“Thank you for bringing me here,” Orsin said. “You’ve renewed my faith. It had been. . flagging.”
“You’re welcome?” Vasen managed.
“Very good,” Orsin said, chuckling. The deva tucked his holy symbol back under his tunic and took another look around. “Odd, not so, that a place holy to the Shadowlord is in a place holy to the Dawnfather?”
“Perhaps not so odd,” Vasen said, thinking of his own soul, his own life, the tarnished holy symbol he bore.
Orsin watched him and seemed to take his meaning. “No, perhaps not. Shadows require light, after all.”
The distant peal of the abbey’s bell sounded three times, breaking the spell of the moment.
“That’s the call to gather,” Vasen said.
Neither man moved. Vasen eyed the tarn, the trees, seeing all of them as if anew. He took the rose holy symbol in shadow-shrouded hands.
“Wisdom and light,” he whispered.
The bells sounded again, three peals.
“We must go,” he said. “The pilgrims are to leave the vale.”
Orsin’s pale eyebrows rose. “All of them? So soon?”
Vasen nodded. “Including you, I’m afraid.”
“Why now?”
“Because the Oracle commands it. He sees things we cannot. That’s his burden.”
Orsin’s expression fell, but he recovered with a smile. “Strange to say farewell so soon after we met. Strange, that I would have come so far only to cross paths with you for so short a time.”
“You won’t have to say it quite yet,” Vasen said. “I’ll be leading the pilgrims’ escort back to the Dales. The war there makes things especially dangerous. I should have gone last time. Although, then, perhaps,” he said with a smile, “I wouldn’t have let you come.”
Orsin chuckled. “So the shade-but-not-Shadovar will take us back to the sun, then. Very good. Very good. The lines of our lives will stay crossed, for a while longer at least.” He scraped another line into the soft earth and eyed Vasen. “Revelation means a new beginning. We walk together yet, Vasen Cale.”
No one had ever called him Vasen Cale before. He allowed that it sounded right.
Together, they stepped over the line and walked back toward the abbey.
Chapter Four
Gerak followed the seldom-used road out of Fairelm for a few hours before cutting across the plains. The rising sun’s light did not penetrate the dark clouds and rain; it might as well have been midnight. But Gerak knew the terrain well enough to navigate it in the dark. The wet caused his cloak to hang heavy from his shoulders. He did his best to keep his bow dry. As always, he kept his eyes and ears sharp.
A lifetime ago his father used to take him to a wood that was two day’s trek out of Fairelm. Game had been plentiful then, but it had been more than two years since Gerak had ventured there. If Tymora smiled on him, he would make it there in safety, take a deer or two, rig a sled, and drag the carcasses back to the village. After drying and smoking the meat, he and Elle would use it to get them through most of the winter.
Fording flooded creeks and picking his way through intermittent stands of broadleaf trees and whispering whipgrass, he made his way toward the wood. He had trod the plains alone before, many times, but it felt different this time. He felt exposed, a man walking a darkness not meant for men. The black pressed against him, made it hard to breathe. The sounds of his breathing and footfalls broke a silence that felt lurking.
He crested a rise and looked back the way he had come, hoping to catch a final glimpse of Fairelm. But the village was gone, swallowed by the darkness. He stood there a moment, reconsidering his decision to leave on a hunt, but finally pushed away the uneasy feeling that plagued him and continued. Elle and the baby needed real food.
As the day wore on to afternoon, the hidden sun lightened the nearly impenetrable ink, turning it merely to oppressive darkness. Around midday, a high-pitched shriek sounded from somewhere out in the black, a terrified, distant wail that put Gerak in a crouch and sent his heart to pounding. He did not think it was human, and it was always difficult judging distance on the plains. It could have originated a bowshot away, or it could have originated half a league distant.
Moving in a low crouch, he stationed himself behind a rotting broadleaf stump, sweaty hands around the shaft of his bow, and waited. The sound did not recur and he saw and heard nothing more to give him alarm. After calming himself, he renewed his trek.
He walked all day, the wet ground pulling at his boots, as if the earth would suck him down under the sod. Several times he felt certain that eyes were upon him, hungry leers out in the dark, just beyond eyeshot. Always he would nock an arrow and put his back to a tree or rock, his senses alert to any sound or motion, but he never saw anything. Twice he doubled back, and once he hid in a ditch, his sword in hand, and lay in ambush, but nothing seemed to be following him.
Or at least nothing he could see.
He told himself that stress was pulling phantasms from his mind. He passed the first day out in the lonely dark without seeing another living creature, except once, a flight of pheasants far too distant to bother with an arrow. The absence of even small game did not bode well for what he might find in the wood.
The rain relented by nightfall, and before the air turned once more from merely dark to total pitch he gathered kindling and wood and found a suitable campsite under a stand of pines that swayed in the rising wind. There was risk in a fire, but he needed the warmth and the light. Besides, he’d scratch out a fire pit so the flames wouldn’t be visible from too far away-one benefit of the shadowed air.
With his sword he scraped a fire pit out of the wet sod. The kindling resisted his flint and steel but he eventually won it over, and a fitful, smoky fire provided a dim counterpoint to the night. He had never been so happy before in his life to see flames.
He stripped off his pack, staked up the tarp that would serve as his tent, and sat before the flames for a time, thinking, trying to keep from shivering. He needed to dry out his cloak, so he shed it and laid it out near the fire.
Some kind of animal brayed in the distance. Overhead, he heard the flap of wings, large wings. Furtive movement at the edge of the firelight drew his eye, a small night creature that vanished before he could nock an arrow or note its shape.
Sitting out there alone, he turned maudlin. He thought of his father, Fairelm, the cottage, Elle, the baby. He realized that he was attached to the farm because it had been his parent’s. And that was not enough of a reason to stay. Sembia was no place to raise a child. The land did not belong to men anymore, not really. It belonged to the darkness, and was no place for his family. Staring into the fire, he decided then and there that he would take Elle and the baby out of Sembia.
Having made the decision, he felt a weight come off him. He considered heading back to the cottage first thing in the morning, but decided against it. He was only a half day away from the woods where he hoped to take a stag. It would take some time for him and Elle to gather up their things and sell what they couldn’t carry. In the interim, they’d have need for some meat.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and his stomach echoed the sound. He thought of just enduring it-he’d gone without food often enough in recent years-but he did not relish the thought of going to sleep hungry. Besides, he’d need energy tomorrow. He remembered whatever small creature had crept up on his campfire, the pheasants he’d seen in the air. There was food out there. He just had to find it.
His mind made up, he threw enough wood on the fire to keep it burning for an hour or two and stalked off into the plains. He didn’t wander far, wanting to keep the fire visible at all times.
Selune was not visible through the swirl of clouds. Instead, her light created only a dim shapeless yellow smear in the sky, but once his eyes adjusted it was enough for him to see by. He realized that he had not had a clear view of the moon in many years. He would do better by his child.