“Fine. If you’d been truly clever, it wouldn’t have taken you two tendays to figure out that your uncle wanted you to look in there,” Hamil said. “I don’t read Dwarvish. What’s the cover say?”
“It’s not Dwarvish. It’s old Damaran, which used the Dwarvish runes. It says ‘The Book of the Harmachs, Lords of Hulburg.’ It’s something of a family history.”
“You’ve seen it before?”
“Yes, on several occasions. It was one of my uncle’s prized possessions. When I was a lad he’d sometimes show me different parts of it.” He smiled a little at the old memories; he’d been very impressed as a small boy by the size and age of the tome, and the care with which his uncle handled it. He flipped it open, turning the pages gently. It was a disorganized collection of old letters, genealogies, records of proclamations and patents of nobility, illustrations and maps, essays on the family history … whatever the harmachs of old had seen fit to save or write down for those who would follow. He noticed that many pages toward the book’s end were written on new vellum in his uncle’s hand, including a fairly extensive index. “Books were his great love. He should have been a scholar,” he murmured.
“Are there any spells in there? Rituals? Other things that might explain why your uncle thought it was so important?” Hamil asked.
“I’ll tell you if I find any,” Geran replied. He closed the book with care, and carried it to the door. “Excuse me, Hamil-I think I’ve got some reading to do.”
He retreated to the house’s library, threw a couple of logs on the fire, and settled down in one of the armchairs by the fireplace to carefully peruse the Book of the Harmachs. One of his old tutors had taught him long before that the best way to read a book was to start with the first page, proceeding through introductions and prefaces with the same care he’d spend in the body of the book, and Geran had never abandoned the habit; he was a very deliberate reader. He spent the rest of the afternoon engaged in his task, losing himself in the stories of people dead for centuries, the glimpses of a Hulburg in the days when it had been a great city several times the size of the realm Grigor had ruled over, the records of old tragedies and lost wars that had reduced the harmachs’ domain to a desolate ruin in the decades before the Spellplague and its gradual resettlement. Dinnertime came and went, and Geran absently ate a little bread and sliced roast that the mistress of the kitchens had sent to him.
An hour before midnight, he found what he was looking for in a chapter added by his great-grandfather, Angar Hulmaster. A hundred years earlier, Angar had been forced to open the crypt of the old Hulmasters by tomb robbers, and he’d visited the crypt of Rivan, learning the truth of the family’s origins. Not long after that he’d encountered Aesperus the lich, the first Hulmaster to do so in centuries. Geran read his great-grandfather’s account in amazement, then immediately reread it to make sure he’d understood it correctly. When he finished, he set the book down and went to stand by the fireplace, gazing into the flames as he grappled with what he’d learned.
The Hulmasters were the only living kin of Aesperus, the King in Copper. And the lich permitted Hulburg to exist only because Angar had promised to keep the places of the dead in the Highfells unspoiled.
In the margins of a drawing next to Angar’s account-a drawing of Rivan’s sarcophagus-an invocation was scrawled in a shaky hand. “An oath that must be kept in Rivan’s crypt,” Geran murmured. He took a blank piece of parchment and carefully copied down the words of the invocation, deliberately avoiding speaking them aloud. When he finished, he tucked it into his pocket, closed the Book of the Harmachs, and protected it with a minor warding spell before returning it to its wrappings and locking it in one of the library cabinets.
Two hours before sunset on the following day, he took a mount from the Lasparhall stables and rode up into the Highfells. Kara, Hamil, and Sarth accompanied him. The afternoon was clear, windy, and cold, and a rippled overcast of steel gray like the serried scales of a dragon roofed the moorland. Bright sunbreaks lingered in the west, where the sun was slowly sinking toward the horizon.
“I have misgivings about this, Geran,” Sarth said as they left the wide fields of Lasparhall below them. “It is a reckless thing you intend!”
“Aesperus offered me counsel once before,” the swordmage answered. He drew his hood over his head, shivering against the cold. “He might not care much about the living, but I think he’s absorbed in his own legacy. That’s why the troubles of our family interest him; the only thing that he fears is that he might be forgotten. He’ll come if we call him.”
“That is exactly what concerns me,” the tiefling replied. He frowned deeply, but he fell silent as they continued to ride deeper into the Highfells.
Geran had grown up riding, hunting, and sometimes skirmishing in these wild lands, and he knew them well. Much like Hulburg, Thentia lay under the verge of the wild and desolate moorland of Thar, a hundred miles or more of wiry moorgrass, ribs of wet stone, gorse-filled hollows, and meandering streams winding through hidden channels that were often ten or fifteen feet below the plain, posing a considerable hazard to an unwary rider. Wind-blown mists often rolled in without warning to hide landmarks and confuse travelers; in wintertime, heavy snow only lingered in low places or along the lee side of hills and ridges, since the ever-present winds usually scoured the level ground clear. Yet, despite all that, Geran had always found the moorlands beautiful in their wild desolation. The vast distances and stone-crowned hills could be spectacular on a clear day, beckoning to his native wanderlust with the promise of lands few people had ever seen.
Geran thought he sensed a whisper of peril in the biting wind, a hint of supernatural malice gathering as night drew near. He said nothing, but Hamil narrowed his eyes and shifted in the saddle. “Do you feel it?” he said aloud. “Something’s stirring in the wind.”
Kara nodded. She knew the Highfells even better than Geran, having spent most of her life crisscrossing the wilds as a scout and hunter. “Sometimes the spirits of the dead roam abroad in the wild places after the sun sets. I think this will be one of those nights,” she said. She looked at Geran, a crease of worry marking her brow. “Will that help or hinder you in what you intend to do?”
“Help, I think. I don’t know how far King Aesperus’s domain extends toward Thentia, but I’ve got a feeling that if the dead are restless here, he’ll hear us.”
“We are well within the borders of Aesperus’s old domain, so he can certainly answer if he is willing,” Sarth said. “However, I still advise against proceeding. Drawing Aesperus’s attention may very well be the last thing any of us do. And even if he deigns to treat with you, Geran, he may not see any reason to aid you-or may offer you assistance that fails you at the crucial moment.”
“He aided Sergen,” Geran replied. “And he kept his bargain. But I’ll agree that we must be very careful in what we promise him.” The dying sun finally broke through the clouds in the west, throwing long orange rays across the moorland; their shadows stretched out long and dark before them. Ahead, Geran spied a row of small, regular hummocks marching across a gentle hillside-a line of old barrows, completely covered in moorgrass. He turned his horse toward the ancient grave mounds. One didn’t have to ride far in the Highfells to find an old grave, but he was gratified to find that this small group was more or less where he remembered it from his days of exploring the country around Lasparhall as a young lad. “There, I think those will do,” he said.
Distances could be deceiving on the open moor, and the barrows were the better part of a mile off. By the time they reached the old graves, only the last limb of the sun remained above the horizon, and the wind was growing viciously cold. They picketed the horses a hundred yards away in a small jumble of boulders, and as the day slowly faded Sarth picked out a spot near the middle barrow and fashioned a ring of fist-sized stones around it, muttering wards and protections over each one as he put it in place. Before he emplaced the last stone, he motioned for the others to step within. When Geran did so, he felt the palpable menace of the evening drawing back, as if it had been pushed away by some great unseen hand.