Olive shrugged. She’d been trying to understand that herself. “Before you came along,” she said, “the stone was Finder’s crowning achievement. He can’t really take all the credit for you, though, like he can for the stone. The stone is a little like his life. He can never make another one. It’s one thing to say his songs and his daughter make him immortal, but in the end, his songs will change, and you aren’t him. He’s never going to get another chance to live.”
Akabar joined the two women. “Grypht says we’ve got to leave in a few minutes,” he said.
Alias nodded.
The Turmishman put his hand on Alias’s shoulder. “Don’t feel bad about Finder. He’s not worth your grief,” he said. “He’s a selfish, arrogant man. He hasn’t returned because he’s too cowardly to join us.”
“Akabar,” Olive snapped angrily, “we’re about to go into the camp of an enemy god. We may get possessed or killed. Aren’t you afraid at all?”
Akabar looked down at Olive with a faint smile. “You forget that I was possessed by Moander before,” he reminded the halfling. “It’s not an experience I’d care to repeat. But I must do all I can to fight Moander. I defeated the Darkbringer once. I must believe I will defeat it again.”
“The last time we fought against Moander, we had a red dragon fighting alongside us. This time you might die,” Olive pointed out.
“Then I’ll die for a good cause,” Akabar said.
“My mother used to say life is wasted on the young, that the young always believe they’ll never die. You’re not very old. Maybe you don’t believe you’ll ever die,” the halfling suggested, “and that’s why you’re not afraid.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t afraid. All men are afraid. I’m prepared to die because my life has been full. I have lived with three beautiful wives and will leave behind four beautiful children. That was Finder’s mistake. He was too interested in himself. He should have had a family.”
“He has a family. He has Alias and me” Olive said. “Some people aren’t as easily satisfied as you are. They want more out of life than to have children and die for a good cause.”
“Tb get something more out of life, a man must live for others,” Akabar replied. “No monument, no empire, no song or tale left to posterity will satisfy the soul the way bringing joy to another person will. Finder Wyvernspur will not learn this, so he could live another three and a half centuries and still not be satisfied, still be unprepared for death. Death will come, though, whether a man is prepared or not.”
Grypht came up behind Akabar. “It’s time to go,” he said.
With the setting of the sun, the wind began to whistle into the cave.
Finder sat in the ruins of his old mansion, staring at the sun setting over the Desertsmouth Mountains and the moon rising over the Elven Wood. Beside him, courtesy of the finder’s stone, sat an illusion of himself singing “The Tears of Selûne” the way it was meant to be sung, the way he’d written it three centuries ago.
The first part of Akabar’s curse seemed to be working. Finder had been listening to the song for hours without pleasure.
The bard ordered the stone to halt. He looked at his image seated beside him—a young image with a charming smile, more sure of itself than the master beside it. The image was one of a man who’d thought he’d discovered the secret of cheating death. He’d deceived himself into thinking his music would be immortality enough. Now Finder realized that it wasn’t. He wanted to live forever. “Damn!” he muttered.
“Sleep,” he ordered the stone. Instantly the image beside him vanished.
Finder’s mind began to wander. Unable to resolve the problem of death, he began to plan ways to improve the finder’s stone. He should record Alias singing into the stone. He should record her singing some songs with Olive, too. Their voices blended well together.
Finder looked at the stone. It wouldn’t be the same, though, he thought. The recording wouldn’t be Alias and Olive. He couldn’t teach the stone to compliment him when he was especially clever, or worry about him or tease or chide him the way Alias and Olive did. He couldn’t get the stone to love him.
He wanted to be with Alias and Olive, he realized. Before he could change his mind, he sang to the stone to return him to the Singing Cave. The yellow light appeared, blocking out his vision of the ruined keep. When it faded again, he stood inside the Singing Cave.
The cave was empty. The wind whistled through it like an eerie voice. The four of them couldn’t have gone alone to rescue Dragonbait, he thought. It would be suicide, yet he realized that was exactly what they’d done.
Finder stroked his beard, trying to decide the best way to help without risking the finder’s stone. Some sort of diversion, perhaps, he thought.
As he brought his hand down from his chin, he noticed that his fingers were stained green, as if he’d been rubbing a leaf. He scratched at his beard with both hands. A moment later, he looked down at his fingernails with disgust. He’d scratched away great gobs of moss and lichen from his face.
Then he felt something sticky moving in his ear. Shuddering at the thought of earwigs and other gruesome bugs, the bard brushed at his ear. His fingers caught on something fragile and soft, but when he pulled on it, a stabbing pain shot across his temple.
He held up the finder’s stone to look at his reflection. A small orchid hung beside his ear, its tendrils wrapped around his earring and other tendrils were sliding into his ear.
“No!” Finder gasped. He slipped his earring off and yanked harder at the orchid, ignoring the stabbing pain in his head. The flower snapped off in his fingers, and he threw it to the ground and crushed it under the heel of his boot.
He felt something trickle back down his ear canal, then tickle his ear again. Finder looked again at his reflection in the stone. Another orchid squeezed its way out of his ear and began to wrap its tendrils about his hair.
Breathing hard with fear, Finder reached up to pinch the second orchid away between his fingernails, but at that moment, a pain gnawed at his stomach. He doubled over with a howl. Something was inside him, growing and eating his insides.
The pain in his stomach subsided. With a sense of horror mixed with irony, the bard realized what had happened. The black spores that had burst from the burr that Xaran had thrown at him had indeed penetrated into his body. They must have been partially destroyed and greatly slowed down by the potions that had been in his blood. It had taken them a full day to grow. He’d been possessed by Moander all that time without even knowing it.
18
The Seed
Olive clung to the little bit of wild grapevine Akabar had handed her to keep the group together. With the circle of invisibility that hid the group, they needed some way to keep together, and it had been Akabar who had suggested that each of them keep hold of the vine.
As the adventurers approached the camp, walking along the trails of devastation, they were surrounded on all sides by the possessed saurial workers, who wore ragged shifts with vine tendrils poking through holes out of their backs, which wrapped around the saurials’ legs or waists or throats. Olive didn’t care to look too closely at the vines or the holes from which they issued.
The workers all looked exhausted and numb. They stumbled frequently; their eyes were listless; no saurial emotional scents rose from their bodies. Even if magic and the ground’s heat hadn’t masked the adventurers’ presence, Olive doubted they’d be noticed by these enslaved creatures.
The halfling counted three different kinds of saurials. A few were as small as halflings and had long slender necks and snouts and leathery wings hanging beneath their forearms. These flew into the clearing laden with nets of captured birds and fish and eggs and small forest creatures. Another large group of the saurials were approximately the size and shape of Dragonbait. They carried underbrush and small saplings or buckets of water. A third group, the largest in number, were bigger than Dragonbait, a little taller than Akabar, but much more powerfully built, with sharp diamond-shaped blades running from their skulls and down their backs to the ends of their spiked tails. These creatures dragged great trees toward the pile. None of the saurials appeared to be as big as Grypht.