‘Fire-mountains again?’ Red-Beard asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

‘I’m not completely sure,’ Dahlaine replied. ‘Ashad wasn’t very specific. Something’s going on down below, but that’s about all we can say for sure. Tell Sorgan to hustle right along, and I’ll go warn Narasan.’

Sorgan, Torl, and Rabbit were standing around the sizeable fissure in the ground where the geyser that had been the source of the River Vash for the past twenty-five eons had been spurting high up into the air, and the three of them seemed to be more than a little astonished by the fact that the geyser wasn’t there any more.

‘What’s going on here?’ Sorgan demanded, gesturing at the fissure.

‘I wouldn’t stand around waiting to find out if I were you, Sorgan,’ Longbow replied. ‘Dahlaine came by just a while ago and told us to advise you that something fairly awful’s likely to come along soon.’

‘Just exactly what do you mean by “awful”, Longbow?’ Rabbit asked as the earth began to shudder again.

‘Does that answer your question, Rabbit?’ Red-Beard asked the little smith. ‘In this part of the world we’ve learned not to ask questions when the ground starts to wobble. The best thing to do when that happens is to run away.’

‘Which way should we go?’ Sorgan asked Longbow, his eyes gone wide.

‘The east ridge is quite a bit closer, Sorgan,’ Longbow replied, ‘and in this sort of situation, closer is better, and running is much better than walking.’

‘Do you think your unknown friend might be playing games again, Longbow?’ Torl asked.

‘Why don’t we run for right now?’ Longbow suggested. ‘We can ask questions later.’

‘And running fast is probably much better than running slow,’ Red-Beard added. ‘Real fast, if you get my drift.’

‘Pass the word, cousin,’ Sorgan told Torl. ‘Tell the men to run toward the east just as fast as they can - and let them know that their lives probably depend on it.’

3

Ashad had behaved as if his dream that night in the basin above the Falls of Vash had been more than just a little different from the dream he’d had in our cave under Mount Shrak when this had all begun. There was an urgency in his voice that hadn’t been there in our cave. He didn’t give me very many details, but I got the feeling that what was about to happen frightened him more than a little.

I realized that this wasn’t really the time for reflection, so I advised Veltan and my sisters that it was time for us to take our Dreamers and leave this basin. If Ashad had given me more in the way of details I might have been able to be more precise, but after Yaltar’s twin volcanos had engulfed the ravine above Lattash, we’d all learned that getting out of the way in the face of the natural disasters the Dreamers jerked out of nowhere was the best course of action.

Then I rode my thunderbolt on down to warn Sorgan, Longbow, and Red-Beard, and turned to give Narasan a similar warning.

‘Are we looking at something on the order of those twin volcanos that saved the day for us back in the ravine?’ Narasan asked rather tensely.

‘I can’t be entirely sure, Commander,’ I admitted. ‘Let’s stay on the safe side, though. I think it might be best for you to get all of your men clear of this basin. Did your friend Padan join you here after he’d abandoned his position down by the Falls of Vash, or did he go on over to the east rim?’

‘He came here. He’s commanding the men off to the west.’

‘You’d better get word to him,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s not take any chances right now.’ I glanced down the slope at the barricades Narasan’s men had erected to delay the invasion of the servants of the Vlagh. ‘Have the insect-people shaken off the effects of Lillabeth’s sandstorm yet?’ I asked.

‘Not entirely, I don’t think. Their attacks on the third breast-works down there have been sort of tenuous. We don’t really know just how many bug-people the Vlagh had at its disposal, but I’m quite sure that a sizeable number of them were suffocated during that storm. It might take the Vlagh quite a while to bring in replacements.’

‘I don’t really think the Vlagh has that much time, Narasan,’ I told him. ‘The church armies are on the move again, and it won’t be long before they’ll reach your wall here. I think you’d better pull your men back from the slope and send them off to the east as well. Let’s get all of our people out of harm’s way.’

‘Right,’ the commander agreed. Then he turned. ‘Gunda!’ he shouted. ‘I need you here - right now!’

Narasan’s balding friend came running along the wall. ‘Have we got trouble of some kind?’ he demanded.

‘I’m not sure if “trouble” is the right word, Gunda. Send a runner off to the west to tell Padan that I want him and his men to abandon their positions and come here just as fast as they can run. And send word on down to Andar as well. I want his people up here too.’

‘We’ll have bug-people all over us before the sun goes down if we do that, Narasan,’ Gunda protested.

‘Not if we aren’t here anymore, we won’t. Our grand plan has changed just a bit, Gunda. I think we might want to move on to “run away”. Lord Dahlaine just advised me that the children have been playing again, and we don’t want to get in their way.’ Narasan paused, and then he turned back to look at me. ‘Veltan told us that he and his toy were going to open a passageway through Gunda’s wall here so that the church armies would be able to get through to greet the bug-people. Can you get word to him that we’ll need that opening fairly soon?’

I smiled. ‘My pet’s just as efficient as Veltan’s is, Commander. If Veltan’s busy someplace else, my pet will get to have the fun this time. There will be a highway waiting here when the church armies arrive.’

The assorted officers in Narasan’s army all seemed to be very fond of the term ‘logistics’, which I took to mean ‘getting the right people and the right equipment in the right place at the right time’. Military language tends to be just a bit stuffy at times, I’ve noticed.

The major problem Narasan’s men encountered lay in the fact that Gunda’s wall was only about thirty feet wide at the bottom and even less at the top. Since he had to move about a hundred thousand men off to the ridge that lay to the east, it was obviously going to take more time than I was positive we really had to get them to safety.