Judyth flushed and looked away. "Question your own bearings, Aglaca Dragonbane, for you're on the road to the Abyss itself if you keep that one company."
She gestured disgustedly at the cave, and for a moment, an uncomfortable silence rose between them. The first cool winds of night passed over them, carrying the smell of smoke and the faint sound of shouting from the plains.
"I can't leave him, Judyth," Aglaca explained. "There's still the gebo-naud that binds us, and just because he'll break his part now doesn't mean that I can break my own-mine and my father's."
"Silly Solamnic Measure-wrangling," the girl muttered. "You'll honor yourself to death, Aglaca."
"Oh, I know exactly what will come to pass now," Aglaca replied. "He'll be changed… changed for good. We both heard the Voice when Verminaard took the mace. He's with her now, whoever she is, and I've more than a suspicion she'll swallow him whole and try to kill me in the bargain."
"Then go west," Judyth insisted.
"It isn't that easy. There's blood between us. Verminaard is my brother."
"Your brother!" Judyth exlaimed. "But he couldn't be! You couldn't… though you do have the same features… but, no, Laca…"
Aglaca's eyes narrowed. What did she know of his father?
"B-Besides," Judyth stammered quickly, "how can you be sure?"
"My surety is that I know it," Aglaca declared. "As well as I know he has taken the Dark Gods to him and that I shall never hear that Voice again. Perhaps he's taken the Dark Queen herself, but he can still choose to… to set her aside."
Judyth glanced at Aglaca skeptically.
"He's my brother, Judyth," Aglaca insisted. "And I am all he has, though he doesn't know it."
"Not anymore," the girl whispered, and pointed toward the mouth of the cave, where a dark, hulking shape emerged into the night air.
Verminaard shielded his eyes against the moonlight. The entrance of the cave seemed unbearably bright, as though he had walked from midnight into the fullness of noonday.
Hand in hand, Judyth and Aglaca stood waiting, their faces turned toward him, eyes wide in consternation and dread. For a moment, he thought that he was taller, older… somehow terrifying with the dark weapon in his seared hand, the blood dripping from his reopened shoulder.
He smiled scornfully down at them and started to speak…
Then, with a cry of dismay, Aglaca pointed beyond him toward the plains.
Verminaard turned, slipping on the narrow footpath, and fell to his knees facing north, his eyes toward the plains.
In a swath five miles from west to east, the summer-dry grasslands were burning in a mad and relentless blaze.
Chapter 11
High up the slanting hills, where prickly gorse grew into tbick nuts that shepherds sometimes skirted for miles, L'Indasha Yman moved deftly through the tangles of thorn and yellow bloom toward Mount Berkanth, where the ice never thawed.
Of late, the ice of her augury, still holding through careful attention and the deepness of her cave well, had shown a black tower growing, almost as if it were alive, attended by scores of chained ogres. And this morning she had discovered someone near that tower, barely visible and only for an instant, shielded from view by some kind of warding.
The one Paladine had sent.
In L'Indasha's excitement, she had looked too long at the vision, and her chances of exactly locating the girl had melted away. Emptying the bucket and taking up a light, oaken bowl instead, she had raced from her cave toward the permanent frost of arid Berkanth to try to catch another ice-augured vision and find the violet-eyed helper.
Fatigued from the intense concentration and speed the trek required, the precarious footing and the high switching winds, the druidess stopped to rest and check her progress. She was now just above the timberline, where the forest gave way to rugged, short alpine vegetation. While the climb was steeper, the view was at last unhindered. Her breath steamed in the cool, thin air. It was a long, precipitous way down the side of this nameless rise, the highest of the Nerakan foothills. The plains spread out and away in voluptuous green waves below the trees. Several miles to the south, smoke danced over tents and banners. L'Indasha stared in shocked wonder when the cloud feathered away and revealed the twisted, spiring shape of the black tower of her vision, in the midst of the huts, barracks, and pigpens.
The druidess wrapped her green robes closer and stared out at the smoke and flames rising from the village. The sky was nearly dark. That tower was no Nerakan invention, if she knew Nerakans, but the construction of darker and more powerful forces. She made a quick decision. She must get there somehow, in secret, and bring out the girl. A warding would no doubt surround the captive, but breaking it would be no hindrance once she deciphered its pattern. The journey would take some thought and planning-and nourishment; it had already been a very long day.
Digging through her pockets for a bit of food, she found only the last of the daylilies from yesterday's dividing and replanting. It was an undersized fan, with only a couple of decent leaves, but the vigor of the little plant had kept it firm and healthy despite its sojourn in her pocket. She marveled at the strength of life in its greener forms and started to return the lily to her rpbes; there would be time to plant it later. But as she closed her hand over the sprig, a remembrance of Paladine's words came to her: Plant against famine and fire.
She dropped to the ground and quickly began to sing the sowing prayer over the plant and its lofty new home. Only a moment later, she was dusting off the mountain soil from her hands and knees, and the runtish daylily was settled within a protective circle of stones.
As L'Indasha turned to mark the place in her mind, she froze at what she now saw out on the dark plains. The tiny puff of smoke had become a huge billowing thundercloud, and bright fire lashed at the edge of the grasslands. Two horses raced down from higher ground southeast, galloping obliquely along the edge of the fire, their riders low in the saddle. Behind them, swarming like queenless bees, a great many ogres lumbered in pursuit. From the North-Nidus? — through the smoke to the edge of her sight, the druidess could see a small party riding toward the forest. Two dozen men or so, their torchmen wearing red standards, all no doubt unaware of what ill wind blew before them.
She felt for the purple pendant around her neck, but it wasn't there. She vaguely remembered tearing the clasp in her recent haste, somewhere in the cave. There was no help for it now. She would have to brave the flames without Paladine's protective gift.
L'Indasha slung her skirts up over her arm and raced down the hillside, this time catching her bare legs and feet on every thornbush she ran through. Another fire. Another burning. Another darkness.
Daeghrefn wheeled in the saddle, shouting vain orders to his confused search party.
The fire storm had surged all around him, rushing over the plains and into the forest like a devouring wind. The plume of his helmet was charred and smoking, and the mane of his stallion brittle and tipped with ash. He had called to Reginn, to Asa, called desperately to his captain Kenaz, but they had vanished behind a wall of smoke. Beside him, five young guardsmen sat their horses unsteadily, their eyes fixed on the commander, awaiting orders, strength, assurance. Robert, mounted on a skittish roan mare, watched the thickest part of the smoke, the column to their south, in which dark, hulking shapes turned and doubled and danced amid the burning trees.
What had begun as a simple search for Aglaca and Ver-minaard had come to disaster just as they emerged from the Nerakan Forest, intending to follow the foothills south to the borders of the settlement.
Then the fire had rushed on them like something out of the Rending, like the images in a shaman's vision. Daegh-refn's column had scattered, a dozen crack soldiers bolting from heat and curling flame, and he had led them back through the forest, groping toward open country and the castle beyond, toward thinning smoke and clear skies and unimpeded breathing…