The scent-laden breeze skirted him, and he cast his gaze upward. The sky had not yet begun to lighten, but it could not be more than an hour or two away, or so he thought. There was a time he would have known such a simple thing with precision, with unshakable certainty, but the internal clock he had always taken for granted seemed to have deserted him during his long months trapped deep within a prison of stone. It was as if nature held him apart as a stranger now, no longer recognizing one of its own, and a twinge of sadness pierced him at the rejection.
A horse whickered somewhere behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder. The fire had burned low in its pit, a dull red ember sunken amid the copse of trees. Its glow warmed the outlines of the men sleeping there, and he considered the companions thrust upon him by circumstance. Shaking his head, he faced forward once more.
He wondered why he had not already slipped away into the night. He was better on his own, had always been better alone. He had insisted on taking the last watch in part to give himself the opportunity to depart unseen. He smiled, remembering the open suspicion on Amric’s face when he pleaded to do his part and relieve the man. He suspected that the warrior, if he slept at all, slumbered now with one eye open and affixed to Syth’s back.
That alone would not have kept him here, however, and his smile faded as he pondered his own inaction. If he ever owed these men anything, he had repaid it in Stronghold. He had always felt little enough need for the respect or affection of others. Why, then, did he not leave, he who had always chafed in the company of others? There was validity, he thought, in the reasoning that the forest had become too dangerous to travel alone, even for one with his talents, but he was disturbed to find it a partial truth at best. Perhaps being so long in the grasp of his inhuman captor had awakened a deeply buried hunger for companionship. He shuddered. He hoped it was a condition that would pass; in his experience, nothing good ever came of depending on others.
A rustle of grass brought him about, wind coiling beneath him by reflex and lifting him to his feet in a burst. His hands clenched into fists within the black gauntlets, though he did not recall snatching them up when he stood. Syth relaxed. It was the Half-Ork, wending his way between the gaunt trees, leaning on his staff with movements cautious and stiff. He watched the healer’s slow approach.
“I did not mean to startle you,” Halthak said in a hushed tone as he halted a few paces away.
“I am on watch,” Syth responded with a grin. “It is my duty to jump at every sound. Did I not impress you with my vigilance? Or did you expect to find me dozing?”
The healer smiled back, his creased face splitting to display the tusks at the each corner of his wide mouth. Even in the faint light afforded by the glimmering stars overhead, Syth could see the fellow’s tired, drawn expression.
“You should be resting, conserving your strength,” Syth said.
“I will, soon enough,” Halthak replied. “I needed a moment to say something to you.”
“Oh?”
Halthak nodded and hesitated, as if uncertain how to proceed. “I wanted to thank you for your part in rescuing me, and for risking your life for us all, in the end. Amric told me you had a choice. You could have fled with your freedom, but you chose to stay. He said without your knowledge of Stronghold’s layout, the cause might well have been lost.”
Syth stared at him, recalling his heated exchange with Amric over possession of the key device. He flushed, though whether in shame or anger he was not certain, and he found himself grateful for the concealing dark. “Well,” he said at last, “your friend Amric can be a persuasive fellow.”
“Nonetheless,” Halthak pressed, “I owe you my freedom, and probably my life as well.”
Syth fidgeted, and then shrugged, flashing his ready grin. “I have stolen much in my lifetime,” he said. “I thought it would be a welcome change to be rightfully owed, for once.”
Halthak nodded and swung away. Syth watched his silhouette pick its way back toward the camp, and then he sank smoothly to the ground to sit cross-legged once more, facing out into the night. Later, when the sky began to lighten with the coming morn, it found him still seated there, a solitary figure lost in unaccustomed thoughts.
The man in black emerged from the Gate to stand on a broad platform high above the ruins. He glanced behind to see the Gate seal itself, a searing vertical slash of light that frothed and hissed at the edges until it dwindled and finally vanished. Then the portal was tranquil once more, or at least as tranquil as it ever became.
The man cocked his head, regarding its shimmering surface within the great enclosing arch of stone. As always, he could not decide which it resembled more, the iris of some massive eye without a focusing pupil, or a roiling, fibrous mass of clouds. And he shrugged, as ever before. It was a thing of function, not of beauty, though he had always felt there was an ancient splendor to it that transcended mere beauty.
He turned his back on the construct, and took a few cautious steps. His knees quivered but held, and already he could feel strength seeping back into his limbs. Passing through an Essence Gate was always disorienting, but in this case the reward was almost immediate. He tasted of the energies gathered here by the Gate, and he smiled. Nothing compared to the heady rush of power back home, except of course for this, when a Gate was gathering. And this one was doing little more than sipping thus far, he thought with anticipation, trying to imagine the concentration of force it would reach when in full operation.
The black-robed man strolled around the platform, hands clasped behind his back as he took in his surroundings. Tiny, dark shapes wheeled high overhead in a cloud-streaked sky, but they did not approach and he paid them no heed. The mid-morning sun struggled to pierce that high shroud, sending sparse shafts of warmth down to dapple the crumbling ruins, which stretched away in every direction to the limit of his vision. A blanket of mist rolled and curled over the ground, like some turbulent phantom sea. Where the white waves parted, he could see vegetation pushing through shattered paving, and great mounds of wind-worn, sun-bleached stone.
Bent, misshapen forms shuffled and crawled through the mist, but they gave a wide berth to the colossal pedestal and the wide stairs leading up to the Gate. Good, he thought, as it would save him the trouble of dealing with them.
His expression twisted in distaste as he surveyed the ruins, and with long fingers he stroked a neatly trimmed ebon beard shot through with grey. The place was a shambles. He preferred it when the locals kept the Gate locations in a suitably respectful state, but that had obviously not been the case here. There was no longer power enough to spare from the other side for the old ways either, he reflected with some regret. No matter, he supposed; the Essence Gate was the important thing, and it was fully functional and well preserved by magic. On a whim, he tried to recall the name given to this place. It took long seconds, but finally, through the dusty halls of memory: Queln! That was it, he decided, pleased with himself at this small indulgence.
Then his mood darkened as he remembered his purpose in coming here.
Indeed, how could he forget the name of this place, even over the intervening years? Another part of this otherwise insignificant world had played host to a personal failure which had taken him a great deal of time and effort to overcome, ever since. In many ways the echoes of that time haunted him yet today, for he suspected its influence in the treatment he received, in the assignments he was given, and in the galling pace of his advancement.
And now the vanished threat which he had long argued was dead and gone, which he insisted had been swallowed by a primitive and hostile realm, had instead been detected after all these years in a flaring burst of power. He was not sure how it could be, but one thing he did know: this was his chance to wipe away that past failure, once and for all.