“I thought the holy lady would have you cured by now,” she said, frowning as he fought back another cough.
“The infection is entrenched. But don’t worry, my heart. I shall be here when you return.” He touched two fingertips to her still-flat belly. “Both of you.”
She placed her hand over his. “Does it please you?”
“It’s the best news we’ve had since coming to Inath-Wakenti. Does it please you?”
He knew how profoundly stunned she’d been by the priestess’s revelation, how hard it was for her to imagine having a child. Her expression reflected her continuing uncertainty, and he sought to reassure her.
“Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid!” she insisted. “Well, not much.”
She bent and kissed his forehead. As soon as she moved away from him, Truthanar hurried across the tent, ready to offer his arm if support was required. With the brief audience at an end, Gilthas was confined to bed for a few hours of rest.
Kerian caught up to the others as they headed out of camp. They were traveling on foot. Neither Kerian nor Hytanthas wanted to risk making their griffons targets for another thunderbolt, and every horse was needed by the cavalry. Tracking the elusive Faeterus would be more practical on foot anyway. Stealth was more important than speed. Their best hope of overcoming the sorcerer was to take him by surprise.
The trio headed toward the dawn sky. The Lioness had a general idea of where they should start looking, based on the origin of the lightning hurled at her, and she set a steady pace, one they could maintain all day. They put some distance between themselves and the sprawling camp, the exercise chasing away the morning chill. They shed their light cloaks.
As she tucked her cloak into her small pack, Kerian gave Hytanthas a considering look. “You have an admirer,” she said. He answered with a blank look. “The scribe. Vixona.”
“She’s not my type,” he said brusquely.
She snorted. “What is your type?”
Rather than responding with a jest, the young captain took a deep breath and blurted, “You saved my life in the tunnels, Commander.”
The seeming non sequitur confused her. She hadn’t been present when he’d told the Speaker the full story of his adventures in the tunnels. She knew only the bare outline. Hytanthas explained the sound of her voice had brought him back from certain death, waking him when so many others had never opened their eyes again.
She shrugged. “The Speaker has said my battlefield voice can cut down small trees. But no one’s ever likened me to a holy chorus.”
He insisted he hadn’t imagined it, that he would be lying dead in that tunnel if not for hearing her voice. She started to make another joke, but something in his expression stopped her. It wasn’t simple obstinacy she saw there. When his eyes slid away from her questioning look and a blush reddened his face, the quick-witted Lioness knew all she needed.
“Vixona is an intelligent girl. Don’t squander that. Be grateful for the gifts of chance.”
“Spoken like a general,” Hytanthas said sourly.
“Spoken as one who has more love than she ever deserved.”
Taranath, who’d been ranging ahead, doubled back and joined them. Hytanthas’s face was still flushed, and Taranath asked if something was wrong.
“It seems I have an admirer.”
With that cryptic declaration, Hytanthas shifted the conversation to his griffon’s well-being. Kerian watched him surreptitiously while he and Taranath talked, finally nodding to herself. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with an infatuated junior officer, and she knew that in time Hytanthas would be fine.
The disk of the sun was lifting above the mountains ahead. The Lioness quickened their pace toward the shadowed peaks.
* * * * *
Favaronas once more was kicked awake. He’d been deep in a heavy, dreamless slumber, but arose without protest. It amazed how quickly one became accustomed to such battering, how pathetically grateful one could be to have the use of legs, eyes, and mouth.
“Get up the mountainside,” Faeterus told him. “Don’t come down until I say you can.”
Faeterus had created a fence of parchment, chest high and mounted on tree branches, that arced behind the central pedestal at the far end of the ledge. He had painted the parchment with the clear liquid he’d made from silver compounded with other ingredients. Favaronas’s assistance was not required. Faeterus had to do the work himself, and every inch of the scroll must be saturated. Now Favaronas must leave the dying fire and remove himself from the Stair. The slightest stray shadow might ruin the sorcerer’s efforts.
The spot to which Favaronas was banished was a narrow spire of rock a few yards above the Stair. It was still in deep shadow. He shivered, hugging his arms close. The western mountains were gilded by sunlight. Above, the sky changed from indigo to dark rose to pale blue, and was streaked with high, dry clouds. Faeterus stood atop the pedestal, arms raised high. The sleeves of his robe slid back, revealing narrow wrists and forearms tufted with red-brown hair. Favaronas looked away. Like all full-blooded elves, he had no body hair and found the sight repellant. Faeterus recited a brief conjuration then crossed his arms over his chest and bowed toward the valley.
The sun peered over the mountain behind them. When half its disk was showing, golden light struck the array of monoliths. They glowed steadily as the sun cleared the peak. Faeterus was shouting, flinging ancient Silvanesti words skyward in rapid succession. Favaronas had to avert his eyes from the brilliance of the monoliths, so he stared at the parchment. He couldn’t make out any changes to the long tail of paper, but Faeterus continued his exhortation until the monuments lost their fire completely. Then he climbed down off the pedestal and gestured curtly for Favaronas to descend as well.
Drawing near the parchment, Favaronas could see black streaks had formed on its pristine surface. They resembled scorch marks, and he could feel a faint heat coming off the scroll. Even as he stared, the diffuse marks focused and became more distinct.
“Don’t touch it!” Faeterus barked, and Favaronas, who’d had no intention of touching the scroll, quickly backed away.
The sorcerer moved sideways along the length of the parchment, studying the darkening marks. He held his ragged robe close to his body to keep the fabric from touching the scroll. Although his face was buried in the robe’s deep hood, his gasps and exclamations as he beheld the metamorphosing parchment made his satisfaction plain.
“What does it mean?” asked Favaronas, keeping his voice low and deferential.
“I can’t say yet. The result requires study.”
“But what is it for, master?”
“You call yourself a scholar! You know nothing, like the rest of your kind!” Faeterus made a sweeping gesture, still careful not to touch the parchment. “This is the secret of Inath-Wakenti, the testament of the Lost Ones. When I have deciphered it, I shall acquire the ultimate power of this place!”
“Power left by the dragonstones?”
Hardly had the words left his lips than he wished them unsaid. Faeterus advanced on him with unexpected alacrity. A wave of one hand knocked the archivist flat on his back.
“What do you know of such things?” Faeterus hissed.
“Only the legends any elf knows of the Pit, master,” gabbled Favaronas. “The Pit of Nemith-Otham.”
The hood regarded him for several heart-pounding seconds then turned away. “You know nothing. And you have no need to think. Only to do as I say.”
Faeterus turned away and began rolling up the long scroll. Marveling that he still possessed his limbs and senses, Favaronas sat up. He wanted desperately to beg the sorcerer to release him. The stone scrolls were dust. Favaronas wouldn’t be needed to read them. Faeterus had what he wanted, his key to the valley’s secrets. What possible use could Favaronas be to him? What possible threat could one exhausted, starved librarian pose? None and none. Perhaps if he asked in just the right manner, with enough grove
ling deference, perhaps Faeterus would let him go.
“I’ll not be letting you go,” Faeterus said, and laughed at Favaronas’s expression. “Discerning your thoughts hardly requires a seer. They are written on your face. I have one final use for you, elf spawn. Every good conjuration requires a test subject. You shall be the first to feel the effects of my new power the first to be destroyed. Then I will know I have succeeded.”
Fresh horror coursed through Favaronas. Up until that moment he’d told himself Faeterus would release him when his usefulness had ended. That comforting fiction could no longer be maintained. He was marked for destruction. There was nothing left to lose.
Favaronas turned and ran.
Faeterus watched, all emotion lost beneath the smothering layers of his robe. He waited until Favaronas was within a few yards of the edge of the Stair then lifted his hand. Favaronas’s legs jerked together, his ankles fused, and down he went, rolling over and over. When he fetched up against a low outcropping of stone, he discovered his mouth was sealed.
Gravel crunching underfoot warned him of Faeterus’s approach. Even from twenty yards, the sorcerer’s voice carried with astonishing clarity.
“Don’t be so impatient to meet your destiny, elf spawn. You cannot change your fate.”
Tears coursed from Favaronas’s eyes. Faeterus had left him his sight, and he watched in abject terror as his tormentor slowly closed the distance between them.
“It would be easy to let you die on your belly here. But your death can serve a higher purpose. I wish I could exchange you for the Speaker of the Sun and Stars, but he’s unlikely to put himself in my hands. You are the only elf spawn I have, so you will have to do.”
A careless wave of one hand freed Favaronas’s legs, and he was commanded to stand. “Clear away the stones and branches that held the scroll. Prepare a fire. I will not rest until I have penetrated the meaning of the key.”
And so it went. Faeterus sat with the scroll on his lap. He unrolled a portion, studied it, then advanced it to peruse a new section. They had no water, and Faeterus didn’t partake of his disgusting victuals. He simply sat and studied the scroll. Favaronas collected wood for a large campfire. Deliberately he kindled it near the front edge of the ledge so the flames and smoke would be more easily visible in the valley, and he loaded the fire with green wood and rotten windfall branches to thicken the smoke. If Faeterus recognized his prisoner’s stratagem, he did nothing about it.
Usually Faeterus avoided direct sunlight, keeping to the shadows like some hulking insect, but not today. He remained where he was, hunched over the parchment as the sun rose higher, bathing the Stair in heat. Often Favaronas could hear him mumbling and muttering, and occasionally he would burst out with sudden vigor, shouting unintelligible phrases, then lapse back into more subdued gibbering. Favaronas could make no sense of any of it. The words sounded like Elvish but larded with unintelligible phrases and garbled by a truly barbarous accent. Favaronas couldn’t tell whether Faeterus was reading the foul-sounding stuff from the scroll or simply talking to himself. Frankly, he no longer cared. His lust for knowledge and his resolve to stop Faeterus had died beneath the sorcerer’s effortless cruelty. All he wanted was to escape and warn his people. Perhaps the Speaker could send his warriors to overcome the sorcerer. Maybe it was already too late. For all Favaronas knew, Faeterus could be reciting his final conjuration at that moment.
As he struggled to yank dead wood from a narrow roc crevice, he tried to remember the verse Faeterus had recite from the ancient scroll. He had an excellent memory, trained by decades of practice. He ceased trying to free the piece of dead wood and closed his eyes, allowing the words to echo again in his memory.
The sun’s eye grows dark. No moon loves him. The stars sleep and answer not the night. Until The father holds the key in his hand,
standing before the Door
And reads the Holy Key.
Did the first line mean the release of the valley’s power had to take place after sunset?
From the Stair of Distant Vision
under the sun’s black eye
The Door is opened. The Light revealed
“Sun’s black eye” sounded like an eclipse, but there were no eclipses expected for many months.
Burns all, consumes all, kills all
Favaronas shuddered. That certainly sounded like a goal Faeterus would embrace.
Unwraps the flower, cracks the egg
Pulls the seed from the ground.
If the Holy Key is broken.
More obscurity. If the Holy Key was “broken” (whatever that meant), would life be restored or forever blotted out?
Although Favaronas didn’t know it, his theories about the valley were running along the same lines as his Speaker’s: that it was the location of the Pit of Nemith-Otham, where five dragon- stones containing the essence of five evil dragons had been buried. The stones had been dug up later, but Favaronas thought it logical that their power could infect the area where they had lain.
The walk back to the bonfire was a long one. Every strike of his heel jarred like a blow. Faeterus had stopped mumbling. He sat silent, chin on his chest. Favaronas’s footsteps slowed, grew more stealthy. If Faeterus were asleep, he might have a chance to get away. He circled wide of the unmoving sorcerer and wondered how to dispose quietly of the wood cradled in his arms.
“Put it on the fire.”
He jerked in surprise, dropping several pieces of wood. He snatched them up and deposited the entire bundle next to the fire.
“Fall down,” Faeterus said, quite matter-of-fact, and all feeling left Favaronas’s legs. He dropped flat on his back. His legs weren’t fused together, but they were paralyzed. Unable to sit up, he rolled over onto his stomach and began dragging himself across the rock ledge. Faeterus chuckled.
“Save your strength. Before the sun sets again, you will see the greatest release of power since the Cataclysm. You wouldn’t want to miss that. As a royal archivist of Qualinesti, surely you want to witness firsthand the final obliteration of the elf race?”
The paralysis in Favaronas’s legs was creeping upward. His belly went numb. With a last, desperate heave, he rolled himself onto his back so he might see the brilliant sky before all went dark.
* * * * *
“Do you see smoke?”
Kerian and Taranath were taking a short rest, leaning against a low monolith. Hytanthas’s question brought them to their feet. He was returning from filling their water bottles at a nearby spring. All three shaded their eyes and looked high up on the mountainside.
“That’s our target,” Kerian declared.
Taranath was skeptical. “How can you know? Anyone could’ve made that fire.”
“Faeterus thinks he’s killed the khan’s bounty hunter,” she said. Taranath had told her of his patrol’s rescue of Robien, from Faeterus’s magical trap. “He’s finally begun whatever it was he came here to do, so he doesn’t care whether the Speaker’s warriors find him either.”
Her logic was good but not impeccable. The Nerakan soldier they’d found in the tunnels might have comrades, Hytanthas suggested, and the fire might be their doing. The Lioness’s certainty was unshaken. The Nerakan was a professional warrior; if he had comrades, they wouldn’t be so careless with a campfire.
That convinced Hytanthas. He was eager to press on as quickly as possible, but Kerian urged caution.
“You just said he might have begun what he came here to do!” Hytanthas protested. “We have to stop him!”
“We will but not by exhausting ourselves. A steady pace maintained through the night will get us to the source of the smoke by midday tomorrow.”
Hungry and strained as they were, an all-night march was not a pleasant prospect, but Taranath and Hytanthas did not object. What had to be done would be done.
Kerian shouldered her bedroll. “I’ll take the lead.” She strode off among the gaunt trees and standing stones.
The smoke was a beac
on rising in clear view of the entire valley. Skulking through the underbrush, Prince Shobbat had come to the same conclusion as Kerian: only Faeterus would be arrogant enough to declare his presence with a bonfire. Since the priestess’s magical hand had thrown him several miles providentially in the right direction, the prince had a lead on the laddad expedition. He knew they were not far behind him, having first smelled then heard them. He also detected the teeming laddad camp, farther back, and tasted the pines and cedars, vines and wild sage all around him. It was quite dizzying, having the senses of a beast.
He broke into a trot, anxious to reach Faeterus first. If Kerianseray caught the sorcerer, Shobbat would never be able to extract the necessary counterspell to undo his transformation. He would spend the rest of his miserable life as a beast. That was not the destiny promised him by the Oracle of the Tree.
He pondered how to convince Faeterus to release him from the spell. The sorcerer was accustomed to life in Khuri-Khan. His sojourn in the lifeless vale would likely make him all the more eager to have his position restored. Shobbat could offer him a place at court, an estate of his own, any amount of money-as soon as Shobbat had taken his rightful place as khan. If that didn’t sway him, Shobbat would dismember him, piece by piece, until he agreed.
His lips curled in a snarl. Maybe he should start with dismemberment and to the Abyss with trying to buy the sorcerer’s aid. Why waste treasure and privilege on an untrustworthy mage? Pain and terror were far better inducements. He would leave just enough of Faeterus alive to remove the curse then rend him to bits.
Another pair of eyes beheld the smoke rising from the side of Mount Rakaris. They were rimmed with tears. Breetan Everride had worked her way up the eastern slope, just south of the broad ledge where the smoke originated. After scaling the heights above the ledge, she carefully made her away across the higher range toward a boat-shaped rock prominence above the Stair. Fatigue, the persistent pain of her broken rib, and the constant presence of the valley ghosts at her heels had clouded her mind and hampered her pace, until finally she made a crucial misstep. She set her foot on a slab of fractured shale and swung her full weight onto it without first testing its stability. The narrow slab shifted abruptly, sending her plunging, feet first, a hundred yards down the mountainside.
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