Iome paused, shaken.
Gaborn said, “Erden Geboren is describing the Darkling Glory, isn't he?”
Even mentioning the monster made Iome shiver. “Perhaps,” Iome said. “Or maybe we're mistaken. Maybe these aren't the same creatures.” She read on.
“The bars to its cage were of blackened iron. Glowing violet runes encircled the base of it, and a roof covered the crown.
“‘As I drew near, I felt entranced by the creature. I peered hard to view it, drawing closer and closer. Yet the nearer I got, the more the darkness about it thickened, obscuring my view.
“‘It was not until I was nearly upon it that I became dimly aware that the Bright Ones were speaking to me: nay, shouting to me. But I could not hear them. Their voices were dull, as if they called from miles and miles away. Instead, all I could hear was the creature, urging me, “Come! Come to me.”
“‘I saw a door on the cage. I could see no…’ “Iome paused. “I think the word must be ‘lock.'” She began again. “‘It looked as if the door would sway open with a touch of the finger, yet the dark servant could not open it.
“‘As I drew near, the creature made no move. Its wings quit beating so wildly against the cage, and it regarded me almost as if it were made of stone.
“’ “Open the door,” I could hear it whisper. “Open it.” Distantly I could hear the Bright Ones shouting, but their words.'”—Iome struggled to make sense of the statement by context—” ‘had no intelligence,’ it says. But I think he means, ‘conveyed no understanding.'
“‘I did not intend to open the door. I only thought to experiment, to touch the gate.
“'I was about to do so when Daylan grabbed me from behind. He shouted in my ear, but I could make no sense of his words.
“‘He pulled me back from the cage and threw me on the ground, then stood over me gibbering.
“The locus raged at me with a sound of thunder, and it seemed that all of the heavens roared with it. “I see you, King of the Shadow World! I shall sift your world as wheat, and cast off the chaff thereof.” I could feel the hatred of the servant, could smell it in the air, as palpable as the stink of dead men.
“'At some length, I was able to make out the words of Daylan. “Didn't you hear us?” Daylan cried. “Can't you hear me?” His face was red with worry, and tears of ‘—I think the word must be ‘frustration'—'filled his eyes.
“’ “I heard you not,” said I, coming to my senses.
“Then the voice of the Fael did pierce me, that I heard it clearly. “Beware Asgaroth. He is a most subtle child of the mother of all loci, the One True Master of Evil.”'”
Gaborn yelped as he slammed a rock against his hand. The green light of his opal pin shone down as he turned toward Iome. But it was not the pain of the wound that had made him cry out.
“The One True Master—” he said, “I thought she was the One True Master of All Reavers, or something like that, not… “
“Of Evil,” Iome offered.
Gaborn felt as if his head were spinning. The creature he was going to face was an enemy that even the Bright Ones and Glories feared. No wonder they had come to fight beside Erden Geboren. Iome continued to read.
“‘Many words did the Fael speak unto me, words that were understood in the heart. I realized that if I had touched that door, tried to open it, strength would have failed me. The door was bound with runes so powerful that a common man like me could not have broken it. Yet if I had tried, I would have succeeded in opening another door: a door into my heart.
“’ “Asgaroth could have filled you,” the Fael told me. “Its evil desires could have become your desires. It could have filled you, as blackness fills the hollows of the earth.”
“‘An unnamable fear seized me. So shaken was I that I could not stand.
“’ “The locus is not the creature that you see before you,” the Fael said. “The Darkling Glory can age and die, but the shadow hiding within it is immortal. When the Darkling Glory dies, its essence will move on, seeking a new host. Thus we have sought to imprison Asgaroth, rather than destroy him. Many Glories were destroyed trying to bring him here. A thousand times a thousand shadow worlds Asgaroth has helped to seize.”'” Iome faltered for a moment, and said, “Erden Geboren doesn't like the word ‘seize.’ He has crossed it out once, suggested ‘destroy’ or ‘sway’ or ‘capture.'” She read on, “’ “But so long as we hold him, he can do little harm.”'”
Iome closed the book, and sat for a moment. Sweat poured down her face, and her clothes clung to her like rags. “Do you think that Raj Ahten's sorcerer is the one who set the Darkling Glory free?”
Gaborn wiped some sweat from his own brow with his sleeve. The running, the growing heat, had left him feeling oily and gritty. He wished for a bath. He had seen the sorcerer enter the fiery gate at Twynhaven, and seen him come back out only moments later. Had the sorcerer had time to break into the cage? Or had he only met the monster there, after some accomplice freed him on the other side?
Asgaroth was its name. Could the monster that Erden Geboren described two thousand years ago be the one that had stalked Iome at Castle Sylvarresta only a week past?
He felt sure that it was. It had come in a cloud of darkness and swirling wind, sucking all light from the sky, wrapping night around it as if it were a robe. Thunder had boomed at its approach, while lightning snarled. It had spoken “as if with a sound of thunder.”
“Well,” Gaborn said. “It seems as if you have found yourself a worthy adversary.”
“I didn't pick a fight,” Iome said. “It came hunting for me.”
Gaborn grinned, hoping to allay her concerns.
“Wait,” she whispered. “It didn't come hunting for me. It came for our son, the child that I carry in my womb.”
“Why?” Gaborn asked. A fear struck him, and a certainty. The Darkling Glory had come for his son, and as Gaborn stretched out his senses, he felt danger stalking the child.
“It isn't just killing a child that the Darkling Glory enjoys,” Iome said as if to herself. “The clubfooted boy was with me, and the Darkling Glory didn't seek his life. Wait—” Iome's face fell and she clutched her womb, then let out a gasp. “Wait!”
“What is it?” Gaborn asked.
“The Darkling Glory—” she said. “Or the locus within it, it didn't want to kill the child. It merely asked for him. It demanded him.”
“What do you mean?” Gaborn asked.
“I think it wanted to possess the babe,” Iome said, “as a hiding place!”
“Of course,” Gaborn said. “The Darkling Glory has fled the nether-world. It might even be worried that its enemies will come looking for it. So it needs a place to hide. And what better place than in a mother's womb?”
By voicing Iome's concerns, perhaps Gaborn gave them weight and heft. Iome began to sob. She covered her womb protectively with Erden Geboren's manuscript.
“I, too, worry about where it has gone,” Gaborn said. “But with my Earth Sight I can see the child's spirit. There is no darkness in you. The child in you is like any other, alive, but as yet unformed. I sense no malice, no evil intent.”
Iome shook with fear as Gaborn held her. She peered into the darkness, her eyes unfocused.
Gaborn asked Iome, “How long will it take you to translate the rest of Erden Geboren's book?”
“I don't know,” Iome said. “It's slow going. I could do it in a week, maybe.”
“I don't need it all,” Gaborn said. “Just… tell me everything he says about the loci and the One True Master.”
Gaborn drained his flagon. It was water that they had taken from the pools at Abyss Gate, and it tasted strongly of minerals. He drank deeply, then sat for a moment. There was absolute silence, a silence so deep that it seemed to penetrate the bones. The distant pounding of reaver's feet was gone. He had heard it when they looked over the spot where Averan was captured. When had it gone silent?
Aboveground it never grew this qu
iet. There was always a jay squawking, or the rush of wind through trees, or the bawl of sheep in a distant meadow. Here, there was nothing.
It overwhelmed him. It was as if the earth loomed above him, a sky of stone and iron, waiting to fall. He could smell it all around, the mineral tang.
It feels like a thunderstorm, Gaborn thought. That was the closest thing to it, like on a summer evening when the air grew heavy and the clouds slogged over the horizon, as black as slate. All of the animals would fall perfectly silent and hide. Even the flies quit buzzing.
That's how quiet it was now, only deeper. It penetrated the skin and made the hair prickle nervously on the back of his arms. Ahead and behind there was only night so deep that he had never felt the like of it.
We're in a wilderness, Gaborn realized, far, far from any human habitation.
He reached out with his Earth senses, then sighed heavily, looked at Iome. “Averan keeps moving. I suspect that we've run a hundred miles and we could have gone no faster, but my Earth Senses warn that Averan is far ahead.” He paused, as if considering what to say next. “There are reavers between us and her, I think. I sense danger.” He did not tell her how great the danger was. He couldn't quite express it. It was as if there was a wall between them and Averan, a wall of death. Gaborn might make it, but could Iome?
Iome shook her head in near defeat.
Gaborn beat at the door for a bit, knocking off flakes now and then. When he grew fatigued, Gaborn let Iome work as he mended his shoe and put a new leather grip around Erden Geboren's ancient reaver dart.
After only a few turns at the wall, Iome broke through. She sighed and nodded down the tunnel. “They're up there waiting for us, aren't they—the reavers? I can see it in your face.”
“Aye,” Gaborn said.
“Well then,” Iome said, climbing to her feet with the help of Averan's staff of black poisonwood. “Let's go make trouble.”
14
THE LIGHT-BRINGER
After seventeen years of prosecuting this war underground, one might think that my men would most crave fresh air, clean water, good food, or the company of a woman. But no, we are beginning to learn how desperately a man can crave light.
—Fallion the Just, Reporting on the Toth War
The Consort of Shadows raced through the Underworld, its feet thundering over stone. Averan floated in and out of consciousness, struggling for breath.
She opened her eyes. The tunnels were a blur. The mucilage seals had begun to erode. Shadows of twisted stalagmites, like deformed giants, lumbered forward in the small light thrown by her opal, then were swallowed again by the darkness.
The reaver grasped her firmly to make sure that she didn't escape, much as Averan had held lizards and frogs as a child. The more she had fought, the harder the monster gripped her.
So she faded back to sleep until she jolted awake. The Consort of Shadows had just leapt a fifty-foot cliff and was racing through a maze of stalagmites. As he did, he cupped Averan close to his chest.
He doesn't want to kill me, she realized. He's trying to keep me alive. The best thing I can do is to go limp.
She wasn't sure that he was being tender enough to keep her alive. The skin of his massive paw was as thick as a bolster and as tough as scale mail. His three fingers were so wide that they enveloped Averan's body from shoulder to heel. With every step he took, the monster dealt out a jolt. Averan felt sure that she was covered with bruises.
Powerless before the beast, Averan dazedly watched the scenery go by. She had no idea how long the Consort of Shadows had been carrying her, but he ran at a tremendous speed.
A fold of reaver's skin was pushing against Averan's ribs. She wasn't sure if she dared try to move, lest the monster grasp her tighter.
She could think of only one thing to do. She cleared her mind, as Binnesman had taught her, and imagined the Consort of Shadows. She envisioned his great, spade-shaped head, as she'd seen it when he rose black from the waters, and she imagined how his philia quivered as he studied his prey. She imagined the feel of his feet as they struck the stone of the tunnel floor, and the sense of purpose he felt as he raced on and on. Soon her mind did a little flip, and she saw, the world through the “eyes” of the reaver.
He registered the force electric in the rocks around him as ghostly blue images, almost as if they were a fog. Plants and animals along the path were much brighter. Blind-crabs scurried from his path, blazing like stars in his field of view.
The path ahead was marked with old reaver scent. Even if it hadn't been, the Consort of Shadows knew it well. He had hunted in the barrens most of his life.
“Where are you taking me?” Averan asked.
The Consort of Shadows jolted to a halt. He held Averan up to study her, and his philia waved.
“Are you speaking?” the reaver asked. She could feel wariness in the monster, “Or am I worm dreaming?”
“Yes, I can speak,” Averan said.
She felt a fleeting question. “Is this how humans talk to one another?”
“No,” Averan said. “I am a wizardess, a protector of the Earth. I can speak to your mind. But most people don't talk like this.”
A memory came to the Consort of Shadows. There had been an Earth Warden among the reavers. The Consort's ancestor had murdered the wizard in a grim battle, and the Consort had later eaten the ancestor's brain.
“Your grandfather killed an Earth Warden!” Averan said. “I see it in your mind.”
“The One True Master ordered his death.”
Averan saw snatches of the battle unfold in the memory of the Consort of Shadows. The Consort's grandfather had crept up behind the wizard, leapt on him and ripped off his forelegs. Once the Earth Warden was helpless, his attacker brutally pried apart the three bone-plates on the wizard's head while he still lived, to torture him until the very last moment, when he scooped out the wizard's brains. Now the Consort of Shadows held some of the wizard's memories.
“That's horrible,” Averan said.
“Proud was my ancestor to have done this deed,” the Consort of Shadows said.
He boasted, but Averan saw that the monster tried to hide more uncomfortable feelings. The memories of an Earth Warden lived inside him.
True, the Consort of Shadows hungered for human flesh. But he also sensed something that other reavers could not. Men were creatures of the Earth, too, beloved by their Creator. They were as valued by the Earth as reavers and blind-crabs, as world worms and tickle fern.
“Where are you taking me?” Averan asked once again.
“A place for humans,” the Consort of Shadows replied. A scent came into his mind, the stench of unwashed people huddled in a dark cavern, the air redolent with the stink of urine and feces. Keeper had also known of the place. It was a cell where the One True Master experimented on people, testing her new spells. Dread knotted Averan's stomach.
“Your master will kill me there,” Averan said.
“In time,” the Consort of Shadows agreed.
“Please,” Averan begged, “let me go. You know the power of the Earth Spirit. You know that I mean you no harm.”
I must not speak of this human, the Consort of Shadows thought. Others will think I am worm dreaming.
Abruptly, Averan felt as if a gate slammed shut between her and the Consort of Shadows. Like the thief who had stolen her horse at Feldon-shire, he pulled back from her scrutiny, broke their tenuous connection.
The huge reaver raced through the Underworld, the tunnel a grotesque blur. He clutched Averan so tightly, that she could hardly draw a breath. She tried to summon the attention of her captor, to beg him not to squeeze so tightly, but without her staff, she was almost powerless.
Averan dreamt of fire—slow-roasting coals that reddened the bottom of a campfire, and of tongues of flame as scarlet as those of the flame lizards of Djeban that snapped out and licked her skin till it was raw.
When she woke, as she often did while in the grasp of the Consort of
Shadows, she would find herself racing along at a dizzying pace, plunging into the black depths of the Underworld through garish ribbed tunnels, past steaming pools that roared and thundered, past mud pots and the bones of strange Underworld creatures.
She woke once, after what seemed like days, gasping for breath, and found that the Consort of Shadows had stopped to speak with some other reavers. It was a war party of twenty-seven. They were led by a grizzled old veteran named Blood Stalker.
“Hide,” Consort of Shadows warned in a spray of scent. “Set an ambush. Assassins are coming from above, to hunt the One True Master. I have captured one of them, but more follow.”
“I shall not hide,” Blood Stalker said, in odors that hissed from his anus. “The One True Master has set runes of power upon us. I am strong now, stronger than you.”
Averan did not slip into her captor's mind to learn what he was thinking. She already knew. Blood Stalker was a proud warrior, and even now he raised his tail higher than the Consort of Shadow's tail, as a sign that he hoped to win the right to breed. His philia were waving excitedly, and all of his muscles had tensed.
The Consort of Shadows had long held such a reputation for ferocity that none dared challenge him. Now Blood Stalker imagined that he was equal to the contest.
“You may be strong,” Consort of Shadows said, “but so are the assassins that follow. Kill them and prove yourself worthy to challenge me.”
His huge paws tightened involuntarily upon Averan, as he prepared for battle. And as they tightened, Averan's breathing was cut off. She struggled to keep from suffocating until she fainted.
When next she woke, it seemed to be hours later. The Consort of Shadows was feeding. He had torn the back off an enormous blind-crab, called a “mugger,” and he used his tongue to scoop out the crab's entrails. Averan lay on her belly on the floor for a moment, seemingly forgotten.
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