The Last Rune 4: Blood of Mystery

by Mark Anthony

“And whom will you see, Belira? Lord Teravian?”

  The one called Belira looked up, expression hard. “We haven’t spent all day working this spell for girlish fancies. There’s another I would see, one of far greater importance. And if we were the ones to find him, surely we would be drawn to the center of the Pattern.”

  The others frowned prettily. “Whom do you mean?”

  The brown-eyed one gazed into the pot and murmured a single word. “Runebreaker...”

  Gauris rose upward—then began to sink again. His wings were molten with pain; he could hardly move them. Never had he flown so many leagues in a day. But he had not found her, the one to whom he was to give the king’s message. Better to fall than to return to the king’s dominion having failed.

  As the sun neared the western horizon, a cruel wind rushed over the land. The wind caught him, buffeting him about. By the time he righted himself, he was dizzy and lost. Which way was north? He whirled around, searching...

  ... and saw a shadow on the land.

  It was subtle yet unmistakable: a premature gloom clinging to a hill that should yet be bathed in the last rays of the sun. There could be only one answer; no matter where she went in the light, a tatter of darkness would always follow her.

  Gauris fluttered downward. The hill was perfectly circular, its slopes green, its summit crowned by a ring of pitted stones. A burial mound, then, perhaps a relic of the king’s first war. Gauris let out a croak of laughter. He should have known he would find her in such a place.

  All life and feeling went out of his wings; he could move them no longer. His wheeling descent became a plummet. Just as the bloody circle of the sun touched the horizon, Gauris crashed to the turf in the center of the stone circle. He lay crumpled in a heap of black feathers, dazed, unable to move.

  A shadowy figure approached him.

  “Well, now what have we here?”

  The words were cooing, the voice feminine, but the sound of it was hard and lifeless.

  Another figure drew near. “It’s just a bird, Shemal. That gust of wind must have caught it and dashed it down. If I’m out here too long, my absence from the castle will be noticed. Toss it down the hill and let it die.”

  “Truly, Liendra?” crooned the icy voice. “And here all this time I believed you and your sisters considered every living thing precious. I’m so pleased you’ve shown me otherwise. However, this is certainly not ‘just a bird.’ ”

  The one called Shemal knelt beside Gauris, encircled his body with thin fingers, and picked him up. He struggled weakly, then gave up; he did not like being held, but he could not escape her clutch. He craned his head to look at the one who gripped him. All he caught was a fragment of a sharp, white smile inside the heavy black cowl of a robe.

  The other, the one called Liendra, stepped closer: a tall, regal woman with red-gold hair, a cloak of pale green thrown over her shoulders against the evening chill.

  “Why can you never speak plainly, Shemal? If the bird is important, then tell me.”

  “Come now, Liendra. I know your magics are feeble compared to those of your sisters. That isn’t why I chose you. But surely your spells are enough to sense this is no mundane bird.”

  Liendra frowned; either she did sense it, or she didn’t wish to admit otherwise.

  “This raven is one of his messengers,” Shemal said, stroking Gauris’s feathers. He shuddered under her touch.

  “Whose messenger?”

  “And now you’re willfully misunderstanding. A messenger of the one who will have you trade your heart for iron the moment you show the first sign of weakness.”

  Liendra shivered despite her cloak, tightening her arms across her breast. “Your master....”

  “My master?” Shemal laughed, a sound like glass shattering. “Yes, I suppose he believes he is my master still. But in the end, we both serve the same master, that is all. Sometimes I believe, over the centuries, he has forgotten that—that he has become used to ruling in our master’s absence.” A colorless eye peered from the cowl of the robe. “And recall, Liendra, my master is your master as well.”

  Liendra swallowed. “If it is a messenger, then what is its message?”

  Shemal stroked Gauris’s feathers, harder this time. “Speak, raven. What did your pale master bid you tell me?”

  The message. He had to speak the message. Gauris opened his beak, but only a low croak came out.

  “Hush,” Shemal said, a sound like a flame dying. She pinched his beak shut with two fingers. “You need not bother to speak the words. I know the message he would send me. It has been long years since I have journeyed to his dominion. He bids me go there and abase myself before him, so that he can be certain he rules me still. He, who was born a mortal, while I was once a goddess!”

  “Shemal? I...”

  The robed one shuddered and released Gauris’s beak.

  “Yes, Liendra. I have not forgotten. It would not do for that wench Ivalaine to discover you here. Soon she will be nothing, a doll for us to play with, but not just yet. So run along to the castle.”

  “But you haven’t told me why you called me here.”

  Again Shemal laughed. “I fear our feathered interloper has quite distracted me. I simply wished to tell you this, Liendra: I have found the one whom we seek.”

  Liendra’s eyes flashed. She took a step forward, her voice quavering. “You don’t mean...the Runebreaker?”

  “No, not quite. But close. You see, I’ve found a Runebreaker.”

  Liendra’s frown returned. “I don’t understand, Shemal. You mean to tell me there’s another who can break runes?”

  Shemal’s voice was triumphant. “Yes, a second Runebreaker! And this one has pledged himself to me.”

  “But the prophecy of the Witches...”

  “The prophecy says only that Runebreaker will shatter the world. It does not say which Runebreaker. And now this one is under our control, a tool we can use toward our ends.”

  Liendra opened her mouth to speak, but Shemal shook her head.

  “That’s enough, dearest. I will tell you more later, when you have need to know. For now, keep watch over Ivalaine, and if she hears any more from your two sisters in the south, let me know at once.”

  The sun was gone; dusk had fallen over the mound. Despite the dimness, Gauris could see the hate in the eyes of the gold-haired woman. Liendra wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself and slipped between two stones, into the gloom.

  Shemal held the raven to her breast. “Soon, my little messenger. The signs fall into place. The war comes. But it may not all go as your master believes it will.”

  Gauris struggled in her grasp. Something was wrong here. He had to return to the north, to tell the king.

  The other held him tightly. “No, little brother. I can’t let you tell your master what I’ve spoken here. It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. And you are weary; you have no strength left to fly.” Her cold fingers encircled his neck. “It’s time for you to rest.”

  One last time he fought against her, but it was no use. She was right. He was weary, so terribly weary.

  The fingers tightened around his neck. A popping sound echoed off the circle of stones. For a moment Gauris flew into an eternal sky of darkness.

  Then he was lost.

  2.

  Grace Beckett had never really believed in fate.

  After all, it wasn’t fate that brought people through the doors of the Emergency Department of Denver Memorial Hospital. It was cruel luck. They happened to cross a street just as an oncoming driver—who had never been sick a day in his life—had a brain aneurism. Or they didn’t notice the electrical cord was frayed as they plugged it in. Or they got a phone call when they were unpacking groceries and forgot to put the box of rat poison they had bought on a shelf where their toddler couldn’t reach it. In an instant, for no reason at all, their lives were changed forever.

  Nothing was destiny; things simply happened. And if sometimes prophecies
came true, it was only because they were selffulfilling by nature. Oedipus Rex wasn’t an affirmation of the existence of fate; it was a warning about heeding warnings. Oedipus would never have killed his father if the seer’s words of doom hadn’t set the whole thing into motion. The only real fate was what people made for themselves.

  At least, that was what Grace had always believed back in Colorado. Only now she knew another world. A world where gods appeared to the naked eye. A world where magic was a force as real as electricity. A world where maybe, just maybe, prophecies really did come true.

  It had been over a month since the demon freed by Xemeth was destroyed, transformed to a dead lump of rock by the touch of the Great Stone Sinfathisar. Over a month since they fled the destruction of the Dome of the Etherion only to find that not all of their number were present. And over a month since they had begun the impossible search for those who were lost.

  The villa where they had been living stood atop a hill a half league from the outermost wall of Tarras. The tile-roofed building was shaped like a horseshoe, encircling a courtyard filled with fountains and fragrant lindara vines, and the entire house was surrounded by a circle of ithaya trees that made Grace think of green-gold columns. The emperor had rented the villa for them when he learned of their intention to take rooms at a hostel in the Fourth Circle.

  “I won’t have my cousin dwelling with the unwashed rabble,” Ephesian said, jowls waggling in outrage. He had taken to calling Grace cousin, much to her chagrin and—she was forced to admit—her secret delight.

  “Nonsense, Your Excellency,” Melia said soothingly, “there are a large number of bathhouses in the Fourth Circle, and your subjects appear to be admirably well washed. We shall be quite comfortable at the hostel.”

  “Absolutely not!” Ephesian pounded the arms of his throne with chubby fists, and his attendants—he was back to eunuchs now, all fully clothed Grace was glad to see—edged away, eyes wide. “You already have something of an irregular reputation, Lady Melia. But for Lady Grace to stay in the Fourth Circle would besmirch the exalted station of the empire.”

  Melia raised on eyebrow. “You mean unlike the centuries of pillaging, corruption, and slaying of innocents?”

  However, despite their protests, there was no swaying Ephesian. Nor was Melia about to give in to his demands; she refused to take an apartment in the First Circle. “You’re every bit as bossy as a mother hen, Ephesian. You’d never stop pecking at us if we didn’t do exactly as you wished.”

  It was Grace who finally came up with a compromise. She asked Ephesian if there might be some accommodation outside the city that would be of both appropriate station and suitable distance. After Melia’s caustic remark, Ephesian seemed none too keen on the idea of having her nearby, and the idea of the villa was settled on.

  “That was very diplomatic of you, Your Majesty,” Beltan whispered with a grin as they left the palace.

  These words took Grace by surprise. On retrospect, she had to admit it was a good solution. Maybe she was better at this whole royalty thing than she gave herself credit for. Maybe it was in her blood.

  Sometimes, long before the others awoke, Grace would slip from her bed, part the gauzy curtains that were the only barrier between her and the last breath of night, and step onto a balcony outside the room. She would touch the steel pendant that hung at her neck—a pendant that was in truth a fragment of a sword—and ponder that thought. Could fate really be contained in the suspension of one’s blood?

  Once there was a patient in the ED whom she diagnosed with symptoms of leukemia. She remembered him clearly. He was one of those big, burly men who moved with exaggerated care, as if afraid he might accidentally break someone. He taught high school, still lived with his elderly mother, and had a gentle laugh. Grace had liked him.

  They put him on a list for a bone marrow transplant. But a few months later Grace learned that no donor match was ever found, and he had died. She felt a pang of sorrow, but his fate hadn’t been up to her. The answer of whether he would live or die had been locked in his blood, determined by his genetic code, and there was nothing anyone could have done to change it.

  Maybe she had been wrong all of those years. Maybe everything really was fate.

  For a while Grace would stay there on the balcony, gazing at the distant city. The white houses of Tarras glowed in the ghost light that always came a full hour before the sun, and low in the sky, just visible over the chalky cliffs south of the city, pulsed a single spark of crimson.

  The red star.

  Once the star had been a harbinger of change and death; it was the Great Stone Krondisar, first raised into the sky by the Necromancer Dakarreth to spread a plague of fire across the land. But Travis Wilder had defeated the Necromancer, and the mute, red-haired girl Tira had taken the Stone and risen to the heavens: a goddess newly born. Now the star was a symbol of hope, and a reminder of a closeness Grace had felt, if only for a fleeting time.

  “I love you, Tira,” she would whisper.

  While it all seemed as if it had happened long ago, the red star had appeared just that spring. It was Sindath now; back in Colorado it would be November. Impossible as it was to believe, it had been barely over a year since she encountered the preacher Brother Cy outside the burnt husk of the Beckett-Strange Home for Children. Barely a year since she came to Eldh.

  Came back to Eldh.

  Whether it’s fate or not that you’re here, Grace, this is where you belong. You know it is. Just like you know you’re going to find them, wherever they are.

  She would wait until the red star set beneath the line of the cliffs. Then she would step back inside, to wait for dawn and the others to rise, so they could begin their search anew.

  “You never did tell us where you went yesterday, Falken,” Melia was saying, as Grace stepped into the courtyard where they gathered for breakfast each morning. It was the ninth day of Sindath. Over a month they had been searching; over a month without any sign.

  Melia, clad in a silver-white shift, was filling cups from a pitcher of margra juice. She glanced at the bard. “I wasn’t even certain you were back.”

  “He came in late,” Beltan said. The blond knight cracked a great yawn. “And might I suggest, the next time you try sneaking across a tile floor, take your boots off first. Or get a pair of sandals, like everyone else in this city.”

  The knight was dressed in the fashion Tarrasian soldiers adopted when not on duty: sandals, a kilt that reached below the knees, and a loose white shirt.

  Falken winced, running his black-gloved hand through his hair. While he wore a long tunic and loose breeches in the Tarrasian fashion, he still hadn’t given up his northern-style boots. “Sorry about that. I suppose I was a bit tired myself. I was up in Tyrrinon all day yesterday.”

  “Tyrrinon?” Aryn said. “Where’s that?” The young baroness wore a flowing Tarrasian gown of soft azure that contrasted with her dark hair. She accepted a cup of juice from Melia.

  “It’s a village a few leagues west of Tarras, dear,” Melia said. “It’s up in the hills, and other than shepherds and their flocks there’s not much there.” She shot Falken a speculative look. “Except, of course, for the old monastery of Briel.”

  “Briel?” Beltan said around a mouthful of bread. “Who’s that?”

  Grace couldn’t help a smile. These days she could hardly keep food down for worry. However, in the year she had known him, no matter what was going on, Beltan’s ability to eat never waned. As far as she could tell, the appetite of Calavaner knights was a universal constant.

  “Briel is one of the minor gods of Tarras,” Falken said.

  Melia shot him a piercing look. “Please, Falken. That’s such a demeaning term. No god is minor.”

  “Then what term should I use?” the bard said with a scowl.

  Melia tapped her cheek. “How about penultimately glorious?”

  “How about I just keep talking?”

  Melia let out a pained sigh b
ut said nothing more.

  “Briel is a minion of Faralas, the god of history,” the bard went on. “He’s known as the Keeper of Records, and it’s said he possesses a book in which he’s written down every significant event since the beginning of Tarrasian history. I heard some years ago there was a good library at his monastery in Tyrrinon.”

  “And was it still there?” Aryn said.

  “I’m afraid things were in something of a state of disrepair. It turns out there aren’t many monks left at the monastery. I suppose people aren’t really all that interested in history these days.”

  “Which only means they’re bound to repeat it,” Melia said.

  Beltan brushed bread crumbs from his sparse gold beard. “Falken, you still didn’t say what you were looking for in the Library of Briel. Was it something about gates?” A light glinted in his green eyes. “Something that might help us find—?”

  “No,” Grace said, the smile falling from her lips. “It was Mohg, Lord of Nightfall.”

  The others looked up, faces startled.

  “Good morning, dear,” Melia said, recovering first. “There’s hot maddok for you.”

  Aryn’s sapphire eyes were concerned as her voice sounded in Grace’s mind. Are you all right, sister?

  “I’m fine,” Grace said aloud. While Lirith and Aryn seemed comfortable speaking across the Weirding when others were present, Grace avoided it if she could. Despite what King Boreas might think, she really wasn’t all that adept at intrigue; it took so much more energy than being obvious.

  She sat down—adjusting the folds of her gown, which was similar to Aryn’s but a pale green—and poured a cup of maddok, breathing in the slightly spicy fragrance. Only after she took a sip did she realize that the others were still gazing at her. She glanced at Falken. “You were hoping to learn something more about Mohg, weren’t you? Something that could help prevent his returning to Eldh.”

  Falken nodded, his faded blue eyes grave. The sun in the courtyard seemed to go thin. Grace could feel it: the shadow attached to the thread of her life. They all had their shadows, she knew. She had passed through hers when the demon tried to consume her, and while she hadn’t defeated it, it was behind her now. The shadow might have made her who she was, but it was up to her to determine what she would be.