by Alec Hutson
The carriage halted where the gleaming black stone of the bridge disappeared into the wood of the dock. A guardsman hurried to open the door, and then moved to help the same elderly woman who had questioned him earlier step down. She was one of several archons who had visited him before he had gone before the council. The Lady Numil. All the Pure who were sent out into the world to hunt sorcerers were given a firm grounding in the powers that controlled every city and kingdom, and Senacus knew she was a great power in Lyr, one of the handful who actually wielded influence behind the vain and ineffectual archon council.
A large man in hardened leather armor, the hilts of two swords visible over his shoulders, appeared beside her holding a strange device. It was long and stick-like, flaring out into a flat circle of what looked like dyed leather, the rain running off its edges and keeping the space directly beneath it dry. The Lady Numil saw Senacus staring and motioned for him to come closer.
“Ingenious, wouldn’t you say? They’ve spread like wildfire here in Lyr, since it rains nearly every other day.”
“What is it, my lady?”
“The merchant who first brought them in called them parasols, because their original name is unpronounceable. They’re from Shan. Apparently, in the Empire of Swords and Flowers the noblewomen carry them around to keep the sun from browning their skin.” The old woman squinted up at the gray sky. “I can’t even remember what the sun looks like. But they do a fine enough job of keeping the rain off as well. You see, I’m quite dry standing under here.”
“Very dry,” repeated the man beside her who was holding out the parasol, the water running in rivulets off his great bald head.
The old woman ignored her servant. “Come closer, paladin.” She studied him, her dark eyes shrewd. “Remarkable. If it wasn’t for your white hair there would be nothing to mark you as a warrior of Ama.”
“It is a blessing of Tethys,” he said, touching where the amulet of bone lay beneath his cuirass.
“A powerful artifact, and quite the gamble to send you into Dymoria bearing it. And this lends credence to the claim that you were dispatched by the very highest among the faithful in Menekar.”
“I would not lie.”
The Lady Numil quirked a smile. “Yes, yes. You paladins pride yourselves on your adherence to the truth. But even if you do not lie, I’ve—how should I say it?—I’ve known the Pure to withhold certain facts so that others will arrive at mistaken conclusions.”
She paused, as if expecting Senacus to say something, then continued when he did not.
“I’m curious what you think of this summons to see the Oracle.”
Senacus shrugged. “I am… surprised. I’ve never heard of anything like this happening.”
“And yet it has, for the first time in two hundred years. The question is: why has she requested to see you and the boy? He has the potential to become a great sorcerer, I’ve been told, and you are a paladin of Ama who allied himself with the kith’ketan to steal him away from Dymoria’s sorceress queen. That alone is a story beyond belief. But there must be more to come. The Oracle is concerned with the future, not the past.” She reached out and grabbed his wrist, her grip surprisingly strong. “There is more you did not tell me. What is it?”
Senacus met her gaze calmly. She was right, there was more. It was the reason he had abandoned Keilan at the gates of Herath, rather than attempt to return him to Menekar. Powerful sorcerers had somehow infiltrated the faith of Ama and were positioned highly enough in the temple back in Menekar that they could influence the actions of the High Mendicant himself. Such a thought was chilling. Ama’s faithful were the only defense against the terrible danger that could be brought down upon the lands, and now it seemed they had been subverted.
But this was not something he could share with the infamous Crone of Lyr. He needed to return to Menekar and help draw out this corruption from the faith before the disasters of the past could come again.
The old woman sighed. “Fine, keep your secrets, paladin. The Oracle will lay some things bare, I’m sure.” She started to turn away from him and then paused, looking back. “You know, you do have beautiful eyes. It’s a shame no one can ever see them.”
That caught him off guard, and he was left blinking in mild surprise as she hobbled onto the soaring bridge, her bald man-at-arms keeping pace to continue shielding her from the rain. The sound of a throat clearing brought him back, and he turned to find the batch of guardsmen who had brought up the rear of their procession watching him expectantly, their hands on the hilts of their weapons.
When the Oracle requested someone to attend her, their presence was clearly not voluntary.
Senacus kept to the middle of the black stone bridge as he began the crossing, but every strong gust of wind still made his heart leap. The rain had made the stone so slick it was almost like trying to walk across a frozen pond, and he was forced to edge along slowly in order to keep himself balanced. He wasn’t the strongest swimmer, and if he slipped over the side and fell into the churning black water he didn’t like his chances of making it back to the docks.
After what seemed like an eternity, he passed the bridge’s midpoint and something emerged from the gloom ahead, a great shape bulked within the fog. Gradually it resolved into an island of bleached white stone. The ground there seemed to undulate strangely, barren of any grass or trees, sloping precipitously upwards into a series of small, lumpy hills. The guardsmen were clustered near where the black stone of the bridge disappeared into the island’s white rock, as if nervous to venture too far. The Crone and her servant, however, were a ways off, and the child-priestess had left her litter-bearers behind and was picking her way over the rugged landscape.
“The temple of the Oracle,” he heard the girl say as she stepped off the bridge. “I always wondered what it looked like.” She was turned away from him, standing beside Keilan as he crouched over a pool of seawater.
“Is the whole island one giant piece of coral?” Keilan asked, running his hand along the ground’s pitted surface.
That’s what it was, Senacus realized. He had seen bits of this sea-substance before, washed up on beaches. An old fisherman had told him once that the brittle little shards were the bones of the fish-men who lived beneath the waves, but he had suspected that to be just an old fabler’s tales. Here, though, the thought that this great bleached expanse might be the remains of some dead leviathan made him shiver. He kicked at the ground with his boot, breaking off a chunk of the strange substance. It certainly wasn’t rock.
“Aye, it is,” the girl said. She looked uneasy, her hand playing with her sleeve as she squinted at the rippling hills.
The Crone stumped closer, leaning heavily on her ebonwood cane. “The island changes,” she said. “It is alive, always growing, though slowly.” She grunted and turned away. “Let’s get out of the wind and rain, eh? If a chill like this seeps into my old bones, it will stay for half the winter. Keilan, Nel, come with me.”
Nel. That was her name. Senacus had heard it when he’d been half delirious as she’d cared for him after Uthmala, but he’d forgotten until now.
“And you too, paladin. She asked for you as well.”
They turned to him then, just now realizing that he stood only a few paces away. Nel’s gaze could have soured milk, and for a moment Senacus thought she might reach for one of her daggers. He didn’t see anger in Keilan’s face, to his surprise. The boy would have had every right to hate him. Senacus had taken him from his family, then tried to kidnap him again from his new home. What was he thinking? Senacus saw wariness… and something else. Curiosity? Keilan opened his mouth as though to ask Senacus something, but before he could begin Nel interrupted.
“Where is the temple?” she asked.
Senacus glanced around, wondering the same thing. There were no buildings secreted in the folds of the coral mounds; just a barren white expanse.
“We’re standing on it, girl. The entrance is over there.” Senacus’s gaze followed the old woman’s outstretched hand towards a rent in the side of the white hill barely large enough for a man to enter. “It’s in a different place every time I come here. But that looks like it, and the girl seems to think so as well.”
The child-priestess had almost reached the cave’s mouth, picking her way carefully over the jagged ground, and as Senacus watched she vanished inside the opening.
The demon-helmed guardsmen and the Oracle’s servants stayed behind as their small band followed the priestess across the shattered landscape. They skirted the edge of several deep basins filled with seawater, tidal pools where brilliant ecologies flourished. The coral beneath the surface was not the bleached white of bone but instead vibrant shades of brown and green and blue. Small fish skittered among drifting fronds, hiding within the swaying tentacles of things that resembled purple flowers. The contrast between the dead world outside and the riot of life just below the surface was striking.
Soon they stood on the cave’s threshold. “Should we light a torch?” Keilan asked hopefully, peering into the darkness within.
“No,” the Crone said. “The Oracle does not permit fire in her temple. There will be light inside.” She ducked her head to avoid the low-hanging coral and stepped into the dark, disappearing almost immediately.
Keilan and Nel hesitated at the entrance, and a moment later the old woman’s voice came from inside, slightly muffled as if she’d already descended a ways. “Quickly now. She’s waiting for you.”
“It’s harder to take that first step when we’re not following Vhelan, eh?” Nel muttered, then took a handful of Keilan’s sleeve and pulled him along into the cave.
Before the boy vanished he turned to look at Senacus. “Come on,” he said, and these simple words, spoken without hate or anger, hit the paladin like a blow to the stomach. Have I been forgiven?
Senacus stepped into the cave. The blackness in front of him was seamless, and he was tempted to remove the relic of Tethys and allow his holy radiance to push back the dark. But he did not. Instead, he groped blindly until his hand brushed the rough, jagged coral, and then he moved forward, stumbling slightly on the uneven ground. Keeping his other arm extended so he wouldn’t walk into a wall Senacus moved down the passage, hoping there was only the one leading away from the cave’s entrance. He felt a small stab of relief when he heard a thump from up ahead, and then a torrent of colorful curses from Nel.
Slowly the tunnel began to lighten, and Senacus emerged with the others into a vast, soaring chamber. Part of the ceiling had been hacked away, and the wan light filtering in from outside through the falling rain painted the coral walls in shades of gray. It was not the only source of illumination in the space: a vast pool filled most of the chamber, swarming with blue lights. Senacus stepped closer to get a better look, his boots nearly touching the dark water, and gasped. The pool seethed with spectral jellyfish, shards of blue within a darkness plunging down so deep the creatures within dwindled into tiny glimmering specks.
“Gods,” he heard Nel breathe, and he tore his gaze from the swirling, hypnotic patterns of the drifting jellyfish.
His companions were all staring at the far wall of the chamber, which bulged oddly and hung over the pool like some tumescent growth. There were things embedded in the coral; the color was nearly the same, so they almost blended with the wall, but the texture was different, smoother, not rough and pitted.
Bones. The coral was festooned with bones. A skull leered down at them, only its grinning mouth and eye sockets visible—the rest had vanished into the coral. A skeletal arm dangled from the wall, its fingers missing. The shattered remnants of ribs emerged elsewhere, above a pair of feet that still stood upon a narrow ledge carved from the living rock.
A sense of unease was rising within Senacus. He saw a dozen skeletons, at least, each to a varying degree in the process of being swallowed. One was not yet even reduced to bones. The pale, emaciated corpse of a woman stood on another small ledge, her right arm vanishing into the wall. The coral was creeping over her other limbs, fusing with the flesh until Senacus wasn’t sure where the body ended and the wall began. A long, snarled cascade of yellow hair obscured most of her unclothed body, but Senacus could see that the corpse’s skin was scabrous and covered with festering sores.
The child-priestess knelt by the edge of the dark pool and raised her hands towards the body embedded in the coral. Sickening dread stole over Senacus as realization slowly dawned.
The woman in the wall lifted her head and turned to look at them with empty eye sockets.
“They come,” she rasped. Her voice was soft, but it echoed in the vast chamber.
A chill filled Senacus as he stared into that sightless gaze. She saw him, he was sure of it. She saw into him.
He let out a shuddering breath. It felt like spiders were crawling inside his head, skittering along his skull on countless prickling legs. Her presence was there, within him. Watching and measuring. Senacus swallowed, his hand going instinctively to the hilt of his sword, even though he knew it would do no good. The spiders were picking their way through his memories, and at times they paused to examine moments from his past –
Crying out from the burning pain in his legs as Nel crouched over him, the dark forest blurring as they fled the ruined city –
He and Demian riding along the Wending together, mist clotting the gray waste as the Mire unraveled into the distance –
An old man with kind eyes plunging a shining knife into his chest as he screamed for his mother –
It was like he was experiencing those times again, and all the emotions he had felt crashed down on him in a single great wave. Beyond that last memory was nothing but blinding light, yet the presence inside him pushed closer, peering into what he had been before his rebirth as Pure… Senacus groaned, nearly falling to his knees.
“Get out of my head!” cried Nel, and the sound of her ragged voice pulled him back to the cavern of dead coral.
From the look of it, the presence had imposed itself on everyone save the child-priestess, who still knelt motionless at the edge of the pool. Keilan looked stricken, like he had been forced to witness again something terrible. Nel’s face was pale and drawn but her eyes flashed angrily as she glared at the Oracle. Even the old woman had been affected, as she leaned heavily on her cane, her eyes closed and her mouth set in a thin line.
The child extended her arms out towards the woman in the wall, her palms upraised. “Blessed lady, I bring before you the boy and the paladin, as you desired.”
The woman’s bony shoulders slumped, and her head fell so her face was veiled by tangled hair. For a long moment, the only sound was the whisper of rain falling onto the slice of the pool beneath the gash in the cavern’s ceiling.
“I gorge,” she finally said, her voice cracking from disuse. “Too long since others have come. Too long since I have tasted what was instead of what might be.”
“What do you know, Oracle?” asked the Crone, wiping at her face with an embroidered cloth. “Why did you send the summons?”
The gaunt woman raised her empty gaze again. “Lady Numil. Many years have you visited the House of Many Streams. We welcome you for the last time.”
The old woman blinked in surprise. “Last time? Oracle –”
“I see a great threat.”
“To Lyr?”
The Oracle shook her head, her snarled blond hair swinging. “Not just to Lyr. To Menekar. To Shan. To small villages on the shores of distant seas.”
“Can you tell us what shape this danger will take?”
“Step forward,” the Oracle commanded. “All of you. Senacus, Keilan, Nel. Look into the water.”
Senacus edged closer to the pool, staring down into the abyss. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Keilan and Nel do the same,
and then his attention was drawn to the swirling blue jellyfish as they pulsed in the darkness. There was a pattern to their movement that slowly resolved the longer he concentrated; they spiraled down into the deep in undulating circles, creating a shaft of black water untouched by their luminescence, and from within this emptiness something was rising from the depths. At first it was just a smear of white, then gradually it became more distinct: pale flesh marred by swollen black veins, dark hair slowly writhing in whatever currents moved within the pool, tattered clothes. It was a corpse, a child’s corpse, although it was so wasted he couldn’t be sure if it had been a boy or a girl. Its ascent slowed as it approached, until it drifted motionless a few span from the surface. Had some poor urchin fallen off the city docks in the storm? How had it come here, to the Oracle’s pool? He leaned out over the water and studied the child’s body, looking for some clue.
The corpse’s eyes opened, and it saw him.
“Radiant Father!” Senacus cried, stumbling back a step. Then he lunged forward to confront this creature, his hand gripping the holy relic around his neck, poised to pull off the amulet and let the full power of Ama flow through him once again.
But the corpse was gone, no trace of it remaining. The shimmering blue jellyfish had abandoned their strange dance, filling the space where it had floated.
“What was that?” Nel asked hoarsely, and a glance at her face showed Senacus that she must have seen the same vision in the pool.
“Death,” the Oracle replied, her voice hollow. “The end of all.”
“The child will bring about that?” the Crone asked. “How?”
“I do not know. I am only a rock in the river of time. I cannot see the future, save in tattered glimpses. Nor the past. Only this moment is clear and sharp; all else is shrouded by mist. What has come before is a mighty torrent surging towards me; it dashes upon this moment and breaks into endless possibilities. Now many of these streams tumble into darkness. This has never happened before to me, so I have sifted through the memories of past Oracles searching for anything similar. And I found it—for when the empires of old cracked the world open with their sorceries, it was the same. Something terrible is approaching.