Looking across the sea, he saw that the other two ships had fared no better. The stench of blood filled the air, and a terrible silence engulfed the stricken vessels as they rocked listlessly from port to starboard and back again. After all of the screaming and noise, everything seemed strangely quiet.
Looking across the deck, his azure blood still oozing from each of his shoulders, Tristan searched for Tyranny. He finally found her standing on the mizzen deck, her face down, her sword hanging from one hand as though she no longer had the will or the strength to raise it. She was covered with blood, and as he started toward her she slowly turned to him and looked him in the eyes.
Just as he reached her she collapsed, and he quickly hoisted her limp body into his arms. Holding her there, he looked sadly at the bloody, mangled ship and wondered what would become of them now.
CHAPTER
Thirty
S tirring from her nap, Celeste yawned, then stretched her back and arms as she lay on the huge, four-poster, canopied bed. The large hourglass on the nearby stand told her that a little less than two hours had gone by since she had left Shailiha and Abbey to make their way down into the Redoubt and to the Hall of Blood Records.
She rose up on her elbows and looked out through one of the four open, stained-glass windows lining the exterior wall of her private quarters. The soft indigo that always preceded dusk had begun to encroach on the turquoise edges of the sky and would soon overtake it altogether. Then the many lights from the Minion campfires would begin to flicker like stars in the night. Beautiful and reassuring. But then the usual frightening thoughts crowded in again, and she lay back down on the bed, staring at the red velvet canopy above her.
She was desperately worried, as was everyone remaining here at the Redoubt. Tristan had been gone for days, and there had been no success in the search launched by the Minions. Even Ox's hopefulness seemed to deteriorate with each passing hour, despite the fact that he was trying to act like a warrior and not let his concern show.
Wigg and Faegan had not returned from their journey to the place the Tome called the Chamber of Penitence, and her fear for her newfound father and the crippled wizard was great. But it was Tristan upon whom her heart dwelled the most.
She rose from the bed and padded in her slippers to the other side of the room to retrieve her pearl-handled hairbrush from the dresser, then mechanically began brushing her hair, her worry for Tristan still filling her thoughts.
She wanted desperately to be near him again, to see him, to know that he was safe. Sometimes she thought she might burst with the conflicted feelings that surged through her whenever the prince was near. But it was easy to simply miss him and worry about him when he was gone, especially now that he was in danger.
As she ran the brush through her long, deep red hair, she heard the evening wind comfortingly rustling the trees outside her window. Then she heard the squeak of a window hinge. The wind was stronger than she'd thought, and she turned to shut the windows, in case a storm was rising.
Her heart leapt into her throat, and she dropped the brush.
Three of the four windows were shut and locked, and the last one was hauntingly closing by itself.
Before she could run for the door, an azure beam appeared out of nowhere, snaked itself around her waist, and threw her across the length of the room, back onto her bed. She raised an arm to counter with a bolt of her own, but the glow had her pinned to the bed. She was caught in a wizard's warp, she realized, just like the one Krassus had used against them all that day in the card room, when he had assaulted Wigg and violated the wizards' minds.
She tried to scream, but found to her horror that her voice carried no sound. Terrified, she turned her eyes as best she could to look over at the windows.
The last of them had finished closing, and the latch was slowly coming down, locking itself into place. Her heart pounded relentlessly as she waited and watched, unable to do anything else.
Now another glow was building in the room, growing brighter and brighter until it began to take on a shape. Her terrified mind convinced her that it must be Krassus, come back to the palace for some reason. But as she looked closer, she began to recognize the shape standing so dangerously close to the edge of her bed. Tears welled up in her eyes and cascaded maddeningly down her cheeks.
The thing spoke.
"Hello, my darling," it said in a deep, melodious voice. "It has been far too long since we have lain together. I have missed you dearly."
She was going to faint-she knew it. But then her mind was touched by that of the being standing before her, and she was fully conscious once more.
It was Ragnar, the half wizard, half blood stalker who had for over three hundred years kept her his prisoner, abusing her incessantly.
She saw the bald, shiny head, dangling earlobes, and the long, yellow incisors that that jutted down just below his smiling bottom lip. His white robe was untied and slightly open down the center. He was clearly aroused. The mad, bloodshot eyes looked up and down her body with a hunger that seemingly knew no bounds. The small wound in the side of his head was still there, and as a drop of yellow ooze dripped from it, he reached up to wipe it away. Then he placed the wet fingertip into his mouth and smiled.
"So many questions, aren't there, my love?" he asked, lowering his awful face closer to her own. The smell of his fetid breath brought back horrible, mind-numbing memories of her times with him.
"Did you and the wizards actually believe that Nicholas, my beloved master, would really want me dead?" he added. "Or did any of you, as you reveled in the destruction of the Gates of Dawn, actually see my corpse? No. I now serve Krassus, and together he and I carry on a part of Nicholas' glorious work. But first I am going to take you back to the Caves with me. And this time you will never leave, I promise you."
As he spoke, he ran the long, pointed fingernails of one hand down the side of her face. "You always were my favorite." Then a strange look came over him, and he lowered himself even closer.
"And one other thing, my love," he added softly. "Krassus has very kindly imbued me with the Forestallment that, after three hundred years of failed attempts, shall finally grant me the power to make you pregnant. I can't wait to see what our children will look like." He stood up again, his robe falling open obscenely.
"Before we leave here together, I shall take you right here in this very bed," he added menacingly. "A fitting insult to Wigg, my dearest enemy, don't you think? To luxuriate in his only daughter yet again, in the very seat of his power! With both the wizards and the Chosen One gone, there is no one left here of any consequence to stop me. And who knows-you might even conceive here in the royal palace this very night! Deliciously ironic, wouldn't you agree?"
As she watched in helpless horror, he reached down and parted his robe fully. Reaching out, he caressed her face once more.
"It shall be just as you remember it," he said smoothly. "Long and slow, and again and again. And this time, my sweet, it shall go on for eternity. I may even allow enough of your powers of speech to return so that I might hear you softly whimper." Again the wicked smile came. "Surely you remember how much I enjoyed hearing you weep."
Ragnar held out a finger and pointed it at the bodice of her dress. She heard a slow, deliberate ripping sound, and looked with horror as a rip parted her dress at the top and began to tear its way down. Her body wanted to shake with fear but couldn't, locked as she was within the monster's unyielding warp.
Saying nothing more, his bloodshot eyes gleaming, Ragnar knelt by the side of her bed, placed his wet, pink tongue against the inside of one of her thighs, and began moving it upward.
Screaming, Celeste bolted from the bed and fell to the floor. For a moment she remained on all fours, her chest heaving and sweat running down her face. Then, finally, she dared to look about the room.
Amazingly, everything was just as it should be. The windows were open, and the night breeze was caressing the tree branches outside. The Minion ca
mpfires were lit, sending their glow upward into the dark of the night sky.
And there was no Ragnar. It had been another nightmare.
Lowering her head in shame, she sobbed mightily, wondering when she would ever be free of her horrific memories. At last she rose to stand on shaky legs, walked to the mirror, and slowly lifted her head to regard the stranger staring back at her. The eyes were red; the long dark red hair was disheveled; and the woman staring back at her was shaking uncontrollably. She placed her quivering hands over her face so that she couldn't look any longer.
This is what he still does to you, even though he is dead, she heard her mind whisper. Suddenly, though, several more words floated to the surface-unusually defiant, challenging words that, after three hundred years of torment finally transformed her life.
But I will allow it no more!
And then something in her psyche snapped.
She stamped to the door, tore at the doorknob, and sprinted down the hallway. Her newfound rage intensifying with every stride, she went faster and faster, trying to dispel her energy. When she reached one of the secret passageways leading down into the Redoubt, she opened the door, went through, and practically ran down the circular staircase.
Her fury was limitless. Soon she found herself banging on the door of the Hall of Blood Records and screaming relentlessly, demanding to be let in.
A startled Shailiha came to the door, only to have the exhausted, furious Celeste embrace her desperately, the tears coming yet again.
The princess quickly dismissed Abbey and Lionel, and the two women sat and talked until dawn.
CHAPTER
Thirty-one
T he darkness was impenetrable; there was absolutely no sound. For all the lead wizard knew, this place could be either very small, or endless. Uncertain what might lie beneath them, he dared not release the spell that kept him hovering in the air. Floating weightless, all of his senses deprived, Wigg wondered if this was what it was like to be dead.
He could not see his own hand before his face. Only the familiar squeak of Faegan's chair, caused by the crippled wizard's turning it in an attempt to look around, told Wigg that he was not alone.
As Faegan raised his hand to produce some light, the Paragon hanging around his neck began to glow, just as it had done earlier. It flooded the room with its vibrant, red illumination.
The stone chamber in which they found themselves was quite unremarkable. One might even have called it disappointing. It seemed to be little more than a small, square room cut out of the rock, with a matching stone floor and a rather low ceiling. Looking at each other in silent agreement, they gratefully lowered themselves.
When they touched ground, an azure beam shone from the ceiling, illuminating a hole in the floor. They went to it and looked down. It was the opening to a circular stairwell that was barely large enough for Faegan's chair to pass through. It wound its way down into utter darkness.
Taking a deep breath, Wigg looked over at Faegan. "After you?" he said dryly.
Pursing his lips, Faegan looked tentatively down the hole, then seemed to make up his mind. Levitating his chair, he lowered himself into the depths, the wheels narrowly scraping their way by on either side. With a sigh and a concerned shake of his head, Wigg began following Faegan down.
The winding staircase was very small and cramped, lined by walls of solid stone that added greatly to the sense of confinement. It was exactly like being trapped in a cramped, stone tube. Like Tristan, the lead wizard hated being closed in. The farther down he went, the greater his sense of foreboding became. The air grew cold and smelled increasingly damp and musty.
After a while Wigg looked up, trying to gauge how far they had come. He paused, taken aback.
The opening to the stairwell was gone, replaced by another ceiling of solid rock, just inches above the top of his head. In fact, the length of circular stairway they had just descended was gone, too. A solid stone wall had silently materialized only inches behind him, blocking their way back. Between the cramped ceiling, rear wall, and sidewalls, he could extend his hand no more than half a meter in any direction other than downward. The red light from the Paragon around Faegan's neck cast eerie, sharp shadows against the unforgiving barriers and added greatly to the suffocating sense of helplessness.
Wigg felt like a trapped rat. Despite the coolness of the air, he broke out in a sweat, his sense of dread growing by the moment. Looking forward, he saw Faegan continue down the staircase, apparently quite unaware of their predicament.
Wigg took another tentative step down the stairs. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the wall just behind him silently, quickly advance by the exact length of the step, while the ceiling closed in by the same margin. And the step he had last stood on had disappeared, leaving only the one he was now occupying and those that lay below him. Someone or something had taken great pains to make sure the two wizards could continue their trek in only one direction: downward.
"I think you had best see this," Wigg said to Faegan as calmly as he could.
The elder wizard turned in his chair and immediately understood the dilemma. His face darkened with worry. But for once he said nothing, and simply turned back around. With no other course of action possible, the two wizards continued downward, into the bowels of the earth.
After what seemed an eternity, they exited at last into another simple, square room of stone. This one was even smaller than the first, and barely large enough to accommodate the two of them. There were no other doorways, or holes in the floor such as there had been in the other room now so far above them.
Suddenly a frightening thought occurred to the lead wizard, and he turned around to find his suspicions confirmed. The stairway they had just come down had vanished, filled in by the wall that had so ominously followed them in their descent. There remained no exit whatsoever, and their only source of light was the Paragon, which seemed to glow even more brightly as they waited.
The silence in the room was oppressive and the air was thin. Wigg tried not to think about the prospect of dying in this unforgiving fortress of stone.
Then a narrow line of azure appeared in the air before them. It snaked toward the wall they faced and pressed itself against the stone in the shape of a rectangle large enough for a person to pass through. The area within its borders began to glow. Then the glow faded, and the section of wall simply dissolved.
Where the stone wall had been stood a tall figure, unmoving, silent. A dark cloak covered the body, its hood pulled up over the head and face. In one of the hands was a long, gnarled wooden staff. Looking closer, Wigg noticed that the hand holding the staff was only a collection of bones.
Wigg finally found his voice. "Who are you?" he asked.
"I am the watchwoman of the floating gardens," the answer came back. It was a woman's voice. But its timbre was ancient, and her words seemed to fight and scratch their way across the distance between them. "But you come at a bad time, for the gardens are not what they once were."
Faegan wheeled his chair a bit closer. She remained motionless.
"And why is that?" he asked anxiously.
"First tell me," she said, "has there been a recent disturbance in the life of the stone?"
"Yes," Faegan answered. "The dead son of the Chosen One was returned from the heavens as a servant of the Heretics of the Guild. He tried to take all of the power of the Paragon into himself, so as to allow the Heretics to return here, to the land of the living. Only at the last moment were we able to stop him and return the power to the jewel of the craft, where it rightly belongs."
"So the Chosen Ones have finally come?" For several moments she did not speak, the silence in the chamber engulfing them all like a shroud. "Tell me," she went on at last, "are the Chosen Ones now the Jin'Sai, and the Jin'Saiou?"
"What are you talking about?" Faegan asked.
"So you do not know," the watchwoman said softly. "But one day you will. Finally, after eons of waiting, the progression tow
ard joining the two sides of the craft can begin." Her voice was a mere whisper. "Perhaps the Vigors may triumph, after all." Silence reigned again for a time as the two stunned wizards tried to grasp the enormity of her words.
"You still have not told us about the state of the gardens," Wigg pressed. "Our need for your help is very great. Yet another threat to the Vigors walks the land, and has the potential to become the most potent danger we have ever faced."
The figure in the robe glided over to Faegan's chair. Reaching down to his chest with a skeletal hand, she picked up the Paragon and examined it closely. Even at this proximity, Faegan could see nothing within the dark confines of her hood. Finally she let go of the stone, allowing it to fall back into place.
"The gardens are not as they once were because all things of the craft take their sustenance from the power granted by the stone," she answered. "As the stone neared its death, so too did the gardens that I tend. They have only just begun to rejuvenate. Because of this, what you have traveled so far to find may no longer exist, but we shall try. What exactly is the nature of your request?"
"Agents of the Vagaries have mixed our stores of herbs and precious oils," Faegan explained. "They must be separated again, reclassified, and their potency revalued so that they might be employed by our herbmistress to use her gazing flame. The Chosen One is missing, and we must find him. We also seek the Scroll of the Vigors. Can you help us?"
Her answer was both frightening and immediate. "Do you mean to say that the Scrolls of the Ancients have been loosed upon the world?"
"Yes," Wigg answered. "Can you tell us why they are so important?"
"No," she told them, "for I have not been blessed with such knowledge. But I do know that the importance of the scrolls is on a par at least equal to that of both the Tome and the Paragon. For the Vigors to survive you must recover the scrolls at once, or all that we have worked for so long to preserve will perish."
The Scrolls of the Ancients tcobas-3 Page 30
