“Yes. That is Hawk Haven. Inland. Near the city called Eagle’s Nest.”
Ynamynet shook her head in consternation. “I was afraid of that. There is no active gate in Hawk Haven.”
Firekeeper’s dark-brown eyes met Blind Seer’s blue, not so much to ask his advice, as to tell him what she planned to do before she did it. When he did not growl, Firekeeper breathed out a deep sigh.
“There is a gate. A gate that works. We found it some moonspans back, but we did not tell you what we had found.”
VIII
IF THERE’S A way out of here, Laria thought, it’s going to be where the wreckage is the worst. That’s where there would have been windows. That’s where there would have been doors. Kabot’s people aren’t thinking straight. Or maybe they don’t really care about getting out. Maybe all they care about is finding whatever it is they’re after. Then they’ll just magic themselves away. If I don’t want to be magicked away with them, then I need a door or a window. I could probably find where one was with my talent, but then what?
Laria realized that even if she did figure out where a door or window was located, she probably couldn’t burrow her way out. Who knew how deeply underground they were? Hopelessness started to creep up on her again. If she were Firekeeper, she’d take down all three of these, sorcerers or not, then probably dig her way out through solid rock.
No. Not even Firekeeper could do that. Not really. Oh, the Rhinadeians might not be a problem for her, but Firekeeper would be just as trapped as Laria was. The difference was, Firekeeper could at least put the sorcerers on the defensive, and Laria couldn’t. She looked longingly over to where Volsyl was heaped with the rest of the sparse equipment, but she knew that even a magical sword wouldn’t solve her problems.
Am I really so pathetic that I’m just going to sit here and let myself be used as a blood source? I can’t fight them, not like Firekeeper would, but surely I can do something.
As she nervously twisted her fingers through the leather lacing of her boot, a memory spoke in Laria’s head: her mother, Ikitata, telling Laria the hard, cold truths of being a slave on the Nexus Islands.
“You’re of an age now, Laria, when one of the Spell Wielders is likely to take notice of you. You won’t have a choice about that. What you will have is a choice as to how you’ll handle it. They’re powerful. Yes. They hold us captive. Yes. But never forget, no matter how horrific some of them look, they’re human, too. You can use that humanity not so much against them as for you. If you can make them see you as another person, that may protect you, especially if you’re lucky enough to be adopted by one of those who wants to be liked.”
Laria felt the beginnings of hope. She’d been so lost in past terrors that she’d forgotten how very different her situation was from what she had faced in her childhood. Kabot scared her but, the other two… She forced herself to shove aside the words she’d let cover them with an intimidating aura—spellcasters, powerful, captors—and look at what else they were. Rhinadeians. Rebels. Refugees. They might be her captors, but they were being hunted by people who wouldn’t stop. Deep down, Daylily and Uaid had to know that when Kabot had taken Laria prisoner, he’d sealed their fate. If Laria didn’t want to find herself once again a hostage with a knife at her throat, then she had to do what she could to make the concept repugnant to Uaid or Daylily—both if possible. And soon. Kabot had awakened briefly, then collapsed again, but Laria had a feeling that the next time he came around, he’d be asserting himself more.
Laria shoved herself onto her feet. Uaid and Daylily looked over from where they’d been focusing on some aspect of cookery. Now that she had put her own fear aside, Laria saw how worried they were. She could use that.
“I’m hungry,” she said. Not whining. Just stating a fact. She walked over to where they’d set up camp. “I’m really, really hungry.”
Uaid looked guilty. Daylily swiveled, reached into her pack, and took out a large fruit, somewhat like a fig, overly ripe and definitely bruised.
“Eat it slowly,” Daylily said. “We don’t have much.”
Laria took the fig from Daylily’s hand, trying to look trusting, although every nerve she possessed screamed for her to run. “Thank you.” She looked down at her feet, then began to slowly back away. She stopped mid-shuffle.
“Water? Please?”
This time Uaid responded, reaching for a tin camping cup and filling it, not from the seep, but from a canteen. “This has been purified. It’s safe to drink.”
Laria accepted the cup, shuffled back a couple more steps, then hunkered down. After she had eaten a few bites of the fruit and washed it down with water, she said, very softly, “Are we stuck here? Can he”—she looked over at Kabot and shivered—“get us out?”
The “we” and “us” had been carefully chosen to make a connection between herself and the other two, while separating Kabot into his own group. These were Rhinadeian. Rebels or not, from what she’d overheard when she’d first awakened, Daylily at least wasn’t pleased with how Kabot had used Laria.
There was a long silence during which Laria nibbled more of the overripe fig. Eventually, Daylily said, “We’ll get out of here. I’m certain.”
Laria looked around. Young and helpless was one thing, but stupid. No. She didn’t want to be taken for stupid.
“I think the door must be there, don’t you?” She pointed to the largest heap of dirt. “Where I grew up, there are lots of ruins. You get to know the look. Since the ceilings are fine, there has to be some other reason for all the dirt, right? A weak spot, like a door that was pushed open by a collapse.”
She let her momentary enthusiasm ebb to embarrassment. “Uh… I mean, sorry. Just because I think the door is there doesn’t mean it goes anywhere. Sorry.”
Uaid rose from where he’d been sitting and stretched his fingers. Laria froze, wondering if she’d overestimated how guilty these Rhinadeians felt about how she’d been treated, and she was about to be hit, but Uaid all but ignored her as he strode over to the largest mound of dirt.
“It can’t hurt to check,” he said, his tone so deliberately casual that Laria realized that she’d embarrassed him.
Careful. Careful. Embarrassed people are dangerous.
Laria had already gathered that Uaid’s magic was centered on earth and stone. She’d heard about such magics—Urgana’s deceased sister, Ellabrana, had been an earth mage, and her work was ubiquitous on the Nexus Islands—but she’d never seen an earth mage at work. She decided it was all right to seem interested, as long as she seemed awed as well.
Uaid began by burying his hands up to the wrists in the pile of dirt and rubble. He closed his eyes and began to murmur. Laria knew he was vulnerable now and Daylily was distracted, but she made no move. What good would attacking them do her? Even if she was successful, that would just leave her trapped here, with no one to stand between her and Kabot. And if she managed to… eliminate… Kabot? She’d still be trapped. Laria believed with all her heart that Firekeeper and the rest would try to find her, but she’d seen how hard it was to trace the rebels. Finding her could take days. Or longer. After all, this time they wouldn’t have her to read the surroundings for clues.
Laria watched in unfeigned fascination as Uaid began moving his hands through the rubble and dirt, something he did as easily as if it were water. Even when he pushed his arm in up to the shoulder, moved it back and forth, up and down, only a few little bits of dirt were shaken loose. Then his expression changed. He began to move his arm lower and lower in the pile, obviously homing in on something.
But if it’s the door, why so low? Maybe it was shut when the building collapsed and part broke?
“Daylily,” Uaid said, his tone so deliberately nonchalant that he might as well have been shouting, “I’d like your opinion on something. Come here, tell me… Well, just tell me.”
Looking distinctly puzzled, Daylily trotted over to where Uaid was. She waited until Uaid had pulled his arm free, stood up, an
d was in a position to keep an eye on Laria. Then, humming a few bars of something Laria thought Arasan would immediately want to set lyrics to, she began making shapes in the air over and around the pile of rubble and dirt. She started at eye level but, like Uaid, ended up sinking down until her examination was focused on an area close to floor level. When she rose to her feet, her leaf-green eyes were shining.
“I felt it, too! The next thread is there, buried under all that rubble.”
“I think there’s a door, too,” Uaid said, giving Laria a polite nod of acknowledgement. “Should we wait for Kabot to come around?”
The reply came from a voice thick and rusty with sleep, but far more powerful than it had been before.
“No need. I’m awake.”
“A gate to Hawk Haven!”
“Are you certain?”
“You didn’t tell any of us? Not even Derian?”
The outcry was general. Firekeeper waited until it stilled before speaking.
“Truth showed us and only us, and when Truth does this, perhaps telling is not the best thing. Now, we can wait and chatter, or we can go find Laria.”
“Where is the gate?” Ynamynet asked.
Firekeeper replied, “On the mainland, not too far from the Setting Sun Stronghold, but not part of it. Come with us, if you wish, and see it. We told King Tedric we would keep it a secret, but I think he would understand that now, with a pack member taken by blood mages, we cannot keep the secret entirely.”
“King Tedric?” Like all the Nexus Islanders, Ynamynet had heard many stories about the elderly king of Hawk Haven, Derian’s homeland, as well as the first human land Firekeeper had visited. “He asked you to keep it a secret?”
Blind Seer rose and padded over to the conference room door. He reared up on his hind legs, pushed down on the lever, then shoved the door open. Firekeeper didn’t feel she needed to translate.
“We go. If you want to see, to know, then come with us.”
They did, of course, stopping only to gather up their packs, say quick good-byes, and, in Firekeeper’s case, make a quick dash over to the blacksmith. For this trip they left Rusty behind because, if all went well, they would not need their foodstuffs and camping gear. If something went wrong, they did not want to strand the goat.
At the Setting Sun Stronghold, Firekeeper ducked into a storeroom and returned with a long ladder. Ynamynet raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t comment. Although Wythcombe and Kalyndra both had questions, Firekeeper refused to go into any details until they were hiking through the forest toward where the gate was hidden. Then, trusting to Blind Seer’s and Farborn’s sharper senses to detect any predators crazed enough to attack such a large group at midday, she launched into her account.
When Firekeeper finished relating how she and Blind Seer had found the gate, and how it had taken them to the ruins of what appeared to be a school of some sort, she paused. There had been surprisingly few questions, which didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. After all, she’d left out the complicated part.
“Do I tell them about the statue?” she asked Blind Seer.
“Yes. And not for the reasons you think you should,” the great grey wolf responded. “I think I know why it acted the way it did. And I think it may still be a problem.”
A human would have asked why, but wolf speech was as much gesture as it was sound or scent. As he had spoken, Blind Seer had moved his shoulders in a fashion that drew her attention to Hohdoymin’s necklace, which he still wore. Maybe because the many little charms and beads dispersed its weight, maybe because it was as much woven as strung, the necklace did not sink through his scruff and hackles, but rested slightly atop the dense fur, as if borne up on the lightest of breezes. When Blind Seer shrugged, Firekeeper realized what he meant. Though her breath came short, she began to explain.
“Once through the gate, we went through several doors. Outside of one we found a rounded room with some doors off of it, and a stairway going up. There was also much rubble and places where ceilings or walls had given way. But time had made the unstable stable, so we explore. You see, then we did not yet know where the gate had taken us, and we thinked we should learn this. While we were checking the nearest room, making sure our backs were safe before we went up the stair, we were attacked.”
“Attacked?” Ranz blurted out. “But you said the place seemed deserted.”
“And so it was,” Firekeeper replied, hearing not disbelief but how caught up in those moonspans-old events the young man had become. “What attacked us was a statue that came to life and tried to make us dead. In the end, we did not so much make it dead as make it weak. When it was down and Blind Seer held it with his weight, I tied it with both ropes and with wire. Then we buried it beneath the largest of the heaps of rubble and piled both stones and timbers on top of it. We telled King Tedric, too, and his bodyguard, and we all think that this is enough.”
Blind Seer said, “Translate for me, dearest,” and continued, Firekeeper speaking his words nearly as quickly as he shaped them. “At the time, I only recognized the scent as that of old magic, sleeping until wakened by whatever need had been set to direct it. Now”—here he shook slightly, so that the charms and beads of Hohdoymin’s necklace caught the light—“as a pup learns how an elk and a deer may smell alike but not be the same, I know what that scent is like. It is close kin to the coins hidden within this necklace, to the charm Kabot took from Azure Towers.”
“So you believe,” Wythcombe said slowly, “that not only will this gate take us to Hawk Haven, it will take us to where Kabot and the others went.”
“And,” Firekeeper agreed somberly, “if they have traveled as they did from Azure Towers to Tey-yo, following the scent trail of the artifact they found, then they will have grabbed the scent of the artifact and be there ahead of us.”
“I was getting to that,” Wythcombe said, his tone calm but his scent as sour as that of an old snapping turtle disturbed when enjoying a warm mud bath. “Blind Seer, because we’ve all been so worried about Laria, I have not asked you for the charm you took from Hohdoymin. Now, especially that we’re closing on Kabot, I think it would be wise for you to give it to me.”
Blind Seer panted what those closest to him knew as laughter, but the way he pinned his ears back also gave warning. “I think not,” he was saying, and Firekeeper translated for him, although she thought any but a blind idiot would understand the meaning. “I won this prize, and I will keep it. Unless you think you can take it from me.”
He growled then, deep in his throat, and this time Firekeeper did not bother to translate.
Let Daylily and Uaid waste time trying to figure out how to cook cave crickets and what fungi might be safe to eat, Kabot thought derisively as he sank deep into meditation. That just shows they’re already beaten, trapped within the limits of their own imaginations. Who cares if we have enough to eat? We’re not staying here long enough to starve.
“Yours,” said the Voice, “are the thoughts of those who have the capacity to change the future. There are reasons you were the first among your company to whom I was drawn. The others, yes. They have vision, but it’s more limited, and so more easily defeated.”
Kabot grinned what Wythcombe had always called his “fox in the henhouse” grin. The phrase hadn’t been precisely meant as a compliment, but they’d been parting ways even then.
“Uaid and Daylily said they hadn’t been able to reach you,” he said, not precisely asking a question, but the Voice replied as if it had been one nonetheless.
“I was less available than I am now, and, as I said, I have always found it easier to talk with you. I’m not sure what they would have asked me.”
“Almost certainly where we are,” Kabot responded, trying to seem as if he didn’t care. “That’s the first thing Daylily asked me. The second would probably have been if there was a way out. I haven’t examined the room closely, but we seem to be in yet another set of ruins.”
“Are you surprised? I
told you that Sykavalkay had been separated into parts and those parts taken to different lands to be studied. This was before the curse. As I told you, all facilities dedicated to the practice of magic, up to and including the homes of many sorcerers, were destroyed in the upheaval that followed the curse. Surely you don’t expect to find yourself in a tidy palace.”
“That might be nice,” Kabot retorted, then sighed. “Or not, because it would mean that one of the newly reawakening sorcerers in this post-curse age might have found one of the threads. How could a wolf have realized what Teyvalkay was? I suppose it’s too much to hope that he was just wearing that necklace on some whim of his mistress—Firekeeper, I think I heard her called.”
“Don’t underestimate Blind Seer,” the Voice chided. “I have heard it said that he may be among the most rawly gifted of the post-curse spellcasters. He lacks training, though, and that is to your advantage.”
“I’m glad we have some advantage,” Kabot countered. “They have Teyvalkay. We have Palvalkay, so we’re even there.”
“Not even,” the Voice assured him. “As I said, Blind Seer lacks training. He also has—peculiar as this may seem to you—an aversion to blood magic. Since Sykavalkay was created by one who accepted the use of blood magic, the threads respond most rapidly when blood magic is employed.”
“I wondered if that’s why I don’t have the usual post-overextension hangover,” Kabot mused. “Did I bring us where the next thread is?”
“Xixavalkay,” the Voice said. “Named using an abbreviation for the Tishiolan name of the third major landmass. Why don’t you check? You have Palvalkay, and you have learned a great deal about how to detect other threads by the resonance between them.”
Kabot reached. Xixavalkay was so close that its aura struck him like a blow. Indeed, he was looking so hard that he sensed something else.
Wolfs Soul Page 21