The Jewel of Turmish c-3

by Mel Odom

  CHAPTER SIX

  "You're sure this is the place?"

  Eyes burning from only occasional restless sleep over the last three days, Cerril glanced up at Two-Fingers's hoarse, whispered question. He stood on trembling legs only from sheer force of will and a desire to survive. Leaden-gray fog rolled in from the Sea of Fallen Stars and carried a cold mist that had already dampened Cerril's hair and skin. The young thief pulled the thin blanket more tightly around his shoulders and shivered again.

  Another of the small cemeteries that pockmarked Alagh?n's surrounded them. Headstones and markers, tumbled and disheveled, offered visual proof that most-if not all-of the families that had left dead there in the past had long since died out or moved away. Rampant weeds and untrimmed trees formed living walls that subdivided the land of the dead.

  "Is this the place?" Two-Fingers asked again. "Is this the cemetery you dreamed about?"

  Cerril peered out at the piles of broken markers and shattered crypts. Nightmares-vibrant and bloodcurdling-had haunted what couldn't have been more than a handful of hours of sleep during the past three days.

  "Perhaps," Cerril said.

  "Perhaps?" Hekkel sounded restless and angry.

  Before he realized it, Cerril took a step toward the smaller boy and gripped the haft of his knife.

  Hekkel stepped back, tripping over a toppled headstone and sprawling in the greasy loam that had been left from the rain earlier in the day.

  "Don't touch me!" the smaller boy yelled.

  Two-Fingers gripped Cerril's shoulder. "He's not who you're here to be mad at, Cerril." Two-Fingers spoke gently, and there was a trace of fear in his voice.

  For a moment, the blanket flying around him and rage boiling inside him, Cerril considered shrugging Two-Fingers's grip off and leaping down on Hekkel, except he knew he wouldn't be satisfied until he'd cut the boy's heart from his chest. Instead, Cerril made himself turn away.

  Two-Fingers drew away quickly. Wan starlight blunted by the thick cloud cover formed a dulled sheen on his round face.

  "I'm sorry, Cerril," the bigger boy mumbled.

  Hekkel slowly, warily, got to his feet. "Maybe we should forget this," he suggested.

  Drawing the sodden blanket back around him, grateful for even the small amount of warmth he drew from the cover, Cerril shook his head. His hair was so damp it stuck to his face, but that wasn't entirely due to the weather. A fever had plagued him, along with the nightmares.

  "No," Cerril said, turning to look out over the time-ravaged cemetery. Rats scurried among the stones, their red eyes gleaming in the darkness. "We finish this tonight."

  During the course of the two previous nights, Cerril had led them through over a dozen cemeteries. They'd been chased from three of them by the city watch and by a couple of gravediggers preparing a plot for a burial the next morning.

  Until the dreams had sent him into the cemeteries of Alagh?n, he hadn't known how many graveyards there were in the city. He still didn't know an exact number, but he had garnered a better sense of the city's long history from his endeavors.

  Even before Turmish had become a nation, Alagh?n had existed as a trade port to the Sea of Fallen Stars. Nomadic tribes traveled from the Shining Plains to trade with seafaring merchants who stopped over during their journey to the southern lands. Even the dwarves of the Orsraun Mountains came down from their digs and cities to barter gold they'd clawed from the clutches of the earth.

  As the trade port became a city, growing by leaps and bounds as successful trade ventures encouraged hew business, death followed. Besides war and robbery, plagues claimed the lives of the settlers. The Year of the Clinging Death took nearly half the populations of the entire Vilhon Reach. War with pirates and other nations followed, lasting hundreds of years. Alagh?n stood as a city despite the worst of it, but citizens fell and were buried, sometimes in mass graves. The Plague of Dragons in 1317 began in Alagh?n and spread throughout the Vilhon Reach.

  The Time of Troubles had followed forty years after that, and none of Faer?n remained untouched. Gods had walked the lands, and death and destruction had followed. The building of more gravesites had followed as well.

  Knowing that the other boys in the group were on the verge of deserting him, Cerril plucked Malar's coin from his belt pouch. The gold coin glinted dully under the overcast night sky.

  Effortlessly sliding the gold coin on top of his thumb, Cerril sent it flipping through the air with a practiced toss. Even heavy as it was, the gold coin twisted and twinkled, making the most of the available light.

  At the apex of its flight, the coin seemed to catch a brilliant streak of light. The gold burned reddish-yellow for a moment, like it had suddenly caught fire or was freshly hammered from a dwarven forge. Noticing the effect, Cerril feared for his hand as the coin plummeted. Over the last three days, he'd felt nothing but evil from the coin.

  The fire died out in the coin as suddenly as it had come. It fell heavily into Cerril's palm. Even if he'd deliberately tried to miss the coin, the cursed thing would have landed in his hand. Despite trying to lose the coin over the past few days, even to the point of luring pickpockets to snatch it from him, Cerril had been unable to get rid of the thing.

  Cerril gazed at the coin lying against his palm. The heavy heat of the coin weighed against his palm. Breathlessly, he curled his fingers over it.

  "That was a sign," Hekkel whispered.

  "We're in the right place," someone else added.

  "Where, Cerril?" another boy asked. "Which way do we head?"

  For a moment, Cerril was afraid to answer, certain that the coin was only fooling with him. He felt a burning grip seize his heart and tug him forward, and he took a stumbling, protesting step. For a moment, the pressure around Cerril's heart eased, but it immediately tightened again, drawing him forward.

  "This way," Cerril said in a squeaking voice that surprised him.

  He raised his hand with the coin in it, as if the coin was now leading him. The others couldn't feel the pressure around his heart, but they couldn't miss the raised arm.

  "It's pulling him!" one of the boys crowed excitedly. "The damn thing is leading him."

  Cerril stumbled through the graveyard, feeling the pressure inside his chest increase even as he fought against it. He grew more afraid. Malar was a dark god, given to vengeance and bloodlust. During the Time of Troubles, Malar had tried to invade Gulthmere Forest and destroy the Emerald Enclave druids there. Nobanion, the Lion God of Gulthmere, also known as the guardian of the Reach, had turned the Stalker away from the forest.

  The viselike grip tightened around Cerril's heart, urging him on. Drums sounded in the boy's ears, and for a moment he thought someone was beating them in the graveyard, then he realized that the sound came from the panicked rush of blood pounding through his own head.

  Cerril's pace quickened from a halting stride to an uncertain-footed trot. He listened to his own footfalls smack against the rain-drenched loam. Weeds rustled as they pulled at the blanket he wore around his shoulders. Dead branches scraped through his hair and against his skin like a beast's claws.

  High-pitched squeaks erupted from the dozens of rats that ran in front of Cerril. Several narrowly escaped getting trampled beneath the boys' feet as they pursued Cerril. Their excited whispers echoed in his ears.

  Propelled by the anxiety that filled him and pressed against his heart, Cerril ran through the thickets of brush and fallen trees. Cheaply-made grave markers shattered beneath his feet. Here and there a few graves stood partially open, their denizens strewn across the ground. Grave robbers plied their craft in Alagh?n, but most stayed away from the burial grounds of the wealthy due to the wards that guarded them. None of them were brave enough to attempt robbing the grave of a wizard.

  Perspiration poured from Cerril, forced out by the fever that filled him onto his chilled skin. Black spots swam in his vision as he rounded a freestanding tomb that had its roof partially caved in by a lightning-blasted
oak.

  A dozen crypts stood against the cemetery's back wall. Vines covered the wall. Flowers and leaves along the vines shivered as the cool wind raked its talons through them. Most of the crypts were in various stages of disrepair. Some of them were only a framework that had folded down onto the stone coffins.

  Cerril's eyes lit on the largest of the crypts.

  There, he told himself, and he knew he was right. Malar's coin pulsed strongly within his closed fist.

  Cerril glanced across the rear section of the graveyard. His eyes focused on the squat, broad building that tucked into the graveyard's back wall. The roof was angled just enough to keep rainwater from collecting on it. Despite the building's obvious age, the roof remained intact, covered in wooden shingles that had to have only been replaced a few years before. None of the other crypts had a roof in such good repair.

  "Is that it?" Two-Fingers asked.

  "Yes," Cerril said, unable to stay back any longer.

  The grip on his heart was too firm, too sure. He followed an overgrown path between rows of graves littered with rubble. No ornate markers or statuary occupied the graveyard's rearmost section.

  The crypt was less than ten feet tall and was easily forty feet across. Though he couldn't accurately judge how far back the crypt went, Cerril felt certain it had to have been as deep as it was wide, if not deeper. Cracks tracked several of the layers of stone used in the building's construction. Weeds and saplings jutted from the cracks, seemingly growing from the building's corpse. A short flight of steep steps led up to a wide entrance where splintered wooden doors sagged from broken hinges. The thin veneer of stain and lacquer had worn away in places.

  "Do you know what this building is?" Hekkel asked in a hushed voice.

  "What is it?" Two-Fingers asked.

  "See?" Hekkel pointed, just barely visible from the corner of Cerril's eye. "If you look hard under those creepers and vines, you can see a symbol there."

  "It looks like the head of a goose," Two-Fingers said.

  "Not a goose," Hekkel said. "That's a picture of a stream or a river pouring down into a lake."

  "You think this is a well house?" Two-Fingers asked. "Or a bathhouse where the dead are cleaned?"

  A couple of the boys cursed as they considered that possibility.

  Cerril knew he almost lost part of his group then, and he didn't want to face alone whatever lurked inside. "It's not a bathhouse for the dead. That sign belongs to Eldath."