Hearing his friends’ voices call back in assent, Harp stood up and brushed himself off, every muscle in his back and neck complaining of misuse. The glassy floor gave off a faint red glow, but not as brightly as it had done before. At the far end of the chamber, the Torque lay unceremoniously on the floor. Harp leaned over and tentatively touched the band of metal. It felt cool and harmless against his fingertips. When Shristisanti died, the barrier around the city that had prevented their easy entry must have fallen, leaving the Torque unprotected.
Harp turned the Torque over in his hand and wondered at all the machinations that had gone on for a simple piece of tarnished metal, a shackle that had once bound the giant Captive. Had the plan already been in progress when Captain Predeau kidnapped Liel? When Cardew snapped his fingers and had Tresco torture Harp at Vankila? Was Boult right that everything was part of a larger order of events, and when Verran stole the blood elixir, he was acting in someone else’s theater? Who was getting revenge on whom? And had it been the Captive’s day of vengeance, above all else that had transpired during their tenday in the jungle? Harp shook his head. A man could go crazy thinking such thoughts.
“Harp!” He heard Liel calling to him. There was a tension in her voice that made him hurry out of the chamber to see what was wrong. As he crossed through the pearl door into the great hall, he saw ropes dangling down from the hole in the roof. Several masked archers perched on the side of the hole with arrows notched and pointed down at his friends.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
3 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One
(1479 DR)
Chult
Liel, Boult, and Kitto stood in the center of the hall with their hands on their heads, surrounded by a dozen men in leather armor and dark tunics. A handsome, square-jawed man stood off to one side talking to a hooded man in a dark cloak. As Harp emerged from the chamber holding the Torque, the man pushed back his hood revealing long gray hair and a knowing smile. At the sight of the man’s face, Harp’s stomach clenched. The last time he’d seen the gray-haired man, Harp had been strapped to a chair in the Vankila Slab watching parts of his body die piece by piece.
“Master Harp,” Tresco sounded pleased, as if he were seeing a friend after a long absence. “It’s been so long.”
Harp kept his mouth closed. If Tresco was here, that must mean the soldiers were husks and the man beside him was Cardew. Harp had never met Liel’s husband before. Involuntarily, he glanced at Liel and saw that she was looking at him already. When their eyes met, Liel gave Harp a gentle smile.
“You retrieved the Torque,” Tresco said, clasping his hands in delight. “I must say I’m grateful.”
Still, Harp didn’t speak. He avoided looking at Shristisanti’s oozing remains where he’d last seen the vial of elixir. Instead, Harp looked at Verran’s corpse with a strong sense of regret and sadness. Harp wasn’t angry with the boy for what he’d done. If Verran hadn’t stolen the blood, Kitto would still be cursed, maybe even dead. But then, Majida wouldn’t have been hurt, or maybe even dead.
“Does anything happen for a reason?” asked Harp, looking past Tresco’s archers at the blue of the sky. “Or is it just random events ramming into each other in search of a purpose?”
“There’s a reason, Harp,” Liel assured him, earning a dark glance from Cardew.
“Such optimism from someone who should already be rotting in the ground,” Tresco sneered. “And yes, there is a reason. Apparently, you were meant to retrieve the Torque for me. With the barrier in place, there was no way through the ever-so-convenient hole in the ceiling that Cardew found. But once you killed the guardian, we were able to drop in, just like that.”
But Harp barely heard what Tresco said. He was thinking about each of his friends, what might be going on in their heads, and how they might react to the situation they now faced. Kitto would be all right-he wasn’t personally involved with Cardew or Tresco. Harp was concerned about Liel. Her husband had plotted to kill her, which was was bound to shake her sensibilities. But she had given Harp that serene smile, so he figured she was in control of herself. Harp swung his glance to Boult, who looked stoic on the surface. Yet Harp knew that the dwarf must be ready to explode.
Cardew was Boult’s accuser and the object of the dwarf’s hatred for years. At its core, every action Boult had taken for a decade was a calculation on how to slay the man who had doomed him to a life in the Vankila Slab and had ruined his name. Boult must have figured out that Tresco was the mastermind of the Children’s Massacre. Harp had no idea what Boult was about to do, but unless something shifted in their favor, it was unlikely that a dwarf on a rampage would accomplish much except another dead body on the floor.
“Your skin has healed since last I saw you …” Tresco began to say to Harp.
“What’s this guy’s name again?” Harp interrupted. “I can’t quite keep it straight. Practitioner? Ermine? Treecow?”
“Murderer?” Boult asked.
“Scum?” Kitto offered.
“Coward?” Liel suggested.
“I prefer that one for Cardew,” Boult said.
Cardew stirred angrily and opened his mouth to speak, but Harp cut him off.
“So that is Cardew,” Harp said, nodding toward the tall man. “Liel, you could have done so much better than him.”
“I did,” she said, smiling at Harp again. “You.”
“You have no idea what’s going …” Cardew began.
“Cardew,” Tresco warned. “I insist you keep your mouth shut, or I’ll have to kill your whoring wife.”
With his shoulder down like a battering ram, Harp launched himself at the cloaked wizard. But several of the masked soldiers intercepted him. They surrounded him, grabbing his arms, while one of the men punched him in the stomach. As they forced Harp to his knees, Liel slammed her elbow across the face of the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his nose, blood gushing between his fingers, while another man swung his sword at Liel. She sidestepped and knocked his hand away, then kicked the man’s leg above the knee, forcing it back unnaturally, before two other soldiers grabbed her from behind.
They dragged Liel over by Harp and pushed her down beside him. Harp really wanted to stand up and gut Tresco. He really, really wanted to see Boult cut off Cardew’s head with a meat cleaver.
“Hand it over, Harp,” Boult said grimly. “There’s not much you can do about it.”
“Yes, Harp,” Liel said in a monotone voice. “Give him the Torque.”
Harp looked between Liel and Boult in surprise, trying to see if there was a hidden message in their acquiescence, but he didn’t hear anything but defeat. He looked at Kitto, who shrugged noncommittally. Harp held out the Torque to the nearest soldier, who carried it to Tresco and bowed slightly as he handed it to his master. Tresco took an audible breath and accepted the Torque, his face lighting up as he touched the curved band.
“I did it, Evonne,” Tresco said, cradling the Torque against his chest. “I did it for you.”
When Tresco fit the Torque around his neck, the air yellowed and seemed to settle around him, as if it had tangible weight and definition. Tresco’s body became indistinct, the way an object appears through a grimy window. He looked down at Liel and Harp like they were nothing but ants beneath his feet.
“You have no idea how powerful I am,” he said to no one in particular. “No one will ever underestimate me again.”
Tresco turned his back to his prisoners, and a dark shadow formed in the air in front of him. Wisps of smoke appeared, and an acrid smell wafted across the air, as if the shadow were burning the air as it materialized in the stillness of the hall. The shadow elongated and took the shape of a rusty doorframe with a barred metal door that looked like it belonged on a prison cell.