The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6)

by Travis Simmons

It was a woman, from what she could tell, crouched on the snow, her back to Angelica.

  Angelica opened her eyes, and gazed ahead. If she was right, this figure was straight ahead of them. Now that she had seen the woman in her mind, she could feel her out there in the night.

  “I have to go there,” Angelica said, nodding forward.

  “We should wait for the others,” Caldamron said.

  “I can’t wait,” she pushed to her feet, but Caldamron gripped her wrist painfully. His claws bit into her flesh, stopping her from pulling away.

  “Maybe you didn’t understand me, LaFaye. We will wait for the others.” There was a rumble in his voice that stopped Angelica in her struggle to be free of his grip. She realized then that a guard was so much more than keeping you safe from outside sources. They would also keep you safe from your momentary lack of judgment.

  “Alright,” Angelica conceded. “You’re right. With everything we’ve been through it is silly for me to go looking in the darkness for something.”

  Caldamron nodded, and then Angelic thought how truly stupid her attempts to scout out something in the darkness had been. Not only would she get separated from her group in the endless expanse of the mountain highlands, but she would walk right into the grips of whatever was messing with her mind.

  There was a loud bang and a small flash of light in the direction that Jovian and Maeven had vanished into. Angelica jumped, raising her gun. Caldamron placed a hand on her arm and pushed the gun down gently.

  “That was their gun,” he said.

  Another bang and a spark of light.

  “Are they okay?” Angelica asked.

  “We can go to them if you would like,” Caldamron said. But then a hoot of excitement came to their ears from where the guns fired, and Angelica sighed.

  “No, I think they’re okay. We’ll wait here.”

  “What do you think it is, anyway?” Caldamron asked motioning with his chin in the direction Angelica had wanted to explore.

  “I don’t know.” But Angelica had an idea what it could be.

  “Are we ready?” Jovian asked, cutting short her train of thought. He held up three rabbit carcasses, skinned and gutted already.

  “This should do for tomorrow night,” Maeven said. “We’ll hunt more tomorrow while we travel.”

  “Is there something wrong?” Jovian asked, sensing the tension of the group.

  “I just want to get back to the cave,” Angelica decided. She looked in the direction where she had felt the figure and shuddered, but the presence was gone.

  On the way back to the cave Jovian fell back beside Angelica and pressed her further for information. She told him what she had felt, the dizziness that came with it, and the rotting face of Amber in her mind.

  Jovian’s eyes grew dark.

  “Do you really think it could be a verax-acis?” Angelica asked, speaking the name that had been in her thoughts since she had seen the shadows part in her mind and the image of the woman flood her third eye.

  “What else could it be?” Jovian asked as they neared the cave. Faint yellow firelight spilled out of the cave opening. The smell of roasted meat came to Angelica’s nose, and her stomach growled painfully.

  “I don’t know. I know they said the dungeons in the Ivory City had been emptied of verax-acis, but I didn’t give it much thought.”

  Jovian and Angelica drew to a halt outside of the cave. Maeven took the carcasses from Jovian, and with Caldamron he disappeared into the cave.

  “He used them last time,” Jovian said. In the distance an owl hooted. He didn’t have to say who he was. Angelica knew he meant Arael.

  “That’s what everyone says,” she agreed. “So what do we do? Can they be killed?”

  “Everything can be killed,” Jovian said. “We just have to get through their mind games to see the real them.”

  “Should it be a consolation that they won’t kill us before we get to the Turquoise Tower?” Angelica wondered.

  “No, because while they wouldn’t kill you or I, there’s no telling what they will do with the others. We can’t think we are safe for a moment.”

  And that’s where Angelica knew she had gone wrong. For some reason she thought this route through the mountains would be without trouble, but trouble was exactly what they were finding.

  “So, what do you think is following us?” Joya asked once the last of the hunting party exited the warmth of the cave. “The ghost wolf thing?”

  “I can’t really be sure.” Cianna sat on the floor near the fire. Shelara was behind her, puffing her soapy smoke into the air, adding a calm atmosphere to the cave. Russel soaked up the heat further back in the cave, writing in his journal. “But I have my suspicions.”

  “What are they?” Joya asked, giving the meat a crank over the fire. The outside was starting to cook, and occasionally juices would sluice down onto the fire, awarding them with a tantalizing smell.

  “Back when I was a child I had a pet wolf,” Cianna started. And then she launched into the tale of how she was out in the woods one day and Altavius, her pet, had been killed. “It was the first time I’d ever worked necromancy. Well, the first time I can remember working necromancy.” She left out the details of how she had felt Altavius’s spirit moving through her and back into his own body. “And he was alive once more. But Sara and Annbell told me that it wasn’t real, he wasn’t really alive, and we had to put him down again. I know now why we had to do it; he wasn’t really alive, just a corpse, reanimated.” She shivered. “But something happened when we put him to rest — his spirit came back.”

  And he had been her companion ever since. Until she met up with the chaos dwarves, and had her run-in with Wyrders’ Bane.

  “I thought he was dead. With all of the spirits of the chaos dwarves coming to me after I’d killed them, I lost track of Altavius. It was during the corruption of the Well of Wyrding that he left.”

  “So you think this is Altavius?” Joya asked.

  Cianna shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but it feels the same. It feels like him.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Joya asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to tap into my wyrd and have it alert those sentries we’ve been seeing in the skies.”

  “I don’t think it will,” Joya said, but the look on her face said she wasn’t so sure about that.

  “Exactly.” Cianna sighed. “I think he’ll come to me when he’s ready. If it’s Alt, he can sense me, and he’s never had a problem before. I don’t know why he’s being so bashful.”

  “Because he feels you’ve left him,” Shelara spoke from back in the cave.

  “I think she’s right,” Russel spoke for the first time. Cianna had almost forgotten he was there.

  “What do you mean?” Cianna asked, turning to their companions at the rear of the cave.

  “Well, think about it. Wyrd was corrupt, and all of those spirits were crowding around you. If you weren’t tethered to him, how was he to find you in the chaos?” Shelara sat up.

  Cianna shrugged. “He’d always been able to find me before.”

  “But you were having your own issues with your wyrd, isn’t that so?” Russel asked. Shelara scowled at him, obviously not liking him horning in on her conversation. He didn’t seem to notice. He closed up his journal and tucked it away in his pack.

  “Yea, I guess.”

  “So, he was lost to you, and couldn’t find you. Of course he is staying behind, not wanting to come to you for fear you will reject him, like he feels you rejected him before.” Shelara put the pipe back in her mouth, and lounged against the rock once more.

  “Huh,” Cianna said. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “Poor little thing,” Joya said. “He feels abandoned.”

  “How do I fix it? How do I let him know it’s okay?” Cianna asked.

  “You’re the necromancer,” Shelara said with a shrug.

  “Do you think my wyrd would really affect the angels? Do you
think they would know?” Cianna asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joya said with a shrug.

  “But the wyrd would be different, right? The wyrd for an angel?” Cianna asked.

  “Of course it would,” Russel said, coming to sit beside the fire. “We’re angels, after all.”

  “So what would it be?” Joya asked. “What makes our wyrd different?”

  Russel shrugged. “Beats me. But there has to be a difference, right? I mean, not right now that we’re still partially human.”

  “Not all of us,” Cianna said.

  “Well, I think maybe until you get your wings your wyrd might be more human than you think,” Russel said. “The point is, I think those up there that are looking for us have a wyrd that’s different than ours.”

  “But different how?” Joya wanted to know.

  “What do we know about angels? Besides the obvious?”

  But none of them really knew. They had learned about the heavenly host and the angelic hierarchy in religion class, but outside of that, they didn’t know much.

  “Well, the one thing I do know,” Joya said after several moments of silence. “It doesn’t matter if our wyrd is angelic or human, I can sense the wyrd of other beings, and I’m sure those fallen can also.”

  Cianna worried the edge of her lip. She didn’t like thinking of Altavius being out there alone, and she needed to get to him, but if what Shelara and Russel suspected was true, she wouldn’t be able to get close to him physically. She knew that he could come and go as he pleased, and Cianna suspected that if he was afraid of her now, he would only retreat as she got closer. She had to do something to get him back with her.

  Maybe leaving something behind? A bit of my wyrd in the cave that tells him it’s okay?

  Maeven pushed back through the entrance of the cave and held the carcasses of the rabbits up high. “We eat another night!”

  “Oh, perfect!” Joya clapped. Russel took the rabbits from him and tucked them away in the waxed pack near the entrance of the cave where they would stay cold and fresh.

  Caldamron went to the back and started talking to Shelara, who lost all traces of the calm her weed was instilling in her.

  “There’s danger,” she told them all as Jovian and Angelica came back inside.

  “Yes, there is.” Jovian agreed.

  “We’re being followed,” Angelica said.

  “Again?” Joya asked. “And why didn’t you know this?” She turned her gaze toward Maeven. “Isn’t that normally your line?”

  He splayed his hands out to his sides with an incredulous look.

  “This is serious,” Angelica said. “At least one verax-acis.”

  “And we found a black shuck print.”

  “Rose,” Dalah said. “Are you okay?”

  The plump sorceress’s leg was pinned to the ground, with Rosalee underneath her. Dalah had had enough foresight to realize they weren’t going to make it out of the tunnel, and had thrown herself between Rosalee and the falling ceiling. Miraculously Rose still lived. The rocks above them had created a shelter of sorts, and hadn’t completely closed in on them. Dalah didn’t dare use wyrd to get them out of the situation, because she knew she wasn’t strong enough to move the entire mass of stones pinning them to the floor.

  Dalah did a cursory scan with her wyrd to see if Rosalee was injured. Though only one of the seer’s legs was crushed, under a large stone, she had knocked her head hard on impact and wasn’t responding to Dalah.

  Dalah considered calling for help, but who would hear her under the debris? Above she could hear horses whining in pain and other people yelling for help; even a few people coming to aid those who had fallen in.

  But we’re on the bottom, Dalah thought. Everyone else made it out before the ceiling caved in. Did they even see us?

  Dalah remembered seeing the group of people gathered at the end of the tunnel and wondered why they hadn’t helped. But they’d seen her. With any luck someone would speak up.

  A rain of dust and loose stone tumbled around her head, and Dalah put as much of herself between the debris and Rosalee as she could. She held her breath, waiting for the crushing weight that would end Rosalee’s life, but it never came.

  Something else was coming, however, and that was fresh air. As the debris settled around her head, Dalah could see a shaft of light slice across the stone before her. There was hope. Grace had to know what had happened. They were supposed to show up for lunch … unless they were out exploring. There was no way that any of her group would link her absence at lunch with this accident.

  “Hold on, Rose,” Dalah whispered. She wasn’t sure if Rosalee could even hear her, but it made her feel better to talk to her old friend. “I’m going to get help.”

  In the darkness of their prison, yellow wyrd formed into an orb before Dalah’s mouth.

  The door at the end of the hall thumped loudly. Grace looked up from where she sat reading in the lobby of the Ivory Tower. She had wanted to tell Rose and Dalah what had happened in the meeting, but all of her group had found the prospect of exploring the largest city in all the realms more interesting than waiting in the dimly lit lobby for word from Grace. Still, most of the people gathered in the lobby were in groups of their own. From time to time someone tried to strike up conversation with Grace, but her icy stare had stopped them. She was reading, didn’t they see that?

  Why in the Realms do people think that just because you’re sitting down with a book they have to rescue you from your boring fate? Don’t they enjoy reading? Is there an invitation on the back of the book that says, “Hey, I’m bored, talk to me?”

  She had said that much to one person. At first they’d laughed, but when she didn’t join in their laughter their face lost all traces of civility and they had wandered off mumbling. Grace had just started getting into reading once more when the door started thumping.

  She looked around her, but no one seemed to hear the door except her. Finally, when the thumping started rattling the door in its frame, Grace huffed and pushed to her feet. Wedging a finger in her book to keep her place, she walked down the short hall to the entrance door.

  She opened it and immediately a yellow orb charged through the opening, bounced along on the walls, and then whizzed up the stairs.

  Frantic message, Grace thought. It always astonished her how wyrd acted in accordance with the mood of the sender. As she closed the door the yellow wyrd shuttled back down the stairs and straight at her. It halted moments before slamming into her. Grace backed away, book poised to smack the wyrded orb if it got too close. But then she saw the words of the message swirling around the surface moments before the orb spoke aloud.

  “Grace,” Dalah’s anxious voice spoke from the depths of the shimmering orb. “There’s been an accident in the Eastern Mall Bazaar. Rosalee and I are trapped under the debris.”

  “Dear Goddess,” Grace said, her feet carrying her plump body hurriedly up the stars and to where she knew the Realm Guardians were gathered for lunch.

  She only realized she was gasping for breath when she reached the third floor landing. Her feet pounded their way down the carpeted corridor to the chamber at the end. The orb followed her, still reporting what was happening, and what Dalah could see. But it didn’t matter; Grace had heard enough to know precisely where they were.

  She didn’t bother knocking on the door when she arrived. Instead she charged in.

  Aladestra held up a hand to silence Grace as she slid to a halt before the table. There was a purple orb floating beside the Realm Guardian, and she was listening to a similar report.

  “And there are people and horses trapped. We aren’t sure what caused it yet, the survivors are too shaken to make any sense.”

  “Fallen,” Grace reported between gasps for air. “That’s what Dalah’s orb said.”

  “Grace, what’s going on?” Sara rose and went to her sister, placing her hands on either side of Grace’s shoulders, trying to calm her.

  “Dala
h and Rose were in the Eastern Mall when the ceiling collapsed. It was a fallen angel.” Grace motioned behind her to the orb, but already the orb was vanishing, whirling out of existence in a scattering of wyrded dust.

  “Alright,” Aladestra said. “We need to attend to this. Grace, give me a moment.”

  Aladestra seemed to quiver with power when she stood, and she cupped her hands before her face. As she started to speak, lavender wyrd formed in her palms, swirling with the words of her message.

  “I want all available sorcerers to the Eastern Mall Bazaar helping the clean-up.” She tossed the orb at the opened window. Again, she started speaking into her hands as another lavender orb formed. “I want all on-duty constables searching for any persons who look out of place. Especially if they scare you.”

  “Alright, she’s going to be a while,” Sara said, steering Grace toward the door by the crook of her elbow. Aladestra nodded in agreement without breaking the commands she was giving the orbs. “Let’s go see what we can do. You said Dalah and Rosalee were trapped?”

  “Yes,” Grace told her. They left the room in silence, followed by the other Realm Guardians down the corridor and to the entrance door, out into the light of the chilly afternoon.

  The cobbled roads outside were in chaos. Sorcerers in various attire were speeding across the streets in a haste that only wyrd could achieve, each step taking them the distance of three. Constables in their gray uniforms were scouting the area in groups that Grace was sure were mirrored around the rest of the city. But how could they search for something that was able to fly out of sight?

  Still other people, gawkers standing on the sidewalks, pressed against buildings, craned their heads to get a glimpse of the bazaar not far ahead. Grace could see the destruction from where she stood. Her heart sank to think that Dalah and Rosalee were trapped under the cave-in.

  “Alright Grace, we’re going ahead,” Sara said as the other Guardians joined the throngs of sorcerers speeding toward the wreckage. “Catch up to us.”

  And Sara was gone, speeding over the cobbles toward the Eastern Mall.