He’d put her first.
But she very obviously didn’t put him in the same place. He was secondary to her concern over dealing with the Sovereignty. That thought burned him. He’d sacrificed everything and laid his soul at her feet. She hadn’t reciprocated; she had put other things before him. More than that, she had pushed him away.
His skin warmed.
Two could play at that game. If she wanted to be quit of him, and that was her way of showing it, fine.
Japheth clenched his hands and ground his teeth.
“The circle is complete,” said Seren. “You and the monk should be on your way before it fades.”
For a moment, Japheth’s anger urged him to turn and simply walk away from it all.
Raidon, who’d spent the last few hours sitting in a lotus position meditating, stood. The half-elf’s sheathed blade released a cerulean spark that skittered across the floor. The monk bowed to the wizard.
“Thank you,” he said. “Without your help, none of this would have been possible. I hope we see you again after this is all over.”
Seren was caught off guard by the monk’s words. She nodded, coloring. “You’re welcome,” she managed to say. “And you will see me, because I mean to collect. Don’t go getting yourself killed just to get out of our bargain.”
When Raidon actually smiled, Japheth’s smoldering anger faded somewhat.
Then the monk turned to him and asked, “Ready?”
The warlock released a long breath. Of course he wasn’t going to walk away. He could stew about Anusha anytime, damn it.
“Yes,” he replied. He had everything he needed for a long trip hidden away within his cloak.
Japheth focused on the blurred forest inside the circle. He stepped past the threshold, into the image. He gripped his rod in one hand, ready for-
There was no ground on the other side of the linked portal.
Japheth fell. Branches lashed his body and his flailing limbs.
Then his cloak caught him in a fist of lightless safety.
When the darkness let go, Japheth stepped onto a buckled, overgrown flagstone path shadowed by a thick forest canopy.
Weathered stone columns poked from the ground, pointing at awkward angles like teeth in an orc’s mouth. They had probably once formed a ring, but time and some past earth movement had destroyed their symmetry.
A crash of branches jerked his head around.
Raidon slid down the bole of a tree, slowing his descent with a single hand on the trunk. The monk made being dropped out of thin air into a tangle of tree branches seem like an everyday occurrence.
When the half-elf’s feet were on the ground, he said, “I’ve experienced worse, but that transition was unexpected.”
“I hadn’t realized how disrupted the circle was,” Japheth replied. “Now that I see this side, I’m surprised it worked at all.”
Raidon gave a slight nod. The monk’s attention shifted to the trees that pressed close beyond the periphery of leaning stones. “Back in Aglarond,” he murmured.
Japheth studied the monk. The man seemed more like the person he’d first met below Gethshemeth’s island. The listless detachment Raidon had displayed since they’d returned from Xxiphu was still somewhat in evidence, but it was clear the man was making an effort to throw it off.
Raidon continued gazing into the trees, as if recalling an old escapade.
“What is it?” said Japheth.
Raidon shook his head. “Not important,” he said. “Is Malyanna near?”
Japheth frowned and said, “Give me a moment.”
The warlock drew in a breath. He focused on his pact. He imagined it as a physical thing, as a thin strand of celestial fire connecting his heart to all that lay beyond the vault of Faerun’s sky.
Since he’d sworn his new pact, he’d noticed occasional tugs and tiny yanks on the connection. At first, he hadn’t thought anything of it. Then three nights before, he’d awoken from a dream of empty space with an insight. The sensations corresponded to individual and particularly powerful beings associated with the stars. And the two he recognized were the Eldest, and Malyanna.
It scared Japheth more than a little that those two were so entwined with his new spell source he could sense them, even if only vaguely, through the connection he shared. It was something he tried not to think about too much. Unfortunately, just as he could sense them, apparently they were aware of him; Malyanna had crafted a glyph that allowed the Lord of Bats to find him with little effort. He’d have to devise a way to shield himself from such scrutiny.
But it was the Lord of Bats’s appearance that made him realize that each tug he discerned through his connection to the star pact probably indicated literal shifts in the geographical or planar positions of Malyanna and the Eldest. Because she’d sent Neifion after him, Japheth realized he could track her the same way.
Unfortunately he couldn’t yet imagine how to fashion a glyph as potent as the one Neifion enjoyed. Not that he’d had any time to spend on it, given that Neifion had only appeared the day before. Then, that night …
Japheth shook his head, trying to clear it of distracting thoughts. Concentrating on the celestial thread of his pact was difficult enough without the memories of the silky warmth of Anusha’s skin intruding-
Stop it.
He placed his hands palm to palm and closed his eyes. He imagined the thread once again, trying to detect in it the tiny shifts of tension that would betray Malyanna’s location to him.
It’d be child’s play to see where the eladrin noble was if he placed a crystal of traveler’s dust in one eye. The gates of perception would open wide, then.
No! No, not unless he’d exhausted every other method. The desire for the dust still lived in him. Thankfully the urge to dig out his supply wasn’t the irresistible geas it had once been. Lately, it was more like the memory of an urgent desire rather than the desire itself.
Was he finally leaving the crimson road behind?
“Can you sense her?” said Raidon.
“Don’t rush me,” snapped Japheth. In truth, he was embarrassed. He was allowing distractions to cloud his mind. He was scared to make a real effort and engage so intimately with the star pact.
He drew in a slow breath and released it, imagining as he did so that he expelled all the diversions, all the fears, and any concern other than the sense of connection with the stars.
There! The celestial connection pulled and shifted … that way! She was near. But something was muffling his ability to determine specific distance. It was as if Malyanna were not fully in the world.
Japheth cleared his throat. “This way, but I don’t know how far,” he said. He pointed north, away from the path, into the darkness between the trees.
“Then we’d best start,” said the monk. He stepped off the path and headed in the direction Japheth indicated.
Walking between the trees proved easier than Japheth had guessed. The trunks were several paces apart, and at least in the region they moved through, the undergrowth was suppressed beneath a layer of reddish humus. They advanced up a slope at an angle. The ground was studded with stones and larger boulders, occasional ravines, and deadfalls, requiring that they divert from the straight-line path Japheth tried to stay on.
Birdsong brightened the air, but it was infrequent and tentative. The warm smell of a growing forest was evident, but an underlying tang of sweet rot underlay everything, as if corpses of dead animals and overripe fruit lay just beneath the loam.
A few times a curling, scratchy sensation skittered across Japheth’s skin and crazed his sense of connection to his pact. When that happened, the disagreeable smell grew stronger. The first time it happened, Japheth nearly gagged. He realized then the smell wasn’t the odor of rotting flesh-it was the odor of decaying magic.
It was the aroma of a pocket of active spellplague.
Raidon didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he kept his poker face perfectly intact. The warlock resolved to do the same, but he paid careful attention to his surroundings. He didn’t want to step into an unknown sinkhole dancing with unbound wild magic.