by Doug Beyer
Rafiq didn’t know where the Order of the Skyward Eye had gotten their grim vision of the future. The angels had had no ruler, no supreme Asha, for generations, and only the monarchs of the Blessed caste could presume to speak for the angels, according to divine law. Yet the people of every nation of Bant had adopted the prophecy fervently, and had tended to interpret every dire event as confirmation of it.
“Do you think this prophecy is the true word of Asha?” Mubin asked him.
“I don’t know,” said Rafiq. “But it’s right about one thing—the disaster at Giltspire heralds nothing but evil.”
When they arrived at Giltspire, the castle was gone. The gleaming white obelisk that remained was surrounded by three concentric haloes: one of the rubble of the former castle, in which mourners hunched, looking for signs of lost loved ones; a second circle of knights of the Skyward Eye, who stood vigilantly, assigned to guard the shining relic that had been exposed; and a third circle, the encampments of pilgrims who had come to grieve and pay tribute at the site of the disaster.
After showing their sigils to the guards, Rafiq and Mubin approached the obelisk. Its surface swept upward from a shallow base, its shape guiding the eye to the heavens.
“This is ancient,” said Mubin, his leathery hand touching the stone. “It must have been under the buttress tower for centuries.”
“What is its purpose?” asked Rafiq.
“There’s script here, carved in the stone. It’s similar to runes I’ve seen in our Order’s reliquary. There are symbols for mana here, but I don’t recognize all of them.”
“It’s a warning from Asha,” said a nearby knight of the Skyward Eye.
“Why do you say that?” Rafiq asked.
“This obelisk is part of Asha’s Prophecy. ‘The armies of Death are foretold; Their Names revealed in the primeval Stone,’ ” said the knight. “ ‘The prophet’s Word; Fells the mountain of War.’ The merchant Hazid … We believe that he’s the prophet it mentions. He brought a spell that felled the ‘mountain’ of Giltspire, and revealed this primeval stone. And on it are the names of the armies of death to come.”
“Where’s this Hazid now?” asked Rafiq.
“Gone. He fled after the castle was destroyed.”
“I’d like to stay and study these inscriptions,” said Mubin. “Or head back to the reliquary to do more research.”
“There’s no time,” said Rafiq. “We have to find this Hazid before his trail goes cold.”
JUND
As he recovered from his fall to the floor of Malactoth’s cavern, Kresh’s first thought was to find a sword. But blood was obscuring his vision. Had he injured his head? He couldn’t remember. His own weapon was still buried in the face of Malacoth who was engaged with a dragon of pure fire. What should have been awe at the deadly struggle was dampened by the number of his warriors who lay dead around him. He found an unbroken obsidian-tipped spear nearby, but had to push a friend’s body over in order to retrieve it. He had fought side-by-side with that man through a lifetime of hunts. Because the onslaught had gone so badly, his hunting was at an end.
Kresh heard a sharp, grinding sound above his head. Spidery fractures spread throughout the ceiling, and the whole cavern shuddered. Chunks of rubble fell toward Kresh, and he had to roll out of the way, diving for cover. Doing so made him dizzy—how much blood had he lost? In his growing delirium, he thought he saw an enormous obelisk made of red crystal there in the cavern with them, exposed beneath what had been a huge column of rock. It was like a tower made of hardened fire. Could it be made of sangrite, the dragon’s stone? He wasn’t thinking straight—it was far too large to be made out of such a rare material. He needed to focus. He just needed to kill the hellkite, and get his remaining men out of there. Where were all the elementals? And where the hell was Rakka?
He saw two draconic shapes warring before him. He lifted the spear, gathered up all his strength, and threw the weapon without caring which creature he hit.
The pillar of Jund’s rare red stone, sangrite, shone in the center of the cavern, casting a glow over Sarkhan and Malactoth. Sarkhan had his hands locked around his war-staff, causing the dragonspell that blazed around him to lock its claws around the neck of his foe. Malactoth bit and slashed at him directly, burning himself on Sarkhan’s spell repeatedly, but coming dangerously close to cleaving Sarkhan’s actual body in two.
Sarkhan had the beast in his grasp, but needed a killing blow. Kresh’s warriors were mostly dead, and Rakka was nowhere to be found. But then Sarkhan saw it: a spear flew into view, arcing directly at his chest. Sarkhan let go of his staff with one hand and pivoted his body away from the spear’s flight path—only to catch it as it was about to whizz by.
Sarkhan’s movement pulled his fire-dragon’s claw away from the enemy dragon’s neck, freeing the beast to strike at him. Malactoth surged forward—and as he did so, Sarkhan turned the obsidian point toward him and leaned into the hellkite’s motion, burying the spear deep in his chest.
Malactoth died with a deafening roar that shook loose what remained of the cavern’s structural pillars. Sarkhan thought he heard a yell of his name, perhaps a warning from Kresh, but it was lost in the din and too late besides. As Sarkhan fell upon the hellkite’s body, the ceiling collapsed all around him
Sarkhan didn’t regain consciousness as much as have it forced upon him. His body was being lifted roughly out of the cavern rubble, causing the orange light of Jund’s sky to strike his eyes. The other sensation was of mana—powerful, boiling, chaotic mana.
He looked around him. An obsidian elemental was carrying him out of the destroyed cavern, holding him in its rocky arms as if he were a child. The elemental was one of Rakka’s, but there was no sign of her nearby. She could have let him die under the rubble—why the favor? The elemental set him down on the rough volcanic gravel, turned, and walked off. Its task complete, it found a stream of bubbling lava, and stepped into it, melting away its identity once more.
Kresh and his warriors had either died or moved on as well. The hellkite Malactoth lied dead beneath the shattered volcanic remains of its lair. In its place was an enormous column of pure, crystalline sangrite exposed to the sky after what must have been centuries buried in the rock. That was the source of mana. The obelisk wasn’t just emanating mana, but focusing it—for what purpose Sarkhan couldn’t determine.
He looked up into the sky. High above, dragons circled, drawn in by the obelisk’s power. Rakka was never interested in hunting Malactoth, he surmised. She used Kresh—and Sarkhan himself—to distract the hellkite while she freed the sangrite from its ancient prison.
If she had gone to such trouble, why wasn’t she taking advantage of its power?
NAYA
The blood was irrelevant. It wasn’t on Ajani’s mind at the time, so it got all over his white fur—but he didn’t care. His consciousness was consumed with the shape of Jazal’s body, the pose the undead creatures had left him in after killing him with his own axe. Jazal had stopped breathing before Ajani found him, and the blood coming from his wounds pooled in places to make the floor slippery. Still, Ajani hugged his brother close, trying to bury his forehead in Jazal’s sticky chest.
Ajani rocked back and forth, but stopped when Jazal spoke.
“It’s going to be all right, Ajani,” said his brother, petting the white nacatl’s fur.
Ajani didn’t look up. If he looked, Jazal’s voice wouldn’t be real, and death would triumph. Please let this be real, he thought. “Oh, thank the spirits, I’m glad you’re … alive,” said Ajani.
“Yes. Don’t worry. You’re not hallucinating.”
“But all the blood,” he said. He couldn’t help dwelling on it. “I’m too late, aren’t I, brother? You’re—”
“Let’s not think about it. Listen, I need you to go and tell the rest of the pride that I’m fine, all right? And we’ll go right back to the way things were.”
“Because … you’re fine.”
; “Yes, why wouldn’t I be? What, would someone send something to kill me? Right here in my own chambers? Why would someone do something like that? It’s ridiculous.” Jazal’s arms squeezed him reassuringly.
Ajani chuckled weakly. “Yes, ridiculous. Nobody would ever hurt you, Jazal. Everybody loves you. And it’d be chaos if you were gone—I swear, what would the pride do?”
Jazal laughed. “What would you do? But we don’t have to think about that. I’m here, and I’ll take care of everything. So go now, Ajani. Tell them. Tell them I’m perfectly fine. You just made a mistake, thinking I was dead. Nothing’s going to change, Ajani. I’m perfectly fine.”
Ajani tasted copper on his tongue. His mind clenched with dread.
“I can’t.” His voice was muffled by the fur on Jazal’s chest. “I can’t tell them.”
Jazal’s voice was soft, just a whisper in his mind. “You have to. It’s time now. You have to tell them I’m—”
“No!”
Ajani pushed his brother roughly, petulantly. The body slid off the bed and toppled onto the stone floor with a messy thump. Ajani gasped in horror. Jazal’s leg was jutting up at a strange angle against the bed, and the axe handle had been shoved deeper into Jazal’s chest. A sob tried to escape Ajani’s lips, but he choked it back inside. He rushed over and pulled on his brother’s body, to get him back onto the bed.
Ajani cursed sharply, repeatedly, using words he rarely used. As he pulled on Jazal’s arm and leg, he felt a wave of something, a feeling growing inside him that he knew was going to be bad. The cursing helped. He cursed over and over, as angrily as he could, and pushed the feeling back down.
He arranged Jazal’s limbs tidily. “There you go, Jazal,” he said. The blood was sticky on Ajani’s hands and chest.
Suddenly Ajani convinced himself that the two of them were alone in the world. He didn’t need to go out and tell the others, because there were no others to tell. Of course not. It was just the two of them, and Jazal was simply reclining, like when they were children and Ajani had watched his older brother sleeping. Ajani smiled at him.
“I’ll take care of all of this, Jazal,” Ajani said. “I’ll tidy up your room and let you sleep. Then tomorrow we can go on a walkabout, see the jungle, maybe chase some elves around the woods. I’ll miss you tonight but … But I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll just let you sleep now. You sleep. I’ll take care of the room.”
The dark wave welled up in him. He cursed again, trying to feel anger to make it go away. But it was no use. The feeling surged up his chest and into his mind. He couldn’t breathe. He felt intolerably hot. He felt the blood suddenly, felt his feet awash in the puddle of it, felt its stickiness on his face and mane and hands. He smelled it and tasted it, the liquid that was supposed to be inside Jazal. He had never seen so much blood before. It was all over him. He was drenched in red.
“Ajani—” said Jazal’s voice.
“Shut up,” Ajani said to himself.
He tried to roar, but the sound crumbled and choked in his throat.
The world spiraled in on him, forcing him down inside himself. The weight of it crushed his mind. Everything went dark and warm, and he felt as though his consciousness had ruptured, his mind being exiled to some realm of insanity. Shapes swam in the darkness—the blood-hallucinations he always saw under his eyelids.
But then Ajani realized his eyes weren’t closed.
THE BLIND ETERNITIES
Ajani felt a void around him like suction. It dragged at his fur and skin, and sucked at his eyeballs. He blinked repeatedly and moved his head from side to side, but his vision was reduced to watery impressions. He saw a dark green shape, its hills and valleys roiling uncomfortably, and momentary inklings of creatures moving across the world at speeds too fast to be natural. He could sense that place in a way he didn’t understand, a feeling like the memory of a taste, an imprint once removed from reality. It was Naya; somehow he was certain of it. That green, undulating shape was my home world, he thought.
He saw—or felt—other shapes in the void too. He turned his attention to them, which brought a blast of chaos rushing past his mind, like turning to face into a hard wind. He perceived four other realms in the void, dynamic and textured like Naya was, but they each felt very different. They were alien and off-putting, but he strained his perception toward them as much as he could. His eyes couldn’t take the grasping winds of the void, so he closed his eyes. His mind hurt when he tried to concentrate on the scene before him, so he let his consciousness float freely, as blank as the void. After a moment, the worlds appeared to him, as if he could feel their contours with some sense beyond sight or touch. Other worlds, other lives, other bizarre forms of being—he felt a rush of living textures that bewildered him.
And he felt motion. The worlds moved relative to one another, he perceived. In fact, they were nearing one another, so close that they were beginning to overlap. Streaks of existence reached out from each world like blobs of colored light, blending with each other at the edges, forming an irregular ring with an eye of void at the center.
It was too much to take in. He couldn’t hold what he was seeing in his mind. He let his consciousness slide toward one of the worlds, a swirl of hot reds and smoke. Before he could turn away again, he felt it rushing up to meet him. There was a violent jolt, and the sudden sensation of weight—and falling.
He had a body again, a real, physical body. And it was hurtling through fiery air toward the red world’s ground. When he landed, he thought, he would either wake up from the nightmare, or die.
BANT
This is a good place to camp, sir,” said the page.
Gwafa Hazid scratched his chin. “No. We keep going. This isn’t Valeron yet. We’ve made an awful pace, and I want to see olive trees before we stop.”
“We’re still a day’s journey out from the Valeron border, and we’ve pushed the steeds. They’re exhausted. They need to rest. And so do you, sir.”
“I’m fine,” snapped Hazid. Why must this messytressed boy keep telling him that? It was irritating, not to mention above his caste. Had society crumbled so far already?
But he pulled his leotau over to the side of the road anyway. The beast sighed, and its flanks heaved, at which Hazid rolled his eyes.
“It’s not enough that we feed these things half our meat,” he said. “They’ve got to complain about being ridden, too. Doesn’t anything know its place anymore?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Of course you don’t,” said Hazid. “It’s rhetoric—something you wouldn’t understand.”
“No, sir.”
“Correct. Unpack the wineskins.”
“Sir, about the Giltspire—”
“What did I tell you about—?” He stopped himself from cuffing the boy, but only just. “Enough about … that place. It’s behind us now. It’s in the past. We went there, we did our business, and we made a lot of money and … and we gained, in other ways. Transaction over. It was a good deal for us. We’re headed east now, for new ventures.”
“New ventures, sir?”
“Yes! Shut up. You’ll see when we get there. Where are those wineskins?”
The boy set up camp, and Hazid drank. The memories of seeing a castle topple lost their crispness. A fuzzy halo surrounded the day’s events, bringing a slow grin to Hazid’s face. His mind melted into a fluid, and flowed around the sharp edges of those unpleasant thoughts. He rambled as the page did his work.
“We did nothing wrong, when it comes down to it,” said Hazid. “We destroyed nothing. The thing was old. It was probably ready to crumble anyway. I think I remember that—yes, weren’t stonemasons looking into that old thing for decades? There were plenty of warnings about the old deathtrap, so why didn’t they heed them? It was an architectural disaster waiting to happen. And those people”—Hazid winced slightly—“they should have just been out of there. They could have known if they’d only paid attention. So really, it was their own fault.�
� Hazid nodded and drank. “Am I everyone’s personal wet-nurse? Am I in charge of everybody else’s personal safety? Of course not. A man can’t be expected to engineer his life around the ignorance of others. A man can only be expected to look after his own affairs. Praise Asha.”
He raised his glass to clink it with someone’s, but the boy hadn’t filled his cup yet. “Come here, boy.”
The boy was nowhere to be found. The camp was only half-made.
“Boy? Where’ve you run off to now? My tent’s not even up yet!”
“Sir, someone’s coming.”
The boy was over by the road, looking back to the west. There were hoof beats in the distance, at a gallop. Hazid jumped up to his feet.
“Who is it? Who would follow us? We’ve done nothing wrong!”
The boy squinted into the gloam of the waning day. “Sir, I think we should abandon the camp. Come on.”
“Abandon the camp? Where would we—”
The boy was already running into the woods. “Infuriating mop-headed whelp,” Hazid muttered.
Before Hazid could commit his legs to running, the riders were upon him, their lanterns glowing like fireflies. One was a tall, olive-skinned human man in plate armor. Draped from his armor were dozens, maybe a hundred sigils, each one catching the lamplight like a star in the gloam. The other was a broad-faced rhox.
The rhox spoke. “Gwafa Hazid?”
“I … no. I’m his … handservant. My master just ran off into the woods.”
The human and rhox looked at him, and exchanged glances.
“I’m telling you the truth! It was just before you came. He ran off that way!”
“I am Rafiq, knight of the Order of the Reliquary,” said the human, dismounting from his leotau.
“What—? You—you are? You are not.”
Hazid glanced over the man’s sigils. He had medallions of patronage from every major city, in every country across Bant. He even had the Sigil of the Empty Throne, the one that marked him as the official champion of the archangel Asha herself, hand-selected by one of Blessed caste.
