CHAPTER SIX
"You're sure this is the place?"
Eyes burning from only occasional restless sleep over the last three days, Cerril glanced up at Two-Fingers's hoarse, whispered question. He stood on trembling legs only from sheer force of will and a desire to survive. Leaden-gray fog rolled in from the Sea of Fallen Stars and carried a cold mist that had already dampened Cerril's hair and skin. The young thief pulled the thin blanket more tightly around his shoulders and shivered again.
Another of the small cemeteries that pockmarked Alagh?n's surrounded them. Headstones and markers, tumbled and disheveled, offered visual proof that most-if not all-of the families that had left dead there in the past had long since died out or moved away. Rampant weeds and untrimmed trees formed living walls that subdivided the land of the dead.
"Is this the place?" Two-Fingers asked again. "Is this the cemetery you dreamed about?"
Cerril peered out at the piles of broken markers and shattered crypts. Nightmares-vibrant and bloodcurdling-had haunted what couldn't have been more than a handful of hours of sleep during the past three days.
"Perhaps," Cerril said.
"Perhaps?" Hekkel sounded restless and angry.
Before he realized it, Cerril took a step toward the smaller boy and gripped the haft of his knife.
Hekkel stepped back, tripping over a toppled headstone and sprawling in the greasy loam that had been left from the rain earlier in the day.
"Don't touch me!" the smaller boy yelled.
Two-Fingers gripped Cerril's shoulder. "He's not who you're here to be mad at, Cerril." Two-Fingers spoke gently, and there was a trace of fear in his voice.
For a moment, the blanket flying around him and rage boiling inside him, Cerril considered shrugging Two-Fingers's grip off and leaping down on Hekkel, except he knew he wouldn't be satisfied until he'd cut the boy's heart from his chest. Instead, Cerril made himself turn away.
Two-Fingers drew away quickly. Wan starlight blunted by the thick cloud cover formed a dulled sheen on his round face.
"I'm sorry, Cerril," the bigger boy mumbled.
Hekkel slowly, warily, got to his feet. "Maybe we should forget this," he suggested.
Drawing the sodden blanket back around him, grateful for even the small amount of warmth he drew from the cover, Cerril shook his head. His hair was so damp it stuck to his face, but that wasn't entirely due to the weather. A fever had plagued him, along with the nightmares.
"No," Cerril said, turning to look out over the time-ravaged cemetery. Rats scurried among the stones, their red eyes gleaming in the darkness. "We finish this tonight."
During the course of the two previous nights, Cerril had led them through over a dozen cemeteries. They'd been chased from three of them by the city watch and by a couple of gravediggers preparing a plot for a burial the next morning.
Until the dreams had sent him into the cemeteries of Alagh?n, he hadn't known how many graveyards there were in the city. He still didn't know an exact number, but he had garnered a better sense of the city's long history from his endeavors.
Even before Turmish had become a nation, Alagh?n had existed as a trade port to the Sea of Fallen Stars. Nomadic tribes traveled from the Shining Plains to trade with seafaring merchants who stopped over during their journey to the southern lands. Even the dwarves of the Orsraun Mountains came down from their digs and cities to barter gold they'd clawed from the clutches of the earth.
As the trade port became a city, growing by leaps and bounds as successful trade ventures encouraged hew business, death followed. Besides war and robbery, plagues claimed the lives of the settlers. The Year of the Clinging Death took nearly half the populations of the entire Vilhon Reach. War with pirates and other nations followed, lasting hundreds of years. Alagh?n stood as a city despite the worst of it, but citizens fell and were buried, sometimes in mass graves. The Plague of Dragons in 1317 began in Alagh?n and spread throughout the Vilhon Reach.