"Finish it. Tear it down."
Leesil and Jan rammed through stone and mortar with their prybars to widen the opening. When enough of the wall fell away to allow him to step through, Leesil found the dark cavity where the passage continued, but it reached only a short distance. Another wall obscured by darkness stood before him, and he held Wynn's crystal out.
"The seventh room," Wynn said from somewhere behind him.
The door in the revealed wall was severely decayed, and the air smelled of rotted wood over the top of something more rank. Magiere tried to step past Leesil, but he held her back with a shake of his head, and began carefully inspecting the seventh door.
There was no sign of anything unusual, but the years had eaten at the wood. He hooked the door's latch with his pry-bar, stepped as far back as he could, and pulled. The door collapsed outward as it broke from its hinges, and the fetid stench mounted until he could taste it in his mouth.
Leesil heard Wynn moan as his own stomach lurched.
Magiere stood close behind him as he held the crystal up in the doorway. The crystal's light, undiffused by a lantern glass, was so sharp mat it deepened the room's shadows as much as it revealed pieces of what lay within.
The back wall appeared to be old mortared stone. It barely caught the light, so the room was quite large. Near it, Leesil. spotted what he drought were the shattered remains of a large wooden crate or box. One strut remain vertical, its height above his own waist. There was another slightly smaller crate to its right.
Leesil stepped in and spotted a large crusted vat to the left. Next to it was a crumpled mass, and other such piles appeared here and there on the floor along the wall. As he approached the vat, shadows turned around the walls as the crystal's light moved with him, making the dark heaps upon the floor shift like animals disturbed from slumber in their unearthed burrow.
One appeared to roll its head, and as Leesil stopped, the shadows froze all around him.
A mass on the floor in the left front corner took shape in the light as Magiere gripped his shoulder.
It was a body in a sitting position. Rotted clothing par-tially obscured the bones but not the skull. It narrowed toward the dangling lower jaw, hinting at a triangular face it once wore. Its dark eye sockets were larger than those of human skulls Leesil had been forced by his parents to study in his youth. And upon it still clung wisps of white-blond hair. Slender fingers too long for a human rested on a narrow rib cage.
Leesil didn't need a closer look to recognize the tall lithe stature. This elf had died and been entombed without ceremony in the dark forests of Droevinka, far from its homeland.
Magiere's other hand flattened against Leesil's side. Her grip on his shoulder tightened as she pulled him around to face the chamber's back wall again.
Around the base of the walls were the remains of more bodies.
Chapter 5
T hinly veiled by a night mist, the keep appeared to have aged a century in the brief decades since Welstiel had last seen it. From beneath the branches of a spruce at the clearing's edge, he watched two men with spears walk slowly across the courtyard.
"She is inside?" Chane asked. He crouched nearby, and moonlight peeked through a break in the clouds to wash over his pale features.
Welstiel nodded. He peered about the forest with his senses open wide, letting not only sight but also sound and scent flood into him. Being this close to the keep, this close to the beginning, made him wary. Magiere was inside-of that much he felt certain-but what concerned him more was who else might still have a keen interest in this place, and in any visitors from the past.
"We wait," he said. "Stay close to me if she appears, or I will not be able to hide you from her awareness."
Chane looked at him expectantly, waiting for an explanation of how this could be accomplished. Welstiel silently kept his attention upon the keep.
The two would-be guards walked the grounds' circumference together rather than separately. Simple villagers, their presence was one more hint that this place might well have been forgotten by all who knew what had happened here. Somewhere inside those stone walls, Magiere wandered, unaware of the ghosts of her own past. Welstiel willed that she remain ignorant.
As the guards passed from sight around the stables, the crumbled keep appeared still as a headstone in a forgotten, hallowed place. This illusion of peace and serenity masked a long-ago madness, and Welstiel's mind slipped back…
It was nearly twenty-six years earlier, and Welstiel's father dragged Magelia from her village home. She rode behind Welstiel, clinging silently to his waist all the way to the keep. Her sister ran after them as far as she could, screaming Magelia's name in a frenzy of fear and anger.
Someone loves her, Welstiel thought without feeling. Someone was frightened for her.
It hadn't mattered. It hadn't changed anything.
Lord Bryen Massing was tall, but Welstiel had not inherited his father's imposing height. They shared dark brown hair, square faces, and the shallow bump at the bridge of their noses, but heritage and a few features were all they had in common. Most notable to all who saw them together, the father did not have the white patches of hair at his temples that the son wore.
The fief his father had been assigned was primitive compared with others they had tended over the years, with a squat tower keep of mortared rock with crude barracks and stable attached, built near the central village of Chemestuk. Welstiel rode into the keep's muddy courtyard that night following his father. Their family retainer, the robed and masked Master Ubad, stood waiting for them.
The torch-lit courtyard was alive with activity. Men-atarms and a few conscripted villagers attempted to unload the contents of five sturdy wagons. Along with family baggage, each wagon carried a square crate at least two-thirds the height of man and covered by a thick canvas tarp. Seeing the lord and his son arrive, the men grew openly nervous and too hurried in their tasks. They pulled a tarp aside to reveal one of the crates.
It was constructed of oak held together with steel straps and bound to the wagon bed with chains instead of rope. As two guardsmen unhooked the chains, a deep muffled voice howled out from within the container: "Shairsnisag mi, na mi taitagag craiui ag shiui ag cher!"
The words Welstiel heard sounded Elvish but were more guttural, and he could make no sense of them. A thunderous boom issued from the crate's walls, and it slammed sideways into one guard. The impact crushed the man's legs against the wagon's side with an audible crack of bone. His companion leaped out the other side and scrambled clear. The guard screamed and toppled over to dangle against the rear wheel with his legs pinned against the vehicle's sidewall.
Master Ubad glided toward the wagon. His dark robe showed no sway from footsteps.
"Fools!" he hissed, ignoring the trapped man's squeals of pain. "The contents are worth more than all your lives. Take care-and have all five crates brought to the lower chambers."
Ubad's face was covered by an aged leather mask with no eye slits. Only his withered mouth and chin were visible. When he moved, strange markings shimmered briefly across his char-colored robe in the torchlight.
Welstiel heard less articulate growls coming from the crate, as the men returned to pulling it free from the wagon. All were careful not to pass too near Master Ubad, who watched them closely. The maimed guard was quickly dragged from sight.
Welstiel and his father dismounted, and Lord Massing lifted Magelia to the ground and grasped her wrist to drag her inside. Her black hair hung in waves to the middle of her slender back, and her blue dress made her skin appear ivory. She struggled and tried to jerk away, but her captor kept walking, unhindered by her efforts.