“Kheil, I—”
More vines shot downward, ignoring Berun and aiming for Talieth. She shuffled backward, her hands and fingers moving in an intricate pattern. “Gerulu tserulek!” she shouted, then clenched her right fist and punched the air. An orange light glowed round her fist, flared, then shot forward in a shaft so bright that it burned its after image into Lewan’s eyes.
The shaft of light hit the vines, and they exploded in a burst of ash and smoke. But more were coming, snaking along the ground or undulating through the air in several directions. Three more times Talieth invoked the magic and sent it shooting outward to burn and shatter the foliage. But for every strike she made, more vines took their place.
She backstepped as she struck, trying to keep the vines in sight, but one was too quick and wrapped around her left forearm. Talieth yanked at it, but the more she struggled, the more the vine tightened and pulled back, dragging her step by step into the thick foliage.
“Erbeluth draglen!” Talieth’s free hand shot out, hurling a tiny ember of fire that gathered momentum as it sailed through the air. It tumbled upward, growing in strength and fury as the air around it caught fire. It was the size of a knight’s shield—and still growing—when it struck the thick bank of foliage from whence most of the vines had come.
Fire caught in the leaves and branches, and the vines reaching for Talieth fell to the ground, lifeless, their ends smoldering.
His eyes had adjusted to the dim light cast by the floating orbs round the tower, and all of the sudden brightness made Lewan wince. The stench of the burning greenery filled Lewan’s head, making him choke and gag. The scent was … wrong somehow, whether from the arcane flames or something twisted and unnatural in the foliage itself, Lewan did not know. Nor did he care much. He only knew it was time to leave.
“Where is he?”
As Lewan’s eyes began to adjust to the light, he saw Talieth standing beside him, her hair and clothes sodden, her left arm wet with rain and blood where the thorns had raked her skin.
Lewan looked past her. There was no sign of the half-orc. The bodies of the assassins lay where they’d fallen, one man still moving feebly. The archer whom Lewan had struck with the hammer was gone, though his bow still lay on the pavement next to a haphazard pile of a half dozen arrows. He saw nothing of Berun, save the cloak he’d tossed aside. Beyond the burning brush, the light from the fire only seemed to thicken the shadows in the courtyard. But Lewan could see that the shadows were moving—and not from the fall of the rain. Talieth’s spells had hurt the army of vines and creepers, but more were coming.
Lewan cried, “Lady, there—!”
Talieth whirled, bringing her right arm up to cast another spell. But it was too late. Vines shot downward, their leaves rustling like the hissing of a serpent, and wrapped around Talieth’s waist. Before she could complete her invocation, more wrapped round her arms and tightened. The Lady of Sentinelspire thrashed and screamed, but like Sauk, the more she struggled the more she entangled herself. More vines wound out of the forest to grapple her.
“Kheil! Lewan! Help me!” But then she was gone, pulled out of sight into the branches.
Lewan froze, crouched under the tree, the hammer in his hand. He was too frightened to move, afraid that more vines might come for him. But none did. He could still hear thrashing overhead, Talieth and Sauk screaming. An occasional branch or leaf fell, but no more vines dangled down.
“Lewan.”
He turned to see his master. With his knife still in hand, Berun rushed out of the shadows and embraced Lewan.
Lewan squeezed him back. “Master, what just happened?”
Berun pulled away. He glanced up at the boughs where Talieth and Sauk were still screaming. Then he looked back at Lewan and said, “I think they have displeased the master of this tower.”
“The Old Man?”
Berun nodded. “I never knew him to possess powers such as these. It seems what Sauk told me is true. He has learned to bend my master’s power to his own will.”
“I’ve seen him, Master!” said Lewan, and it all came out in a rush. “The Old Man. He came to me. On the mountain. He said … he said that Talieth and Sauk were lying, that he was out to save the world. He said he needed my help, master! He—”
“Lewan,” said Berun. Not a shout, but enough force to cut off Lewan’s stream of words. Berun held him by the shoulders and smiled. “It is good to see you again. I feared the worst. They didn’t harm you?”
“N-no, Master. They—”
“I’m sorry, Lewan,” said Berun, his smile fading and his face becoming grim. “I pray you’ll be able to tell me all about it later. Now, you must find someplace to hide.”
“What? Where are you going?”
Berun looked up at the tower. “I was given a task. During the Jalesh Rudra. I must fulfill my oath.”
The Jalesh Rudra … Lewan had so much to tell Berun, so many questions, so much to confess.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No, Lewan. Listen—”
“No!” Lewan shouted. All of the terror and secrets and worry rose up in him, boiling over and turning into white-hot anger. “No, you listen! You can’t just order me to run off and hide every time it gets dangerous. Look how that worked last time! I begged—I begged to go with you, but you ordered me away without so much as an explanation. I’m hunted down by a bunch of murderers looking for you, dragged off and told that everything you ever told me was a lie!”
“I never lied to you, Lewan.”
“You never told me about Kheil!”
Berun flinched at that, but his heavy gaze returned to Lewan. “No. No, I didn’t. But I didn’t lie. Kheil died—and he deserved to die. Who I am now—”
“I don’t know who you are anymore!”
Berun dropped his hands but he would not drop his gaze. “I have much the same problem.”
“Then let me come with you. Whatever you’re going to face in there, we can face it together.”
“No, Lewan.”
Above them, the screaming had stopped, though they still heard occasional thrashing.
“What makes you think you can stop me from following you?” said Lewan.
“Nothing,” said Berun. “I am sorry I missed your Jalesh Rudra. But one thing you must learn about the difference between being a man and a child is doing the right thing, not the thing you want. If even half of what Sauk told me is true … we stand on the razor’s edge. If we fail …” He shook his head, and his expression hardened. “Time to grow up, Lewan. You need to realize what your limitations are. I’m more proud of you than I know the words to tell, but you must understand that if you go with me, you will limit what I can do. My concern will be for you. I can’t have that. I need you gone. The world needs you gone. Go to the Shalhoond and find one of the Circles. Beg for their aid.”
“My place is with you,” said Lewan. “To aid you.”
“No, Lewan. Where I am going you could not aid me. My concern—my love—for you would only hinder me. It’s going to be all I can do to stay alive in there. I can’t worry about you, too.”
“I’m not a child anymore.”
“I know you aren’t. Now it’s time to make the man’s choice. If I fail here—even if I succeed here—we may still need the aid of the Circles. You can find them. Tell them everything you know.”
“And how do you expect me to get out?” said Lewan. “I’ve been through the tunnels. Without a guard warded against the guardians—”
“You’ve been through the Gallery of Stone Faces?”
“With Sauk,” said Lewan, and he was surprised to find that he had already accepted Berun’s order. How had he given in so easily? Why?
“Listen to me,” said Berun. He gripped Lewan’s arms again and crouched to look him eye to eye. “If you can get there quick, find one of the bodies I left behind.”
“B-bodies?”
“The guards. They had keys to pass the guardians. Drag o
ne of the bodies with you. Keep it with you on the mountain as well. As long as you can. I know it will slow you, but there are guardians on the mountainside. Once you reach the steppe, you should be safe.”
“What if I can’t find a body?” said Lewan. “What if others have come and taken them already?”
Berun looked at him long and hard, then glanced at the hammer in Lewan’s hand. “Then you’ll have to get your own. It’s the only way.” Berun pulled Lewan to him, holding him in a fierce embrace, then pulled away. “You’ve been like a son to me, Lewan. Get out alive. Get out of here and far away.”
Berun turned and ran through the eldritch light-haunted courtyard to the steps of the tower. The doors had been thrown back—had they been open the whole time? Lewan wondered. Beyond lay only darkness. Lewan watched as his master disappeared into the dark, then he turned and walked away. In four steps, he was running.
Chapter Thirty-Four
As Berun entered the Tower of the Sun, the first thing that struck him was the smell. Back when he—when Kheil—had lived in the Fortress, the tower had been a crumbling relic, an ancient testament to the genius of the Imaskari. The Old Man had renovated the tower and put his own mark upon the place—priceless rugs, tapestries, furniture from east and west. All that was gone.
Berun left the arcane-tinted light of the courtyard and entered the first halls of the tower, and the scent hit him—the thick moist smell of growing things. He pulled the starstone necklace out of his shirt, and its green light lit the hallway about him, confirming what his nose had already told him. Vines and thick stalks of ivy, dripping in black berries, clung to the walls and hung from the ceiling. And it was not new growth. Where rugs and carpets had once covered the cold stone of the hall, at least two seasons’ worth of old leaves now made a sort of dry carpet that rustled and shifted with his every step. Berun knelt and swept aside the leaves until he found the floor beneath. Moss and lichen covered the stone beneath the leaves, some of it old enough that it had already begun to crumble the stone. Not far ahead, the shoot of a young tree broke through the rock. How it thrived without sunlight or rain was mystery, but its branches were thick with new spring leaves.
Berun stood and began to make his way forward. The tower had dozens of rooms—some only small storage rooms, while others took up an entire floor. Chereth could be in any of them or in the warren of cells beneath the tower. But Berun knew he had to deal with the Old Man first. Once that was done, he could find Chereth, but until the Old Man was dealt with, neither he nor his master would be safe.
He took the stairway on the left, which hugged the wall of the tower as it wound up to the next floor. As his foot touched the first step, the large double doors at the entrance slammed shut behind him. Berun jumped at the noise and stood stock still, ready in case something else happened. But only a few leaves, shaken loose from the vines by the force of the blow, fluttered to the ground.
Berun turned to the stairs before him. Stealth, at this point, seemed foolish. The Old Man would have to be either deaf or dead not to have heard the fight outside. But the vines that had come to his rescue, entangling Sauk and Talieth …
He’d inferred to Lewan that the Old Man had done that. But had he? If so, why? Why aid Berun against Sauk and his own daughter? If the Old Man was truly aware of the conspiracy then why not catch Berun as well? If he knew that Sauk and Talieth were conspiring against him, then surely he knew they had approached Berun in hopes of securing his aid. And surely the Old Man knew why Berun had come. Why help him now?
Was he wrong about the vines? If it had been Chereth who helped him in the Khopet-Dag, sending the earth spirit and the vision, then could not it have been Chereth who captured Sauk and Talieth outside? If his master could still wield such power, why hadn’t he escaped? Where did that leave the Old Man?
Only one way to find out, Berun told himself, but before he continued forward, he quieted his mind and prodded that deep corner linked to the treeclaw lizard.
Perch?
Nothing.
Perch, are you well? Where are you?
Ever so faintly, like the last fading sound of an echo, Berun felt his friend respond. The lizard was outside in the courtyard. The leaves and vines taking on a life of their own had thoroughly unsettled Perch, and he was huddled deep inside the den of a trapdoor spider. The den’s owner had provided the lizard with a welcome meal to refresh his energies. Killed the tiger! Perch was ecstatic. Tiger swallowed this Perch. Claw-and-bite-and-claw-claw-claw out of the wet darkness.
Yes, you did, Berun told him. You killed the tiger, my friend. Well done.
More fight-fight?
Not now, Perch. Rest. You have earned it.
Perch was strangely silent for a moment. Berun sensed something unusual in his friend. Something almost like pensiveness, which had never existed in the frantic treeclaw lizard. Look and smell and listen and taste-taste the air. Big stone tree—Perch’s understanding of the Tower—smells rot-rot.
I’ll be careful, Berun told him, and continued up the stairs.
The second floor—a series of rooms arranged like spokes round the hub of a wheel—proved much like the first. Thick vegetation crowded every surface, even the floor on which Berun walked. Passing by a window, Berun caught the faint glow of the lights outside, but the window was so choked with vines and waxy green leaves that he could see outside only through tiny gaps in the foliage.
Berun kept going up. At the top of the stairs, a door blocked the way between the last step of the second floor and the main landing of the third. Berun tested the latch. It creaked like moist iron that had not seen oil in far too long, but it opened. He pushed it, and in the hall beyond, he heard small things scuttling away through the foliage. Keeping his knife ready in one hand, he held forth the starstone into the hall. Only an empty hall, also covered in leaves, vines, and twisting branches that clung to the stone. Some of the leaves moved, as insects and small lizards fled from Berun’s light.
He entered the hall. The foliage was even thicker, the footing uncertain, for the floor was a mass of thick, woody vines with clusters of long leaves shaped like double-edged blades. It seemed that the farther he went up the tower, the thicker the vegetation became, almost as if it had grown from the top of the tower down.
The door closed behind him. Not a slam this time. But he heard it creak shut, and when he turned to look, three woody vines were falling away from the door, like arms going back to rest after having done their duty.
The knife in Berun’s hand went suddenly cold, like grabbing an icicle through silk gloves. When he turned to face the hall, eyes were watching him from the darkness just beyond the reach of his light. Three sets of eyes—he saw one of them blink slowly—reflected his starstone’s light back at him. Two glowed from about a man’s height to either side of the hallway, but the third set—slightly farther back—was looking at him from near the ceiling. From their odd angle, Berun realized that the watcher was hanging upside down, as if clinging to the vines.
Everything around Berun seemed to come into sharp focus, and although his heartbeat did not increase, it beat with a stronger rhythm, and his breath came in deeper draughts, as if his body were seeking to draw in and sort every scent. Berun recognized his body’s reaction at once. Fear. The old childhood fear of the dark and the unknown, the first true emotion he’d understood as an orphan on the streets of Elversult. As a young man under the tutelage of the Old Man of the Mountain, Kheil had learned to harness that fear and ride it into a formidable aggression. Take your fear and give it to your enemies, Alaodin had told him. Make them fear the dark. Make them fear the night. You must become fear. You must become the night.
Berun crouched and brought the knife up into a guard position. Another set of the eyes blinked. Berun brought back his hand holding the starstone, intending to throw it farther into the hall so it would bathe the three watchers in light while leaving him in shadow. But in the instant before his arm came forward, he felt something wra
p round his forearm and constrict. He tried to pull away, but the grip tightened, and another snaked around his right leg up to his knee. He looked down and saw that the vines were wrapping round him, just as they had around Sauk and Talieth in the courtyard.
He slashed at the vines with his knife. The blade cut through them as easily as a new razor parting cobwebs, but even as he pulled his arm free, more vines rose up, grabbing both arms and then his waist. He managed one more slash before his knife arm was caught. The feeling of the vines and leaves moving against him, gentle but unyielding, almost brought a scream to his throat. But the sound of the vines was the worst. The leaves rustled and hissed, not like a breeze through boughs, but more like a snake through spring grass.
The more Berun struggled, the tighter the vines squeezed, and more came, detaching from the walls and ceiling, even rising from the floor. In moments his entire body was wrapped up to his chin, though the starstone still dangled from its leather cord in his fist. The vines tightened and pulled, lifting his feet from the ground so he was suspended from the ceiling. He hung there, slightly swaying, like a dressed pheasant hung from the eaves.
From out of the darkness, the eyes came forward, and as they entered the nimbus of green light cast by the starstone, Berun saw their true forms. Berun’s first thought was that they were elves, but he dismissed that almost at once. Their ears had sharp points like elves, and their eyes were angled so as to gather even the faintest light. But their limbs were lithe and too long for elves, and the tint of their skin was only a shade lighter than the surrounding foliage. All three were male. Two of them walked, and they moved as if their joints did not fit together in the usual fashion. The third was creeping along the ceiling, either holding onto or being held aloft by the thick vegetation. As they came near, Berun caught their scent. It reminded him of a rain-freshened breeze blowing through spring blossoms. But there was an undercurrent, too, something bestial and primal.
The two walkers stood in front of him, the third still hanging from the ceiling, all watching him, expressing neither malice nor compassion. Merely curiosity. The one on Berun’s left reached out and plucked the knife from his hand. Holding it with both hands, he closed his eyes, brought the knife just under his nose, and inhaled, like a nobleman testing the bouquet of a fine wine. As he did so, the fine etchings of vines and leaves that ran along the blade glinted green, then faded to a glow, almost as if a spark had lit in dry leaves before fading to an ember.
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