“Astrias… is safe?” Amnelis looked like she wanted to say more, but she stopped. “How about Gajus?”
“Gajus, too, was accounted for, but—”
“We cannot find Cal Moru,” Lindrot informed her sullenly.
“What do you mean?” Amnelis demanded anxiously. The loss of the spellcaster would be a great blow to the Mongauli cause. Without Cal Moru of Kitai, the Mongauli could never hope to find the great secret hidden at the heart of Nospherus. “He has fallen into their hands?”
“Somebody saw him get cut down. He cannot be alive.”
“I see…”
Amnelis' perfect features took on a look of bleak resignation. She whispered to herself:
A thorough disaster... What to tell my father?
This was the first time Amnelis had ever been defeated, the first time she had been forced to withdraw her forces from the field of battle. She swallowed a hot lump rising in her throat. In the passionate determination of her eighteen years she found the loss almost too much to accept as fact. And Guin—that leopard-headed monstrosity who had turned her around so easily and robbed her of all but certain victory—him she didn’t even have the energy to curse and hate right now.
Yet she knew very well that she would never forget his name or his freakish figure. Though her defeated troops, straggling home through the sands, would see and hear, Amnelis buried her face in her horse’s mane and gave herself up to weak, drawn-out sobs.
The Kes River was still hundreds of tads away. The desert, filled with a feeling of brooding hostility, hungrily spread its white expanse before the crushed army.
The battle for Nospherus was over.
“Riyaad!”
Siba ran up to Guin and, throwing himself at the leopard-man’s feet, wept.
A moment later Dodok arrived. “Riyaad, shouldn’t we chase after them and kill them all?” asked the giant.
“We have done enough,” Guin stayed him. “Mongaul’s plans for Nospherus have been ripped to shreds. They should now turn their eyes once again to the Middle Country, but were they to plan another invasion, with the Lagon as its protectors Nospherus is safe from the trampling feet of Mongaul. Dodok, the Lagon are certainly a tribe made for fighting.”
Guin’s laugh was a roar.
With long strides Guin stalked down the middle of the battlefield, tiny Siba and giant Dodok keeping pace on either side. All around them the Sem were busy finishing off wounded Mongauli, cutting their throats with blades of stone. Bodies from both forces were piled on top of one another everywhere, and the air was filled with the smell of blood and death, a scene of nightmare illuminated by the bright light of the desert sun.
Suddenly Guin stopped short. His eyes took on a look of strange surprise, and he stared down at a shape before his feet.
“Riyaad?”
Siba and Dodok looked down dubiously, and Dodok frowned.
“What is this monster? It has yet to be eaten by sand leeches but already has the form of a death’s head!”
The three were gazing upon a carcass garbed in a black, deeply hooded mantle. The hood had fallen aside, revealing a terrible, otherworldly face that had melted down shapelessly to expose deep eye sockets and a skeletal jaw.
The figure’s chest had been skewered brutally from behind by a Lagon spear which remained there. Cal Moru, who had survived walking across the desert of Nospherus, who had returned from the Valley of Death, could not elude the peril brought to him by the Lagon. His crippled form had no longer commanded any magic. His thin, bony wrists, ending in handless stumps, were stretched out as though he were pleading for help. A single eyeball remained in one of his black eye sockets, staring emptily up at the sky.
The three companions left the spot without saying anything more. They did not and could not know that the secret of Gur Nuu—the Valley of Death that made Nospherus into a land of death and a home of monsters—had surfaced for a while like some vessel just to plunge deeper into the netherworld with the passing of Cal Moru. Many years were to elapse before the resurgence of the secret and still more before its elucidation.
The three warriors were unmoved by the carnage as they walked on through the field of battle. Often their feet almost slipped on the bloody guts spilled upon the ground; all around them carcasses were drying out and stiffening under the sun. Severed heads, arms, and trunks of bodies were everywhere. Some of the Sem were satisfying their hunger by eating dead men. Shortly after the three passed by a spot where the bodies lay thickest, they heard voices calling.
“Guin!”
“Oh, Guin!”
Two children were running towards them, almost falling down in their haste.
“Rinda! Remus!”
Guin let the two crying children cling to him on either side. Their bodies heaved with sobs of relief.
“Oh, Guin, Guin, Guin! I always believed in you. I believed that you would come back to save us. I knew that you would take care of everything! I believed in you, always…”
Rinda’s voice trailed off into more sobs; the tears were running in streams down her grimy face. Guin’s big, trustworthy hands gripped the shoulders of the royal twins who had lost their country.
“I would have come back earlier, if I could.”
His voice was warm and soothing.
“It’s a good thing you two came here with the Sem when you did. The Lagon know of a limestone cavern called the Wind Hole that passes through Dog’s Head, leading from one side of the mountain to the other. We took that path. I was growing a little desperate thinking about the distance to the battlefield. I did not know how close to me the battlefield had moved! When I saw the end of the Wind Hole and heard the sound of fighting, I thought it must be a dream. At the same time, I became convinced that the heavens are on our side.”
“Oh, Guin!” was all Rinda could say.