From the Stair of Distant Vision
under the sun’s black eye
The Door is opened. The Light revealed
“Sun’s black eye” sounded like an eclipse, but there were no eclipses expected for many months.
Burns all, consumes all, kills all
Favaronas shuddered. That certainly sounded like a goal Faeterus would embrace.
Unwraps the flower, cracks the egg
Pulls the seed from the ground.
If the Holy Key is broken.
More obscurity. If the Holy Key was “broken” (whatever that meant), would life be restored or forever blotted out?
Although Favaronas didn’t know it, his theories about the valley were running along the same lines as his Speaker’s: that it was the location of the Pit of Nemith-Otham, where five dragon-stones containing the essence of five evil dragons had been buried. The stones had been dug up later, but Favaronas thought it logical that their power could infect the area where they had lain.
The walk back to the bonfire was a long one. Every strike of his heel jarred like a blow. Faeterus had stopped mumbling. He sat silent, chin on his chest. Favaronas’s footsteps slowed, grew more stealthy. If Faeterus were asleep, he might have a chance to get away. He circled wide of the unmoving sorcerer and wondered how to dispose quietly of the wood cradled in his arms.
“Put it on the fire.”
He jerked in surprise, dropping several pieces of wood. He snatched them up and deposited the entire bundle next to the fire.
“Fall down,” Faeterus said, quite matter-of-fact, and all feeling left Favaronas’s legs. He dropped flat on his back. His legs weren’t fused together, but they were paralyzed. Unable to sit up, he rolled over onto his stomach and began dragging himself across the rock ledge. Faeterus chuckled.
“Save your strength. Before the sun sets again, you will see the greatest release of power since the Cataclysm. You wouldn’t want to miss that. As a royal archivist of Qualinesti, surely you want to witness firsthand the final obliteration of the elf race?”
The paralysis in Favaronas’s legs was creeping upward. His belly went numb. With a last, desperate heave, he rolled himself onto his back so he might see the brilliant sky before all went dark.
“Do you see smoke?”
Kerian and Taranath were taking a short rest, leaning against a low monolith. Hytanthas’s question brought them to their feet. He was returning from filling their water bottles at a nearby spring. All three shaded their eyes and looked high up on the mountainside.
“That’s our target,” Kerian declared.
Taranath was skeptical. “How can you know? Anyone could’ve made that fire.”
“Faeterus thinks he’s killed the khan’s bounty hunter,” she said. Taranath had told her of his patrol’s rescue of Robien, from Faeterus’s magical trap. “He’s finally begun whatever it was he came here to do, so he doesn’t care whether the Speaker’s warriors find him either.”
Her logic was good but not impeccable. The Nerakan soldier they’d found in the tunnels might have comrades, Hytanthas suggested, and the fire might be their doing. The Lioness’s certainty was unshaken. The Nerakan was a professional warrior; if he had comrades, they wouldn’t be so careless with a campfire.
That convinced Hytanthas. He was eager to press on as quickly as possible, but Kerian urged caution.
“You just said he might have begun what he came here to do!” Hytanthas protested. “We have to stop him!”
“We will but not by exhausting ourselves. A steady pace maintained through the night will get us to the source of the smoke by midday tomorrow.”
Hungry and strained as they were, an all-night march was not a pleasant prospect, but Taranath and Hytanthas did not object. What had to be done would be done.
Kerian shouldered her bedroll. “I’ll take the lead.” She strode off among the gaunt trees and standing stones.
The smoke was a beacon rising in clear view of the entire valley. Skulking through the underbrush, Prince Shobbat had come to the same conclusion as Kerian: only Faeterus would be arrogant enough to declare his presence with a bonfire. Since the priestess’s magical hand had thrown him several miles providentially in the right direction, the prince had a lead on the laddad expedition. He knew they were not far behind him, having first smelled then heard them. He also detected the teeming laddad camp, farther back, and tasted the pines and cedars, vines and wild sage all around him. It was quite dizzying, having the senses of a beast.
He broke into a trot, anxious to reach Faeterus first. If Kerianseray caught the sorcerer, Shobbat would never be able to extract the necessary counterspell to undo his transformation. He would spend the rest of his miserable life as a beast. That was not the destiny promised him by the Oracle of the Tree.
He pondered how to convince Faeterus to release him from the spell. The sorcerer was accustomed to life in Khuri-Khan. His sojourn in the lifeless vale would likely make him all the more eager to have his position restored. Shobbat could offer him a place at court, an estate of his own, any amount of money—as soon as Shobbat had taken his rightful place as khan. If that didn’t sway him, Shobbat would dismember him, piece by piece, until he agreed.
His lips curled in a snarl. Maybe he should start with dismemberment and to the Abyss with trying to buy the sorcerer’s aid. Why waste treasure and privilege on an untrustworthy mage? Pain and terror were far better inducements. He would leave just enough of Faeterus alive to remove the curse then rend him to bits.
Another pair of eyes beheld the smoke rising from the side of Mount Rakaris. They were rimmed with tears. Breetan Everride had worked her way up the eastern slope, just south of the broad ledge where the smoke originated. After scaling the heights above the ledge, she carefully made her away across the higher range toward a boat-shaped rock prominence above the Stair. Fatigue, the persistent pain of her broken rib, and the constant presence of the valley ghosts at her heels had clouded her mind and hampered her pace, until finally she made a crucial misstep. She set her foot on a slab of fractured shale and swung her full weight onto it without first testing its stability. The narrow slab shifted abruptly, sending her plunging, feet first, a hundred yards down the mountainside.
Her fall ended only when her left boot wedged in a gap between an oak stump and a sharp-edged boulder. Her body hurtled past until its momentum was arrested with a jerk that snapped her ankle. The pain was horrendous. A sharp scream was torn from her throat, and she shoved her fist in her mouth. Certain she had given herself away, she waited for the inevitable cries of discovery and the hail of elven arrows that would pierce her battered body.
None came. Wracked with agony, her face torn and bleeding, she carefully freed her shattered ankle and lay back, gasping for air and staring at the sky. Through tears, she saw a thick column of smoke rising from the cut in the mountainside below. There was almost no wind. The smoke rose straight as an arrow. Good conditions for her crossbow, if she could still manage it. Her ankle throbbed mercilessly. It was swelling inside her boot. She’d never be able to walk on it, but if she wanted to complete her mission, she had to move. The nearest place that afforded a clear shot at the ledge below was the boat-shaped prominence to which she’d been heading. It was still three hundred feet upslope.
Breetan pushed herself over onto her belly. If she couldn’t walk, then she would crawl.