Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1)

by Karen Hancock

  She came to lying on her side, air rasping like fire over her bruised throat. Her lungs craved it, demanded it, and at first she could do nothing but satisfy that demand. As her breathing eased closer to normal, she heard a voice from far off. “Kick … over here.”

  Metal clanked on rock, and something silvery flew across the ground in front of her. She watched Danarin stoop to pick up a sword and dagger. The sword he pitched away somewhere behind her, the metal ringing as it hit the rock.

  “I see you have recognized my trifle,” said Danarin as he slid the dagger left-handed into his own belt. A blossom of blood darkened his dusky red tunic at the right shoulder and he held that arm close to his middle. “I trust you have not forgotten how it feels to be Commanded?”

  “I have not forgotten,” Abramm replied grimly.

  Carissa pushed herself upright to sit braced against the cool sandstone wall. Abramm stood at the midst of the basin against a backdrop of darkly striated rock. Every line of his body was taut, his hands flexed and ready, and though he was now unarmed, Danarin had not relaxed his vigilance.

  “Don’t think you can remove this one as easily as Meridon removed yours,” Danarin went on.

  He was speaking of the necklet, Carissa realized, cold and constricting around her throat.

  “Who are you?” Abramm demanded, his voice as tight and strained as the rest of him.

  Danarin chuckled. “You still do not recognize me, old friend?”

  A cold breath of air shivered through the basin, and the Thilosian’s face seemed to focus, as if it had been blurry before. Suddenly she cringed back against the wall, sick and light-headed with recognition.

  Simultaneously, Abramm recoiled with a hiss. “Rhiad!”

  Is this a nightmare? Carissa wondered. A delusion? Did I fall and hit my head?

  Yet it was Rhiad, bearded, his pigtail shorter, but Rhiad all the same: head of the Order of St. Haverall, Saeral’s right-hand man, and one of the most famous holy men in Springerlan, especially among the court ladies who had long lamented that his stunningly good looks were wasted in service to the Flames.

  Shock paralyzed her as it apparently paralyzed her brother. Danarin- Rhiad-grinned back at them, cradling his injured arm to his waist. Memories scrolled through her head: the Thilosian staring after the White Pretender in the warrens beneath the arena at Xorofin, swooping down to rescue her at the city gates, offering aid, pushing them to follow Abramm’s track, convincing her the Dorsaddi meant to harm him….

  Chagrin and horror welled up in her. And then shame. And anger.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you,” she croaked. “Right from the start, I knew it.”

  Rhiad swung around, eyes wide as he looked down at her. Then he chuckled. “You should have listened to your instincts, my lady.”

  Cooper! Carissa remembered suddenly. What has he done to you? Oh, plagues, what have I done? How could I have been so foolish?

  Misery gave the pain in her throat a knifelike twist.

  “The High Father has been quite concerned about you, Eldrin,” Rhiad said, turning back to Abramm. “I spoke with him earlier today. He is eagerly awaiting our return.”

  Abramm glanced around the basin, golden whiskers bristling at the corner of his jaw. His gaze flicked back to Rhiad, clearly questioning.

  Rhiad smiled. “Surely after all the time you’ve spent down here you have heard of the mystical corridors that traverse the etherworld?” He gestured toward Abramm. “Look behind you.”

  Abramm glanced over his shoulder. A little less than three strides away, the air shimmered in a column of red, undulating threads. When he faced the Haverallan again, his cheeks were a pale, sickly gray.

  Rhiad laughed. “Beltha’adi is not the only one who knows how to use them. We’ll be back in Springerlan before an hour is passed. Soon now, after all this time and heartache, you will get to touch the Holy Flames.”

  “I’ll die before I serve them,” Abramm grated.

  “Oh, I think not. You want too much to live. And the Father would never allow it, anyway. Your conversion will be slow and gentle this time. Although I do not think it will take that long.” He smiled. “Deep down you want everything we have to offer.”

  “I want nothing you have to offer.”

  “No? My friend, you’ve spent two years in close company with that Terstan and still you are unmarked. It’s obvious you don’t want what he has to offer-and rightly so, since it’ll only kill you. Besides. At home you are king now….” He paused to let that sink in. “Yes, Raynen is dead. Threw himself off Graymeer’s Point four months ago. The Crown would’ve gone to you, were you there to receive it. Now Gillard rules in your stead.”

  He pulled a leather pouch from his belt and tossed it at Abramm’s feet. “There’s a vial in there. I want you to drink its contents.”

  Abramm frowned at him.

  Rhiad sighed, and the necklet cut into Carissa’s throat, pain flaring across her world. She dug vainly at the collar, her throat crushed, her lungs once more on fire, the world again spinning wildly. A sharp distant word released the pressure, and when she had recovered enough to take notice again, Abramm was sniffing the vial’s contents suspiciously. “Hockspur?” he asked. “But you already have your hold on me.”

  Rhiad chuckled. “You are the White Pretender, my friend. I’ve seen you fight. Besides, you’ll need it to pass through the etherworld since you have no Guide to shield you. Drink.”

  “No?” Carissa cried, but it came out as one more gasp among many.

  Abramm stared at the Haverallan, lifted the vial—

  And upended it, dumping the contents onto the rock. Then he leapt for Carissa and grabbed at the necklet. Fire seared across her throat, and red light blazed up under her chin. She screamed and wrenched reflexively from his touch even as he jerked his hand back with a cry of his own.

  Something white spun through the air between them and burst upon her brother’s chest, spewing a cloud of lemon-colored smoke into his face. He staggered backward, hands to his eyes, coughing, gasping. Then he crumpled like an empty sack and lay still, the corridor’s faint light shimmering behind him.

  By then she was woozy herself, her mouth filled with a bitter taste, her eyes burning and watering. Through a wavering haze she saw Rhiad kneel at Abramm’s side and withdraw a new vial from his robe. She was shaking, certain her throat had been cut. Tears trickled down her cheeks, and her breath came in ragged, wheezing sobs. A sharp pain burned at her waist-she must have fallen on a rock, though it felt like she had a live coal tied up under her belt.

  But she had no time for hurts. She must do something.

  Using his teeth to unstopper the vial, Rhiad pulled Abramm’s head back, then had to use both hands, one to open her brother’s mouth, the other to pour in the drug. As the vial tilted, she lurched up. But she was weaker than she anticipated and did not move quickly enough. The brown liquid streamed into Abramm’s mouth.

  Panic gave her strength. With a desperate cry she flung herself at Rhiad, bowling him over. Her fingers closed upon the hilt of Abramm’s dagger, tucked into Rhiad’s belt. She started to pull it free—

  Then the vise closed upon her throat, swift and merciless. She lost the dagger and rolled away onto hands and knees. He started to rise. Ignoring the choking pressure at her throat, she drove into him, shoving him as hard as she could toward the shimmering column. He twisted backward, flailing for balance, and toppled half into it. The necklet’s pressure eased at once, enough for her to lurch again and shove him the rest of the way, her hands burningtingling with the proximity of the flickering shaft. A shrill whine pierced her ears, and the column flared bright red mingled with silver. Fire scraped over her nerves, a whirlwind of evil chitterings that sought to turn her inside out. Then a blinding white fire blasted it all into oblivion-sound, light, all of it. Even Rhiad.

  All that remained was a dull, opalescent disk gleaming in the red sand.

  Carissa staggered back, tr
ipping over the weeds and the uneven rock, to fall on her bottom at Abramm’s side. There, her fingers skittering helplessly over the collar she still wore, she gasped for breath and finally gave herself over to bitter weeping.

  C H A P T E R

  40

  As soon as Abramm regained consciousness he began to vomit, and at first that necessity occupied all his thoughts. Once his stomach was emptied, however, and he had backed away from his mess to settle on the sandy slope a little distance below Carissa, he began to remember.

  Rhiad had been here? Disguised as one of Carissa’s retainers. But-how was that possible? And he was certainly not here now. Abramm scanned the bean-shaped basin, seeing clearly there was no way out of it-and that his only company was his sister.

  She knelt beside him and pressed her water bag into his palm. The walls at her back shivered and shifted as if they were melting. He closed his eyes against the dizziness and drank, washing away the awful taste in his mouth.

  Rhiad had been here, had sought to dull his will with hockspur and bring him back to Saeral. Or was it just a dream?

  He opened his eyes and looked at Carissa, sitting now in front of him. Her face was pale, her eyes stained with the dark shadows of fatigue and fear, her neck red beneath the choker with its startling blue-green stone.

  “He’s gone,” she said, and the raw hoarseness of her voice pulled another image from his tangled memory-Carissa gasping at his feet as she clawed at that choker and slowly turned blue. He had grabbed it, was driven off by a flash of searing heat, and remembered nothing more. Was it real, then? Was it not a dream but an actual event? But if Rhiad had been here, where was he now?

  “I pushed him into the corridor,” Carissa offered in that dry-leaves voice, turning to gesture up the sandy slope.

  “Corridor?” His voice came out a low croak, hardly better than hers. And then he recalled that, too-the pillar of red mist that had set his arm afire and was to have taken him to Saeral.

  “Into the etherworld,” she said. “The disk is still over there. Does that mean he can come back?”

  Come back? It was monstrously hard to make his mind work right, as if all his thoughts were drifting through fog.

  She went back to look at the disk, pointing at it just in front of her feet. “I think it might be fading, but I’m not sure.”

  He stood shakily and went to see for himself. His arm twinged with the proximity, not so much with pain as with an awakened energy, an awareness, a drawing of like to like. Surely if Rhiad was able, he would have already returned. But maybe it didn’t work like that.

  In truth, he had no idea how it worked and finally admitted as much.

  “Then we’re trapped,” she said, the fear she was struggling to contain raising the pitch of her poor, hoarse voice.

  He turned from the disk to examine their prison and saw now that it had once been a cistern. Its ceiling had long ago collapsed in the large slabs of red rock that jutted up from the sand. The slit through which they entered might have fed it, or else was formed by other forces, possibly an earthquake. In any case, it was hidden to them now, concealed by Rhiad’s magic, and though Abramm felt carefully over the portion of wall he suspected was not real, he could find no sign of it. He even tried throwing himself against the striated surface, hoping to break through the illusion as Trap had pulled him through in the tunnels outside Xorofin. To no avail. The image was as substantial as it was indiscernible from the reality, and all he did was hurt his shoulder.

  At last he stopped trying and went to stand beside his sister, who had settled on the ground not far away to watch.

  “So now what do we do?” she murmured.

  He scanned the curving russet walls, the low, woolly ceiling. “I don’t know.”

  Walking a circuit of their prison, probing his fingers along the walls produced no more than his attempts to find the entry slit, nor did it reveal to him any other means of escape. He returned to Carissa, seated at the basin’s lower end, and sat beside her.

  But only for a moment. Then he was up again, trying to climb the smooth face of the cistern where the walls curved over the least. That did not work, so he tried piling the sand higher against the wall in a likely spot. That, too, proved futile. In between he returned repeatedly to the place where he knew the slit to be, always finding nothing but solid rock, though he bruised his shoulder in the effort.

  Finally, exhausted and boiling with frustration, he sank down beside Carissa again. Not to give up, he assured himself, only to rest while he thought of some other tack. In the day’s uncharacteristic warmth, he had long since removed his outer robe and headcloth. Now sweat drenched his tunic and dribbled down his face as thunder rumbled in the distance, harbinger of the imminent rains. Once the skies opened, the channels in these rocks would roil with hundreds of small rivers and streamlets. It wouldn’t take long for this cistern to fill. Perhaps the water would lift them enough to climb out.

  But that supposed there would be a place to climb out to, where they wouldn’t get washed away. That supposed it would not be churning so viciously with all the incoming streams they’d be unable to keep their heads afloat. It supposed … far too many variables to control.

  The overwhelming sense of his own stupidity and helplessness held him in its teeth, wrenching his middle and filling his throat till he could hardly breathe. The mist and rock mocked him with their impenetrable, imperturbable faces. It seemed impossible that this could have happened-bizarre, unthinkable, and infuriatingly unfair. It made him want to shout and hit things. And when he thought that soon Trap would be facing Beltha’adi in Jarnek’s amphitheater-if he wasn’t already-he could hardly bear it. That was a battle Abramm should be fighting-a battle he had been brought here to fight. He was as sure of that as he was of anything in his life.

  And he wondered now, with the cool clarity of hindsight, why he’d ever felt so compelled to leave. Yes, the rains would make travel impossible for another month, but what was a month after two years?

  Beltha’adi had challenged him, not Trap.

  All the hot rage he’d felt for Gillard, all the searing thirst for justice that had birthed the urgency to get back to Kiriath had somehow vanished. He was left empty and perplexed, as if the man who’d felt all that and let it dictate his choices was someone else entirely. He rubbed the ovoid scar on his wrist, feeling a slight twinge. Trap had explained the spore’s function to him once. He’d not paid much attention because he’d counted it more of the man’s Terstan babble. Now all he could recall was something about its ability to affect-even invade-the mind, churning up an inward mist of thoughts and passions so as to obscure any clear perception of the truth.

  The truth that he’d had no business leaving. The truth that under all the talk and fierce lust for vengeance he’d simply been running away. Yes, part of him still desired that vengeance. And it appalled him to think of Carissa caught in the horrible, savage chaos that was almost certain to erupt in Jarnek this afternoon. But those were not the real reasons he left.

  The real reason, the truth he had not wanted to see, was that on some deep level he’d known that if he did not flee now, he would very shortly be changed-profoundly and irrevocably. If he did not fill his mind with thoughts of vengeance and glory and obligation and run away, he would have to look squarely into the light of the Terstan star, into the credibility of the Terstan claims—

  And perhaps into the face of his own pride.

  “You want it to be about you. Your sacrifice, your efforts to make yourself worthy.”

  It was true. And yet it seemed with every decision he’d made, every action he took, he’d only made himself more unworthy. Almost as if he couldn’t help himself, almost as if some part of him insisted upon showing him how weak and helpless he was. Now he was trapped like a fish in a bowl, every good thing he might have accomplished wrenched from his grasp. He couldn’t deliver the Dorsaddi, couldn’t deliver Carissa, couldn’t deliver Kir- iath-couldn’t even deliver himself.<
br />
  He dropped his head back against the wall and shut his eyes, letting the shame and self-contempt wash over him in wave after bitter wave. How ironic, he thought, that I finally see the truth and it’s too late.

  A strange sound penetrated his misery. He looked around, frowning, and when the sound repeated a moment later, he realized it was Carissa. She was sitting at his side, arms crossed on bent knees, forehead dropped on her arms, and she was weeping unrestrainedly. After a moment he laid a hand on her back. “It’s okay, Riss,” he murmured awkwardly. “We’ll be okay.”

  The lie lay bitter on his tongue.

  She shook her head. “No, we won’t. You were right. I never should’ve come. Everything I’ve done, every way I’ve tried to help-it’s just made more trouble for you! If not for me you wouldn’t be here, and now you’re going to die, and it’s all my fault.”

  “Hey, no.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known who he was.”

  “That’s just it.” She lifted her head, wiped her eyes with a trembling hand, and looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was swollen and blotched. “I never trusted him. It’s just … I thought he was the king’s man.” Her mouth spasmed, and the tears welled again as she turned away from him. “I was so afraid for you.”

  `Afraid for me?”

  She wiped her cheeks again. “That you’d … that they’d make you face Beltha’adi.” Her voice trembled at first, then strengthened as she looked skyward at the churning mists. “Ormah Fah’lon said you’d have to do it. That even though the Esurhites were afraid, they wouldn’t break rank unless you stood against him. And then … well, they were all Terstans, and I … I just wanted to get you away, free again. Free to choose your own life. And all I did was … oh, Abramm, I am so sorry.”

  He pulled her toward him and she came, letting herself be comforted in his arms. But her words echoed in his mind.

  “Choose your own life.”

  Choose. He snorted inwardly. Well, I guess I’ve chosen, haven’t I?