by C. Greenwood
Geveral nodded understanding. “I have little enough to pack,” he said. “If we travel quickly, we may intercept the assassin in the mountains.”
“Not we,” Eydis corrected. “This is something I have to do alone. You’ve never asked what visions I saw during my venom-induced state, before Parthenia’s death. But this is one thing I foresaw, that the catalysts must take separate paths from this point forward.”
Stung, Geveral protested, “But we’ve always been strongest together. You taught me that the catalysts must hold together until the time of chaos.”
“I’m afraid that time is upon us,” Eydis said regretfully. “The war Rathnakar has prepared against Earth Realm is about to break. All of us have to use these last days before the storm to the advantage of our cause. For me, that means a battle with the wizard. There is a different destiny for you.”
She hesitated and glanced toward the oracle, a look of reluctance crossing her face. “Right now,” she said, “you can do the most good by helping the oracle in her coming task.”
“But I thought you no longer trusted her,” Geveral said in a low voice. It was awkward to speak so right in front of the seer.
Eydis said, “There is much work to be done, and I can see no way of accomplishing it without the oracle. That necessitates putting aside my personal feelings about her manipulations.”
Something flickered in the eyes of the violet-hued young woman seated before them, and Geveral thought she was mildly amused at being discussed in this way.
“I’m glad you can still acknowledge that I have my uses,” she told Eydis. “Your ability to focus on duty above selfish emotion will be needed in the future—as will the dryad’s skill for making unlikely friends.”
The oracle eyed his recently acquired staff from the pool guardians as if she guessed, and approved of, the source.
She continued. “But this is not why I sent for you. I called you both here because there is a matter to be dealt with before the departure of the mistress of masks. There is an ally whom I have foreseen could do us great good. This winged friend is not easily summoned but can be awakened only by one with the lifetouch.”
Geveral had a creeping sense of what she had in mind, and a shiver ran down his spine. This time he knew why the oracle’s dark gaze fell upon him. He still carried a kerchief tied to his belt, holding the ashes that were all that remained of the dragonkin youth, Keir. Without meaning to, he dropped his hand to hold the kerchief. His feelings were a mixture of fear and hope.
Eydis too seemed to know what was in the oracle’s mind. “When you speak of a winged ally, you can only mean Keir,” she said. “What do you know of the boy?”
“No more than the visions tell me,” came the response.
Eydis said, “And you wish me to return him to life? I am surprised you would make such a suggestion. Was it not you who once warned me against using my power to revive the dead?”
“Yet you have done it since. And with no ill effects,” said the oracle.
It was true that Eydis had used her magic to restore life to Kalandhia after a fatal wound. Geveral had seen it happen.
“The practice is not without risk,” Eydis said, her tone betraying her nervousness. “Naturally I wish to save Keir, but we cannot be heedless of the consequences. There is no guarantee of success. Even were I able to restore the youngling, he might not be who he was before. The process might alter him into one of the mindless undead creatures, no different than those summoned by Rathnakar and his minion, Varian Nakul.”
The oracle looked untroubled. “The dragon you revived retained his will. So too will the boy. He has the blood of dragonkin, and theirs is a spirit not easily conquered.”
Eydis hesitated. “Keir himself asked not to be revived. He warned that awakening him could awaken also the shadow monster he died defeating.”
“That,” said the oracle, “is why I instructed the dryad to bring his blade.”
She turned her attention to Geveral. “When the mistress of masks summons the youngling back to this world, it will be up to you to destroy whatever evil returns with him.”
Geveral gripped his sword’s hilt. Steel always weighed heavy in his hand, but it felt more so than usual just now. He had no idea how to go about slaying a shadow monster, a powerful creature invisible to mortal eyes.
Eydis was looking at him questioningly, Geveral realized. “What do you think?” she asked. “Can we risk this?”
It was the first time he had seen her unable to make a decision. She usually had such a firm sense of where she was going.
He looked from Eydis to the oracle. “If it must be done, we have no choice,” he said, sounding more confident than he felt.
He untied from his belt the kerchief containing Keir’s ashes and handed them over to Eydis. She opened the kerchief and laid it out flat across the top step of the oracle’s dais.
As she knelt over the small heap of ashes, Geveral stood nearby with his sword at the ready and hoped the oracle was equally prepared to wield some magical weapon of her own if necessary.
Eydis spread her fingers over the ashes and stared at them fixedly, as though summoning her powers within. Geveral hadn’t been close enough to see what it had looked like the time she brought Kalandhia back from the dead. They had been separated then by a sandstorm. He didn’t know what to expect now.
There was a moment of silence, during which Geveral imagined he could hear his own heart beating. Then the fine ashes stirred subtly beneath Eydis’s fingers, as if touched by a gentle breeze. They drew together, drawn by an invisible force, then scattered just as suddenly. Rising in a thin cloud, they swirled in the air, hovering above the heads of the three witnesses.
CHAPTER FOUR
As the cloud of gray dust spun like a miniature sandstorm, Geveral picked out something, hints of a shape concealed within the blur of motion. It was a flimsy insubstantial form, sometimes resembling parts of a human. Here was a hand, there a wing. There weren’t enough ashes to amount to more.
He recoiled at the grotesque sight. What was Eydis doing? This wasn’t Keir. It wasn’t even a whole person but shifting pieces, resembling an unfinished puzzle. Part of a face took shape from the gray dust, but there was only a single eye and a cheek. With a pang, Geveral recognized Keir’s prominent cheekbone below an eye that looked wildly out at them. There was fear in his semivisible features, an emotion the dragonkin boy had never revealed when alive.
Geveral took his attention off the figure taking shape before him long enough to glance at Eydis. Was this what she had expected? But her eyes were glazed, her concentration turned inward. She was unaware what her magic was creating.
The ashes stopped swirling. An indistinct, half-formed creature dropped down to land clumsily on the floor.
Eydis instantly awoke from her trance to take in the situation. She, Geveral, and the oracle closed in quickly, ringing the newly created thing. The creature crouching before them was unlike anything Geveral had ever seen. Its only color came from the thin dusting of gray ash that made up its more solid parts. Other areas were visible only as moving shadows.
“What are you?”
Geveral didn’t realize it was his own voice that spoke the question until the shadow creature turned its head toward him.
The single eye, so painfully similar to Keir’s, widened as if in recognition or memory.
“You asked me that question once before, on the mountain. It was the first time you saw my wings.”
The voice too was that of Keir. It sounded dazed. Confused. But it left no room for Geveral to doubt what his eyes told him. The thing before him was the same dragonkin youth he and Eydis had rescued from Asincourt. The same boy who had persuaded him to save a trapped dragon and fly it across the plains to battle a monster.
“It is you,” Geveral said, lowering his sword and stepping closer.
At his approach, the wild look returned to Keir’s one visible eye. “Stay away from me!” he cried. “The mons
ter is returned!”
Before anyone could make sense of the warning, he rushed in a lightning-fast blur past Geveral and across the room. The last time Geveral had seen anything move with such speed was the time he and Keir had encountered the shadow monster fleeing after having stolen the scepter from Eydis and Orrick.
Keir, or the strange being that now represented him, threw himself at the granite door in an attempt to escape the chamber. But the door didn’t budge. It was heavy, and in his flimsy new form, the boy was no match for it.
As he continued his struggle to flee the room, Geveral and the others scanned the dim corners of the chamber. Keir’s warning about a returning monster fit all too well with their fears about reawakening the creature of darkness that served Rathnakar.
There didn’t appear to be any sign of danger, but since the shadow monster was invisible, he could be nearby and no one know it.
“Watch the floor and walls for its shadow,” Eydis told Geveral lowly. “That’s the best way to spot it.”
But a suspicion was growing inside Geveral. He tried a different tactic.
“Keir, you say the monster has returned with you,” he said. “Is it in this room now? Can you help us find it?”
Keir gave up his fruitless efforts at escape and leaned wearily against the thick door, making pitiful sounds of distress. It was disconcerting seeing the youngling who had once been so brave reduced to near madness. At least Geveral’s question seemed to make him recall himself.
“You have found the creature,” he said with something between a sob and a giggle. “The monster is in me.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Keir,” Eydis said softly. “You’re no monster.” Her voice was soothing, as though she approach an untamed animal that might bolt at any moment.
Keir regarded her with a look of sadness. “I warned you, mistress of masks, not to bring me back. For the shadow monster and I are now mingled, and to have one you must also accept the other. The Raven King lives in the back of my head, communicating his will to me, as once he spoke to his shadow servant.”
“Then don’t hear his voice,” Eydis instructed. “Listen to mine instead. The forces of good approach our final hour in the struggle against Rathnakar, and we need every ally we can find. That is why we have called you back from death. Will you use your old skills and the new powers you have absorbed from the shadow monster to help us?”
Keir’s expression was hopeless. “I make an uncertain friend, in this state. I can’t promise I will be able to control the side of me that remembers the darkness. You would be better off destroying both me and the monster inside me, while you have the chance.”
“If I believed that were true, I would not hesitate.”
Geveral started at the oracle’s unexpected intervention. She had kept silent so far, her presence all but forgotten. Now she crossed the room to join them.
“I have looked into the future, dragonkin, and have seen we will have need of you,” she continued. “You will not betray us.”
Maybe the firm certainty in her voice lent Keir confidence, because for a moment he looked less miserable. At least the glint of madness had disappeared from his eye.
Geveral seized the chance to add encouragement. “You won’t be alone,” he said. “Kalandhia and I will be with you all the way.”
Keir seemed to like that. He had always been fond of the dragon.
The oracle appeared to take the ebbing tension to mean the situation was resolved, for she now suggested everyone retire for the night. Keir, she said, should stay with Geveral. She caught Geveral’s eye with a look that said he shouldn’t let the youngling out of his sight.
Not until this moment did Geveral realize how truly tired he was. It had been a long day, and with Keir now in his permanent charge, he doubted he would be getting much rest in the future.
He said a hasty farewell to Eydis in the corridor outside the oracle’s chamber, knowing he might not see her before her departure in the morning. Their friendly embrace and wishes for one another’s safety seemed inadequate, considering they might never see one another again. It was a dangerous mission she was about to set out on. It was difficult to accept that he couldn’t accompany her.
But even while they said their good-byes, weariness tugged at him. His bad leg throbbed from overuse, and he was keenly aware of Keir looking lost in the background. He found himself looking forward to lying down on his hard pallet on the cold floor of his little room, closing his eyes, and escaping it all.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Oracle
The oracle breathed deeply. She was vaguely aware that she sat in her dark audience chamber, alone now that the two catalysts and the transformed dragonkin boy had left. But her mind wandered from the temple, transported in a vision to a distant location. In this new place, her thoughts roamed the shadowy halls of an underground crypt.
She passed skeletons covered in cobwebs, funerary urns, and open chests full of bones. She didn’t know what drew her in the direction she moved but was confident there was a reason to travel these passages. Her visions always had this sense of urgency, propelling her in the way she needed to go. She had learned to trust the instinct.
As she came upon a set of winding stairs, she saw a faint glow of light shining up from a lower level of the tombs. She followed it down until she arrived at a great cavern lit by glowing braziers. It must have been a grand chamber once. With the towering columns and crimson wall hangings, it was fit for a king. But it was not a place that had seen human use in a very long time. The tapestries were falling apart, the walls covered in cobwebs. The tall pillars were damaged and close to collapse. The only hint of habitation lay in the lit braziers that had cast their flickering glow up the stairs.
But it wasn’t the room’s abandoned state that gave it a sinister feeling. It wasn’t even the claw marks that seemed to have been made by some furious giant raking the walls. No, it was the figure on the dais at the head of the room that gave the space a sense of danger.
Rathnakar.
This was not the first time the oracle had glimpsed the Raven King through visions. She knew him at once. Not only because of his black armor with its spiked shoulder pauldrons. Not because of his helmet, worked into the design of a winged skull with red gems above the eyes. But because of the evil that emanated like a foul stench from the dark one himself. Taller than any mortal man, he seemed to tower higher still because of the raised platform he stood atop.
It took the oracle a moment to realize Rathnakar was not alone. On seeing there was another in the room and that the dark one’s attention was solely focused on him for the moment, she almost crept away from the bottom of the stairs and hid herself in the shadows along the wall. Then she remembered she had no form, either physical or ghostly, to be seen. Some dream wanderers traveled as disembodied spirits. But when she roamed, only her thoughts were transported.
That meant she could get as close as she liked, without fear of discovery. She moved nearer, curious to examine Rathnakar’s other visitor. He was an ordinary-looking man of average height, wearing a gray cloak with the hood drawn up to conceal his face in shadows. There should have been nothing remarkable about him, other than the impressive number of daggers visible about his person. But there was something about the catlike readiness of his stance that suggested he was fully aware of his surroundings and ready to spring into action at the first hint of danger. He was a trained fighter, for certain. A mercenary? An assassin?
He was speaking to Rathnakar, so she crept closer to hear what he said.
“My master, Torvald the wizard of the mountains, sends to you a priceless gift.”
The hooded man’s voice was as neutral as his appearance. It was impossible to tell what he thought of his message.
“Torvald knows you will recognize the power of this offering and remember him when you arrive at your rightful place as ruler of Earth Realm.”
The messenger reached into his cloak and withdrew an object wrapped in
a strip of cloth. He unwound the item until it was exposed, firelight glinting off its golden surface.
“The scepter,” Rathnakar hissed in apparent surprise. “Give it to me!”
He thrust out a greedy hand and, instantly, the scepter flew from the messenger’s grasp. As though called by some invisible magic, it hurtled across the short distance between them and landed in the dark one’s outstretched gauntlet.
The red gems over the eyes of the winged helm flared with victory. The Raven King tightened his iron fist around the gold rod.
“With this scepter, my physical form will be unbound from these shadowed halls and free to wander the earthly realm,” said Rathnakar. “I will go to Endguard, where my servant Nakul has paved the way with my army. Allied to the Lostland beasts, we will conquer the Lythnian kingdom, then Kroad, and finally all of Earth Realm. But first I need more mighty soldiers, a force no mortal army can defeat.”
He swung the golden scepter toward the near wall. Something moved within the shadows, a large strongbox stowed in a recess in the wall. The sturdy box began to tremble and then, drawn by a magnetic force, it shot across the room. It hovered as if it weighed no more than a snowflake, suspended in the air before Rathnakar.
The dark one made a satisfied sound. “Do you know what lies trapped inside this box, assassin?”
The gray-cloaked assassin was silent, and Rathnakar did not await an answer. “Confined within are the life breaths of two thousand great soldiers. These are no rotting cages of bone and dead flesh, like those unearthed in my name by Varian Nakul. These are mighty soldiers, strong and battle tested, who have served me in another life. Imprisoned by eternals and guardians of old, they will fight for me again and share in my freedom.”
There was a rusted chain wrapped tightly around the box and many metal locks securing it. But these were no longer any protection against Rathnakar. He made a motion with the scepter, and fiery light shot from the end of the gold rod, striking the box and busting its locks and chains into a thousand pieces. Tiny splinters of metal rained down on the floor.
