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The Will of the Wanderer
The Rose of the Prophet Volume One

by Margaret Weis And Tracy Hickman




Foreword


Look where you will, bold adventurer, for as far as the eye can see, there is nothing.

You stand near the Well of Akhran, a large oasis located in the center of the great Pagrah
desert. This is the last water you will find between here and the Kurdin Sea, which lies to the
east. The rest of the party, delighting in the first signs of life they have seen after two days of
travel through rolling, empty dunes, revels in the shady greenness, lounging beneath the date
palms, dabbling their feet and hands in the cool water that bubbles up from somewhere
underground. You, howeverтАФby nature restless and wanderingтАФare already tired of this
place and pace about, eager to leave and continue your journey. The sun is dipping down in
the west and your guide has decreed that you must spend the night riding, for no one crosses
the stretch of desert to the east, known as the Sun's Anvil, during the hours of daylight.

You look to the south. The landscape unfolds before you, an endless expanse of windswept
granite whose broad, brownish, reddish monotony is occasionally relieved by touches of
green: the feathery-limbed tamarisk, the tall acacia, man-shaped cacti, scrub pine, thorn
trees, and clumps of a silvery-green grass (which your camels love to eat) that springs up in
odd and unexpected places. Continue traveling to the southwest and you will enter the land of
BasтАФa land of contrast, a land of huge cities of vast wealth and primitive tribes, skulking on
the plains.

Glancing to the north, you see more of the same monotonous windswept land. But
well-traveled as you are, you know that if you journey several hundred miles north, you will
eventually leave the desert behind. Entering into the foothills of the Idrith mountains, you
follow a pass between the Idrith and the Kich ranges and arrive at a well-traveled highway
built of wood over which rolls innumerable wagons and carts, all heading still farther north
for the magnificent Kasbah of Khandar, the once-great capital city of the land known as
Tara-kan.

Irritably slapping your camel stick against your leg, you glance about to see that your guides
are loading the girba , the waterskins, onto the camels. It is nearly time to leave. Turning to the
east, you look in the direction you are to travel. The patches of green grow less and less, for
that way lies the eerily singing, shifting white sands, known appropriately as the Sun's Anvil.
Beyond those dunes to the east, so it is told, is a vast and locked oceanтАФthe Kurdin Sea.
Your guide has informed you that it has another name. Among the desert nomads it was
once known scornfully as the Water of the KafirтАФthe unbelieverтАФsince they had never seen
it and therefore assumed that it existed only in the minds of the city-dwellers. Any statement
made within the hearing of a nomad that he believes to be a lie is received with the caustic
remark, "No doubt you drink the Water of the Kafir as well!"