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PROLOGUE
The dust of ages greeted Brother Thaddius Roncourt of the Abellican Church when he and his companion at last pried open the stone slab set into the side of the hill. Thaddius tilted his head back, to more fully take in the stale air, and closed his eyes, basking in hope.
Sister Elysant, meanwhile, grunted and pressed harder against her stave, using it as a lever to force the slab—no, not a slab, but an actual door hung on curved metal hooks—open wider. The door was angled, so its weight pressed back against the solid staff.
“Help, if you please, O lazy one,” she said through her clenched jaw.
Brother Thaddius didn’t reach for the door but instead lifted his hand, holding a large malachite. He fell into the song, attacking the weight of the door with the gem’s countering magic.
Elysant stepped forward when she felt the press lessen, and the door swung fully open to fall against the side of the hill.
“Look at these,” she marveled, feeling the curved hinges. “Fifth century?”
“Sixth, and beyond,” Thaddius replied. They had both seen these types of door hangings at St.-Mere-Abelle, of course, for the old monastery had been fashioned bit by bit across the ages, featuring the architectural designs that spanned the nearly nine hundred years of its existence.
“And nothing we would expect to see out here in the Wilderlands,” Elysant added.
Brother Thaddius nodded and stared into the dark hole now opened before him. Was this really a gateway to another time? Was this really a crypt of Abellican brothers? Of saints, even, including one of the greatest Abellicans who had ever lived? He found that he could barely draw breath, and not for the stale air.
For months, Thaddius and Elysant had scoured the foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle Mountains, far to the southwest of the city of Ursal, following the rumors and myths of the people settled about this region known as the Southern Wilderlands. It had been a frustrating, often infuriating journey of discovery, for the ways of these uncivilized folk were quite offensive and foreign to Thaddius. Like the two monks, they were Bearmen, including many who had deserted the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear, seeking the freedom and potential riches of these lands untamed, and many more who had been born in this region, descendants of previous emigrants from Thaddius’s homeland.
Even though the wilderfolk, as Thaddius had come to call them, mostly professed themselves Abellicans, few had treated Thaddius and Elysant with any hospitality. Rather, the monks from Honce-the-Bear had been seen with great suspicion. Whispers followed their every step when they ventured through a village, and many, particularly the children, ducked into shadows when they noted the pair passing.
“Do you feel it?” Thaddius asked, and in looking at his companion, he knew that Elysant didn’t have to ask him to clarify.
“The door has not been closed for centuries,” she noted. “The growth covering it is not as old as that.”
“How long, do you think?”
She moved closer and studied the roots, including some that had been chopped apart at some points. “Decades?” she asked as much as stated, with a noncommittal shrug.
“Twenty-five years?” asked Thaddius.
Again, Elysant shrugged.
“As the old man told us,” said Thaddius, referring to the aged villager who had directed Thaddius and Elysant to this nondescript hill hidden in the forest on the very edge of civilization.
“We know nothing yet,” she reminded.
Brother Thaddius nodded and fished from his pouch another gem, this one a diamond. He spent only a moment finding the song of the magical stone, then brought forth a rich glow and held it aloft as he might a torch. He took a step for the opening, but Elysant cut in front of him, presenting her staff before her into the darkness with one hand, half turning to put her other hand on Thaddius’s chest, holding him back.
“You do your job, I’ll do mine,” she said.
Thaddius chuckled, amused by her feigned seriousness. “If we are right, it is a place for dead things,” he reminded.
“And if there are other ways in, a place for snakes, perhaps? Scorpions?”
Thaddius answered by calling for more magic from the diamond in his hand, the gemstone’s glow increasing greatly.
The tunnel went in a short way, through natural stone and dirt, with roots crisscrossing here and there. The floor was of set stones, however, smooth and mostly flat. It bent around to the right, to another door, also of stone, but open. Elysant used her staff to push it wide, revealing a descending stair beyond.
Down they went, their view blocked by a low ceiling that matched the angle of the stairway until they came to a landing and another set of stairs, turning sharply right. This time, the angled ceiling only followed them for a dozen stairs before opening into a chamber of worked stones, roughly square. Elysant crouched low and whispered for more light, the tone of her voice telling Thaddius to hurry. He moved down beside her as he increased the magical diamond light again, and he and Elysant gasped together at the sight revealed.
On the bottom of the stairs lay a body, a skeleton, mostly, in the ragged clothes and hides of the wilderfolk. Another body lay crumpled in the far left corner of the small room, broken and twisted, but neither of the monks gave it more than a passing glance.
For this was indeed a crypt, an old one. A stone sarcophagus was at the center of each wall, all but the one on the opposing wall open. A fifth sarcophagus, the largest of them all, sat in the middle of the room, its lid secured by large stones piled atop it.
“What?” Elysant asked, looking to her companion.
Thaddius could only shake his head and answer with uncertainty. “The robbers, I presume. The superstitions of the wilderfolk run deep.”
They went in slowly, Elysant carefully leading the way over the body at the base of the stairs. She moved to the coffin on the wall to her immediate left. Its stone lid was askew enough so that she could see old remains within, a broken skeleton in tattered Abellican robes.
“Closer with the light,” she bade, and she bent low to an inscription on the lid and blew hard, lifting the dust from the lettering. She pulled the sleeve of her robe over her hand and briskly rubbed it, then recited the poem inscribed:
Alas for Master Percy Fenne,
Who killed the goblins plenty,
With tiger’s hands he felled a score
And piled their bodies twenty.
Alas for Master Percy Fenne,
Whose efforts should have won,
Excepting that his foes this day
Numbered twenty-one.
Elysant couldn’t help but laugh. “Even in death, they were heroes,�
�� she said.
“Because they believed, and so they did not despair,” Brother Thaddius added, and he, too, gave a chuckle at the poem, so wittily macabre and amusing all at once.
Thaddius stood back and turned, and Elysant did, too, and took a step toward that central, most impressive stone sarcophagus. She stopped, though, and motioned to the back wall, where rested the smallest box of all—and one, it seemed, that had not yet been violated.
“By Saint Abelle,” she whispered.
“The old man was right,” said Thaddius.
* * *
Like a black maw, it stared back at them, open and uninviting.
But here they meant to go.
“Give ’em time, what-ho,” whispered a large man as he reached out and grabbed a friend striding ahead, bow in hand, arrow nocked.
The others of the gang bristled.
“Let ’em do our work for us, eh?” said the large man.
“The skinny one and the little girl?” a sturdy woman asked skeptically from behind.
“Y’ain’t doin’ it with a hammer, no matter how hard ye’re hittin’ it,” said the oldest of the group, a middle-aged man, the son of the oldest man in the Wilderlands village, who had heard these tales for all of his life.
“Aye, let ’em do our work, then ye take down the skinny one fast,” the large man told his archer friend.
* * *
“As you believed,” Sister Elysant whispered when Thaddius had finished his magical work on the small box. Thaddius held his diamond high once more but lowered the intensity of the glow—he wasn’t quite sure why that might matter, but it seemed, somehow, more respectful. He stayed back as Elysant carefully slid the now-separated lid from the opened coffer. And it was a coffer, she knew now, and not a funerary, for this one had not been put here to hold a body, as with the other, larger four.
Deceptively strong for such a compact woman, Elysant managed to ease the lid quietly to the floor. She looked over her shoulder at Thaddius for direction, for he had stepped back again and stood unmoving.
“Thaddius?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. He could not bring himself to step forward and look in. He recounted the steps that had brought him to this place and this moment—if it was, after all, that which he believed and that which he fervently desired.
“So it was true,” Elysant said, barely able to get the words past her shivering lips, and it was not cold in here. The short woman gingerly went up on her tiptoes, peering into the open stone box, but only for a brief moment before turning away. She was feeling the same way as he, Thaddius understood.
“The pagans are good for something, at least,” Brother Thaddius said, trying to lighten the tension.
“Pagans?” Elysant asked skeptically.
“You wouldn’t consider them Abellicans,” Thaddius replied. “Have you witnessed their prayers and offerings? More Samhaist than Abellican—or worse, some blending of the two, which is a greater offense than simply being a Samhaist!”
“Because Abellicanism is so pure?” Elysant asked, flashing a wry grin and letting her quarterstaff twirl slowly in one hand, an unsubtle reminder that she had been trained as a warrior by Pagonel, a Jhesta tu mystic from faraway Behren.
“That is not the same thing,” Brother Thaddius argued, but he shook his head and let it go, knowing he could not win the argument here. For a decade, Sister Elysant had been his mental foil, always challenging him and many times (too often for his liking) tying him into logical corners from which he could not escape. It amused Thaddius now to consider that Elysant, three years his junior, not even yet thirty years of age, had become to him his most important teacher.
He hoped that she felt the same of him.
“They believe what they have to believe to get them through the trials of this difficult land,” Elysant replied. “And through life itself, for death is ever staring at them, hungry. Was our own faith so ensconced just a few years ago? Was yours?”
“We stand before a great treasure and argue politics,” Thaddius replied with a nervous laugh.
“We stand before secrets of the early and great Abellican monks, so we hope,” Elysant reminded. “These are treasures only because of politics, and faith.”
Brother Thaddius stepped farther back from the open coffer and stared hard at the woman, though his thoughts were judging himself and surely not her. He considered her point more carefully, particularly given his own internal strife during the convulsion of the great civil war that had ravaged the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear a decade before. Brother Thaddius had been a part of the defense of the greatest monastery in the world, the abbey of St.-Mere-Abelle, under the command of Father Abbot Fio Bou’raiy, an Abellican following the tenets of newly sainted Brother Avelyn Desbris. Avelyn’s teachings were of compassion and tolerance—even to the point of spreading the beauty of the magical Ring Stones.
Opposing them were the forces of the demon spawn, King Aydrian Boudabras, who led his mighty army to assault St.-Mere-Abelle, the last stronghold opposing his iron rule. That army had included more than a few Abellican monks, led by the fierce and powerful Master De’Unnero.
De’Unnero.
Simply recalling the name brought a wince to the face of Brother Thaddius Roncourt. Marcalo De’Unnero had believed in the old ways, ways of judgment and punishment, of hoarding the Ring Stones within the Church alone and letting the misery of the world serve as a proper reminder to the peasant rabble that their only salvation lay in complete obedience and devotion to the Abellican Church. Father Abbot Bou’raiy’s hug of compassion would be met with the slash of De’Unnero’s arm, a limb transformed into the killing paw of a tiger.
Both men had died in that battle, one that had included a dragon from the deserts of Behr, and thousands more had perished beside them, but Bou’raiy’s side had prevailed. St.-Mere-Abelle had won, with King Aydrian defeated and exiled and gentle Braumin Herde, a friend and disciple of St. Avelyn, elevated to the position of father abbot of the Abellican Church.
The side of goodness and community had won, Brother Thaddius now understood. But he knew, too, as did this woman beside him who had become his closest friend and confidant, that he had begun his inner journey to his current philosophy as a secret follower of Marcalo De’Unnero.
“Hold your judgment of these people about us, Brother,” Elysant said, as if reading his mind—which was not likely hard to do at that time, Thaddius realized. “Your consternation weighs on you more than on them. They only know what they know, as we only know what we know.”
“And now we are here,” Thaddius said lightly and grinned, a proper smile, given the priceless relics now apparently sitting right before them. He hesitantly moved back to the edge of the open casket, the only one of five in this vault that had survived the vandalism and looting of the previous uninvited visitors. The markings on this coffer—the only markings, for it had no inscription like the previous ones—showed that grave robbers had tried to break it open but had failed, as the old villager had recounted. He had told the couple that he had heard tales that one of the coffers would not yield to the determined hammering of the thieves. This one casket among the five, an unmarked and otherwise unremarkable stone coffer, fit that description, and showed exactly those marks.
The other four, Thaddius believed, had held the possessions and bodies of Abellican monks of long ago. All that likely remained now was the scrambled bones and rotted cloth that had survived the looting, as they had seen in the first of the graves. But this one remaining, previously unopened box was no funerary. Those who had buried the others in here had taken special care with this one—or more likely, it had been one of the monks here entombed who had done so, shortly before his death. For this treasure had been magically sealed and could not be forcibly revealed, the stone strengthened and made into one piece by the magical power of the orange citrine stone, and so it could not be opened, not by hammer or mace or brute strength.
Brother Thaddius, however, posse
ssed what the previous intruders had not. He had Ring Stones. He had magic. And he used that magic: First the powerful sunstone to dispel many of the guards and enchantments placed upon this box, and then a polished piece of citrine, the stone of earth, not to break the stone open but to gently separate the top slab from the rest of the coffer.
“Are you going to look?” Elysant said after a long pause.
Thaddius took a deep breath.
“I know,” the woman agreed, and then she stepped forward suddenly and faced her fears of disappointment, and stared into the open box. She slapped her hand over her mouth and began to giggle nervously.
“What is it?”
“Come see,” Elysant told him. “Oh, come see!”
“Is it?”
The woman never turned from the stone box, and she began waving excitedly. She gasped again and giggled more loudly when Thaddius approached, diamond held high, showing the true beauty of the sight before her.
For there in the stone box sat three alabaster coffers, decorated in gold, intricately carved with evergreens and other symbols of the Abellican Church, standing on legs that also seemed made of gold. These alone were a treasure, of course, but that only hinted at something even more precious within them.
“These were no ordinary brothers,” Thaddius whispered reverently. “This is no simple tomb for lost monks.”
“Aye, that’s what we’ve been thinkin’ for most o’ me life,” came a voice from back by the entrance, and the two monks spun about to see a host of ruffians, weapons drawn, entering the room.
The speaker clued Brother Thaddius in to the truth of this, for he recognized that the large man was the son of the very person who had guided him to this place. They had used him and Elysant to get back in and get that last box opened! Now all he could think of was how he might get that cover back on and resealed—but, of course, he knew he hadn’t the time for that.
“No reason for the two of ye to get yerselves killed,” said the large man.
Song of the Risen God Page 1