand he drew on the flat white surface with a line of color, rust-red. Moment by moment, the design grew, forming a pattern she had never seen but that throbbed with power long before it was complete. Other colors joined the red: blue, yellow, green, black, white, each from its own jar one of the helpers held out to him.
She recognized some of the symbols—the image of the Sunlord, Esea, the Stormlord, Rainbringer, Barrandowea, the familiar wheat sheaf of Alyanya, the circle of the High Lord. But the rest, though it teased her vision as the elven patterns had, she did not understand.
At times it seemed the design drew itself, but Dorrin saw the tension in the man’s hand, the care with which he worked from the center outward. The center itself he left bare, perhaps a handspan across. He stepped back as the sun reached its zenith.
Wind died; the sun beat down. With a gesture, the Guardian of Guardians halted the chant.