She had led them to a parched desert fortress, abandoned by Great Kesh’s Empire centuries before. There was almost nothing that now resembled a fortification. A few large stones that were once part of a wall, the lonely foundation of a gate half-buried in dust, and a staircase leading down into a labyrinth of tunnels and storage rooms. So little was left above ground that anyone might ride past it at a short distance without noticing that the Empire had once thought this pass worth defending.
Sandreena’s two knights had been told only what she needed them to know until they reached this point. Using the documents that Creegan left for her, she had followed an ancient trade route out of Durbin, south into the Jal-Pur, then southwest into some foothills. They would eventually rise in the west to become the Trollhome Mountains, but here they merely formed a landscape of tablelands and hills. Whatever the original name of this once proud fortress, it was now known to the desert men as The Tomb of the Hopeless. To its south lay a valley with an even less appealing name, The Valley of Lost Men.
Before leaving Krondor, Sandreena had studied all of the maps of this region that had been in the Order’s possession, and not one had shown the fortress or the valley. She trusted that Creegan wouldn’t have insisted she read the report if he hadn’t wanted her to act on it, and she was equally certain that he expected her to do exactly what she was doing: taking matters into her own hands. There was no one in Krondor besides herself that could do so. She knew Creegan had a relationship with Pug and the others on Sorcerer’s Isle, but in rushing off to Rillanon to become the Order’s leader, he had neglected to leave her any hint about how to contact them. She suspected there were other Kingdom agents of the Conclave, like the man who had passed her the messages in Durbin, but she had no idea how to identify and contact any of them.
She remembered the young man who had fetched her from Ithra after she had almost died during her first encounter with the Demon Legion’s agents; Zane was his name, yet she had no idea how to reach him. She felt frustrated that Creegan had put this burden on her alone, but she pushed down her concerns to deal with the matters at hand.
Farson and Jaliel were reliable, but neither of them had been named on Creegan’s list, so there were some things she could not share with them. They knew only that they were needed for a special mission at the Father-Bishop’s request and that secrecy was paramount.
They had left the city together at sunrise to ride into the desert, headed due east, and then turned south and circled around to meet the ancient caravan trail. Sandreena did not know if the Imperial Keshian Intelligence Corp was following them, but she was certain they knew her small party had left. When they failed to appear at the usual oasis in a few days, the Keshians might send someone out to track the three knights, but Sandreena hoped that by then, her business here would be finished and they would already be heading back to Krondor.
It was near sundown when they reached the edge of the ancient fortress. The report about the carnage that had taken place here had been written weeks before, but the scene before them now was no less grisly. The corpses were now bones, picked clean by scavengers, the drying heat and blowing sands. But enough of their connective tissue remained that a few skeletons still hung from the makeshift gibbets around the edge of the clearing. The piles of ash contained the contorted forms of those who had been burned alive, and bones riddled with arrows were strewn around the fortress ruins. Hundreds of people had been slaughtered.
Sandreena called out. ‘You can come up now!’
The two other Knights rode into the ancient fortress and Jaliel said, ‘Goddess! What manner of butchery is this?’
Farson looked at Sandreena and said, ‘If you don’t mind my saying, Sergeant, this is a little more unusual than any normal mission, secret or otherwise. Are we to know what is going on?’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ she said. ‘There is a very dangerous, evil man named Belasco, who consorts with dark powers; his followers did this.’ She decided to omit the fact that most of the remains belonged to fanatics who had gone to their deaths willingly. It was an unnecessary detail for these two to do their duty.
‘Sergeant,’ said Farson. ‘What happened here?’
‘I only have a rough idea, but it appears that it’s the work of a cult of death worshippers who have appeared around here.’
The two Knights exchanged glances, and Sandreena knew exactly what they were thinking. A death cult should be the province of the worshippers of Lims-Kragma or perhaps even, Sung the White, they were not usually a concern for the servants of Dala.
Sandreena said, ‘Father-Bishop Creegan is worried that they may be abducting local villagers for their sacrifices.’
It was not a complete lie, for she could imagine that might be part of Creegan’s concerns, but left her explanation at that. The Conclave of Shadows had made an alliance with the most important man in the martial order of the worshippers of Dala, perhaps because Pug didn’t have anyone else to call upon. There were certainly few other people who had as much experience with demons as she did; she had destroyed more than her share.
‘Are you both carrying wards?’ she asked.