“The Earth is in pain,” the wizard Binnesman whispered.
Averan heard a child squeal in delight. Up the road, beside one of the cottages, a woman squatted on her lawn. Three girls, none older than six, stood with her, looking up at the heavenly display in wonder.
“Pretty!” the youngest child said, as she traced the trail of the fireball with her finger.
An older sister clapped in delight.
“Oh, that was the best one yet,” their mother said.
Other than these four, the town slumbered. The cottages clustered in dark, tired mounds. The farmers within would not dare rise until the cows began bawling to be milked.
Gaborn drove the buckboard through town. The mother and her daughters watched them pass.
Now the earth shivered beneath them like an old arthritic dog. Binnesman had spoken truly. Averan recognized the earth’s pain by more than just the earthquakes or the fall of stars. There were less definable signs that perhaps only one who loved the land could discern. She’d been able to feel it for days now as she walked, a wrongness in the soil, an ache among the hills.
“You know, Gaborn,” Binnesman said at last, “you say that you will lean upon my counsel. Therefore, let me say this: I think you take too much upon yourself. You plan to seek out the Lair of Bones, and hope there to kill the One True Master. But you have not been called to be the Earth’s warrior, you are the Earth King, the Earth’s protector. You also talk of warring with the reavers, killing...perhaps thousands. But more than just the fate of mankind hangs in the balance. There are owls in the trees, and mice in the fields, and fishes in the sea. Life, every kind of life, may fade with us. The Earth is in pain.”
“I would rejoice if we could heal its pain,” Gaborn said, “but I don’t know how.”
“The Earth has selected you well,” Binnesman said. “Perhaps we will find the way together.”
The wagon raced over the road, and Averan lay back with a heavy heart, feigning sleep.
And what of me? Averan wondered. As a skyrider, she’d often had to travel far from home, and she had found some special places that she loved. She recalled a clear pool high in the pines of the Alcair Mountains where she’d sometimes picnicked, and the white sand dunes forty miles east of Haberd where she had played, rolling down the hills. She’d perched with her graak on rugged mountain peaks that no man could ever climb, surveying vast fields and the forests that undulated away in a green haze. Yes, Averan loved the land, enough even to live every day in its service.
That’s what makes me an Earth Warden’s apprentice, she realized.
The wagon rolled through the night with Averan lost in thought. It wound up into the hills. All too soon it came to a halt just outside a vast cavern, where dozens of horses were tethered. A bonfire crackled within the cave, where scores of knights were engaged in rowdy song.
“Averan, wake up,” Gaborn called softly. “We’re at the Mouth of the World.”
He reached into the back of the wagon and as Averan raised her head, he retrieved the sack that held his armor, along with his long-handled war hammer. Binnesman got up and hobbled stiffly toward the cave, using his staff as a crutch.
“I had a dream last night,” Erin Connal whispered to Celinor as they stooped to drink at a stream in South Crowthen, nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Averan. The sun would not be up for half an hour, yet the sky glowed silver on the horizon. The early morning air felt chill, and dew lay heavy on the ground. “It was a strange dream.”
She glanced suspiciously at South Crowthen’s knights nearby, who were busy breaking camp. Captain Gantrell, a lean, dark man with a fanatical gleam in his eyes, stood ordering his men about as if they’d never broken a camp before. “Sweep the mud off that tent before you put it in the wagon,” he shouted to one soldier. To another he called, “Don’t just pour water on the campfire, stir it in.”
By the surly looks he got, Erin could tell that his troops did not love him.
As the men bustled about, occupied with their work, for the first time since last night, Erin felt that she could talk to her husband with a measure of safety.
“You dreamed a dream?” Celinor inquired, one eyebrow raised. “Is this unusual?” He drowned his canteen in the shallow creek almost carelessly, as if unconcerned that Gantrell’s men surrounded them, treating the crown prince and his new wife as if they were prisoners.
“I think it was more than a dream,” Erin admitted. “I think it was a sending.” Erin held her breath to see his reaction. In her experience, most people who claimed to receive sendings showed other signs of madness too.
Celinor blinked, looking down at his canteen. “A sending from whom?” he asked heavily. He did not want to hear about his wife’s mad dreams.
“Remember yesterday, when I dropped my dagger into the circle of fire at Twynhaven? The dagger touched the flames and disappeared. It went through the gate, into the netherworld.”
Celinor nodded but said nothing. He watched her suspiciously, daring her to speak on.
“I dreamt last night that I saw a creature of the netherworld, like a great owl that lived in a burrow under a vast tree. It held my dagger in its beak, and it spoke to me. It gave me a warning.”
Celinor finished filling his canteen, then licked his lips. He trembled slightly, as if from a chill. Like most folk, he felt uncomfortable when talking of the netherworld. Wondrous beings, like Bright Ones, peopled it, but there were tales of frightening creatures too—like the salamanders that Raj Ahten’s flameweavers had summoned at Longmot, or the Darkling Glory they gated at Twynhaven. “What did this...creature warn you about?”
“It warned me that the Darkling Glory could not be slain. A foul spirit possessed its body, a creature so dangerous that it strikes fear even into the hearts of the Bright Ones. The creature is called a locus, and of all the loci, it is one of the most powerful. Its name is Asgaroth.”
“If you are convinced that this Asgaroth is a danger,” Celinor asked, “then why are you whispering? Why not shout it to the world?”
“Because Asgaroth may be nearby,” Erin whispered. A squirrel bolted up the side of a tree, and Erin glanced back at it furtively, then continued. “We can slay the body that hosts the spirit, just as Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory, but we can’t kill Asgaroth himself. Once a locus is torn from one body, it will seek a new host, an evil person or beast that it can control.” She paused to let him consider this. “When Myrrima slew the Darkling Glory, a whirlwind rose from it—and blew east, toward South Crowthen.”
Celinor looked at her narrowly, anger flashing in his eyes. “What of it?”
“You say that your father has been suffering delusions....”
“My father may be mad,” Celinor said curtly, “but he has never been evil.”
“You were the one who was after telling me how his far-seer turned up dead.” Erin reminded him. “If he killed him, it may have been an act of madness. Or it may have been evil.”
“I only suspect him,” Celinor said. “There is no proof. Besides, his odd behavior began before Raj Ahten’s sorcerers summoned the Darkling Glory. Even if you received a true sending, even if your ‘locus’ is real, there’s nothing that should lead you to suspect my father.”
Celinor didn’t want to consider the possibility that his father might be possessed. She didn’t blame him. Nor could she argue that his father’s odd behavior had begun weeks ago.
Yet something that the owl of the netherworld had told Erin caused her concern. It had shown her the locus, a shadow of evil that inhabited one man, even as it sent out tendrils of darkness around it, tendrils that touched others—seducing them, snaring them—filling them with a measure of its own corruption.
Thus the locus’s influence spread, rotting the hearts of men, burning away their consciences, preparing them to act as hosts for others like it.