ALLORY PEEPED PAST YAARAH’S tufted ears, never more grateful for a touch of Chameleon magic to keep her hidden from sight. The team lay prone behind a fold in the ground a mere eight or nine inches tall, but it was enough – not enough to feel like enough, she reflected soberly, but the only cover available from which to spy out the lay of the land. The way to the Gates of Saradoom beneath a dramatic part-overcast sky, striped with thick bands of puffy grey clouds that Middlesun’s rays burnished with golden aureoles and sweeping crepuscular rays. Nobody was admiring the sky.

The speckled dark grey granite expanse ahead was so flat and featureless it might easily serve as Durc Durhelm’s polished ballroom floor, an area about a mile square. The plain ended in a towering granite rampart that assaulted Centresky itself with adamantine purpose. Front and centre in that rampart, rammed between the burly shoulders of two mountains, stood the fabled Gates of Saradoom. Fashioned of black iron mottled with great streaks of deep red rust, they measured an awe-inspiring one thousand feet tall and boasted pentagonal, ironclad gatehouses to either side that towered half as tall again. The décor was pure Dragon – forests of jutting spikes to the fore and below, and three layers of ditches again protected by thousands of sharpened metal spikes, proof against any fool who would dare to assault such a stronghold. Built to stop Giants indeed.

As if that were not enough, Yaarah pointed out for them a gate within the gate built on a more mortal scale. They did not even open the main gates. Ever. She could only imagine what manner of enemies or obsession must have led the architects of yore to imagine building a fortress of such titanic proportions. Even the Dragons patrolling the skies above were mere specks in the distance, but she had plenty of their friends nearer at hand to judge just how huge they were. Two rows of pedestals lined the white road that led right up to that gate, starting about a hundred feet to their left hand and proceeding arrow-straight into the heart of doom. Each hundred-foot pedestal played throne-seat to a draconic sentry. They appeared to have been handpicked for sheer, unmitigated ugliness besides the usual excess of belligerence and doubtless, appalling cases of sulphurous halitosis.

Well-guarded would be the understatement of the century.

The Dragons brooded over the near-empty road and a tent camp about halfway down to the right, just beyond the pedestals. As she watched, the beast nearest the camp yawned and expelled a thirty-foot plume of billowing orange fire out over the motley, mismatched collection of dirty tan tents. Yaarah stiffened beneath her. Allory hated to be disloyal to her friend, but that while the Golden Purrmaine could think rings around any beast, they both knew that six-legged onyx hulk could snaffle him up for breakfast without a blink.

She piped, “Did I mention how much I like the idea of a detour?”

Ash ruffled up her hair with a cheeky forefinger. “I heard Sabline thinking just the same thing, can you imagine?”

“That’s the emptiness echoing inside your own head,” the Dragoness grated. “Harzune, what’re you getting through that Faescope?”

He lowered a complex instrument from his eyes, folding up the brass tubes and lens arrays with the ease of long practice. Taut of voice, he said, “One of the flags in the camp belongs to a band of Ormic Low Faerie –” more than a few of the Chameleons hissed furiously “– they’re slavers, probably here to sell their cargo to the Marakusians. They’ve a load concealed in the back of a cart you can just about see behind one of the tents toward the back left of the camp.”

Yaarah hissed lightly, “Ormic Low Fae? Aren’t they reputed to be –”

“Cannibals,” spat several Chameleons. “Fae-flesh eaters.”

Allory breathed, “Suggids! Surely not?”

Judging by the pitying glances directed toward her, not so much. Allory thrust out her hand, wordlessly demanding the Faescope. Harzune had taught her the basics a couple of days before. At the same time, she tried to quantify the peculiar, churning sensation in her gut. Not physical nausea but something akin to it. She tugged at her antennae repeatedly, trying to fight of this sense of unease, of distress, of wrongness. No. Not good. Her fingers drifted over to scratch at the butterfly still emblazoned beside her temple. If she were a Pixie, she would have complained of an allergic prickling of her dust, an affliction common to their kind.

Her shaky hands fumbled the instrument.

“Allory!” Varzune scolded, executing a deft catch. “That’s a priceless antique!”

“No harm done, brofae,” said Harzune, elbowing Varzune neatly out of the way. “Rotate this bezel here, Allory. Adjust here like I showed you, with the left hand –” there went her brain again, evaluating exactly how her hero might stroke her fingers and whisper sap-fizzing endearments into her ear “– and so. Now, taking it from the right edge of the camp, count two tents back … good.”

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“Six million stinking suggids!” Allory swore.

“Shh! A little less on the rumpus, mrrr-prrrt,” Yaarah hissed. “Sound carries out here.”

“Lost it – freaking – there, and … oh my sap!” Softest squeal ever. “They’re – that’s – well, I thought I just saw … something. Suggids. No. Maybe not.”

A golden paw rubbed her back. “Breathe. Assemble coherent sentences. Speak.”

Flushing furiously, Allory spluttered, “I … I thought I saw a sparkle. They have cages, you see, square metal birdcages on the back of that cart, covered in dirty sackcloth. I caught a glimpse just before they secured the tarpaulin.” She pressed her eye to the eyepiece so hard, the metal rim dug into her orbital bone. “I see a group of Marakusians and four Faroon there as well, arguing over something … I think they’re going to fight.”

Ashueli said flatly, “As in, you saw Scintillant sparkle? You’re sure?”

“I – I’m not sure-sure, Ash, but I do have a bad feeling –”

“You have a feeling?”

“Well –”

“We’re warriors. Give us something to work with here, please!”

“Princess Ashueli, that quarrelsome tone is entirely unnecessary,” Harzune interrupted. “Allory Fae is a sensitive, perspicacious soul. With your permission?”

He pried the Faescope from her numb fingers.

Feelings. She makes them sound evil.

Meantime, Sabline interjected, with her usual belligerence, “Princess, she has feelings, grrr-hrrrt, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned to respect, it’s that when Sparkles has an intuition, we had better start watching out for earthquakes, sunbeams and widespread mayhem!”

Well, that made it all better.

The Elf folded her arms crossly. “I am not risking my neck for some –”

“Oh, she’s a goddess!” Harzune mewled.

Everyone stared at him. He, with his eye glued to the eyepiece, had to be caught and held back by four Chameleon Fae as he repeated the line and tried to walk out into the open at the same time. All the sense they could squeeze out of him was that he had glimpsed a girlfae of unknown origins, perhaps the object of the heated discussion, locked in a strange glass bottle or enclosure which had just been kicked over by one of the Marakusian Slavers.

“We have to go save her!” he pleaded. “She’s my muse, my beloved, my all!”

Allory’s sapphire eyebrows shot upward.

Jilted!

“I’m still your hero,” he muttered, subsiding a touch.

Right, and Mauve spouted purple sunbeams that roamed the lands in search of Marakusians to frazzle in their ugly Human juices – which, while improbable, sounded like rather more amusing than it probably should.

Varzune snatched the instrument from his brofae. “Smack my antennae, you gabbling pollen-head! Let the one with actual good sense take over, please. And we have … aye, she called it. A spirited discussion. Can’t see into any of the cages now, mind … no, here we go … oh. Oh, I say! She is rather striking. You are so predictable.”

The hero voiced a decidedly unchivalrous snarl. “Brofae! Don’t you dare –”

“Dark, dusky … hair like glowing coals …”

“Huh?”

The two brofae paused in trying to throttle each other to rapidly work out their prospective love lives. Different girlfae in separate cages, they concluded. Neither of them was called Allory, to someone’s relief, but with Sabline clacking her fangs about the place and complaining of immaturity and an overload of stinking male hormones blowing on the breeze, the discussion over who had seen what and how much quickly subsided. Everyone got down to business.

Five minutes later, their new illusion slithered off down the white road, sweating under the febrile gazes of many Dragons. Three Faroon. Their main actors were deeply unimpressed with the idea, but this pre-prepared Chameleon illusion was once more a paragon of excellence, according to the scholarly one. Yaarah and Sabline walked upright on their hind legs, making for a pair of believably tall and deeply unimpressed snake people. Ashueli tripped along beside them, a supposed Faroon child. Even less impressed. From his position at Allory’s side behind Yaarah’s shoulders, Harzune coached them into producing a more slithering gait. Sabline muttered something about throttling him with his own slithery intestines.

The Golden Purrmaine said quietly, “How much did you see? Was that a Scintillant, Allory?”

“No, but it was sparkle. Maybe. It’s very particular, that silvery-azure glint … I just pray it wasn’t my overactive imagination, Yaarah. You know how much I worry for my family.”

“I do.”

Could it be just another case of wish fulfilment? Phantasms served up by a fractured, irredeemably impaired mind?

She whispered, “If there are others – other Faerie, I mean – we can’t leave them.”

“We need to be very, very careful, drrr-hssst, but we also need to get through those gates. Pretending to be slavers isn’t the most terrible idea.”

Every Fae in the group hissed at Yaarah. Even Ashueli ground her teeth audibly.

“Having slain a couple to take their place,” he added mildly, “killed a few more to emphasise our point, and executed the rest just because they didn’t brush their teeth this morning.”

Muted laughter.

Sabline chuckled murderously, “That’s what I love about you, scholar. So eloquent.”

“And I – mrrwll!”

A frisson ran through his body as he – and everyone else – realised what she had just revealed. The Sable Sabrefang began to growl in humiliation, but as Harzune hissed at everyone to keep the illusion solid, Yaarah added gravely:

“In this declaration we are matched heart, fang and soul, o Sabline-shar-Maranjix Tashkarine Alvar. Let it be known that you alone are the Dragoness who stokes this Felidragon’s most elemental fires, whose regard for this unworthy scholar is daily a fresh revelation, whose love is returned in equal and incandescent measure.”

An exquisite silence pooled about them.

Sabline, it seemed, had lost even the power of a minor mewl.

Allory quivered uncontrollably, her wing edges creating a soft vibration that pervaded her entire body. Had Yaarah not claimed no Felidragon would ever respect him for his scholarly pursuits, preferring the strapping, brash warrior stereotype? Ne’er did the course of a jungle river flow straight. So too the course of love. Just the sweetest ambush ever!

Oops, a touch of leakage around the eyes. Just the dust in the air, she’d swear on her own sap.