by Ulff Lehmann
A subdued knock on the door interrupted his pacing. It was dark now. Arawn had spent some time in the dread place. “Enter,” Darlontor said.
The swordpriest was pale. Gone was the determined glare, he thought he detected even a hint of terror in the other’s stance. “You’re right,” Arawn finally said, leaning against the heavy door. “What little I could understand was enough to make me sick.” A deep breath, and then, “What language is that?”
“Not ours, that much is certain. Seems similar though.” He paused, motioning to a chair. “Sit.” It wasn’t a command, but the swordpriest barely looked his way as he slumped down. “Ever read something from the dark years? The time before man and elf existed together peacefully?”
Arawn shook his head.
“Neither have I. In a way it seems as if there wasn’t much to say in the first place.” He walked to his chair behind the desk and settled down. Folding his hands on his lap, he continued. “I spoke to a Librarian once. He told me the most curious thing: that our history began a few hundred years ago, as if we had just appeared out of nowhere.” Arawn blinked and stared at him. “Look at our language, bastardized Elven, nothing more. Did we learn from the elves?” He shrugged. “Does it matter? And if we learned from them, whom did they learn it from? The gods? Or whoever came before them? If the language inside these books is the language of the gods, then we are better off without them.”
On that the swordpriest seemed to agree for he nodded his head almost imperceptibly. “They aren’t written in ink, are they.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“No.”
“Gods. Think Gryffor believes them to be the words of the gods?”
“I don’t know what Gryffor believes. All I know is that we use only our own life force to feed our magic. Whoever wrote these books did not. I’m not even sure the so-called Servant was any such thing.”
“Is that how you tracked Dalgor?”
“Aye, there is a spell I deciphered, adapted. It allows me to find someone by tracing their blood.”
“That’s how you knew where Drangar would be.” It was a statement, a question, and even an insinuation. Or was it just his imagination playing paranoid tricks on him?
Darlontor remained silent. The truth would be told on Lliania’s Scales, not a moment earlier.
CHAPTER 21
Fourth of Cold, 1475 K.C.
The books Kevonna had given him made Lloreanthoran’s skin crawl. It all felt familiar. The castings with lifeblood, something he had suspected from the moment Gaedhor had wiped his hands clean, roused the same feeling of helpless submission he’d had once before, with the Lightbringer. His strength of will sufficed to beat down the despair. Ancient fiery tales told to misbehaving children summoned the same fear, primal, instinctual. Lloreanthoran recalled his own misery as a child when his parents had told him the story of the bloodyman waiting for him. He shuddered.
Why this tale of woe—of the cruel lord who punished those who misbehaved—worried him even now he couldn’t explain. He doubted any elf could.
The details were sparse, whether accidentally or on purpose to mislead outsiders, he could not tell. Maybe the Sons’ chroniclers like Traghnalach’s Librarians wrote different versions of history. In the end it hardly mattered. The volumes hinted at enough that he was able to form an opinion, one that caused a new wave of discomfort.
Bloodmagic was stronger, yet it also was a perversion of nature. Where his magic played with past and future memories of one element or another, nudging things to create the desired effect, a person’s lifeblood hammered chance into oblivion, creating fact. And, apparently, it was the only way to defeat the demons’ servants. Fire had to be fought with fire. He recalled reading that during the Demon War Lesganagh’s priests had summoned demons to battle the slaughtering hordes.
Again, the unnatural urge to cower arose.
Why did these things frighten him so? He had fought dragons, defeated Phoenix Wizards. None of those had ever provoked this primal fear. Animals reacted that way sometimes. The mouse scuttled away when the hawk’s shadow crossed its path. Prey ran and hid from predator. He was no animal!
Would Julathaen have known what to make of this? Maybe. Working his magic here in the Eye of Traksor was nigh impossible, and now he knew why. The entire structure had been torn from the bowels of the earth, shaped by bloodmagic, a scar of fact. Yes, he had managed to explore the place in spiritform, but breaching the Veil of Dreams was more difficult than traveling in the spiritworld. Was it wise to communicate with the old elf? He looked out the window.
The horizon showed the first hints of dawn. A sliver of grey separated the black night sky from the skeletal fingers of Gathran’s trees. There was no time. Soon Darlontor would tell him where he would find this human, Dalgor. He had a vague idea of what might be asked of him, and had it been easy he might have considered expending his energies on contacting Graigh D’nar. But if Dalgor were as versed in bloodmagic as Darlontor had hinted at and he was in trouble, he would need all of his strength to find the man.
Snow covered the circular bailey; winter had arrived, and smothered the last vestiges of autumn under its white blanket. To the west clouds loomed, promising even more snow. After nigh a century in his people’s otherworldly prison, he was happy to see a real winter. Seasons barely had meaning in Graigh D’nar; there the artificial weather patterns would be as alien to people here as nature’s unpredictability would be to those born on the other side.
The Eye of Traksor stood some sixty miles east of the Kumeen foothills, by horse a trip of maybe two days; on foot it took considerably longer. But magic provided more than one way of travel. Darlontor had warned him of the dangers of teleporting into any area that the shadow of Kumeen Mountains touched, and with that mode of travel out of the question, flying was the only decent alternative. Unhindered, he left the Eye; the instant his feet touched ground outside the fortress, the dreadful sense of finality was gone. The thought of falling came automatically; then he added the slight possibility of floating and voluntary movement, magic did the rest. In a matter of heartbeats the Eye, its plinth, and the Sons of Traksor’s almost elven intrigue was far behind. Lloreanthoran soared over the whitened forest, twigs and boughs looking as pitiful and forlorn as black and white stick figures.
Soon the cold air began to sting. Cursing himself, he imagined a warm blanket covering him. Again, the mere possibility, no matter how improbable, was sufficient to create a sense of warmth about him. The chill was still there, but the layer he had created kept the worst of the cold at bay. A sense of loss spread inside him, as it always did when out in the snow. Everyone who beheld the covered world experienced it sooner or later; it was both the knowledge that all things would eventually be buried, and the feeling of peace gone for even this shelter of ice would fade in spring.
He had known jungle dwellers from near the Veil of Fire who, despite never having seen snow before, still felt the same loss. Even squirrels somehow knew winter was a time of death, Bright-Eyes had confirmed as much. But only those who lived and died felt it. The dwarves cared little, and the dragons even less. Then again, neither of those races was alive in the same sense as elf or human or squirrel.
Steeling himself against this melancholy, he soared west. The Kumeen Mountains, already a looming great white wall when seen from the Eye of Traksor, grew more ominous by the heartbeat. Frosted trees flashed past; he made out a few huts, a village, but these signs of civilization faded the closer he got. Soon the white foothills were all that he saw, sparsely forested, with granite crags and peaks that stood defiant against the grey of the clouds.
How had Darlontor managed to locate Dalgor in the first place? Every source claimed observation of the mountains was impossible. Maybe it wasn’t? Maybe bloodmagic could pierce the shroud of nothingness the demonologists had pulled over the peaks? Maybe, and this thought caused his focus to slip for a moment, Darlontor could have rescued his nephew himself, but wanted to put
Lloreanthoran to the test yet again? As ripe with intrigue as the Eye was, maybe the Priest High’s absence would spell inevitable doom for the entire order? In a way there was no difference between the two people, both were far too selfish.
“Bloody humans,” he muttered. Not that his kind was any better. Still, it felt good to curse someone else.
And just how was he going to find this Dalgor character? He had been given no conclusive information; what he had been told was as vague as everything else he had found out in the past three weeks. “Below the tree line, near a spring,” was not really that precise. The Kumeens were riddled with springs, rivulets that in the end fed the Tallon. Under normal circumstances he would have probed the area in spiritform, but that—as was scrying and teleportation—was out of the question. Just how, he wondered, had the demonologists managed to seal off an entire mountain range? How much blood had they shed?
The answer forced itself upon his consciousness a moment later. Suddenly, without warning, the flow of magic seemed dull, muffled. It felt like it had in the Eye, only stronger, so much stronger. His flight became erratic; he banished the random musings, focusing solely on remaining in the air. Even the warming sheath about him vanished; he had no mind left for it. With stunning speed, the cold lashed out. Wind, which moments before had merely been an annoying howl, now dug its icy fingers into his flesh, piercing the meager layers of cloth. Just how strong was the bloodmagic in this place?
No sooner had the question formed in Lloreanthoran’s mind than the sense of wrongness slammed into his soul. It was similar to the Aerant C’lain, this feeling of perversion so much stronger than the Eye of Traksor. But whereas the mindstorm had wreaked its own terror on his spirit, thus dulling the lack of anything natural, the all-encompassing peril seemed to leap up from the ground and permeate the air itself. Not even the encounter with the bloodbeast had prepared him for this!
Again, the ever-present atrocity to the natural order tugged at his already fraying grasp on magic. Had his teeth not been frozen in grimace, he would have snarled, cursed, instead he gave a mental shout and struggled to land safely. The last few yards were a desperate tumble. His link to all possibility gone, fact enveloped him. Powdery snow, barely enough to cushion his impact, rose in a cloud as he slammed into the ground. Certainty surrounded him, a grim bloodstained smothering cloak. The pain of impact was nothing compared to his despair. How could he pierce that? How could he defeat this, if the elements themselves believed it to be right?
Already he felt this decisiveness crawl through his clothes. Forcing down the agony, he rose, closed his eyes, shut wind and chill out, focused on magic as he knew and loved it. There! He sensed a drop of water frozen in the air somewhere beyond the reaches of this dread domain. It wasn’t alone; there were more of its kind, all still unsoiled by the unbending will of the Kumeens. As they floated down, they changed, robbed of the possibility to ever be anything else than a snowflake or another drop of water. It wasn’t so, he knew that, but they did not. Up, high in the clouds, magic was still unsoiled. Now all he had to do was reach out, and touch nature once more.
Then, like a flash of lightning, a realization struck him. “No!” Lloreanthoran whispered. “Gods, no!” he muttered through split lips. Was the elven realm beyond the Veil of Dreams becoming like this as well? The certainty of events dragged life out of his people. If Julathaen learned of this, the old mage would have every reason to call for a return. For if his people did not, they might become part of the same rigidness the soil here already belonged to.
With clenched teeth he punched through the muddle that formed the barrier between potential and certainty. It was as if a shaft of colors suddenly pierced the clouds above and the gloom around him. Like a breath of fresh air after a long rest in some sewer, he inhaled magic. Now, that he knew where to look for possibility, he felt confident he could master the perils of this land. The only thing to do now was to find Dalgor.
He had erred. His confidence evaporated when a deformed monstrosity reared its ugly head above a low rise. How this bloodbeast had come into being mattered little, his link to magic was too weak to leave the ground.
With bared fangs this symbol for the perversion of the land loped toward him. It had been decades since he had cast any battlespell, but the years spent fighting off Phoenix Wizards had honed his skills to such a degree that his reaction was almost instinctive. Before he knew what he was doing, Lloreanthoran had already searched the ground for a suitable pebble. This close to the mountains they were abundant. With a flick of his hand he launched the small stone at the charging monster. He hardly thought about the words, and spoke them in quick succession.
Nothing happened. The pebble still flew toward the salivating maw, unchanged. “Gods!” the elf breathed. Not only had he to remind the rock of what it had once been, no, he also had to remind the stone that it was a stone and had the potential to be something else!
The pebble struck the bloodbeast’s head, lodged itself in its teeth, and still the thing came on. Lloreanthoran worked feverishly, summoning to his mind the roll of mountains, the things that could happen to its pieces. A small rock could become sand, or part of a house or castle, a child might play with it. The rock reacted, slowly, urging him to double his efforts. Again, he cast the spell. Scant feet from him, the magic finally worked, and the creature’s head exploded in a shower of gore, in its place, if only for a heartbeat, lingered a chunk of rock as big as boar.
As he watched the rock shrink back to its original size, something disturbingly strange happened. The blood, still pumping out of the severed neck, almost took on a life of its own. It flowed freely, gathered into a puddle, and then vanished without a trace into the hard-packed ground, leaving behind nothing but carcass and furry splinters of bones, and churned but clean snow.
Even if winter had not covered the land, he would have felt cold. What had the demonologists done? Was the land a sponge, leaching blood to the last drop? He dimly recalled Julathaen expressing his regret for children; it hadn’t made sense then, and although he still lacked detailed knowledge of what had happened all those centuries ago—that story had also been recorded in the Tomes of Darkness—suspicion dawned on him. Coupled with what he had gleaned from the books Kevonna had provided and the almost complete absence of possibility here, it could only mean one thing: to open the portal to the realm of demons his ancestors had made use of the biggest source of potential available. They had sacrificed lives, young lives.
If Danachamain had stumbled upon this information and made the lesser sacrifice of an adult, the door would have been considerably smaller. Lust for power was the greatest motivator for many people, human or elf, and many would find the death of others a simple price to pay. The countless wars of his kind alone were ample proof for that. What if the Stone of Blood was just a tool of murder, a sacrificial altar to the dark masters who went before? And what if the archdemon Turuuk had, in his brief time on this world during the Demon War, managed to infect this entire area with the qualities of the Stone? “One gigantic altar,” he muttered as he came to this dreadful conclusion.
It was far worse than he and Julathaen had suspected. The state of turmoil among the Sons of Traksor and their subdued, secretive behavior made even less sense now. What prevented them from striking at the heart of evil? He recalled reading about Lesganagh’s priests summoning demons of their own to battle the invaders. How much blood had these other fiends shed to be victorious? How much blood would the Sons need to win? The thought alone brought a new sense of dread. But what were Danachamain’s followers waiting for? By now the gathered blood, great potential or not, surely sufficed. Unless… Cold dread ran down his back. He glanced at the mountains, the Kumeens’ forlorn silhouette dim against the grey horizon. “They haven’t spilled much blood yet,” he whispered. “What are they waiting for?”
He already knew part of the answer, but his rational mind fought against the still lingering horror of having watched the formless ashes pil
e higher and gain shape. The chant seemed to reemerge from within the wind howling around him. “Rise, Danachamain! Arise!” the air sang. The images rose from a part of his memory his instincts had fervently tried to erase, blot out due to the terror they still held. “Rise, Danachamain!” He had seen it—him—peeling out of a whirlwind of ashes. It had almost driven him mad to see how an impassive, naked figure had formed in the middle of the Aerant C’lain. When this being had turned its eyeless gaze his way he had fled. That much he remembered of his time fleeing through Gathran, but little else.
He found himself kneeling before the monstrosity’s corpse with snow already piled up to his hips, his hands clawing the white frost. Perceiving the lack of feeling in his limbs, he realized he must have been this way for a while, thinking, reliving the nightmare of which he had regained memory. Imbedded now in his mind was a dread of what the future held. Not only were the artifacts in the hands of Danachamain’s followers, no, they also had prepared for his eventual rebirth, and what could only be a massive sacrifice to open not a door but a massive gate that would unleash the demons.
All of them.
Somehow the inconvenience of frostbite felt insignificant compared to this threat. Then, starting, he shook his head, clearing his mind of the horror. He had to stay alert, not become entangled in visions of the future.
Now calmer, Lloreanthoran focused his thoughts, reached out to the untainted regions of sky, the spot he had drawn on before. The link came quickly, and, although it was hardly as strong as anything outside this zone of utter rigidity, he managed to cast a spell that re-heated his body. Then, when his extremities slowly regained feeling, he began to consider his options.
