Tristan froze, holding his breath.
Several of the awful things stretched their long wings and half flew, half jumped into the trees at the farthest edge of the clearing. Their speed was astounding. Perching almost gracefully upon the bending branches, they closed their wings, becoming quite still. The silence surrounding this place was suddenly overwhelming, for now even the captive consuls did not move. And then the creatures’ eyes began to glow even more brightly.
The red within their orbs became brighter and brighter, until it was actually painful to look at. The beams of red light shot from them, tearing across the clearing and into the night. The intensely focused tunnels of scarlet illumination were so vivid that Tristan and the two others were forced to turn their heads.
They’re looking for us, the prince realized.
The three of them slid back down behind the crest of the knoll just as the scarlet beacons shot out in their direction. Once behind the lip, the prince looked up to see the red lights shooting crazily to and fro, crisscrossing almost constantly as they searched out any sign of movement. It seemed to go on for an eternity, imprisoning the three of them there. Finally the crimson beacons vanished. At an approving nod from Wigg the three of them slowly made their way back up to the crest and peered over it cautiously. The hideous birds were all back on the ground, again tending to their containment of the consuls.
Why are they doing this? Tristan wondered. Joshua said that they have the power to fly the consuls away. So why do they stay here, in this one place? Almost as soon as he thought the words, the prince got his answer.
Many of the birds turned their heads to one side of the clearing. Looking toward the edge of the glade, Tristan squinted into the darkness, trying to see whatever it was the creatures were looking at. A figure upon a horse appeared from out of the woods and rode slowly into the midst of the stricken consuls.
The birds were not alarmed, Tristan realized. They knew the rider.
The fellow jumped down from his horse, the spurs at the heels of his boots jangling lightly. Walking in between the various consuls, he began examining them closely. He was tall and lean, and looked to be dressed in brown leather. A dagger hung low at his left side, tied down to his thigh. He carried no sword. The cruel face that showed up in the rose-colored moonlight was sharp and angular, revealing sallow eyes and gaunt, sunken cheeks. His unkempt hair was long and dark. Then he turned just right in the moonlight, allowing the prince to see the miniature crossbow that was laced along the top of his right forearm. Tristan’s endowed blood immediately began to swirl hotly in his veins.
Scrounge.
Wigg turned to the prince, his raised eyebrow telling Tristan without the need for words that he was not to move, no matter what happened. His lips in a snarl, the prince could hardly contain his anger. Nonetheless, he nodded a curt agreement back to the old wizard and turned to lock his dark eyes upon the assassin in the glade—the man who had become the object of his unyielding hatred.
Scrounge stood before one of the larger birds. “They are in good condition this time?” he asked. “None of them are damaged severely?” The bird he was addressing tilted its grotesque head and made a harsh call into the night, apparently answering.
They understand, Tristan realized, amazed. These birds are not simple, mindless beasts. They can actually think!
Scrounge smiled at the awful thing. “Very well, then. Let’s begin.”
The bird began extending and retracting its deadly-looking claws, as if in apparent anticipation of what was to come, and then jumped upon one of the consuls lying on the ground. Straddling him, it pinned his arms to the earth with its long, dark claws. Another of them did the same to the consul’s feet as the remaining birds began to contain other men. One bird kept watch over those consults who were not yet restrained.
Scrounge smirked. He removed a dagger from inside his shirt, rather than reaching for the one at his side. In the bright moonlight the prince strained his eyes to look at the blade. It did not appear to be stained yellow. And then, with the methodical, painstaking precision of an expert butcher, the assassin began his grisly work.
Bending down, Scrounge reached for a pinioned consul’s right arm and pulled back the sleeve of his robe, exposing the tattoo of the Paragon. The consul tried frantically to get away, but he proved to be no match against the strength of the two horrific birds. With four quick, surgical strokes Scrounge excised the tattoo completely as the consul’s screams reverberated through forest. Then Scrounge lifted the tattoo, impaled on the end of his dagger, into the moonlight. He smiled as if it were some bloody, sick prize he had long coveted, then walked back to his horse and retrieved a leather satchel from the back of his saddle. He deposited the tattoo into the satchel and brought it back to the center of the clearing with him.
The consul he had just cut fainted. Scrounge and the birds ignored him as if he did not exist. Instead, Scrounge selected another of the captives and began the same process, the screams commencing anew into the cold night air.
And so it went, one victim after the other, the great, obscene birds holding down the consuls while the sadist employed his dagger. The screams and the begging ripped into the hearts of the wizard, the prince, and the gnome as they watched silently, helplessly, from the knoll.
Wigg lowered his head in the midst of all the madness, tears coming from his eyes. He looked over at Shannon and the prince and again shook his head, silently telling them both that they must also do nothing, despite how much it hurt. Tristan’s eyes were not full of tears. Instead they held the same kind of darkness Wigg had seen in them whenever the Chosen One had thought of Kluge, the previous commander of the Minions of Day and Night.
Despite how much Wigg wanted to reach out a hand to try to stop what was happening, he was still unsure of the birds’ powers. He looked over again into Tristan’s face, knowing how hard it was for him to remain still.
He will face Scrounge before this is all over, Wigg thought. And when the time is right, I will not try to stop him.
And then, blessedly, the assassin’s work was finished.
Scrounge picked up all of the tattoos from the ground, carefully placing them into his satchel. Turning to the birds, he said, “Take these consuls to the master. And be careful with them. They are no longer to be harmed. Should any of you drop one, you will pay for your mistake with your life. Go now.”
With that each of the great, awful things grasped one of the consuls firmly in its claws. Tristan noticed that the birds now seemed to be concerned for the men, rather than simply trying to contain them in the glade. They took the greatest of care when gripping them with their long, black talons. Then they flew up and away. For a moment their silhouettes, bizarre-looking with the consul’s bodies dangling below their wings, flashed across the rose-tinted light of the moons. As a group they wheeled into the dark sky and were gone.
Scrounge remained alone on the blood-stained grass in the middle of the clearing. For a moment he simply stood there, looking at the moons, a wicked smile creeping across his angular face.
Placing one of his hands into the satchel, the assassin ran his fingers luxuriously through the twelve bloody pieces of human flesh he had obtained. He then walked back to his horse, tied the satchel to the back of his saddle, and galloped away. The sound of his mount’s hooves eventually retreated into nothingness.
Someday, Tristan swore to himself as he gripped the hilt of his dreggan.
With another nod from the wizard, the three of them carefully walked down into the clearing. Blood could be seen everywhere—far more than they had noticed from their hiding place. The redness lay like a specter of defeat, adding to the sadness each of them sensed as they stood in the spot where the consuls had suffered.
“Why?” Tristan asked the wizard angrily. “Why would anyone do such a thing? And where did these awful birds come from? I can now completely understand Joshua’s fear.”
“Indeed,” Wigg said simply. He squatted down,
taking some of the consuls’ blood between his fingertips. He examined it closely in the moonlight.
“But the other question is ‘how?’ ” he continued. “How was it that the consuls did not try to use their gifts and fight back? Did you notice how powerless they seemed to be in the face of those things?”
The wizard stood up, turning his bloody fingertips to the light of the moons. A sudden flash of recognition came over his face. “Tristan,” he called softly. “Come here.” The prince walked around Shannon to where the wizard was standing.
“Tell me,” Wigg said, holding his bloody fingertips before the prince’s eyes. “What do you see?”
“All I see is the blood of the consuls upon your hand,” he answered. “What more would there be to see?”
“Perhaps nothing more to see, but much more to be known from the seeing,” Wigg answered cryptically. “Look at the blood again. Think.”
Another test, Tristan thought to himself.
He could not fathom the wizard’s reasoning. Layers of thought and deed, he reminded himself.
He stood there, perplexed. Then something tugged at the back of his mind, and he realized he had the answer.
“The blood is not moving,” he breathed, unashamedly fascinated at his own discovery.
“Exactly.” Wigg nodded. “And why is this significant?”
Tristan’s mind went back to that day in the Redoubt, when Wigg had told him so much about himself, his blood, and his destiny.
“If the blood of the endowed does not move, it can only be for three reasons,” he said slowly. “First, its owner could be dead. Second, the endowed was never trained, as is the case with Shailiha and me. Or third, he has for some reason lost his powers—the blood returning to an inert state. Since we know the first two reasons are not possible, it must therefore be the third.” The importance of his statement hit him all at once. “The consuls have somehow been stripped of their powers,” he whispered, not even believing it himself.
“Well done,” Wigg replied. “But the question remains ‘how?’ How could someone or something strip all of the consuls of their power? And if the cause is a blanket incantation, covering all of them at once, then why has Joshua not lost his powers, as well?” he asked. The wizard paused, rubbing his chin with his clean hand.
“I believe Joshua has not lost his gift because he has been in seclusion with us at the Redoubt,” he continued. “At first, when I saw that the consuls were not using their gifts to try to fight off the birds, I concluded that it was due to the weakening of the Paragon. Because their blood is less endowed than ours, any variance in the quality of the stone would affect the consuls’ powers much more quickly—far more drastically than it would mine or Faegan’s. Compared to us, the rate at which the consuls would lose their powers would be virtually exponential. But now I’m not so sure that the decay of the Paragon is the only reason.” Wigg paused, lost in his thoughts.
“In addition,” he added, “Joshua told us that the squad he was with tried to use the craft to fight off the birds. The means that whatever took their powers did so after that incident. This must be yet another reason why Joshua retains his gift. For that we should feel thankful, for we shall need all of the endowed blood on our side that we can muster.”
“And all of this means?” Tristan asked.
Wigg’s face darkened. “What all of this means is that whatever we are up against is growing in its power,” he said softly. “And probably continues to do so with each passing moment.”
Tristan looked around at Shannon, finding that the gnome was still speechless. Curious about something Wigg had said, he turned back to the wizard. “What is a blanket incantation?” he asked.
Pursing his lips, Wigg took a long breath in through his nose. “A blanket incantation is one designed to influence more than one person at a time, in exactly the same manner. If, for example, I wished to have everyone at a dinner party believe that the common gruel being served to them was Eutracian pheasant under glass, the incantation used would affect them all at once, in the exact same way. A ‘blanket’ incantation, if you will, ‘covering’ them all. Such spells can be very useful, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“You also used your powers to mask our blood from them, didn’t you?” Tristan asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did,” Wigg answered. “At first I could not be sure whether the birds had the power to detect endowed blood. I masked our blood anyway, just to be on the safe side, but I now believe that they do have this ability. How else would they be able to find and hunt down the consuls? In any event, I’m glad they did not find us with those very interesting eyes of theirs. Yet another curious topic . . .”
“But why take the consuls at all?” Tristan asked. Suddenly realizing he had been wielding his dreggan all of this time, he quietly replaced it into its scabbard. “And what would Scrounge want with all of the tattoos? Are they simply some form of sick, twisted proof of his conquests?”
Wigg looked up at the moons. “I don’t know why the consuls are being taken,” he answered simply. “I only wish that I did. But as for the tattoos, perhaps that is not really what they seek. Perhaps it is the consuls, without their tattoos, who are for some reason the true prize.”
Above, the inky black of night was beginning its daily retreat into the softer, more fluid shades of pink and orange that would soon accompany a beautiful sunrise. Tristan knew that the wizard would want to get under way again before they lost their cover of darkness.
Remembering Scrounge’s final words to the flying creatures, though, he found he had one more question.
“Wigg,” he asked, as the wizard began to wipe the blood from his hands, “who is the ‘master’?”
His face darkening again, the wizard stopped what he was doing and looked the prince in the eyes. “There have been many masters, Tristan,” he said softly. “Faegan and I are but two of them. Some of them I have known, and many of them I have not. Only time will tell. But what I can tell you is that we are up against someone or something of inordinate power—the likes of which I have never seen. And our odds of surviving this entire situation do not appear to be particularly good.”
With that the wizard began to walk out of the clearing to retrieve their horses. The prince and gnome followed, their footsteps sadly trailing the blood of the consuls as they went.
CHAPTER
Fifteen
As Faegan wheeled his chair down the labyrinthine halls on his way to the princess’ quarters, his mind turned over endlessly. So many problems had so quickly presented themselves to the small group of people living here in the Redoubt. The price on the Chosen One’s head, the disappearance of the consuls, and the sudden emergence of Joshua’s birds of prey all weighed heavily on his mind. But no problem concerned him as much as the decay of the Paragon.
He and Wigg had properly prepared the stone so that it might take a new host, and Faegan had put it on, hiding it beneath his robes. He had dutifully checked the Paragon several times since Wigg and Tristan had left for the Caves. Any subsequent change in the color of the jewel was still undetectable to the untrained eye. Nonetheless, he could sense the minute decay of the stone. The several months he and Wigg had estimated would rid the stone of its color would pass quickly, indeed, unless the process of decay could somehow be reversed. His sense of dread increased with every moment of every day.
He turned his gray-green eyes to look at Shawna the Short, Shannon’s wife, who was patiently walking alongside his chair. He had asked her to accompany him to the princess’ room so that she might stay with the baby while he and Shailiha went about their business. Business that the wizard felt was long overdue.
Shawna the Short was an incredibly hard worker. Her hair was gray and tied at the back of her head in a bun, so that it would never interfere with her tasks. The simple dress she wore was covered in the front by a white apron that she washed out every night. Her no-nonsense shoes were flat and sturdy. Her blue eyes and strong chin sh
owed a fierce independence, and Faegan had learned to rely on her very much over the last three hundred years. He had also come to love her as he would a daughter.
At last they arrived at the princess’ door, and the wizard knocked softly. At the sound of Shailiha’s voice he narrowed his eyes, opening the door with the craft, and wheeled himself in.
Shailiha was at her loom, and both the wizard and the gnome wife could begin to recognize the pattern that had begun to take shape in the woven lengths of thread. It was clearly a representation of a king and queen—her parents, he assumed. They were standing side by side in one of the great rooms of the once-sumptuous palace above.
Faegan suddenly realized that this was Shailiha’s way of dealing with her grief in this massive, lonely place. The young woman had been so used to light, gaiety, and love in her previous existence. It was apparent to him that her work at the loom was, at least in some small way, an attempt to relive those days. Smiling at his sudden insight, he found himself wholeheartedly agreeing with her methods.
She deals with her pain through the process of creation, Faegan thought. And Tristan dealt with his personal tragedies through the process of destruction—the killing of the sorceresses and the commander of the Minions of Day and Night. He paused in his thoughts for a moment, still regarding the lovely young woman at the loom. The Chosen Ones. So alike, so different.
Shailiha turned from her work and smiled at the two visitors. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, rising and walking to them. She wore an off-white gown, with ivory satin shoes. A matching string of pearls lay around her neck, accompanied by the gold medallion she always wore.
She gave the elderly wizard a quick kiss on the cheek, then did the same for Shawna. “I am glad you have come,” she said. “I was just about to take the baby for a walk. Would you like to join me?” Faegan smiled, hoping that the blush on his cheeks wasn’t noticeable.
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