“Believe what you would like, but the Conclave knows differently.”
Salindra fell silent for a few moments, still holding Brohmin’s sword. He let her hang on to it, wanting her more comfortable with the idea of carrying it. If he could, he intended to teach her how to use the sword, in spite of her resistance to the idea.
They continued to wind their way through the trees, and the forest began to thin. They were now far from the city, but the sounds of the creatures of the forest had yet to return.
How could the Deshmahne influence reach so far? It troubled him that there could be such emptiness.
“How could I join the Conclave?” she asked.
“You must be invited by the rest of the Conclave.”
“Like you?”
“I’m not the rest of the Conclave. I am the Hunter.”
“What does that—”
A scream rang out.
Brohmin grabbed his sword from her and started running.
“Where you going?” Salindra asked, chasing after him.
Brohmin’s heart raced. “Toward whoever screamed. I think that was the priest.” But why would the priest be screaming? What could have happened to him out here?
Chapter Seventeen
The forest ended abruptly, and Brohmin paused at the edge of the trees, peering around him. They had reached a narrow road that led away from the forest and wound through rocky mountains on either side. The mountains climbed high overhead, with shadows looming over their path. The air had a still quality to it, and a heaviness. There remained a hint of rain, and with as much as had dumped on them before when they were in Polle Pal, he didn’t like the idea of being caught out in it again. Not here, not where there was no protection.
Where had he detected the scream? There had been something, but he was no longer certain what it was. The sensation on his ahmaean, that of the priest he’d been chasing, remained, though it was fainter than it had been before. Now it was little more than a mild draw on his awareness.
Salindra surveyed the landscape along with him, her eyes narrowed, and tension in her posture. “Where do you think he went?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Whatever we detected…”
It troubled him. Whatever he detected wasn’t where he thought it would be. He had expected to see the priest, but he was not here.
They could follow the road, but he wasn’t certain where it led. Possibly to another city, and possibly to Masetohl, but was that where they needed to go?
He had told himself—and the priest—that he could follow the man, but that was proving more difficult than he had expected. He could still detect the subtle pressure on his ahmaean, and could still detect which general direction the priest went, but finding him was not straightforward.
It left him with few options. He could continue onward, tracking this man, following the road that might or might not lead him to Masetohl as he had originally planned, or he could return to Polle Pal. There was still much he could learn there, but spending time there had not been part of his plan. The purpose of their long journey to get to these lands had been to go to Masetohl, or farther south.
With a sigh, Brohmin started off down the road, moving away from the forest, away from Polle Pal, and toward Masetohl in the distance. He remained silent, and Salindra said nothing. She had learned during their travels that there were times he preferred silence, and she knew him well enough not to disrupt that silence. It was one more thing he appreciated about her.
There remained the possibility that ahmaean was masked from him. Brohmin knew that he couldn’t detect everything, and wouldn’t be surprised if the Deshmahne had a way to mask themselves from detection.
Perhaps the most worrisome of all was the fact that his sense of ahmaean continued to fade. The longer he was in these lands, the more his connection changed, going from the solid connection that he’d had while in the north, to what was much less distinctive connection now.
He hadn’t thought of it at the time, but was it possible that the Great Forest, and perhaps even the forest of the daneamiin, had sustained him?
He didn’t think it likely. More likely was the possibility that his confrontation with Raime had weakened him, and had stolen much of what ahmaean was left.
For so long, his task had been that of the Hunter, searching for Raime, preparing the Conclave for the eventuality that they would need to somehow stop him. All knew it would be difficult, and it was not something the Conclave had ever been good at. Had they been, Raime never would have grown in power as he had. Instead, they had sat back, watching as he accumulated power, stealing ahmaean from creatures, including Magi and daneamiin, growing until he was something unrecognizable.
That was not something Brohmin would ever admit to others on the Conclave. It was something he struggled to admit to himself. In a way, he was complicit. He could have pushed, he could have forced the issue when he knew that Raime was growing in potential. Even over the last five hundred years, Raime had changed and had grown in power, progressing to the point where he was now nearly unstoppable.
Jakob hadn’t stopped him. Brohmin had learned that fact while in Gomald, hearing rumors that the High Priest had escaped. Now that he was damahne, if Jakob could not stop him, perhaps there was no one who could.
Salindra took his hand, squeezing softly. He didn’t resist, though he knew that he should. She deserved better than a dying man, a man at the end of his power, better than one who’d failed throughout the years.
“You’ll find him,” Salindra said.
Brohmin nodded. He would find the priest, but finding him might require using more of his ahmaean than he thought safe to do. The farther they traveled, the farther away they got from the north, the more he began to wonder whether he risked sacrificing too much strength by spending his ahmaean the way he had. It was time to conserve it.
The Magi long believed that ahmaean—what they called manehlin—could not be created or destroyed. In that, they were mostly right. The power of the Magi never disappeared throughout their lives, and with practice, and with effort, they could grow their strength. It was not the same for Brohmin.
“I might find him, but at what cost?”
“There’s a cost to track him?”
Brohmin smiled sadly. “There’s a cost to everything. The only question is whether we’re willing to pay it.”
He thought of what the priest had told him, the way that he had shared the fact that he—and others—rescued children abducted by the Deshmahne who had the intent to turn them, to coerce them into becoming fervent followers of the faith. Wasn’t stopping that worth it?
Brohmin sighed, thinking of the damahne who had gifted him his abilities, and the expectation that Jolene would have of him, the expectation she would have asked of him. She had claimed to see great things along his fibers, and thought to gift him a reward, that in spite of Brohmin’s objections. He still didn’t know what great things she had seen along his fibers. He didn’t feel as if he had done anything great. Perhaps bringing Jakob north to Avaneam, and to the Unknown Lands, but what else had he done?
There were times he questioned whether he had done anything worthy of the sacrifice she had made, the gift that she’d given him that granted him such long life. There were other times when he’d suspected there was something along his fibers that required him to have such a long life. And maybe he had already accomplished what was needed.
He hoped not, just as he hoped that he had more time remaining, that he had more that he could accomplish.
Pausing along the road and closing his eyes, Brohmin pushed his ahmaean away from him, stretching out with fingers of power, more tenuous than they once had been, and searched for the priest.
He was there, distant but not nearly as distant as Brohmin had suspected.
With the pull on his ahmaean, he realized that he’d been wrong. Masetohl was to the east of them, but the priest was to the south, and far enough that he didn’t think the priest intende
d to go to Masetohl.
“You did something there, didn’t you?” Salindra asked.
He nodded. It was good that she was gaining an awareness of when he used his abilities. That would serve them well, especially as his powers began to fade.
“I still detect him, though he’s not where I expected him to have gone.”
“Where did you think he was going?” Salindra asked. “We traveled south, far enough that we should be beyond the road to Masetohl. For that matter, I think we are far enough that we might be beyond the lake. Liispal is enormous, but it’s mostly forest and water.”
Brohmin chuckled, and Salindra arched an eye at him. He shook his head. “I forgot that I’m traveling with one of the Magi. I should have asked you for guidance, rather than thinking to press forward without knowing exactly where we were.”
He had been to these lands before but had never traveled them nearly as frequently as he had other places. Salindra, on the other hand, would have much experience studying maps and using what the Magi would have taught her.
“And that is supposed to mean?”
“That’s supposed to mean that I seem to have forgotten my geography.”
Salindra studied him for a moment before nodding once. “If we stay on this road, this will take us to Paliis. It’s at the border of Liispal and Coamdon and at the end of the mountain range.” She nodded toward the mountains looming over them. There didn’t seem to be an end to them, but as Brohmin thought about where they must be, he realized she was right.
Paliis was not a large city, certainly not like many of the grand cities spread throughout the south, but it was an important one. It was situated at a crossroads where it could reach each of the ports in the different nations of the south.
If nothing else, it would make an ideal location to set up a network. From Paliis, Brohmin imagined that the priests would have been able to move easily, heading to the ports along the northern border, as well as along the southern border, and could even disappear into the forest, much as the priest had just done.
“That is where we must go,” Brohmin said. He hadn’t pushed enough of his ahmaean to know with certainty whether that was where the priest had gone, but it made sense. Often, that was enough.
“Can you still detect him?”
Brohmin glanced over to Salindra. How much should he share with her? Did she need to know that his abilities were fading slightly? Or, perhaps more rightly, more than that. If he shared, how much would he worry her? She already worried about him, and he remembered all too well how she fretted over him when he’d been injured before. He had little doubt that she would do so again if she knew that his connection to the ahmaean was fading.
“I can still detect him.”
“And you think he’s in Paliis?”
His connection to the ahmaean didn’t tell him that, but it made sense. “I think he’s in Paliis.”
She squeezed his hand and continued down the road. “Then we should move more quickly. With the clouds overhead, I fear it might rain again, and I don’t want to get stuck out in the rain.”
Brohmin glanced to the sky and realized that it had grown increasingly darker. How had he neglected that? Thunder rumbled, and the clouds moved quickly, hurrying toward the mountains. In his experience, the storm would crash into the side of the mountains, and the rain would be severe.
Salindra was right. They should hurry and reach Paliis before it came—if it was possible.
Thunder rumbled again, an ominous sound that unsettled him. Maybe the storms would chase him much like his age now seemed to.
Chapter Eighteen
The city of Paliis was enormous and spread out across the valley at the base of the mountain range. Many of the buildings were small, set into the rocks so that the hillside itself seemed a part of the construction. Few were of any significant size. It was nothing like Polle Pal where many of the buildings had been two or three stories tall, towering over the streets out of necessity as much as anything. There, they had been crammed in, forced by the nature of the geography, the limitations imposed by the mountains surrounding the city, and the harbor. In Paliis, there were no such restrictions.
Brohmin had been to Paliis before, but it had been decades, and in that time, what had once been a small city had grown, and now was a sprawling, enormous, city. Near its southern border, an enormous structure rose, the tallest in the entire city, and seemed comprised of dark fingers of stone that ringed a central structure.
Salindra pointed to it. From where they stood on a ridgeline, overlooking Paliis, that building loomed over the entire city.
“What is that?” Salindra asked.
He shook his head. It hadn’t been here the last time he had visited Paliis.
“I’ve seen similar structures in other places,” Brohmin said.
“Why do I have the sense that you are not pleased by what you see?”
Brohmin sighed. “Because that is a Deshmahne structure. The fingers of stone are a telltale sign.” Even without the appearance, there was the pressure that Brohmin sensed coming from the temple against his ahmaean, and powerful enough that he could feel it from the ridge. There was something physical—and alive—about it. There was little doubt in his mind that it was a Deshmahne temple.
“If the Lashiin priest”—they had taken to calling him that to differentiate him from the Urmahne priests they came from—“has come here, he truly does risk the wrath of the Deshmahne.”
Brohmin studied the city. It would be dangerous. More dangerous than he would have expected, especially for a priest. The priests had always preferred to prove that neutrality had power, that by remaining outside of war, they could demonstrate the power of the gods.
If that viewpoint had changed—much like it had changed with Roelle leading her Magi warriors, then perhaps there was something more that could be done to stop the Deshmahne.
It wouldn’t have to be only the Conclave and whatever help those Magi who had returned to their past would offer. If the church stepped in, it would send a different message.
But it would be a bloodier one.
Deshmahne facing the Urmahne would create war, the kind that had not been seen in centuries. The last time there had been a significant war, he had still been serving as Uniter.
“What’s he planning?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Determining what the Lashiin priest was up to seemed to be of central importance. They needed to know and to understand what he intended.
And if the city was this dangerous, was there anything Brohmin could do to help?
He wanted to disrupt the Deshmahne. What better place to do it than at a crossroads like this?
Maybe the priest had given him a way to undermine the Deshmahne that he hadn’t considered. He had come here thinking that he would try to understand what the Deshmahne were up to, but finding that was a much larger challenge than simply working within a network of Lashiin priests.
“We should keep going before the rains come,” Brohmin said.
Salindra glanced up at the sky and nodded in agreement. So far, they had managed to stay ahead of the storms, but Brohmin didn’t think that would last for much longer. The thunder had increased in frequency and intensity, and every so often, a drizzling rain would mist from the sky. Not enough to soak them, but enough to warn them of more.
They climbed down the rocky ledge and reached the road leading into Paliis. They weren’t alone on the road. There were dozens of other travelers, some with wagons, some walking, and a few riding horseback, who made their way toward the city. If his memory of the maps of Paliis was accurate, there would be another road to the west, leading from the southern ports. There would be another heading out of the northwest, coming out of Coamdon City. For that matter, there would even be a road coming from Lakeliis, another centralized city on the southern continent.
Neither Brohmin nor Salindra spoke while they followed the stream of people on the road sloping gently downward and toward
the city. He listened, though. Few people said much, but there was no darkness about these people, not as he had witnessed in the north. There, the people heading south had been scared, running from the threat they couldn’t see, and couldn’t even imagine. These people were travelers, many likely coming from smaller villages and heading into the larger city of Paliis. The trade within the city would be good, and Brohmin guessed that was the largest driver for people coming this way.
He overheard a few comments about the Deshmahne, but not nearly as many as he would’ve expected. Most comments were made with a slight joke or reverence. These were people whose lives had changed because of the Deshmahne, yet they didn’t seem angry about it. They seemed content, willing to continue living.
And what choice did they have?
Most had little choice. They would not have been able to travel north, and if they had, they wouldn’t have the funds necessary to arrange transport across the sea. No, these people were essentially trapped here.
They soon reached the first buildings lining the road into the city. Most were made of stone, and they were squat, with a slight slope to the roof, and set into the hillside leading down into the valley. The farther they went, the buildings changed, elongating as they were set more into the hillside. What would the interior of the buildings look like? Set into the rock as they were, he imagined that they were cool, even on a hot day. There wouldn’t be as much light, which explained the double chimneys that many of them had.
The farther the city stretched into the valley, the less the buildings were recessed into the rock. They began to see more freestanding buildings, though some were connected. The streets were filled with people, and he noted carts, often pushed by both men and women, but there was something missing: unlike in other cities, there were no animals.
Most great cities had dogs and cats running free throughout the streets. Some places, like Thealon, had problems with stray dogs, and measures were taken to try and control the population. Other places, like Gomald, welcomed the thriving feral population of cats, using them to prevent the spread of rats coming in off the ships in the port.
The Lost City (The Lost Prophecy Book 5) Page 14
