“He found the Wraiths.” Lotaern drew in a deep breath, although it did little to break the lines of anger that creased his face. “If this is true, then the Wraiths must be offering him something that will help him gain the Evant. But what?”
Aeren shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything that would warrant the risk of releasing the sukrael.”
“Perhaps you misjudge Khalaek’s ambition,” Eraeth said bluntly.
Aeren frowned.
Lotaern stirred and rose from behind his desk, his eyes narrowed in anger. “I think it’s time we spoke to Benedine about his . . . actions. He may know why Khalaek is interested in the sarenavriell and whether he’s working with the Wraiths.”
They followed Lotaern out of his personal rooms and into the corridors of the Sanctuary. Lotaern waved acolytes away as they made their way past the common areas and into the dormitories. Most took one look at the Chosen’s face and backed off.
“I’ve had Benedine’s activities here in the Sanctuary monitored since you arrived back in Caercaern,” Lotaern said as they arrived before one of the small dormitory rooms. “He keeps to himself mostly,” Lotaern said as he knocked. When no one responded, he frowned and pushed the door open, stepping through. “His main activity is research and—”
Lotaern halted, two steps inside the small room beyond. Colin heard his voice catch, saw his hand tighten on the handle of the door—
And then the stench of blood hit Colin hard. He gagged, stumbled backward into Eraeth, heard Aeren suck in a sharp breath, hand raised to cover his mouth, and then Eraeth shoved past them all. The Chosen shook himself, then stepped back out into the hall.
“Aielan’s Light,” Aeren gasped, breathing through his mouth. “What is it?”
“Karvel!” Lotaern barked, then called something to an acolyte farther down the hall. The acolyte leaped to retrieve a lantern, rushing toward them. He began to ask something in Alvritsthai.
He didn’t finish, the stench of blood and shit hitting him as he reached the doorway. He bent over, began to retch. Lotaern snatched the lantern from him, then stepped up behind Eraeth, raising the light high, his face a stoic mask, devoid of emotion. Colin and Aeren moved in behind him.
The room contained a rough cot, a single stool, and a small table with a few sheets of parchment, a tome, and a bottle of ink. A feather quill lay broken to one side. The tome and parchment and most of the table were coated with what looked like spilled ink.
Except it wasn’t ink. It was blood.
It saturated the blanket on the cot, dripped from its edge onto the floor, had formed a pool that continued to spread along the stones. Splatters of it streaked the walls in grisly patterns. Colin had never seen so much blood, and he felt his stomach clenching at the shock of it, at its dark, viscous color, its stench, the taste of it on the air.
Then Eraeth took a step into the room, and Colin saw what had caught his attention.
Benedine’s body lay in the center of the room, mostly obscured from view by the table and stool. But what he could see of the body made Colin’s stomach turn again. He tasted bile, acidic and thick, and he swallowed, hard, trembling as it burned his throat. The acolyte’s body had been slashed open with too many cuts to count, so many his clothes were nothing but tatters, the skin beneath not much different. He lay facedown, his back lacerated, the backs of his legs, his calves, shredded. His throat had been slit, his head to one side, his eyes wide, mouth open. Blood streaked the pale contours of his face, had matted in his hair and pooled in the hollow of his back. The stone beneath him had been stained black with it.
“How did this happen?” Lotaern muttered. Then he turned on Karvel and roared, “Find Tallin, or any member of the Flame. Now!”
Karvel, face still pasty white, staggered to his feet and rushed off, even though Loatern had spoken in Andovan. Lotaern turned back to the room, where Eraeth had knelt down next to the body. He touched the pool of blood, rubbed it between his fingers with a grimace, then stood.
“The blood hasn’t had time to congeal yet. This happened recently.”
“Who did this?” Lotaern growled.
Colin suddenly remembered the look on Khalaek’s aide’s face in the courtyard as he watched Benedine leave: cold and heartless. “Khalaek,” Aeren said. “He must not need Benedine’s help any longer.”
“Impossible. How did he gain access to the Sanctuary? I have acolytes guarding all of the entrances!”
Two acolytes dressed in the same robes as the others, but with a white patch of flames in the centers of their chests, charged down the corridor, faces tense. Colin was surprised to see they carried swords and saw Aeren and Eraeth trade a shocked look as well. These men did not act like acolytes. Their actions were tight, controlled, and dangerous, as if they were members of the Phalanx.
Lotaern stepped away from the room and met them. A heated discussion in Alvritshai ensued, one of the acolytes stepping into Benedine’s room, inspecting the body, then returning, his face grim. When Lotaern finally turned back to them, he didn’t look any happier. “They say Benedine worked in the archives all morning and retired to his rooms less than an hour ago. I don’t understand. Who could have entered the Sanctuary, killed Benedine, and left, without being noticed?”
Colin thought of the taste of leaves and earth. “Maybe it wasn’t a person,” he said softly.
Lotaern, Aeren, and Eraeth stilled. “What do you mean?” Eraeth asked. “The Wraiths,” Aeren answered.
“Here? In Caercaern?” Lotaern spat, his eyes darkening. “In the Sanctuary?”
Colin heard the doubt in his voice, saw it in Aeren and Eraeth’s eyes as well. He drew a steadying breath, regretted it as another wave of nausea swept through him at the smell of the blood, then said, “I can find out.”
All three Alvritshai stilled. Even the two members of the Flame, the acolytes who were not acolytes, traded a glance and shifted uncomfortably at the sudden stillness.
“How?” Lotaern asked.
Colin glanced toward Aeren, who merely nodded. “I can travel back to the moment he was killed. I can see who killed him.”
Lotaern’s eyes widened, flickered toward Aeren a moment, then back. “Then do it.”
Colin closed his eyes and drew into himself, straightened . . . and then pushed. Time slowed, and he approached the barrier that separated the present from the past. Gathering himself, he shoved through it, his skin tingling as it ruptured around him, and then he waded backward into the past. The acolyte guards retreated, and as Lotaern and Eraeth stepped away from the doorway, Colin slid inside, stepping around the body, even as Lotaern shut the door, closing Colin in with Benedine’s body. He tried not to shudder as he moved to the far side of the room, and then he pushed again. Hard.
And sank back into time too fast. The room blurred, a smear of sudden, violent movment that made him queasy. When he finally stabilized it, he found Benedine sitting at his desk, quill in hand, as he worked on the tome before him.
He kept time stationary for a moment, to catch his equilibrium, then moved around to see what Benedine was working on. The tome was yellow with age, the pages stiff, the text written in a tight scrawl with long, nearly vertical letters, interspersed with amazingly detailed pictures. Benedine had copied a few phrases from the book onto his sheet of parchment and was turning the page, his brow creased in concentration.
Unable to read the Alvritshai words, Colin allowed time to resume and stepped back.
Benedine flipped the page and sighed heavily before leaning forward to read. One hand rose to knead his forehead.
Colin smelled the Wraith before he saw it, the same scent he’d caught while they’d been speaking in Lotaern’s rooms—leaves and earth: the Lifeblood.
A moment later, the door to Benedine’s room opened.
Colin caught a flicker of darkness, of shadow, but nothing more. He doubted Benedine had seen even that. Even as the acolyte spun, the door closed, with another smear of shadow.
Face pinched in confusion, Benedine began to rise. He’d only made it halfway up when the Wraith appeared at his side, completely visible for half a breath. No longer draped in the cloak of the Shadows, he wore a dark gray shirt and muddied breeches, a cloak with a hood pulled up over his head, obscuring his face, and boots. He carried a dagger. And he was human.
In that single half-breath, the Wraith slashed along Benedine’s arm, then vanished. Benedine cried out, stumbled forward over his desk, the quill snapping in his hand as he tried to catch himself, the stool he’d been sitting on rattling to the floor behind him. The Wraith flickered into view on his other side, slashed at him again, this time across the face, blood flying in a smooth arc to splatter agains the wall. Gasping, Benedine shoved away from the desk, half turned, but the Wraith was there, cutting into his arm, vanishing, reappearing two steps away to cut again. Benedine cried out at every cut, spinning around, bewildered, unable to follow the flickering movements of the Wraith. Blood flew in every direction, the cuts getting deeper and deeper. Benedine tried to make it to the door with a strangled scream, but the Wraith slashed the back of his calf, and he stumbled to his hands and knees. Slices appeared all along his back, his sides, the Wraith no more than a blur, and as Benedine arched back, arms raised to ward off his tormentor, the Wraith appeared behind him.
Colin stepped forward, even though he knew he couldn’t change anything, knew he couldn’t stop it.
Gripping the acolyte’s head, yanking it backward, the Wraith cut Benedine’s throat. Blood fountained down over the acolyte’s shredded robes, drenching the bed, splattering onto the floor. Even as Colin gagged, the stench overpowering, the Wraith thrust Benedine’s body forward and stepped toward the door. Colin’s knees grew weak, the shock of the violence—all happening in the space of a dozen heartbeats—hitting him hard. He lost his hold on time, felt it shove him forward, the aftermath of the attack as the Wraith departed a smear of action, and then he fell to his hands and knees and vomited onto the acolyte’s stone floor.
He heard Lotaern gasp, heard the acolyte guardsmen cry out, and then Aeren said, “In here!”
They crowded the doorway to Benedine’s chambers, all staring at Colin in shock. All except Aeren and Eraeth.
“Well?” Eraeth asked.
Colin spat out the sour taste in his mouth, swallowed, then pulled himself upright. One hand had landed in Benedine’s blood, and with a grimace he wiped it off on a clean edge of Benedine’s blanket. “It was a Wraith,” he said. “I couldn’t see his face, but he moved like I do. And he reeked of the Lifeblood.”
“Could you identify the Wraith?” Lotaern asked. “Was it one of Khalaek’s men?”
“No. He wore a hood and kept his face concealed. But he wasn’t one of Khalaek’s men. He was human.”
Lotaern swore, glanced toward the carnage in Benedine’s room, then asked, “What should we do?”
Aeren frowned. “We need to find out what Benedine found in the Scripts regarding the sarenavriell, what it was that Khalaek wanted. Without Benedine, we have no way to connect the Wraiths to Khalaek. We have nothing.”
Lotaern turned to Colin. “Can you go back to see what he was researching?”
Colin shook his head, one hand falling to his stomach and the vague heat and pain there. He still trembled, shaken by the Wraith’s cruelty. Like that of the Shadows. “Not right now. I’m still too weak. Unless . . .” He trailed off, catching Eraeth’s eye. He could smell the vial of Lifeblood on the Protector. If he drank that . . .
“No,” Eraeth said, frowning. When Colin began to protest, his eyes hardened and he repeated more forcefully, “No.”
“And we’re leaving with the Tamaell tomorrow,” Aeren said. “We’ll have to discover what Benedine found another way.”
Colin turned to Lotaern. “He was reading that book when he died.”
Lotaern moved to the desk. The parchment Benedine had been writing on was destroyed, soaked in blood, but the Chosen gingerly lifted the edge of the book to look at the cover, then set it back down. “This wasn’t part of his research. This was for daily study as an acolyte. It tells us nothing. Which means we still don’t know what Khalaek intends.”
Aeren regarded Lotaern for a long moment, then turned away, motioning Eraeth and Colin to follow. “Find what Benedine found,” he said.
“And where are you going?”
“To finish preparations for the meeting with the dwarren.”
Garius reached down and tugged on one of the gaezel’s horns, and the animal snorted and angled slightly right, thundering through the grasses of the plains, reaching a slight rise and charging down into the dip beyond. Hot wind blasted his face, catching his beard as he leaned forward into it. He could hear the beads tied into his braids clicking together, beads that signified all his accomplishments throughout life: his marriage, the births of his sons and daughters, his feats in battle. Behind, the thunder of the hundred other Thousand Springs Riders, including Shea, was a distant rumble. They’d been riding hard for two days. They were almost at the designated meeting place for the Gathering: the warren of the Shadow Moon Clan.
He’d returned to his own city immediately after the meeting with the Alvritshai and had barely spent an hour seeing to the needs of his wife, Tamannen, and of his sons and daughters and extended family. Shea watched and scowled the entire time as he explained what had happened and what needed to be done. Then he’d donned the mantle of clan chief and, with Shea and the rest of the Riders as escort, descended from the height of the cleft to the central chamber of the warren. There, beside the central pool and the cascade of the river, he’d ordered the great drum brought forth and a signal sent through the great tunnels to the other dwarren cities and their clan chiefs.
The Riders he’d selected for the journey mounted even as the first hollow boom of the great drum echoed through the city’s cavern, its voice deep and hollow, vibrating in Garius’ bones. Aimed at the wide mouth of the largest tunnel leading out of the city, its slow rhythm called a Gathering of the clans a ten-day hence at the Shadow Moon Clan’s city, a message that would be heard and relayed by drum throughout the warrens. Shadow Moon wasn’t the most central of the clans on the plains, but it was close enough to the designated meeting place with the Alvritshai to give the clan chiefs time to gather, discuss the situation, chose a Cochen—a Gathering leader—and then arrive on time if it was decided to meet with the Alvritshai.
Assuming all the clan chiefs heard the drum message in time. Ahead, Garius caught sight of the outermost scouts of Shadow Moon. One of them stood and signaled that they’d been recognized and could proceed without stopping. Garius thundered past them, and minutes later the outer tent city rose into view.
Swirls of cloth wrapped around poles and stakes emerged from the plains in a confusion of colors and shapes. Some pierced straight up to the sky, those nearest the gaping hole of the entrance to the warren the highest. Others jutted out to the sides at odd angles, the fabric stretched taut here, falling in soft folds there, the entire array of cloth and pole and ties giving the sense of movement, the blues and greens blending together to give the impression of water, flowing free aboveground, without constraints, without boundaries. A river without banks, dwarren walking free among its eddies and currents. The tents filled the entire length of the shallow valley.
Garius headed his group toward the center of the vortex of cloth along the main approach to the warren, dwarren carrying trade goods and leading wagons and pack gaezels scrambling to get out of the way. Once, only the Riders would have appeared aboveground near the main entrance to the warren, to protect the most exposed portal to the underground tunnels beneath. The women and those protecting them and the clan’s shamans would ascend through the network of much smaller hidden entrances near the communal fields scattered throughout the plains.
But the introduction of the Alvritshai and then the humans onto the plains had changed everything. The dwarren had been forced to live aboveground
more and more, the threat from both foreign races too great. It became inefficient to keep supplies and resources below, and once the Riders shifted to the surface, so did the women and the trade. Within a decade, the tent cities gained limited permanence, and from there they only grew.
Garius ignored the tents and the people and angled his gaezel toward the dark depths of the entrance instead. The well-trampled ramp sloped downward, and he ducked his head as he passed through into the shade beneath. Riders lined both sides within, most standing near a double line of giant pillars embedded in the walls on either side, supporting arches overhead embellished with ancient stonework. The stone between the successive arches was rough and unworked, rigged to collapse and seal the warren if the dwarren destroyed the pillars. But this defense passed by in the space of a heartbeat, Garius not slowing his descent into the massive tunnel. The sound of Shea and the rest of his Riders increased behind him and echoed out ahead. Tunnels branched off to either side, much smaller in diameter, intersections lit with metal-worked stands containing wide flat bowls of burning oil. The walls were lined with stone, buttressed with supports at regular intervals, the stone shifting in color until it had run the entire spectrum found on the plains, including the vivid reds from the desert near the Painted Sands Clan to the east. As above, fellow Riders and dwarren transporting goods dodged out of their way as the roar of Garius’ gaezel reached them.
Then the worked stone ended, the walls and floor abruptly white and smooth, no supports visible. This was the stone of the Ancients, the ones who came before, the ones who gave the Lands to the People, to guard and protect. The rounded edges of the tunnel above became sharp rectangular angles, although the tunnels were still lit with the basins of oil.
When the stands of flame began appearing closer together, Garius pulled back on the gaezel’s horns and slowed.
Moments later, the Ancients’ tunnel ended, opening up into the true city of Shadow Moon, a rounded room that could enclose the entire tent city above. Like that of Thousand Springs, the wide floor swept away to a massive pool, the river cascading down from the circular opening high above, wider than the tunnel they’d just left, frothing in the pool before spilling over its edge into another channel and funneling down into a second circular tunnel. The open holes of the dwarren’s clefts surrounded the walls on all sides, some lit from within by lantern light, but more than half of them dark and empty when once they were crowded, teeming with families. Dwarren scrambled from level to level in the lowest tiers, using stairs cut into the stone walls, but most of the dwarren were on the floor, the wide plaza choked with blankets spread with wares as women bartered for goods and children dodged and cavorted around them, laughing and screaming as they played. Garius saw earthen bowls painted with geometric designs, woven blankets with depictions of Ilacqua and the Four Winds, spears and bows, fabric, produce, and butchered animals, all offered up for the women’s examination. The chamber echoed with a dull throb from the rushing water and the noise of the marketplace, dampened by the immensity of the cavern.
Well of Sorrows Page 43
