Song of Time

1

Sumifa. present-day

The King is dead.Hail the King of Sumifa! Long live the king of Sumifa!" The shouts of ten thousand citizens of the new city filled the hot afternoon and carried over the dunes to the old ruin. Cheyne stopped his sketching to lift his head and sort out the words. So old Thedeso had died. And his son would take his place soon. Cheyne smiled under his broad-rimmed hat and went on with his drawing, deftly capturing the hard edges of the broken walls with his charcoal, taking a measurement every now and then with a stick to maintain his accuracy. Most people thought diggers just hunted treasure. Mostly, they were right. But like his foster father, Javin, Cheyne was an archaeologist. He wanted more than treasure; he wanted answers.

Cheyne took out his hand mirror and held it along the inside of a broken edge of basalt block, checking for the rock's stability, and for the scorpions that liked to breed in those big cracks and would come rushing out by the dozens, tails poised and pincers waving, when a man put his foot unwittingly into their nest. Their sting wasn't deadly-but it surely could hurt-and many a deadly fall had been prompted by such sudden pain. Satisfied that he was safe, Cheyne lodged his boot into the crack and hoisted himself up onto the low wall for a better view down the line of ancient blocks that had housed the old city's olive press. He had finished the sides; now he would draw the top of the old barrier.

The crowds in the new city had ceased their shouts. From the top of the old press, Cheyne could see the shining walls of the fortress town, whitewashed and brilliant in the slanting sun. Tomorrow he would go back there and find the tall elf again and get his answers. He breathed on the little mirror to clean it, wiped it on his sleeve, and reluctantly held it up for inspection. No smudges. No streaks.

And, as always, no reflection.

Cheyne stared into the looking glass for a long moment, trying to see himself, trying to see past the blur that he always saw when he had to face a mirror, but like always, nothing was clear. He put the spotless mirror back into his scrip and made the measurements for the top of the wall, thinking of the tall elf, his face savagely scarred, whom he had seen in the city the last time he had gone in with Muni for supplies.

Tomorrow, I will find him, and he will tell me why he haunted my childhood dreams… and what magic it is that keeps my own image from me. He must know who I really am…

"Lift! Lift! No, no, no, forward. Again. Again." The shouts of the foreman rang through the still desert air, directing the sweating men striving to shift a huge fallen marble slab from an upright comer. There was a room under the slab, the first on site with walls higher than a couple of feet. In a moment more, they had succeeded in sliding the chunk away from the corner, but then something besides the weight of the block halted the work.

"By the cracked face of Caelus Nin!" he swore. "Stop and stand clear. We cannot progress."

Muni, the foreman, waved the crew back and stood staring into the dark depth of the vault. The crew obeyed, one or two of them making signs of protection in the air as they stepped away from the opening. Muni glared at them and the gestures ceased.

"Javin, would you come over, please?" he called, his voice carefully void of excitement. A tall, brown-haired man of about forty-five, working at the other end of the twenty-foot-long block, shrouded in white robes, turned and made his way around the slab to see what Muni wanted.

"Look there," said Muni softly, his wide mouth curling in disgust and trepidation.

Javin peered into the opening, shading his eyes to adjust to its darkness. A dozen feet down below the broken wall slab lay, not the preserved remains of the long dead man they had expected to find, but the crumpled body of a modern day Sumifan, his black eyes frozen with fright at their last sight, a pool of congealed blood on the thin layer of sand beneath his head.

Javin's gray eyes went almost as wide, and deep furrows creased his brow. "By the seven stars! No one has removed the slab until today?" He looked at the foreman levelly.

"Yes, Javin. You may check Cheyne's drawing of the marble wall. He sketched this area late yesterday evening," Muni replied, his face inscrutable.

Javin shook his head. "That won't be needed."

Javin trusted Muni more than he did himself sometimes. They had worked together for years, traversing the huge continent of Almaaz in search of Javin's burning ambition: to find the fabled Collector. Back in Argive, Javin had become convinced that old Sumifa was the final resting place of the man who had been chief mage to the ancient artificer Mishra.

The climate of this region was deadly hot and the politics treacherous. The true nature of the dig had been kept secret, Javin giving out to the Fascini, Sumifa's royals and their courtiers, only that he wished to study the architecture of old Sumifa, the ancient buried city known and shunned for its mysterious abandonment long ago. The Fascini had not cared. They never had believed there was an old city. After all, no one had ever found it before. And archaeologists were just diggers, and diggers were just treasure hunters to them, whatever their reasons. As long as they gave the standard half of what they found to the city's coffers, and didn't stir up the locals against Fascini decrees, the court turned a blind eye.

Javin had brought with him only his foster son, Cheyne, who had traveled with Javin to every site he had dug in the last ten years, and Muni, who spoke every modem language in Almaaz, even some that didn't have words, and told the truth in all of them.

Javin nodded, and Muni brought his crew around him, asking for two volunteers to go down into the room to bring up the body. Finally, Rij and Hadi stepped forward, drawing their long, curved daggers from their hips. Disdaining the ropes, they leapt into the dim chamber.

"Pay these men double today. Give those two double that. Only make sure they stay quiet. Keep everyone else on the site down by the other side of the wall. Business as usual. And ask Zu to bring Cheyne up from the eastern perimeter. I told him to sketch the olive press walls today until we opened this room," muttered Javin.

Muni's crew had been handpicked and worked the most sensitive areas in the dig, but Javin knew that even they would have a hard time with this discovery. Sumifans were notoriously ancestor conscious, and a corpse, especially a fresh one, would send their officials into a frenzy of ablutions and liturgies and sudden new decrees forbidding further excavation on the site. If word got round to the city fathers that there had been a body, even the fragrance of his money wouldn't keep them from closing him down. Javin

knew he was right on top of finding the old Collector's grave. And when he found the Collector, he would find the thing he really searched for.

For years, Javin's colleagues, all eminent scholars, had mocked his theories of where the old mage's grave really lay. Most of the experts believed that the stories of the secret societies and an Armageddon Clock and the fabulous wealth supposedly buried with the Collector or with the Clock were pure folktale, rehearsed and embroidered as local mythology by the primitive Sumifans. Others, who gave the Collector's story any credence at all, thought that the grave must be in the Chimes, a place largely associated with the Borderlands, a place more or less divided from the rest of Almaaz by a mysterious curtain of light held to be located beyond the desert and past the ore kingdom in an isolated mountain range. But the exact location of the Chimes was not recorded in either current memory or on an ancient map. Not that it mattered. Certainly, no one of any respectable academic standing thought the stories were worth acting upon.

favin knew otherwise. He was the last living member of the Circle.

Recently, in a dark corner of the stacks of Argivia's oldest library, Javin had made a discovery that had sent him to Sumifa, against his greatest personal wishes. While cataloguing some old shards, he had found some scrolls packed inside a pottery jar made by the Sarrazan elves. The scrolls had mentioned details of Old Sumifa and the Collector in their stories, and the ley lines measured correctly for where Javin had begun to dig weeks ago. If Javin could but find the old mage's grave, then his writings, specifically the Holy Book of the Confessors, supposedly the original sacred text of his order, would surely be close by also.

There was a chance that Javin would then be able to accomplish what he had been trying to do all his life: find the Armageddon Clock and somehow disarm it. The secret of the Clock had died with Samor, and all through the hundreds of years since, the members of the Circle had passed down to their sons or daughters the mission of destroying it. But one by one, they had all been murdered, or disappeared with absolutely no trace.

The mages of the lost Circle, though their deaths had been as different as their personalities, all shared the same killers. They were the victims of the Ninnites, once their brethren in magic, now their sworn enemies, pledged to the service of a mysterious dark prince. The Ninnites, too, searched for the secrets of the fabled Clock, believing it to be the marker for inestimable wealth and power.

For the Circle, and for all of Almaaz, Javin believed, time was running out. When Javin was gone, there would be no one else to take up the search, no one, at least, who believed that the Beast of the Hours-supposedly a hideous, angry cockatrice, a creature even the Collector had not known how to fight-was what really awaited any who found and opened the Clock. The Ninnites had done a convincing job on the locals as well. Any Sumifan would scoff at the idea that anything but the treasure of the famous Collector was hidden with the Armageddon Clock.

And then there was the matter of Cheyne.)avin knew that if the dark prince, the Raptor, as the scrolls had called him, ever found the young man, Cheyne would be as dead as this corpse in the ruin.

He hunched down to inspect the body Muni's men had brought up. Plainly, the man had been murdered. Not a neat job: the corpse's throat had been cut, the jugular vein slashed with three parallel gashes, almost like claw marks. Almost like the favorite method of the Ninnites.

Javin bent to look at the back of the unfortunate man's head, brushing away a lock of dark hair from just behind his left ear. No mark of the double crescent. The man had not been part of the Ninnites, so this was not an example of the order's extreme discipline. But then why would the two-thousand-year-old renegade cult murder a modern-day Sumifan citizen? If he had been a common thief, Javin thought, there appeared to be nothing of value in the little room, and the man looked to have had no time to steal. Clutched in the corpse's stiff, whitened hand, Javin found only an ancient Sumifan family totem, like the hundreds they had already unearthed around the site: ganzite, inscribed with symbols from an Almaazan tongue older even than the ancient city. Hardly worth dying for.

Or killing for, he puzzled, laying it aside. Javin covered the body again, knowing little more now about the man than before.

Muni shook his head, anticipating Javin's unspoken thought. "He looks familiar, but I do not know him." The other crewmen repeated the same answer one by one as Javin questioned them.

The unknown man displayed the features of the majority of native Sumifans: dark curly hair, dark eyes, olive skin, and a strong, lean jaw. He appeared to have been about sixty, but if he had been a shepherd and spent much time in the weather, he could have been much younger. They called this place the anvil of the sun, and for good reason. One crewman suggested he might be part of the nearest nomadic tribe, but Javin dismissed that possibility immediately.

"He must have come from the city. Look at his clothes." Javin pointed to the man's flimsy shoes and thin shopkeeper's robes. "He wasn't ready to spend any time out here in those."

Muni squatted, crossing his hands in front of him like a big cat. "Javin, your son approaches."

Javin glanced up sharply to see Cheyne striding as quickly as he could manage through the deep sand, a look of alarm upon his face.

"Shall I greet him below?" asked Muni.

"No. Let him come on up. I want him to chart the room under the slab right away, while we are both here. He's more than twenty now, and he can take care of himself, but…"

"But you are still his father," said Muni, almost smiling, his dark eyes half closed against the hard desert light.

Javin nodded, a little undone. Muni had a way of disarming all pretense.

Cheyne cleared the last step, panting from the effort in the blazing noon heat. His face was dry despite the exertion-perspiration evaporated as quickly as it formed here. He gratefully accepted the water jug, threw it back native style across his shoulder, and took a long pull on it.

"Zu said you wanted roe up here fast, Javin. What's going on? Did you find the Collector?" Cheyne gasped before he was quite through with the last swallow. He flashed a brilliant smile as the cooling water trickled down his neck, finding a quicker path along a leather thong at his throat.

Javin gestured to the dead man.

"Oh. I suppose not." Cheyne frowned, instantly comprehending the ramifications. "Not one of the crew," he breathed in relief. "But… who?"

"We don't know. Muni found him under this slab, in what looks like part of a house. As you can plainly see, he has been murdered. We have no idea who killed him or why. But we must keep this quiet, or we won't have a job by the afternoon bells. And watch out for yourself. The body can't be more than a few hours dead. Whoever did this is in sharp habit, from the looks of his method. The murderer could still be close," said Javin.

Cheyne lifted his broad-rimmed hat and ran his fingers through a thatch of dark blond hair, resettling the hat in exactly the same place. He stooped to examine the piece of marble that had been the dead man's crypt cover. "No scraping or pry marks around the slab-"

"We know." Javin slid his eyes over to the crew in warning.

Cheyne nodded and took out his bound tablet and a bit of charcoal. "Have you been down?" he asked Javin.

"No. But the Collector isn't there." The disappointment was written plainly on Javin's face. "I want you to go in and draw before anything else is disturbed. One of us needs to remain up here with the ropes," Javin replied.

He shaded his eyes with his hand and watched the last of the workers leave the site. "You know what to do, and I'll be right here. Muni will go in with you to hold the torch. Be careful. That body got in there somehow, and likely not by magic." / hope, he added silently.

"What about you up here alone?" Cheyne glanced around at the suddenly vacant site.

"I'll be fine. Just do your job and get back up here fast," said Javin.

Cheyne signaled for Javin to lower him and Muni with the plaited fiber ropes, which always looked too flimsy to take any weight, but had, for centuries, helped move the entire Sumifan civilization.

Inside the room, it was much cooler than on the sand, but the air was stale and thick and smelled of limerock. A fine layer of dust covered the several inches of sand on the floor, except for the wide stain of dark, fresh, dried blood. Cheyne carefully examined the sand around the stain, but found no disturbance. Muni stood exactly where he had first touched down, holding a lantern as Cheyne went over the room. Following the dim glow of the lamp, Cheyne sketched a window and a wide doorway, but they were packed with sand. The whole room, thought Cheyne, had likely been filled with it. A dark scar ran along the walls about head level, where the wooden frame of a roof had been. That structure had perhaps fallen into this story, a possibility that would explain the several roof tiles scattered on the floor. Dust became visible in the air as Muni moved the lantern around, swirling in thick currents and eddies with Cheyne's movements, but otherwise the place looked completely undisturbed.

Muni pointed to one corner of the room, where a three-foot-wide hole had been hacked in the wall, probably centuries ago. Looters had obviously excavated the room long before them, taking everything of value, but at least removing most of the sand as well. No footprints marred its smooth surface. Cheyne resisted his first urge to explore the hole and where it could possibly lead, instead placing his measuring stick down by the wall and then drawing the shape of it to scale. He touched the stone, its coolness soothing his sunburned hand.

"Marble," he muttered. "Always eleven hagon degrees cooler than the room temperature." The wall was smooth and polished, hardly snowing its great age at all. One large crack, directly over the hole, ran from ceiling to sand, but the other large slabs still stood straight and square.

"Workmanship of the highest order," Cheyne said softly. "It must have taken some doing to break through that."

Not given to idle chatter, Muni only nodded. He held the lantern out toward the broken wall until Cheyne had drawn a texture sample and gotten a quick sketch of the details of a collapsed set of marble shelves.

After a long look around the room, Cheyne decided they could move on to the tunnel. As Muni knelt beside it, something bright caught Cheyne's eye and he held up his hand.

"Muni-look. Broken glass. Looks like it was a mirror."

Muni waved the lantern over the fragments again, and Cheyne set down his stick, drew them, and then picked up one of the longer pieces. Its silvering had gone black long ago, but the front of the glass was uniform in thickness and had few scratches. Fine work, again. Cheyne started to place the jagged glass in his pack when Muni touched his arm.

"Let me have a look at the edge. I think I saw something else."

Cheyne turned the fragment over and, sure enough, a dark brown substance filled some of the hairline cracks in the glass. When he touched the edges, the powder flaked away and fell to the ground.

"More blood?" Muni queried.

"If it is, it didn't come from our unfortunate fellow above. Look at the texture of the dust. The particles are far too fine to be only a day old," said Cheyne. He wrapped the glass in a clean cloth and put it in the pack.

"Let's see where this passage leads," he continued, bending into the dark hole.

"Your father…" Muni began, caution in his voice.

From the time Javin had taken Cheyne on his first dig, more than ten years ago, Muni had watched the odd, pensive child, a gifted artist even then, grow into one of the best young diggers he had known. Javin had insisted, partly because of the way he had found the boy-a subject favin never discussed-and partly because they traveled to any number of less than safe places, that Cheyne leam the ten Argivan open-handed fighting forms and also to use a blade. lavin's care had made Cheyne deadly accurate with a dagger and better than most with a sword. Nonetheless, when things got dangerous, Muni tended to forget that Cheyne was grown up.

Cheyne let out a deep sigh, reminding him of that fact, and stirring several hundred years worth of dust into a small cloud, causing Muni to sneeze, which caused more dust, which caused more sneezing.

"My father is up there. We are down here. We have to do this," said Cheyne, laughing. "Are you afraid, Muni?" he teased.

Muni lowered his head and narrowed his leonine eyes at the young man, covertly moving his unoccupied hand to his sash, making sure of his dagger. "As you wish, Cheyne."

Cheyne bent again to the opening, this time dropping all the way to his knees as Muni passed him the lantern. Cheyne startled a bit as several hand-sized black scorpions instantly raised their claws and arched their tails.

"Vermin." Muni sniffed in distaste. "You are going in there?"

Cheyne gritted his teeth, held the lantern out as far as he could, sending the scorpions skittering for deeper cover, and then drew it close again, motioning to Muni to back away.

"No. I'm not going in. There is no need. See for yourself."

Muni cocked a dark eyebrow at him, took the lantern, and looked into the crevice. Five feet into the wall, the opening was blocked with sand. A great knot of cobwebs crisscrossed the end of the short tunnel, their silken strands completely intact. The vermin had had the tunnel to themselves for centuries.

"Most adored Schreefa, jewel of the desert, luminous beacon of mercy, they have found Kalkuk the shopkeeper… ah, very, very dead, in a sealed vault out at the ruin. I thought you would wish to know." The dark-robed assassin bowed deeply to his employer.

"Well. That's too very, very bad." Riolla Hifrata mulled the words around in her mouth as if they tasted of poison.

Damn this jewel! she thought, rubbing the black pearl between her fingers. Why can't I get it to work right anymore? Well, at least now I know where I sent the old boy. But maybe this is all right anyway… if those diggers are blamed for his death, perhaps the Fascini will shut them down. And the Raptor will then find better humor and stop charging me so much. Ever since they've been at the ruin, he's been ten times the beast he usually is.

Riolla sighed and dismissed the assassin, who rose gratefully, having begun to feel the intricate, linked weave of the rug digging into his knee. As he backed out of the room, she trudged up the stairs to the top floor of her shop, thinking about her last attempt to work the pearl's magic

"Og, you old fool, however did you do it? How could you make the stones sing for you?" she muttered, reaching the landing.

She entered her bedchamber, drew the shades against the morning sun, and lay down on the gold-embroidered coverlet. Riolla's head had started pounding the moment she had tried to use the pearl to transport old Katkuk's body the night before. It had been years since she had dared to attempt the stone, but alone and desperate, the Raptor's increasing demand for payments upon her, she had been forced to "collect" on Kalkuk. And Riolla knew, despite the fact that she was Mercanto Schreefa, that the Raptor would collect on her without a second thought if she were late with her protection payment.

It had been such a shame, really. Kalkuk was her best supplier; the man had come up with things none of the others could ever equal in value. She had never discovered his source, either. This time, though, poor old Kalkuk had missed his promised delivery-some kind of antique music box he had rambled on about, saving that it had been in his family for generations beyond counting, that it was so old that it might even have belonged to the Collector himself. Of course, of course; everyone in debt has such treasures. Riolla had smirked at him, marked his name on her list as delinquent, and gone on to other business. But when the Raptor had sent a summons for her to appear within three days, with double her usual payment, she had gone to Kalkuk's shop by herself, pressed him for the artifact, and he had threatened her with some old totem he had snatched from his shelf.

You shouldn't have done that, Kalkuk, / had to kill you then. She picked up a pumice stone and filed a snag on one of her long, sharp nails. Word gets around if the Schreefa gets soft. Things just don't work right then.

She sighed. Her head seemed to split with dark imaginings and the smell of dead seaweed filled her nostrils. She took a cup of tea to her lips, swallowing a tiny sip of the spiced brew. But it tasted of decay, just as had her breakfast, just as had her dinner the night before. Og had warned her about the pearl. Of all the stones in his ring, it was both the easiest to use and the most difficult to direct. The other times she had risked it had never been this bad.

Why hadn't the song done its job? She had sung it just as Og had taught her. She had meant to place the body in the middle of the Mercanto's sundial, before the scowling face of Nin, where it would have served as warning to the other businessmen and women who paid Riolla for her protection. Especially all those who had been just a little late. How had the body wound up out in the desert? Inside some old building? She hadn't even known there were old buildings out there. Imagine that, the ancient city of Sum if a was real.

Riolla paused, the stone in her hand growing strangely warm. She smiled a little. Then a little more. For if the ancient city were real, then why not the Clock itself? Maybe the treasure the silly Barcans were always looking for really did exist. This would bear further inquiry. When she could think more clearly.

So much for Kalkuk, she mused, trying the tea again, with no better results. But I still don't have his payment, either. And her own time was quickly running out.

A timid knock at her chamber door brought Riolla's head up too suddenly, the sound seeming to be pitched at the most irritating tone possible.

"Yes! Yes! Stop that. What is it?" she snapped, her own voice raking over her ears like claws.

"Schreefa, Prince Maceo sends greeting. He says to inform you that he has reconsidered your proposal."

"I still say there is no way anyone could have moved that block, and no way anyone could have used that tunnel, Javin," Cheyne repeated, slamming the water jug down on the camp table where he had spread his drawings of the room. A few stray droplets colored the bata-paper for a few seconds, then faded, drying quickly. "Go down there and see for yourself, if you like. It's just an old looter's hole, covered up by the sandstorms long ago."

Javin drummed his fingers over the drawings and shook his head. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I just don't like the alternative. The method looked too familiar. And by the way, you should stay close until this is over. They might know we are here after all."

"You mean the Broken Circle, the Ninnites?"

"Keep your voice down." Javin frowned.

"Javin, why is it every time we come up with something you can't explain, it has to be the result of some old grudge between a long dead bunch of sorcerers?" Cheyne met Javin's eyes and locked him in a long stare. "This time, I want to know."

"It is better you do not know yet. Besides, I couldn't tell you more if I wanted to. It's just not safe."

"Javin," Cheyne said, sighing, "if I were still ten years old, that would be the right answer. But I'm a grown man now. It's time for me to be on my own. Find a wife, find my own work. Find my name. I have to know what all this sorcery and lore you are always poring over and thinking about has to do with me. Who am I? What happened to the first ten years of my life? Why can't I see myself in a mirror like everyone else? Whatever you know about these things, Javin, I deserve to know, too. At last we are in Sumifa-and there is something about this place, this particular place, that feels so familiar to me. I have to be free to explore this place. Maybe here I will find someone who knows what this means-" he added softly, pulling an amulet from under his shirt, its odd marking, very like a tiny fingerprint, deeply and precisely etched into the end of the smooth, cylindrical stone.

Unwilling to answer, Javin started to rise and leave, his way of effectively ending every discussion about Cheyne's past. Then he sat back heavily on his low bamboo stool and looked at Cheyne for a long moment.

"We've been over this countless times before. Not yet. You have to trust me. Someday it will all be clear. But not yet. If my suspicions about this murder are correct, you are far safer not knowing. And as I said, don't go back to the city. Tilings are likely to be strained with the Sumifans until this murder is solved. I'll see you at the vault. We're going to go ahead and empty it. I know the Collector is close. He just has to be."

The ache in his voice went through Cheyne's heart like a dagger. lavin gathered the drawings and the water jug and headed out to the ruin again.

Cheyne gritted his teeth, using his frustration to rub all the harder at the totem he had found in the hand of the dead man when the workers had set about to carry the hapless Sumifan back into the city. Like all of the other family markers they had unearthed at the site, this one had a row of glyphs on it, and when Cheyne applied vigorous pressure, their outlines became clear and readable. If one read Old High Sumifan.

He dug his nail into the incised lines, clearing the deeper dirt away. The glyphs were really pictures, and Cheyne could make out a wavy line, which Muni had once said meant water, a stylized scorpion, probably a likeness of the ones he had seen in the vault, and a basket of some kind. Two others were too faint to decipher. He rubbed the ganzite block as clean as he could, fascinated by the way the colored light danced in its edges. He uncovered a basket and a boat. But there was still a stubborn smear near the bottom. He rubbed again, adding a little spit, and when the smudge still did not come up, he took a rough cloth to it. The mark seemed to be as permanent as the carved glyphs. Intrigued, Cheyne searched his bag of tools for a magnifier, found the fat lens, and held it over the totem.

Cheyne could hardly credit what he saw. Beneath a tough layer of dark soot there appeared to be a tiny fingerprint carved into the ganzite, its lines fluid and clear, an unmistakable match to the glyph upon his own mysterious amulet.

"Cheyne, I need you to come on out here and get the wall finished. We've got maybe another hour before it gets too hot to work," called)avin, from outside the tent. "Might as well do what we can. When word gets around about the incident, we want to have used our time well."

Cheyne found that his mouth was suddenly very dry, and it had nothing to do with the desert heat. "Coming, Javin," was all he could manage. His head swam with possibilities. He stuffed the totem into his pack, collected his gear and a water jug. He washed his face in the basin by the door, by long habit, avoiding the mirror that hung over it.

As the sun climbed to its searing zenith, Cheyne trudged to the north wall, finding, thankfully, a waning sliver of shade from the larger fallen stones to stand in as he drew. The time passed and he hardly thought of the stones he sketched, the shape of the totem's last glyph still burned upon his mind's eye.

By the last stroke of his ochre crayon, the shade had completely disappeared. Cheyne packed up and walked back to the cluster of tents, mulling over his next move. The amulet around his neck seemed heavier than ever before, and he felt it thump against his chest in time with every step.

The main tent was empty; Javin had not returned from the vault. But it wouldn't be long-not even Javin could stand to work in this heat. He thought to check the shed, hoping to take Javin's horse, but then remembered it had been commandeered to transport the dead man. Cheyne laid his drawings neatly on the table, refilled the water skin, pulled on clean robes, traded his hat for a native style kaffiyeh, and walked out onto the rough road toward Sumifa.