Oliver and Peretta joined her. “I’ve never seen so many blooms,” Peretta said.
Verna moved into the meadow. “They are indeed beautiful.” General Zimmer stared ahead as if searching for a path through the sea of blossoms.
“We should bring some specimens with us to Cliffwall,” suggested Oliver.
Out of breath, Nathan and Renn trudged up on foot as the troops milled in place before the great meadow. Nathan could smell the perfume of flowers in the air. Considering so many open blossoms, he expected to hear a buzz of bees, see a flurry of butterflies, but the meadow seemed oddly silent.
Laughing at the beauty, Amber and Peretta ran together toward the meadow, like children about to plunge into the ocean. Nathan felt a cold twist in his gut, and he shouted, “Stop! Dear spirits, don’t go there!” But the sounds of the horses, the muttering soldiers, the rustle of armor drowned out his words. Urgent, he drew a deep breath and shouted out with his gift as well as his voice, making a boom of thunder in the air. “Stop!”
The blow of the word was enough to bring the young people to a halt. Nathan pushed through the soldiers to reach the edge of the meadow and looked at all the blooms, aghast. “I know these flowers. They are deathrise flowers, the greatest poison ever discovered. A single blossom is deadly enough to kill a dozen full-grown men. I’m glad I stopped you in time!”
The soldiers pulled their horses back. Amber and Peretta retreated, and no one else ventured closer. Tossing his long white hair, Nathan cautiously approached the meadow, and Renn followed him, curious. “I have never heard of deathrise flowers.”
Oron rode up to them, tall in his saddle. He sniffed sarcastically. “We lived inside a walled city for fifteen hundred years, Renn. How much wild plant life would you expect us to know?”
Zimmer frowned in his saddle as he looked across the meadow. “It will take a long time to ride entirely around those flowers.”
Like a man approaching a poisonous spider, Nathan bent close to the nearest blossoms, studied their petals without touching them, the intense purple, the slash of deep red, the golden stamens. The mere touch of any one of these flowers would cause an agonizing death. “Emperor Jagang would grow fields of these flowers and then test the poison on his prisoners. Even the smallest touch is enough to bring rashes and blisters, horrible boils. A little more will kill you.”
Renn scratched the stubble on his cheek. “There must be thousands of blossoms.”
Nathan hung his head, remembering the girl Thistle with her large dark eyes and her positive attitude. Thistle had eaten one of the deathrise flowers, and thereby forced Nicci to kill her to stop the agony. It had been one of the most terrible choices Nathan had ever witnessed.
“Keep the horses away,” Zimmer said, and gestured toward the edge of the meadow. “Follow the trees to the opposite side until you reach the stream, then keep to the forest.” He shook his head. “Thanks to you, Nathan, we dodged a dangerous thing. We would all have been dead before we crossed the field.”
The morazeth trotted up, wondering why the group had stopped. The two women were not impressed with the pretty flowers, but became much more interested when they learned about the deadly poison in the blossoms.
Nathan kept staring at the meadow, stroking thumb and forefinger along his chin as he pondered. “This is the obvious route through the hills. At least part of General Utros’s army will surely come this way.” He gave Renn an intense smile. “With a little provocation, we could lure the enemy soldiers right across this meadow.”
CHAPTER 19
As she stayed among the Hidden People, contemplating her plans, Nicci recovered from the unsettling side effects of her journey through the sliph, and at last her gift felt strong again. Trapped inside during daylight hours, she explored the gloomy passageways that echoed with whispered footsteps. The silent population seemed as much in a trance as the ancient city was.
Asha, Cora, and other Hidden People offered only vague answers to her questions about their history in Orogang and how they had watched over the zhiss. As the old woman arranged drooping night lilies in a vase to add a splash of white in the torchlit gloom, Nicci asked, “Is this all you do every day? You just wait and hide? Do you do nothing else?”
“What else can we do?” Cora asked. “We don’t dare leave, or the zhiss will spread far and wide. We have to contain them, and they stay here because of us. That is our purpose.”
Agitated, Nicci brushed the soft stems of the lilies. “Is that enough after so many centuries? Will it ever change?”
“It will not change until the zhiss are destroyed.”
“And will that ever happen?”
Cora hung her head. “I do not know, and my grandmothers before me did not know. We can only hope that someday one of our children will rid the world of this scourge.”
“I can’t wait that long,” Nicci said. “I have other things I need to accomplish.”
Cora continued arranging flowers as pointless decoration. Frustrated with the woman, Nicci returned to her room and lay back, planning how to leave this isolated city without depending on the sliph. If Ildakar had hidden itself again beneath the shroud of eternity, then nothing would keep General Utros from sweeping across the continent. Meanwhile, Nicci was here locked in a building, hiding from daylight.?.?.?.
She didn’t realize she had dozed off until she found herself among powerful, feral thoughts. In her dream state, her body shifted to become a tawny feline shape. She prowled along, seeing the world through a predator’s senses. Smells became a different language. Mrra!
Part of the sand panther’s mind, Nicci loped along, constantly moving, but she panted with exhaustion, and her large padded paws were sore and raw. She had covered countless miles, racing across the landscape toward a destination that was so clear in her mind: Mrra needed to find her sister panther.
Nicci had been separated from the sand panther when she traveled through the sliph to Serrimundi, but through the spell bond the two remained connected. It had been so long since she’d felt a clear contact that she’d feared Mrra had broken the bond. The big cat had been an excellent spy, roaming around the perimeter of the giant army, feeding information to Nicci through her feline eyes.
Now, Nicci expressed her joy through the spell bond. She felt a growing awe as she realized that Mrra had run overland, tracking her down over the mountains. The connection was faint, but she knew that
the panther was not far away. Mrra could taste her presence in her mind.
“Come to me, sister panther!” Nicci whispered in her sleep.
The big cat growled as she bounded through the forest. With her enhanced senses, Nicci realized that other cats were accompanying Mrra. Long ago, when the sand panther had been raised by the handlers of Ildakar, she was trained to fight and kill in the combat arena. From the time she was just a cub, Mrra had been bonded with a pair of sand panthers, her troka, who fought together, moved together with shared hearts. But when the other two cats had been killed by Nicci and her companions, Mrra was bereft and mortally wounded, until Nicci became her sister.
In her lonely sojourn across the landscape, Mrra had encountered other big cats and brought them along as her new pride. Though the sand panther did not understand numbers, Nicci sensed there were at least six or seven cats loping along beside her across the mountainous terrain.
“Come to me,” Nicci murmured in the halfway land of sleep, and Mrra let out a roar in her mind. The other sand panthers roared as well, and Nicci fell into a deeper sleep, content that they would soon be reunited.?.?.?.
When she awoke hours later, still groggy and stiff, Nicci went to the speaking chamber to study the relief map and plan her best route over the mountains to where Ildakar had been, or back to Serrimundi or Tanimura. She had tried to coax the sliph with the promise of information about Emperor Sulachan. Had the silver creature even heard her? There had been no response whatsoever.
As Nicci ran her hands over the sculpted map, finding possible routes, one of the gray-robed men entered the speaking chamber—dour Cyrus, who believed too much in the legend of General Utros. His expression shifted between anger and hope when he saw her. “Though you spoke ill of Utros, we are reassured to know that he is alive. He will come for us, just as the prophecy foretold.”
“You believe too easily in things,” Nicci said. “If you had seen the general attack Ildakar, you wouldn’t revere him so much.”
