No wonder she feels like a supportive wife, he thought. She doesn’t speak the language, and she’s not invested in our purpose here. She’s only here because of me.
She looked up, and her eyes were full of sympathy. “I’m sorry, love. You’ll find it, I’m sure.”
He glanced around at the words woven into the murals. They seemed like captions to the illustrations, though they were couched in the language of the Prophecy. He figured the murals might have illustrated a particular interpretation of the Prophecy, but there was nothing that struck him as relevant to the Time Between. He’d examine them in the morning.
As he lay awake long into the night, Rienne’s head on his chest, his heart still ached. He had the nagging feeling Rienne had only accepted him back into her arms to comfort him, to fulfill her role by supporting him.
Rienne’s hair became a mass of snakes, then a knot of tentacles reaching for him. She was the Soul Reaver then, an abomination, a tentacled head crowning a slender body, great claws on shriveled arms grabbing at him, blank white eyes staring into his and whispers of malice flooding his brain. Gaven rolled on top of it, pinning it to the ground. His hand clenched the spear whose point was the Eye of Siberys, embedded in the Soul Reaver’s chest. His mouth full of slime and bile, the creature’s tentacles raking across his face, he thrust the spear down into the Heart of Khyber.
Through his own hand.
The blood from his hand became a spear of lurid red light, jabbing up from the depths of the earth to pierce the sky. Scarlet filled his vision, and he floated in blood.
Three drops of blood mark the passing of the Time Between.
A ring of silver, a serpent coiled into a circle, shone brightly in the field of red. The red turned to sapphire blue, and the silver ring burst into blinding argent flame. A sword slid through the ring, and then it became a stream of blood, mingled silver and black, flowing out through the ring of fire. Searing flames burst to life around Gaven.
The Time Between begins in blood and ends in blood. Blood is its harbinger, and blood flows in its passing.
Pain like he had never imagined woke him from his sleep.
Rienne stood in darkness. A hard floor, smooth as glass, was cool against her bare feet. The only thing she could see was Maelstrom, suspended in the air before her, the blade pointing up and shining a faint beam of light upward into the darkness. She reached out and grabbed the hilt, savoring the touch of the leather wrapping its hilt. With ground beneath her feet and Maelstrom in her hand, she was solid, rooted.
Maelstrom jerked her arm upward and then lifted her off the ground. She floated in a void. Maelstrom was all-all she could see, all she could feel.
Dragons fly before the Blasphemer’s legions, scouring the earth of his righteous foes.
Carnage rises in the wake of his passing, purging all life from those who oppose him.
Vultures wheel where dragons flew, picking the bones of the numberless dead.
Rienne recognized those last words-Gaven had recited them on the airship as they approached the Starcrag Plain.
But the Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness.
Rienne’s feet found solid ground again, and the world burst into light-into the tumult of a battlefield. Dragons flew overhead, their flames and lightning blasting the armies on the ground. A banner fluttered in the wind, bone white, marked with a twisted rune. Maelstrom was alive in her hand-did she control it, or it her? Together they cut through soldier after soldier in a languid dance of annihilation.
She cut a swath through the soldiers until they fell away before her. Then a demon stood before her, his sword burning with blood red fire.
Darkness again, the brief awareness of Gaven’s arms around her, and then she fell back to sleep.
Lissa waited in the antechamber until her feet ached from the hard stone floor and her eyes drooped from sheer exhaustion. After days of hasty travel, she wanted nothing more than to collapse into her bed and sleep for the better part of a day. But duty demanded this one last thing of her.
The door swung open and two soldiers clad in armor made of blackened bone escorted her into the chamber of the dragon-king. She entered silently, but as she approached, the great dragon’s skeletal head turned and rose up on its bony neck. Lissa fell to her knees and dropped her face to the floor.
“Why do you come before me?” The dragon-king’s words were a whisper, spoken without breath or voice.
One did not mince words with a dragon-king, though of course one used the more formal diction of the dragons. “My lord and king, I have found what you have long sought.”
“What is that?”
“The touch of Siberys’s hand.”
The dragon-king shifted from his recumbent posture to put his feet on the ground. “Then the Time Between has begun,” he said, his eyes fixed on the stars that shone through the open dome of his chamber. He deigned to grant Lissa one more glance. “You have done well.”
She scrambled to her feet and fled the chamber before the dragon-king’s pleasure turned to wrath.
The visitor appeared human, but Kelas knew she was not. He greeted her in the ruined sanctuary of the cathedral, which was unsettling once he realized that the large room gave her space to assume her natural form, if she desired.
She was tall and slender, almost willowy-beautiful, even sultry. Her shining silver hair and eyes hinted at her true nature, and she wore a shimmering gown of the same silver color. Her movements were smooth and graceful, and they gave him the mental image of a dragon soaring on a mountain updraft. Could she be planting such visions in his mind? A subtle method of intimidation-reminding him of what he was dealing with?
“Greetings from Malathar,” she said, “dragon-king of Rav Magar.” Her voice was clear as a tuning fork, melodious and stately. She gave the slightest bow.
Kelas bowed a little more deeply. “Malathar honors us with his greetings and his messenger,” he said, his Draconic perfect and smooth. He smiled warmly-a smile that had begun many successful seductions, though in this case he hoped only for a successful negotiation. She was the first envoy from the dragons, the first response to his widespread inquiries, and she had come all the way from Argonnessen. He had hoped against hope for a response from some lone dragon in Khorvaire. But a dragon-king of Argonnessen?
“Malathar has heard of your efforts and would like to help you bring them to completion.”
A surge of excitement rose in Kelas’s chest, and he struggled not to let it show on his face. “I am most honored,” he said.
“Malathar will send you three dragons to fuel the furnace of your forge.”
“And in exchange?”
“In his beneficence, all Malathar asks in exchange is the privilege of providing its first subject.”
“Its first-?” Kelas’s mind raced. It was impossible-he was building the Dragon Forge to have only one subject.
“The city of Rav Magar has a most unexpected visitor,” the messenger said. “He bears the touch of Siberys’s hand in the Mark of Storm.”
The Siberys Mark of Storm? Kelas couldn’t keep his face impassive any longer. Could Gaven possibly have traveled to Argonnessen? Or did two Siberys heirs of House Lyrandar walk the earth? It didn’t matter.
“Please convey to Malathar my grateful acceptance of his generous offer.”
Sleep eluded Gaven for the rest of the night. From where he lay on the floor, Rienne still slumbering against his chest, Gaven could read a few of the snippets of text on the walls, but he realized that the importance of the shrine had nothing to do with the words or pictures it contained. Sleeping in the shrine-sleeping in the holy presence of the Prophecy-induced prophetic dreams. That explained Lissa’s matter-of-fact assumption that Gaven and Rienne would sleep in the shrine.
He looked down at Rienne’s head, at the hair flowing behind her across the floor. Was she dreaming as well? What visions was she seeing?