Tobias wished he knew what they had to talk about all the time. Ever since the streganicha had joined them the day before, she had kept company almost exclusively with the five scaled creatures, having precious few words for the lord general of the Blood of the Fold. The six of them kept to themselves, as if they only happened to be traveling the same direction as Tobias and his company of a thousand.
Tobias had seen but a handful of the mriswith dispatch hundreds of D’Haran soldiers, and so felt less uneasy about only having two fists of his men with him. The rest of his force of over a hundred thousand of the Fold waited a little more than a week out of Aydindril. Tobias had been told by the Creator, when He had come in a dream that first night with his army, that they were to remain behind, to participate in the conquest of Aydindril.
“Lunetta,” he said in a quiet tone as he watched the Sister gesticulating in her conversation with the mriswith.
She stepped her horse closer to his right side. She took his cue and kept her voice low. “Yes, my lord general?”
“Lunetta, have you seen the Sister use her power?”
“Yes, Lord General, when she moved the windfall from our way.”
“Could you tell her power from that?” Lunetta gave him a slight nod. “Does she have the power you do, my sister?”
“No, Tobias.”
He smiled over at her. “That be good to know.” He glanced around to make sure no one was near, and the six were still visible. “I am becoming puzzled by some of the things the Creator has been telling me in the last few nights.”
“Do you wish to tell Lunetta?”
“Yes, but not now. We’ll talk about it later.”
She idly stroked her pretties. “Perhaps when we can be alone. It be time to stop soon.”
Tobias didn’t miss the demure smile, or the offer. “We’ll not be stopping early tonight.” He lifted his nose as he took a deep whiff of the cold air. “She’s so close I can almost smell her.”
Richard counted the landings on his way down so he would be able to find their way back. He thought he could remember the rest of it because of the sights along the way, but the inside of the tower was disorienting. It smelled of rot, like a deep bog, probably because water that came in the open windows collected in the bottom.
At the next landing platform, Richard saw a shimmering to the air as he approached. In the light coming from the globe he was holding, he could see something standing to the side. Its edges glowed in the humming light. Though the thing wasn’t solid, he recognized it as a mriswith standing with its cape drawn around itself.
“Welcome, skin brother,” it hissed.
Berdine flinched. “What was that?” she whispered urgently.
Richard caught hold of her wrist as she tried to put herself in front of him—she had her Agiel in her fist—and pulled her to the other side of him as he continued on. “It’s just a mriswith.”
“Mriswith!” she whispered in a hoarse tone. “Where?”
“Right here on the landing, by the rail. Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you.”
She clutched his black cape after he forced down her arm with the Agiel. They stepped onto the landing.
“Have you come to wake the sliph?” the mriswith asked.
Richard frowned. “Sliph?”
The mriswith opened its cape to point with the three-bladed knife in its claw down the stairs. When it did so, it became solid and fully visible, a figure of dusky scales and cape. “The sliph is down there, skin brother.” Its beady eyes came back up. “She is accessible, at last. Soon, it will be time for the yabree to sing.”
“Yabree?”
The mriswith lifted its three-bladed knife and gave it a little wiggle. Its slit of a mouth widened into sort of a smile. “Yabree. When the yabree sing, it will be the time of the queen.”
“The queen?”
“The queen needs you, skin brother. You must help her.”
Richard could feel Berdine trembling as she pressed against him. He decided that he should be going before she became too frightened, and started down the steps.
Two landings down, she was still hanging on to him. “It’s gone,” she whispered in his ear.
Richard looked back up and saw that she was right.
Berdine muscled him into the recess of a doorway, flattening his back up against a wood door. Her penetrating blue eyes were intense with agitation. “Lord Rahl, that was a mriswith.”
Richard nodded, a little puzzled by her ragged panting.
“Lord Rahl, mriswith kill people. You always kill them.”
Richard lifted a hand toward the landing above. “It wasn’t going to hurt us. I told you that. It didn’t attack us, did it? There was no need to harm it.”
Her brow furrowed with concern. “Lord Rahl, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Now, come on. Maybe the mriswith gave us a good hint of what we might be looking for.”
She shoved him back against the door when he tried to move. “Why did it call you ‘skin brother’?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it has scales, and I have skin. I think it called me that to let me know it meant no harm. It wanted to help.”
“Help,” she repeated incredulously.
“It didn’t try to stop us, did it?”
She finally let go of his shirt, but it took longer for her blue eyes to release their hold on him.
At the bottom of the tower, a walkway with an iron railing ringed the outside wall of the tower. In the center lurked black water with rocks breaking the surface in several places. Salamanders clung to the stone below the walkway, and rested partially submerged at the rocks. Insects swam through the thick, inky water, skittering around bubbles that occasionally ascended to send out rings as they burst.
Halfway around the walkway, Richard knew he had found what he was looking for: something not ordinary, like the libraries, or even the strange rooms and corridors.
A wide platform in the walkway before where a door had been was littered with sooty stone fragments, chips, and dust. Chunks of wood from the door now floated in the dark water beyond the iron railing. The doorway itself had been blown away, and was now perhaps twice its previous size. The jagged edges were blackened, and in some places the stone itself was melted like candle wax. Twisting streaks on the stone wall ran off in every direction away from the blasted hole, as if lightning had flailed against the wall and burned it.
“This is not old,” Richard said, running his finger through the black soot.
“How can you tell?” Berdine asked as she peered about.
“Look. See here? The mold and slime has been burned away, scoured right off the rock, and hasn’t had time to grow back. This happened recently—sometime within the last few months.”
The room inside was round, perhaps sixty feet across, its walls scorched in ragged lines as if lightning had gone wild in the place. A circular stone wall took up the center, like a huge well, nearly half the width of the room. Richard leaned over the waist-high wall, holding out the glowing globe. The smooth stone walls of the hole fell away forever. He could see the stone for hundreds of feet before the light failed to penetrate farther. It looked bottomless.
Above was a domed ceiling nearly as high as the room was wide. There were no windows or other doors. To the far side, Richard could see a table and a few shelves.
When they rounded the well, he saw the body, lying on the floor beside a chair. All that was left were bones inside a few scraps of cloth robes. Most of the robes had long ago rotted away, leaving the skeleton encircled by just a leather belt. Sandals remained, too. When he touched the bones, they crumbled like baked dirt.
“He has been here a very long time,” Berdine said, “You’re right about that.”
“Lord Rahl, look.”
Richard stood and looked to the table where she pointed. There was an inkwell, dry for perhaps centuries, a pen to the side, and an open book. Richard leaned over and blew a cloud of dust and stone chips
from the book.
“It’s in High D’Haran,” he said as he held it up next to the glowing sphere.
“Let me see.” Her eyes moved from side to side as she studied the strange characters. “You’re right.”
“What does it say?”
She carefully took the book in both hands. “This is very old. The dialect is older than any I have ever seen. Darken Rahl showed me an old dialect that he said was over two thousand years old.” She looked up. “This is older.”
“Can you read it?”
“I could only understand a bit of the book we found when we came in the Keep.” She considered the last page with writing on it. “I understand much less of this,” she said as she turned some of the pages back.
Richard gestured impatiently. “Well, can you understand any of it?”
She stopped turning and scrutinized the writing. “I think it says something about finally having success, but that success means he would die here.” She pointed. “See? Drauka. That word is the same I think—‘death.’ ” Berdine looked at the blank leather cover, then turned back through the book, scanning the pages.
Her blue eyes came up at last. “I think it’s a journal. I think this is the journal of the man who died in here.”
Richard felt goose bumps dance up his arms. “Berdine, this is what I was looking for. This is something not ordinary, not a book others have seen, like in the library. Can you translate it?”
“A bit, perhaps, but not much.” Her features sagged with disappointment. “I’m sorry, Lord Rahl. I just don’t know dialects this old. It’s the same problem I would have with the book we saw at first. I don’t know enough of the words to be able to fill in the blanks correctly. I would only be guessing.”
Richard pinched his lower lip as he thought. He looked down at the bones, wondering what this wizard had been doing in this room, and what had kept it sealed, and worse yet, what had unsealed it.
Richard twisted back to her. “Berdine! That book upstairs—I know that book. I know the story. If I helped you, telling you what I remember of what it says, could that help you decipher the words, and then use those translated words to help translate this journal?”
As she considered, her face brightened. “If we worked together, it might. If you could tell me what a sentence says, then I would be able to know the meaning of words I don’t recognize. We might be able to do it.”
Richard carefully closed the journal. “You hold on to this with your life. I’ll hold the light. Let’s get out of here. We have what we came for.”
When he and Berdine came through the doorway, Cara and Raina practically leapt out of their skin with relief. Richard even saw Ulic and Egan close their eyes with a sigh and a silent thank-you to the good spirits for a prayer answered.
“There are mriswith in the Keep,” Berdine told the other two women at their tumbling questions.
Cara gasped. “How many did you have to kill, Lord Rahl?”
“None. They didn’t attack us. We weren’t in danger from them. But there were enough other dangers.” He waved off her furious questions. “We’ll talk about it later. With Berdine’s help, I found what I was looking for.” He tapped the journal in Berdine’s hands. “We need to get back and start translating it.” He picked up the book from the table and gave it to Berdine.
As he started for the doorway out, he stopped and turned back to Cara and Raina. “Uh, while I was down there, and I was thinking that I could be killed if I did something wrong, it came to me that I didn’t want to die without telling you two something.”
Richard put his hands in his pockets as he stepped closer. “I realized when I was down there that I never told you that I was sorry for the way I treated you both.”
“You did not know Berdine was under a spell, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. “We don’t blame you for wanting to keep us all at arm’s length.”
“I didn’t know Berdine was under a spell, but I do now, and I want you to know that I wrongly thought ill of you. You never gave me cause. I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”
Smiles warmed Cara and Raina’s faces. He didn’t think they had ever looked less like Mord-Sith than at that moment.
“We forgive you, Lord Rahl,” Cara said. Raina nodded her agreement. “Thank you.”
“What happened down there, Lord Rahl?” Raina asked.
“We had a talk about friendship,” Berdine answered.
At the base of the Keep road, where the city of Aydindril started and other roads joined to come into the city, stood a small market, nothing like the one on Stentor Street, but it looked to serve those arriving with a variety of goods.
As Richard was moving past, with his five bodyguards around him and his escort of troops marching behind, something caught his eye in the fading light and he came to a halt before a small, rickety table.
“Would you like one of your honey cakes, Lord Rahl?” a small, familiar voice asked.
Richard smiled down at the little girl. “How many do you still owe me?”
The girl turned. “Grandmamma?”
The old woman rose to her feet, clutching the tattered blanket to herseif as her faded blue eyes fixed on Richard.
“My, my,” she said with a grin, showing the gaps from missing teeth. “Lord Rahl can have as many as he wants, dear.” She bowed her head. “So good to see you well, my Lord Rahl.”
“You, too . . .” He waited for her name.
“Valdora,” she said. She stroked a hand down the little girl’s light brown hair. “And this is Holly.”
“Pleased to see you again, Valdora and Holly. What are you doing here instead of Stentor Street?”
Valdora shrugged under her blanket. “With the new Lord Rahl making the city safe, more people are coming all the time, and perhaps there will even be activity at the Wizard’s Keep once again. We hope to catch some of these new people.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d put my hopes in the Keep thriving again any time soon, but you will certainly have first chance at those come new to Aydindril.” Richard surveyed the cakes on her table. “How many do I still have coming?”
Valdora chuckled. “I would have a lot of baking to do to catch up with what we owe you, Lord Rahl.”
Richard winked at her. “Tell you what. If I could have one for these five friends of mine, and one for myself, we will bargain it as even.”
Valdora’s gaze passed over his five guards. She bowed her head again. “Done, Lord Rahl. You have brought me more satisfaction than you could know.”
Chapter 38
As Verna hurried toward the gate to the Prelate’s compound, she noticed Kevin Andellmere standing guard in the darkness. She was impatient to get to the sanctuary, to tell Ann that she had at last figured it out, and she now knew almost every one of the Sisters loyal to the Light, but she hadn’t seen Kevin in weeks. Despite her heart-pounding rush, she stopped.
“Kevin, is that you?”
The young soldier bowed. “Yes, Prelate.”
“I haven’t seen you around for quite a time, have I?”
“No, Prelate. Bollesdun, Walsh, and I were called back to our command.”
“Why?”
Kevin shifted his weight. “I’m not sure, exactly. My commander was curious about the spell over the palace, I think. I’ve know him for near to fifteen years, and he’s aged. He wanted to see with his own eyes if it were true that we hadn’t. He said Bollesdun, Walsh, and I look the same as we did when he first saw us, fifteen years ago. He said he had doubted it when he heard it said, but he believed it, now. He had his commanders who knew us come look for themselves.”
Verna felt her forehead break out with beads of perspiration. With a cold wash of understanding, she knew why the emperor was coming to the Palace of the Prophets. She had to tell the Prelate. There was no time to lose.
“Kevin, are you a loyal soldier of the Empire, of the Imperial Order?”
Kevin slid his hand up on his pike. His voice hesitated. “Yes, Prelat
e. I mean, when the Order conquered my homeland, I had little choice; I was made a soldier in the Order. I fought for a time up north, near the wilds. Then, when the Order took over our kingdom, I was told I was a soldier for the Order, and assigned to the palace.
“Can’t get a better guard job than this. I’m glad to be back guarding your compound. Bollesdun and Walsh are glad to be back, too, to their posts at the Prophet’s compound.
“My officers have always treated me decent, at least, and I always get paid. It’s not much, but it always comes, and I see plenty of people who have no work, and have a hard time eating.”
Verna put a gentle hand to his arm. “Kevin, what do you think of Richard?”
“Richard?” A grin came over his face. “I liked Richard. He bought me expensive chocolates for me to give my lady.”
“Is that all he means to you? Chocolates?”
He scratched his eyebrow. “No . . . I didn’t mean it that way. Richard was . . . a good man.”
“Do you know why he bought you those chocolates?”
“Because he was nice. He cared about people.”
Verna nodded. “Yes, he did. He hoped that by giving you chocolates, when the time came for him to escape, it would make you see him as a friend and keep you from fighting him so he wouldn’t have to kill you. He didn’t want you as an enemy trying to kill him.”
“Kill him? Prelate, I would never have—”
“If he hadn’t been kind to you, you might have been loyal to the palace first, and tried to stop him.”
He glanced to the ground. “I’ve seen him use his sword. I guess the gift was more than chocolates.”
“That it was. Kevin, if a times comes, and you have to choose—Richard, or the Order—which would you choose?”
His face twisted in discomfort. “Prelate, I’m a soldier.” He let out a groan. “But Richard is a friend. I guess that if I had to, I’d be hard-pressed to raise a weapon against a friend. Any of the palace guard would be. They all like him.”
Blood of the Fold tsot-3 Page 50