by Terah Edun
Just make sure you don't find the wyvern along with it, said Sebastian.
Afraid I'll make mincemeat out of him? Ciardis teased.
That is it exactly, said the prince heir, and we need him alive or the council will make chopped liver out of me.
Ciardis sent a wave of amusement to them both. Don't worry, we won't let anything happen to you.
Speak for yourself, Thanar replied darkly.
Thanar, said Ciardis in a warning tone.
Sebastian laughed. Don't worry, I can handle him. Now go. We'll need you back before too long.
When Ciardis's eyes came back into focus and she was no longer staring into the air in the distance, Raisa said caustically, “Your princes approve?”
Ciardis gave her a haughty look. “We're set to go.”
Ciardis waved to Terris and quickly jogged over. “Keep Sebastian safe and those soldiers on alert.”
Surprised, her friend said, “I will.”
She didn't ask where she was going. She knew better.
But she did say, “Just come back in one piece.”
“Always,” promised Ciardis, and jogged back over to the shaman and dragon with as little fuss as she could.
“Let's go, then,” said Rachael as she shrugged on a pack.
Ciardis looked over at her in surprise.
“Some supplies I found,” the shaman said with a nod. “Not all of us stayed for the whole council meeting, and I was able to get a few of the small dried packs of meat and some semi-rotten rope for us to use.”
“Rope?” said Raisa as Rachael walked between the ambassador and Weathervane out the door.
“Semi-rotten?” Ciardis squeaked as she followed behind.
“Well, the dragon said there was a tower, and unless she can fly and not reveal her form, we're going to need to climb,” the shaman said.
Ciardis blanched at the thought and hurried to fumble at the knapsack on Rachael's back. “How rotten is semi-rotten?”
“It'll hold,” Rachael said while waving her hand at Ciardis in irritation, as if she was a fly she could just brush off.
Ciardis huffed and then nearly fell flat on her face as her feet went in two different directions on the slimy, moss-covered ground.
Fortunately, someone caught her flailing arms from behind and helped her right herself.
Ciardis turned, flushed with thanks that died on her lips.
“It's you,” she said dumbly as she stared into Seven's strange and nefarious-looking eyes.
“It's me,” said the council member. “Now where are you three going alone and unprotected?”
Rachael had come back, and stood next to Ciardis's left shoulder.
Raisa had circled around him, and Ciardis wasn't quite sure she wasn't going to decapitate him where he stood. Or at least try.
She certainly wasn't going to intervene if the dragon did.
The shaman said with a fierce tone, “We don't need your protection. We can do just fine on our own.”
Seven turned his curiously red eyes on her. “Really?” he said. “You know that hordes call our city home and they look for any prey.”
Raisa gave him a cold smile. “And we will take care of them.”
Seven paused and then held out his arms in surrender. “Very well, have it your way.”
They nodded in thanks and turned.
Seven asked, “Will you at least allow me to assign you some guards?”
Ciardis was curious. She turned and said, “Do you have any that are living…like you?”
“No,” said Seven. “But they will follow my every instructions to the letter and shield you with their bodies if necessary.”
Ciardis gave him a weak smile as she felt the chill drop down her spine. “We are fine, thank you.”
He nodded and turned away.
“That man gives me the creeps,” Ciardis said as they walked off into the city, trailing behind Rachael.
Raisa said to her from behind, “That is no man.”
As Ciardis followed behind Raisa, she wondered what the dragon stood to gain now.
She had been adamant about saving the city of Kifar when she'd waylaid them on the road from Sandrin. Something about it being important to her heritage. Now it seemed that she didn't care at all.
30
“That's the tower?” Ciardis asked faintly as she looked up and up and up at the square walls of a very large obelisk.
“That is it,” confirmed Raisa as she walked toward the only entrance to the monument. “It's the highest point in the city at its peak.”
Ciardis eyed the obelisk that was actually leaning to the right a bit at the very top. “Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of,” the Weathervane said.
Rachael uncoiled some rope and jabbed her playfully in the side as she walked by. “Have a little faith, Weathervane.”
Ciardis shook her head. “I can't believe this doesn't worry either of you.”
“If worse comes to worse,” Raisa said as she grabbed the edge of a gray stone door and yanked it off its hinges, “we fall.”
Ciardis blinked as the dragon disappeared inside. “That wasn't very comforting.”
She looked at the shaman, who shrugged.
“You next,” said Rachael.
Ciardis raised her eyebrows. “How very kind of you.”
“Don't mention it,” the shaman said with a grin.
Rolling her eyes, Ciardis walked away muttering about “death traps” and “falling beams.”
But it was better to get this over with than to have an angry dragon come out and yank her into the interior instead.
On the inside, she saw a staircase that hugged the wall, with wide planks cemented into the stone itself and no banister to keep occupants from falling. It reminded her of a ledge on a cliff, except this was an ascending platform from hell.
And Raisa was already on the level.
“I guess that answers the question of whether or not it's stable,” said the shaman cheerfully.
“No, no it does not,” protested Ciardis as Rachael brushed past her and started the long climb.
“And what about the rope?” Ciardis shouted with her hands on her hips as she watched the shaman begin her own ascent.
Rachael's only answer was to toss the semi-rotten rope back down to her, and Ciardis caught it in a tangle around her arms and head.
With a growl, she shoved it all to the ground and did the only thing she could do: climbed after the dragon and shaman who had left her behind.
It took them an hour and half to get to the top of the platform.
Ciardis knew because she had diligently paid attention to the passing time with her inner temporal ability, while dodging falling dust and debris, and nimbly jumping over planks of wood that had completely rotted and disappeared from view.
When they all stopped together on the viewing platform at the very top of the obelisk, she was sweating and wheezing while wondering if she could possibly be allergic to all the wood dust she'd inhaled, and wondering if she could get away with killing Raisa without being accused of homicide.
She decided that she couldn't, only because Raisa was officially a diplomat from her homelands. There would be an inquisition at the very least. There always was.
So she cursed under her breath as she tried to get her wheezing under control, and ignored the dragon with cobwebs in her hair who was walking around the small platform with a compass in her hands and an air of complete ease. The woman wasn't even winded.
Neither of them were.
Ciardis wasn't sure which person she found more disturbing.
Neither and both, she decided.
She finally managed to ask, “What are you looking for?”
“The point that is due west,” Raisa responded.
Ciardis held out a shaking hand and pointed in the proper direction. “That way.”
“Are you sure?” the dragon said while looking up from her compass. “With the magic layering this city and all the turns
we just made, even I admit that I feel disorientated.”
“Oh, jolly good,” Ciardis snarled. “At least there's something wrong with you.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the ambassador.
“I'm sure!” snapped Ciardis.
Raisa nodded. “Very well, then. The city maps indicate a ley line that I can tap into if I'm precisely positioned halfway between north and south in this tower and facing west. I believe that this will give us a good idea if there are any…unusual…mage objects stored anywhere near.”
“And if Raisa can give us a direction,” said Rachael, “I can give us a more concentrated target.”
Ciardis nodded. “Then shall we proceed?”
Raisa took her place, and Ciardis backed as close to the wall as she could. Not to get away from Raisa but to give her as much room as she could. The platform was quite tiny, barely ten feet across.
She waited and nothing happened.
Raisa just stood there for a moment and then closed her eyes.
Raising her hand slowly to her heart, Raisa then lifted it out from her body as slowly and fluidly as if she was performing a dance ritual for a ceremony.
Her hand ended up pointing mid-northeast-east, and Ciardis smiled. They had the first clue to their destination.
One more, Ciardis thought as she looked at Rachael and wondered how she would do it.
Raisa stepped back without a word and shook her head.
Rachael took her place.
“Do you need to tap the ley line too?” Ciardis asked.
“No,” Rachael said. “I just need peace.”
Nodding, Ciardis moved away.
This time Rachael didn't even move. Not a physical twitch to show them she was “seeing” anything; not a hint of magic gathering in her aura.
Just total silence as the wind whistled around the monument and they waited for her pronouncement.
Twenty minutes later, she stirred and turned to them. “I know where it is,” she said.
“Where?” Raisa and Ciardis both said eagerly.
Rachael smiled wryly. “You'll never guess where.”
Raisa motioned impatiently. “This is no time for games.”
Rachael shrugged. “Not two blocks from where we were quartered. But that's not all.”
Ciardis's eyebrows rose. “What is it?”
The shaman hesitated and then said, “It's moving.”
Raisa walked toward her and said in a tight voice, “Are you sure your vision was clear?”
Rachael responded snippily, “As crystal. The collar of Diamis is already around somebody's neck.”
“Well,” Ciardis said after a heavy pause. “We were looking for the collar and its wearer.”
“Yes,” hissed Raisa as she began to stalk down the staircase with a heavy tread. “But that was before we learned that this city is inhabited by the living dead. Nine-tenths of a chance that it is one of those wraith-like creatures which bears the collar.”
Ciardis hurried after her, firing questions. “But how would it have gotten it on?”
“Who knows?” Rachael said in a harried voice from behind her. “It could have been wearing it when it died or acquired it by mistake along the way. It doesn't even have to be around its neck, just on its person, to be moving.”
“Right,” said Ciardis as she leapt over a small break between boards and landed on her feet in a cloud of dust.
Raisa, on the other hand, was being even more reckless than usual. Instead of descending each step and jumping over the jagged openings, she had elected to jump across and downward in an increasingly zigzagging pattern. It allowed her to move much faster and go four to five steps at a time, but it also severely weakened the steps for those behind her.
Until Ciardis came to an opening in the staircase where three steps had broken away and she had to screech, “Do you mind? We're trying to come after you, but we can't if you're destroying our way down.”
For a moment Raisa didn't answer, and Ciardis fumed.
Her arms crossed, she eyed the opening between steps, which was as long as her body was wide.
Rachael came up behind her, and Ciardis said over her shoulder, “There's no way I can make that leap.”
“You have to,” the shaman said.
Ciardis threw her hands up in disgust, and a rope came sailing through the air to land directly on her open right palm.
Surprised, Ciardis gripped it without thinking.
“Hook it on to that large nail in the stone next to your head,” called up Raisa from below.
Ciardis looked over the edge of the wide staircase planks to see the dragon standing impatiently in the center of the base of the obelisk.
She held the end of the rope in her hands.
“Ha,” said Rachael, “so that turned out to be useful anyway!”
Ciardis ignored her and called down to the dragon, “Are you sure this rope is safe?”
The dragon called back up, with more than a hint of growl in her voice, “I strengthened it while you were whining. Now hook it on and climb down!”
Ciardis hesitated.
“Or I will leave you behind,” said Raisa with a roar.
Ciardis didn't hesitate after that. She put the rope on the end of the nail with the jagged edge, said a prayer to the gods, and descended a semi-rotten dragon-strengthened rope with her heart full of butterflies.
As they made haste back across the city, Ciardis remembered what Melina had said to her on the date she had negotiated her contract for Sebastian's hand.
The senior companion had explained that “the visions are powerful but not always clear. But there is a special person bearing an object of old importance.”
She hadn't known who it was. Male or female. Young or old.
Dead or alive, Ciardis thought grimly.
Now all they had to go on was instinct. Ciardis just hoped Raisa was not wrong.
They raced into an empty courtyard.
Ciardis knew that it was the quickest way to get to the individual.
She had no intention of stopping to find Thanar and Sebastian, not before that person got away.
Or worse, was immolated before they could separate them and their precious object from the rest of the horde and get it out of harm's way.
Ciardis wasn't sure what they would do then with a mindless wraith, because surely the wearer had to not only wear the object but mentally control it to get any use out of it. She couldn't imagine a wraith with its mind focused on only one thing—hunger—being able to do any such thing.
So for once in her life, Ciardis fervently hoped that she was both right and wrong.
And if you had asked her directly, she wouldn't have been able to tell you which outcome she wanted more. A wraith with sentience or an undead wraith without the ability to control the collar.
As they hurtled toward a corner, Rachael abruptly stopped and shouted, “Wait!”
Ciardis barely managed to keep from plowing into the dragon's back.
Both the Weathervane and the dragon looked at the shaman with impatience lining their faces.
Ciardis wanted to ask her what they were stopping for, but she could see the concentration and strain on the shaman's face. Whatever she had stopped them for had had a purpose.
She looked around and then pointed directly to Kifar's city hall.
“The wearer has moved,” she proclaimed. “It's inside!”
Ciardis and Raisa looked at each other and then turned to hustle up the steps not far from them.
But they had barely gotten halfway up them before the inner doors of the chambers were thrown open and out stepped none other than Seven, accompanied by Councilor Oiye, Sebastian, Thanar, and a host of others.
Upon spying them, a maniacal gleam flared in Seven's eyes. “Ladies! You've returned! And so quickly.”
“Actually,” said Council Oiye, “you're just in time to see the start of the first purges. We're going to where the horde waits now.”
“N
o,” shouted Ciardis.
She didn't necessarily think any of those in the council were being sacrificed at this specific time, but they had to be sure before they did.
Raisa raced up the steps. “Where are your wraiths?” she demanded.
Confusion flared on Oiye's face.
Seven managed to respond before he did. “There are none here.”
“None?” said Ciardis in confusion as she looked back and forth between Oiye and Seven. “How can that be?”
“We lock them into their own confinement when the city does not call for their aid,” said Councilor Oiye, perplexed.
Sebastian walked down a few steps with questions in his eyes.
Ciardis shook her head, because she didn't have an answer.
Turning in confusion, she looked down at Rachael, who still stood at the base of the steps.
The shaman hadn't moved. But her eyes were fixed on someone who stood in the chamber doors.
Slowly Ciardis turned back to the gathered group with horror in her eyes. No, she thought. It can't be.
Ciardis? she heard both Sebastian and Thanar ask in far-off voices.
But she didn't answer them. She didn't have to.
Her eyes said it all as they landed in horror on the one person who held the shaman's attention so strongly.
Seven looked down at Sebastian, Ciardis, Raisa, and Rachael gathered below them.
And he was grinning like a fool.
31
If Ciardis had felt heartsick before, she felt completely furious now.
Of all the people in the entire city of thousands, it had to be him.
She didn't even have to turn to ask Rachael if he was the one. It couldn't be anyone else. He was the wearer of the collar of Diamis.
She knew from his bearing; she knew from the smirk on his face—she knew without a doubt that it was him. The most hated councilor of them all.
Oiye was looking back and forth between Seven and the group on the stairs with unease.
He's probably wondering if you've all lost your minds, Thanar thought at her from behind Oiye.
Thanar stood with his arms crossed and his eyes carefully shielded in clinical detachment.
I just might in the next few minutes, Ciardis thought back at him as hatred welled.
