Book of Iron Read Online Free PDF Page B

funny. The Wizard Salamander regarded him curiously.
    “Well,” said Bijou, making a show of turning away. “I guess we start walking. Unless anyone wants to ride? No?”
    She took her second long look at the disregarded city of Ancient Erem, cast out like a series of sand castles around the rim of the bowl-shaped valley. Sand castles cast in stone.
    Erem had not been built so much as mined . In the moonlight, the starlight (seeming stronger now; that dusty mauve sky was fading to black violet) Bijou saw the empty doorways and windows of houses carved in terraces from the streaked stone. She knew the contrasting bands of dark and light were a red like dry blood and a white like exposed bone, for she had seen them in the first light of Erem’s terrible dawn—before she and the others fled with their captive, the Alchemist Assari.
    Now, it all looked gray and faintly blood-tinged in the light cast by the bloated red moon. Depth and distance fooled the eye in the twinned moon-shadows; one object bled into the next, and it was hard to tell what was real and what was illusion.
    Beside those carven houses were larger buildings—or ‘minings’—tall pillared faces presenting every appearance of having been constructed until you realized that at their edges, the walls merely blended into the stone behind. Bijou was minded of the blind faces of kittens pushing through the birth membrane, or—with their gaping doors like desperate mouths—perhaps the faces of the Bey’s enemies as they were drowned in bags of silk.
    She only thought of that, she told herself, because the scent of water hung so heavy on the air: a musty sharpness that promised life, relief, comfort despite the burning sands.
    She knew it was a lie.
    “Right,” she called out. “If we should happen to come down by the oasis—don’t drink the water here.”
    “Why not?” asked Salamander—genuine scientist’s curiosity, Bijou judged. Not a challenge to her authority. Their eyes met, and the ghost-pale woman smiled at her.
    Bijou felt a snap of warmth and camaraderie that erased any faint, lingering jealousy and replaced it with something else. Not a romantic interest—Bijou had ever been cursed by a preference for men—but a sense of welcome belonging. A lonely ache reminded her of just how long it had been since she’d had a friend of the heart, another woman to share secrets and sister-stories with.
    “Cursed,” Bijou answered, killing her torch since they had the moonlight now.
    Salamander tipped her head from side to side, that strange bone-straight hair moving over her ears. “Good reason,” she said.
    She crouched down and dug her fingertips into the sand. Although Bijou was not familiar with the form the white Wizard’s magic took, it was plain to anyone that it was magic she was working.
    Something scurried across the sand to her, a pale body like a lump of butter, borne on eight fat legs. “Camel-spider,” Bijou said, when Salamander raised her eyes questioningly.
    “Nice and big,” Salamander said. She drew a pin from her collar and pricked her thumb with it: the blood dripped, and Bijou was about to cry out a warning not to let it touch the sand when Salamander caught it neatly and smudged a dab on the spider’s nose. If spiders could be said to have noses.
    “She’ll help us,” Salamander said, standing. The spider raced away, vanishing over the rippled sand with a speed Bijou could hardly credit. “Follow her!”
    But as she leaped forward, each footstep kicking a divot in the sand, Bijou heard something from the shadows of the cliffs that was not the rising wind or the rustle of sand on stone.
    “Stop!” she called, and Salamander listened, skidding to a halt some ten canes ahead.
    Prince Salih, beside her, must have heard it too. He lifted his head, turning, sniffing, eyes half-lidded in concentration.
    “What was that?” the prince asked.
    Bijou lifted her head to the wind in imitation of him, as if that could make