“Cserhelm,” said Lakini, placing her hand on her breast and inclining her head.
Lusk stood, regarding her a long minute before his lips curved upward in a small smile, and he did likewise.
“Cserhelm,” he replied.
Lakini jumped from the flat-topped rock to stand beside Lusk. She didn’t have to ask him to know that his journey had not given him the peace he sought.
And she wouldn’t ask. She and Lusk had been companions for much of her present lifetime, which now spanned almost two centuries. She knew they had traveled together in other lifetimes, before their current incarnations. Devas remembered very little of their previous existences, born innocent of what they were before-although in extremity devas could call upon their previous manifestations to guide or protect them. Still, Lakini sometimes had dreamlike glimpses of previous lifetimes, and visions of an entity she identified as Lusk. She knew he had like memories. Many decades ago they had met, recognized each other, and exchanged daggers-she giving him the sapphire-studded weapon and he giving her the dagger with the snake-inscribed sheath.
Since then they had ventured together, parting sometimes for days or months or years as their respective destinies took them. Their paths had always met again. Lakini knew what a rare gift this was, and that most creatures of her kind never had the privilege of meeting another deva, fated as they were to live only with the mortal folk of Faerun.
But, bonded by forces beyond their understanding, each deva held a solitude deep in his or her heart, a secret place no one else, not even a dagger-mate, could touch. Sometimes that solitude would cry out to one or the other of them, and cause them to step aside from the path they walked together, to quest alone, although they would eventually return to the same path.
There were places in a deva’s heart deep and sacred as the sea. Lakini would not ask after Lusk’s discontentment.
“The crofters say there’s a nest of gnolls denning near Rophile’s Crevasse,” she said at last. “Shall we go rout them out?”
Lusk grinned. “Nothing would delight me more.”
Rophile’s Crevasse was a deep slice in the side of the mountain where the ground had cracked open once, exposing the dark gray rock of the mountain’s substance. Jagged teeth of layered basalt and granite jutted over a chasm few had ventured far into, and precarious, little-traveled paths wound down, clinging to the sides of the cleft. Sun struck down the slopes only a few hours at midday, and moss and small ferns grew deep. Venturesome folk said one could hear water trickling below.
Rophile was not the name of the discoverer of the crevasse or of an adventurer who braved its depths, but of a sheep that had wandered in one day, never to be seen again. The crofter quickly gave up the errant Rophile as lost, but stories were told of a feral, incredibly tough breed of sheep that roamed the interior.
Lakini had heard, and dismissed, theories that the crevasse had no bottom; that it was a passage to the Underdark and its horrors. She didn’t fear attacks by the drow and their allies, not here. But it was an attractive hiding place for the dangerous creatures, sentient or not, that preyed on the merchants, travelers, and pilgrims who braved the road and the wilderness to come to Shadrun. Local rangers, hunters, farmers and crofters, let the sanctuary’s guardians know when something more than fairy tales and mythical monster sheep took refuge in the slash in the mountainside. Lakini had picked up a rumor three days ago that a passerby had barely escaped the fang-spike club of a gnoll.
As it turned out, rumor was wrong in this case. There were no gnolls in Rophile’s Crevasse.
Lakini kneeled on a boulder that overlooked the drop-off. She breathed deeply, filling her lungs with the air and scents of the wilderness. There was the clean, balsamic smell of the pines, as well as a musky smell from the moss that grew on the cliffside’s damp walls and from the leaves rotting on the forest floor. A dank scent rose from the maw of the rift, and she spared a thought for the mass of the bones of clumsy men and animals, ancient and new, that were probably tumbled together at the bottom together with fallen branches and vines. There was nothing unusual here, there being none of the carrion stench of a gnoll pack. She opened her eyes and felt for the lines and letters carved over the top of the boulder-it wasn’t uncommon for the area youth to come here to impress their friends, bleat in an attempt to call the flock of legendary feral sheep, and carve their signs or initials in the rock to prove they’d done it.
She sniffed again, catching just a trace of something strange. It was not like an animal, or the charnel smell of gnolls, but something almost like the reagents a mage would use, a whiff of an alchemical process. There was just a hint of it in the air, and then it was gone.
She tilted her head at a rustle in the leaves up the slope. Lusk was casting about, looking for spoor, tracks, or other signs of the gnolls. She leaped gracefully off the boulder and called out between the trees.
“See anything?”
“Not much.” His voice echoed, disembodied in the crisp fall air. “No gnoll sign, I think. I found the skull of a deer, but that could be from a big cat, even a wolf. Or it could have just died in the winter-it’s full-grown. Wait-no, a predator got it. There’s flesh still on it-fresh.”
A whisper of a boot on dead dried leaves told where Lusk cast about in the woods above. Lakini loosed her sword in its sheath across her back-ordinary predators were nothing like gnolls, but it was best to be cautious-and leaned against the grainy surface of the boulder, enjoying the heat that the stone had gathered through the day on her back.
“Lakini?” Lusk’s voice had a quality that made her stand straight and reach for her dagger.
“What, Cserhelm?” she called.
“Keep watch, Lakini. I found the rest of the deer. All of them.”
A long, liquid snarl sounded behind Lakini, behind the boulder that overlooked the crevasse. She turned, crouching and reaching for her greatsword, in time to see an enormous wolf round the stone at speed, leaping for her with an intent that had nothing to do with a workaday predator. Caught off-guard, she had the vague impression of cruel, knifelike claws outstretched for her and a mouthful of wicked teeth before it bore her to the ground. Cursing herself for an inattentive fool, she rolled as soon as she hit, avoiding a swipe of claws aimed at her gut, and unsheathed her dagger. The length of her sword on her back pressed into her muscles. Still tumbling, she lashed out with her dagger and saw the creature flinch back. She came out of the roll into a one-legged kneeling position, knife extended, and faced the wolf that slavered a few feet before her, feeling her lips rise into a snarl in return. Dark blood dripped down the wolf’s leg where she’d slashed at it, but it wasn’t any kind of serious wound.
“Lakini!” called Lusk, somewhere behind her.
“I found the wolf,” she called back, not moving from her position, and not shifting her gaze from the creature in front of her. The thing’s mouth seemed to open wider in a grin, and saliva pooled in the corners of its lips.
Very slowly Lakini shifted her dagger to her left hand. The outsize wolf’s eyes-one brown, one an angry-looking red-followed her every movement. The smell of chemicals-sulfur and something like burned iron-filled the air.