The two statues were once of Thon and Kel. Now their faces had been replaced. Where once the brothers had watched over the city, now the long snout and horned mane of the Dragonking cast its cold gaze westward down the Avenue of Triumph.
“The heads seem smaller than they ought to be,” Tragget observed critically.
The stonecutter quailed noticeably. “It was the original stone, Your Lordship. We had to work with what was left. I assure you that the utmost care was taken—”
“Yes . . . yes, I’m sure it was,” Tragget responded quickly. He feared that if he let the man twist much longer on his words, he would hang himself. “You have done well. You may continue with your work.”
“Thank you, Lord Inquisitor!” The master stonecutter bowed several times as he stepped backward. No doubt the man was anxious to get back to his work; even more anxious to get out of the dangerous proximity of the Inquisitor.
Tragget continued to gaze on the statues. Outwardly he was as hard and unmoving as the great figures before him. Within, however, was another matter; his thoughts tossed tempestuously about as he sought answers to questions he barely understood.
After his encounter with Edana, the walls of the Temple had felt confining and its air oppressive. He desperately needed to get out and find some space of his own in which to think. The examination of the stonework being done on the colossi was an excuse readily at hand, so he had exited the Temple at once. He ignored the fountains, gardens, and shops of the inner keep in his hurried step and did not stop until he had passed out of the Conqueror’s Gate.
Now the statues were staring back at him. How appropriate they seemed; the head of a dragon and the body of a man! The priests of the Nobis order had sanctioned the change, stating that it was symbolic of the relationship between the Pir and their Dragonking. Far better, they said, than to perpetuate the fallen glory of humanity.
The head of a dragon and the body of a man: that is the Pir, Tragget mused. Emasculated and decapitated humanity. We do the work while Vasska and his kind think for us. The Dragonkings have a future and a destiny of their own. Humanity has none. Our destiny is the same as the body’s—the grave.
Not I, however, Tragget reminded himself. The doom of the Dragonkings is written in my destiny. I’ve seen it in the smoke; my fate is bound to the power of the Mad Emperors. It is written in prophecy.
He knew his destiny, but what course should he take to fulfill it? This power—this mystic force—was the key. It called to him seductively toward sin and blasphemy against the Pir. He longed to embrace it, flee into it and turn his back on the Pir and his guilt forever. Yet his reason, his duty to his mother, and his duty to the order that had given him everything held him back from that abyss.
He had a destiny, but did that destiny perforce include the Pir? If the dragonsmoke foretold the fall of the dragons, did that not include their religion as well? Was his fate with the Pir—or completely without them?
The head of a dragon . . . the heart of a man. Tragget did not know which road would lead him to his destiny, but one thing he did know; neither road would avail him if Galen died before Tragget could learn what he knew of the power. The heart or the head—either way he had to keep Galen alive.
26
Black Hope
Dwynwyn awoke with a start. She quickly sat up on her bed, her flailing foot knocking several scrolls littering her rumpled bedsheet to the floor. She sat there for a moment trying to catch her breath, feeling as though she had been flying at great speed from some distant place.
Cavan burst into the room. “Mistress Dwynwyn! I heard you cry out!”
“Did I?” Dwynwyn responded. She was disoriented, as though she had been in one place, blinked, and then found herself entirely in another. The surroundings of her room, though familiar, only confused her.
“You did!” Cavan fluttered quickly over to her. “Are you well, Mistress?”
Dwynwyn did not hear him, her mind still preoccupied with the sudden transition from her dreams to the waking world.
A world of dreams? It was far more real this time than any of her previous experiences. She remembered standing upon the tower of Qestardis, though it stood in a different place; a place of rolling hills she had never been before. A fog had blanketed the lowland, obscuring a field of—a field of what? She could not remember it clearly. In her mind she recalled the clouds washed over against the hillsides below as though they were waves of some vaporous sea. The dark wingless man was there, standing at the edge of this fog. There was another wingless man standing with him . . . thin with fevered eyes. The dark one was beckoning to her, urging her to come down to the tower’s base.
There was something there at the base of the tower. The answer to her search. The end of her quest. The key to their salvation. She floated down from the tower, down toward the shore of fog, toward the glinting treasure that could protect them from the doom that threatened them. Dwynwyn looked carefully in the fading light as she neared the ground.
She saw it clearly. It was the wingless man’s gift to her. It was his power given to her. It was a new truth to which he was leading her.
“Dwynwyn!” Cavan was shaking her by the forewing vein of her left wing. “Talk to me! Are you well?”
“Oh! Cavan, stop! Of course, I’m well!” Dwynwyn swatted absently at the sprite, who quickly dodged out of the way. “It’s just that . . .”
No, she suddenly realized, she did know that place . . . or somewhere much like it!
“Cavan! Quickly! We must leave at once!”
The sprite flickered uncertainly for a few moments. “Leave? Leave for where, Mistress?”
Dwynwyn was already out of her bed, kicking aside several scroll sheaves that had somehow managed to fall between her and her crowded closet on the opposite side of the room. “There isn’t time to explain . . . just hurry!”
Cavan had never before questioned his mistress—but he was seriously thinking of doing so now.
They had been together for many, many seasons. Cavan had met Dwynwyn while she was still undergoing her apprenticeship under Seeker Polonis and Cavan had been stationed in the court as a servant to Princess Aislynn’s entourage. Cavan was no longer sure just why he had poured the wine into Dwynwyn’s lap when the Seeker was first presented to the princess. Perhaps it was something Polonis had said that distracted him, or maybe the old crone had managed to give him a shove. Regardless of the cause, Cavan had been certain he would be dismissed from the halls of Qestardis for such a grievous error and thereby become nameless* in his own caste. Dwynwyn, however, had asked that Cavan become her servant and took the young sprite in under her own name. Since that day, Cavan had served her with unquestioning loyalty and devotion.
At least, he had until this moment.
Dwynwyn floated above the waves that rhythmically washed up onto the sands of the beach and then withdrew back into Estarin Bay. The walls of Qestardis were well behind them as they drifted above the shore west of the palace. Cavan preferred the safety offered by those walls. He always considered the world beyond them to be something of a dangerous place: filled with Famadorian creatures of infinite diversity and ferocity. He particularly never trusted the sea. Its merfolk occasionally traded with the faeries, but were mercurial in their disposition and occasionally raided faery ships regardless of the treaties they had pledged.
Now he glanced about uncertainly. “Mistress, perhaps if you could tell me what you seek, I could requisition a group of the third class to come out and retrieve it for you?”
“I’ll know when I see it, Cavan,” Dwynwyn replied, “which is, incidentally, why we cannot send someone out here to get it for me; I don’t know what it is yet. Do you still have that basket?”
Cavan was more confused than ever. “Yes, Mistress, I have the basket, although I can only hope that it is fit to hold your clothing again when we return home. We will be returning home, won’t we?”
Dwynwyn said nothing. She slowed over the waves, whose wa
ters had turned a brilliant turquoise color. Cavan could easily see the bottom as though he were gazing down into a reflecting pool in the palace. It seemed clean enough and not terribly deep. There did not appear to be any of the merfolk around, but one could never tell. He had heard that they were terribly quick in the water. The shore was not far away, but certainly too far for Cavan’s liking.
“Mistress, I really think that we should be getting back to . . . Dwynwyn?”
The Seeker had stopped. She hovered just a wing’s width above the surface of the sea, her eyes wide as a smile played about her lips.
Suddenly, her wings collapsed.
Cavan was ablaze with light. “Dwynwyn! No!”
The faery fell, crashing down into the surface of the sea.
Cavan flitted, desperate and helpless. The water churned below him, opaque now with the froth and agitation of Dwynwyn’s sudden plunge, hiding all evidence of her.
“Dwynwyn! Come back! Come back!”
The roiling surface began to calm, and Cavan could make out a shadow moving beneath the turquoise water fractured by white bubbles. The sprite glanced frantically about, wondering what he might find nearby that would help Dwynwyn out of her mortal danger but seeing nothing of immediate use.
Why had she done this? His mind raged in anger and frustration. He felt certain nothing had damaged her or driven her from the air. Maybe she was sick or poisoned. He should have asked sooner, should have been more attentive and questioned her course of investigation earlier when it might have done her some good.
The surface was nearly calm once again. Cavan could see a dark shape struggling just below the surface. Panic contorted his face.
Suddenly, the dark shape moved and rushed upward. Cavan darted back away from the explosion of water as it broke the surface.
Dwynwyn stood shoulder deep in the water. Her white hair lay flat between her wing veins. The wings themselves sagged behind her. They were hopelessly wet and lay heavily on the surface. The Seeker coughed furiously, water spraying from her mouth.
“Cavan, I must . . . remember to . . . breathe out through . . . my nose when . . . under water,” she sputtered.
Cavan was livid. “Ah, so that is the new truth you have discovered, Mistress? We came out here to discover drowning?”
Dwynwyn smiled between convulsive coughs. “No, Cavan. We came to gather these.”
The Seeker thrust three dark shapes up from the water.
“Those are the ugliest things I have ever seen,” Cavan replied, and faeries never lie or exaggerate their opinions. “What are they?”
Dwynwyn gazed at them. They were, indeed, ugly to the eye of the faery. Even though they were natural, something the faery value above all, they were irregular and roughly crusted disks. More than anything, they looked like dirty, wet rocks.
“They are a new truth, Cavan,” Dwynwyn replied with a smile as she dumped her find into Cavan’s basket. “And there is a lot more of them, too!”
“More of them?” Cavan responded in alarm.
Dwynwyn pinched her nose with her left hand and once more disappeared beneath the surface in a frothing churn of bubbles.
“How many more of them?” Cavan yelled down through the water.
He only got more bubbles for an answer.
Dwynwyn slogged back into her apartments. Her wet wings sagged uselessly from their veins, and her white hair—crusted with the sea salt—hung down around her eyes. Her outfit for the day, a flowing gown, clung to her tenaciously, its hem stained dark from the long walk back to Qestardis.
The palace guards who had strained to lift her back up to the level of her quarters had made it perfectly clear that she stank.
But she was happier than she could ever recall being.
“Mistress.” Cavan spoke from the depths of his misery. He was struggling with the weight of the basket. “The stewards are gathering in the hall. They are dismayed at your appearance.”
Dwynwyn moved quickly across the floor, the occasional drip from her dress marking her path across the litter-strewn floor. “Shut the door and they won’t have to look at me.”
Cavan obeyed as he always had. The portal closed decisively behind him on the gathering and disapproving faces peering in. “The eyes of the queen’s servants are now shut, although I doubt the same can be said about their mouths. What do you want me to do with these—what are these things?”
“Seashells . . . I think. At least that is how they appeared to me,” Dwynwyn replied from her adjoining bedchamber. “Just put them down on the table!”
Cavan cast about the cluttered and disheveled room. “What table?”
“The big one by the window.”
“There isn’t any place on the table to put them,” Cavan replied. There wasn’t any place to put them anywhere in the room so far as he could see.
“Such a bother!” Dwynwyn replied, emerging from her bedchamber, where she had changed into her comfortable, faded lounging robe. She quickly surveyed the carnage on the table, threw her arms around a large stack of bound books, and lifted them clear. She then pushed aside several boxes on the floor with a foot and, having gained some territory, set the books down on the floor.
“I wish you’d let the servants clean your apartments,” Cavan groused.
“I know,” Dwynwyn replied, still absorbed in her tabletop reclamation project, “but after they cleaned, how would I ever find anything?”
“How do you ever find anything now?” Cavan responded.
“There!” Dwynwyn said, happily ignoring his comment as she sat down on the far side of the table. The sun was high in the sky behind her, shining down through the large window. “Set them down right there in front of me.”
The sprite set the basket down, then collapsed back onto a stack of books still remaining on the table. The basket had grown increasingly heavy throughout the morning and their long walk back toward the city. It had been an exercise in both endurance and patience, and Cavan was exhausted.
“I need a knife,” Dwynwyn muttered as she pulled the first of the grotesque shells from the basket. Despite the encrusting outer growth, there was a beautiful symmetry to the underlying shell and something more, she was certain, beyond. “Cavan?”
“Yes, Mistress,” the sprite replied wearily.
“I need a knife?” she repeated. The inflection was a question but the tone said otherwise.
“Yes, Mistress . . . at once.” Cavan sighed, then rose from his resting spot on the books. He flitted once more out the main portal. The sudden opening apparently caught several of the servitors outside speaking among themselves in hushed tones. Startled, they jumped back as the sprite flashed past them. In the next moment, each of them turned away as though distracted by their ordained tasks. The portal closed on the tableau in the next heartbeat.
Dwynwyn smiled. Let them gawk and talk among themselves. She was a true Seeker, and this was a new truth. Something extraordinary was happening, something she had not come across in all the studies and searches of the ancient knowledge. This was what she yearned for all her life and was the heart’s blood of her existence: the revealing of a new truth.
She turned once more to examine the crusty shell. There was a thin line she could see running around its perimeter, which she assumed was the gateway. The fact that she was sure of this thrilled her, too. It was not a truth she had learned in her books or scrolls nor discovered through experiment and trial; this was a truth that she knew beyond those truths of experience. That, in itself, may well be a new truth, she thought.
As Cavan reentered the room, she noticed that the crowd outside had grown in the last few moments. Cavan was clearly frustrated, his normal radiance decidedly shifting in color toward the red.
“I told the servitors that you wanted a knife,” Cavan said in a huff. “Half of them were afraid that you wanted to kill yourself, and the other half were afraid that you didn’t! Either way, they were more than willing to provide the knife.”
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�How good of them,” Dwynwyn remarked with a wry smile. She took the knife—a dagger from one of the house guards—and set the shell against the polished wood top of the table. Leaning down closer, she carefully inserted the blade into the thin line, sawing back and forth down the length. Then, fitting the long edge of the blade into the cut line between the upper and lower halves of the shell, she twisted the dagger, prying the halves apart.
“Mistress!” Cavan said, drawing back in disgust. “What in the queen’s name is that?”
A gritty, white-colored sluice spilled from the open shell down onto the tabletop. The interior of the upper shell was a glorious array of colors, while the bottom half still held the remaining thick liquid.
Dwynwyn cocked her head to one side, then dipped her finger in the fluid and drew it to her lips.
“Mistress! No!” Cavan whispered urgently.
“Salt,” she replied. “How extraordinary a truth!” She then reached forward, her fingers searching through the runny sludge for a moment. A smile once more brightened her face. “Cavan! Some water in the washbasin! Quickly!”
The sprite rushed to the sideboard and poured water from an urn into the basin. He brought it back at once, setting it next to the spilled sluice before flitting back to watch over Dwynwyn’s shoulder.
Dwynwyn pulled something out of the milky liquid and washed it in the basin.
It was a large black pearl shining with a blackness that seemed to shame the night. But as she turned it in the light, variations in its midnight coloring were revealed which gave depth and complexity to its darkness. The pearl was perfect in its roundness and, somehow, difficult to look at for any length of time.
Pearls, the most prized of which were white, were known to the faeries, who often bartered for them with the merfolk at the trade docks of the quay. However, their origins had always been a mystery.
“I have never seen its like, Mistress.” Cavan sounded breathless and troubled.
“You will,” Dwynwyn said in wonder. “Each of these others contains a brother to this one.”
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