Linked, on the Lake of Souls
Far in the northern reaches of Anglas Herad, an eagle perched high in a towering pine watched as a boat drifted on the lake below. He had seen plenty of boats before on other lakes where the humans engaged in fishing, an activity to which he could relate.
Never before, however, had he seen a boat on this lake, a lake even waterfowl had the wits to shun. The eagle cocked his head and blinked his golden eyes, his curiosity piqued.
The pair, he decided, were unlike the fishers he was accustomed to seeing. They dropped no netting over the side of the boat, and carried no bait. Nor did they dip paddles into the lake to propel themselves along, for they had none.
Curiouser and curiouser, the eagle thought.
The gleam of metal caught his eye and he dropped down a few branches to get a better look. One of the females was clad in a shirt of metal, but that was not all. They sat in the bottom of the boat, bound back-to-back by heavy chains, while individual sets of manacles clasped their ankles and wrists.
If all of this was not odd enough, one of the boat’s occupants appeared intent on capsizing it, which would surely bring about undesired results for both.
The eagle ruffled his feathers and preened. He despaired of humankind ever using the intelligence it was gifted with at birth. The antics of the two in the boat only seemed to confirm his low opinion of the species.
Then one of the humans cried out. The eagle paused his preening and refocused his eyes on the boat. The cry had been a warning tinged with panic.
* * *
“Myrene!”
The boat lurched as the warrior shifted to peer over its side. Of course, any move Myrene made, Tiphane was forced to make as well.
“What? I just want to see how deep the water is.”
“Trust me,” Tiphane said, “it is quite deep. Deep and icy cold.”
Myrene grunted, unconvinced.
Had they not been chained together back-to-back in the bottom of the boat, Tiphane would have seen Myrene’s scowl. But Tiphane did not need to see it to know it was there, for the two had been working together for nearly three years now and had grown to know one another well. Too well, it sometimes seemed.
Myrene leaned even farther over the boat’s edge, hauling her chain-bound partner with her. The boat listed at an alarming angle.
“You’ll capsize us!” Tiphane cried.
“I just want to find out if I can see the bottom.”
“You’ll see it when we overturn and that lovely mail shirt you’re so fond of, along with these chains, drag us under.”
Their boat, a tiny, unstable coracle, floated on silken-calm water that reflected the bright autumnal colors cloaking the mountains that ringed the lake. The lake was vast and, as Tiphane said, icy cold, for it had once been a part of the great ice sheet that still lingered in the wastes beyond the mountains. And there was more waiting in the lake’s depths than Myrene could ever imagine.
“I don’t intend to sink us,” Myrene said. “If we aren’t deep, maybe we can—”
When the coracle heeled enough for the frigid water to leak over its rim, Tiphane said, “Believe me, you don’t want to see what’s in the lake. There are—”
Myrene uttered a sudden, strangled cry and jerked away from the edge with such force that the flat bottom of the coracle slapped the surface of the lake. She slumped against Tiphane, her breathing ragged.
Tiphane was rather rattled herself from being wrenched around by her larger and stronger companion, and by a nightmarish vision that had flashed through her mind of the coracle capsizing and the two of them sinking inexorably downward into the lake’s depths where phantom arms were outstretched to receive them . . . Perspiration glided down her temple.
“Damnation, Tiph,” Myrene whispered, when finally she caught hold of herself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Tiphane could feel Myrene trembling against her back. “I was about to tell you. I was going to tell you there is a reason it’s called Lake of Souls.”
The lake was crystal clear though, in the very middle where it was said to be hundreds of feet deep, the sun penetrated only so far before it gave way to the dark. Even there, however, they could be seen; pale hair swirling around bloodless, cadaverous faces; dark eyes staring up, mouths gaping, arms of white flesh always reaching, reaching to haul the unwary into the depths with them. There were thousands of them.
“What are they?” Myrene asked.
“No one knows exactly,” Tiphane said. “Perhaps they lived here before the ice. Perhaps they are lost souls seeking the company of the living. I do not know.”
Myrene, not one to spook easily, shivered. She had seen more than her share of carnage on battlefields, Tiphane knew, but what this deceptively beautiful lake concealed beneath its sun-dappled surface was another thing entirely.
A silence fell between them as the coracle, really nothing more than an oversized basket of woven willow boughs with a hide stretched over it, bobbed down the middle of the lake, tracking southward with the current.
“Are you sure you can’t get the manacles off?” Myrene asked.
“I’m no lockpick,” Tiphane said. “I’m a weaver of light and wind and rain, and my power cannot touch worked iron. Besides, you heard what Sedir said, and you’ve the runny nose to prove it.”
“You’ve no idea how I long to wipe it.” Myrene rattled her chains in frustration.
Their captor, the wizard Veidan Sedir of the Drakdorn Order, cursed be his name, had gone to great extremes to ensure their torment. The coracle was held together not with the ancient boatbuilding craft of fishermen who netted salmon on the rivers, but with magic. The moment Tiphane attempted to touch her own gifts, even for the slightest of breezes to skim them to shore, the coracle would unravel and they would sink into the waiting arms of the souls beneath the water. A cold finger of fear slithered down her spine.
They knew Sedir had not lied about the nature of the magic that held the coracle together, for Myrene reacted to the casting of magical spells with sneezing fits. Her nose had started running the moment they were forced into the little boat.
It was a rather odd affliction Myrene suffered from, considering her constant companion, Tiphane, was a priestess who used magic as a matter of course. But it was also useful in its own way, warning them when magic other than Tiphane’s was afoot. Or, it could be a liability, as in this instance, for Myrene’s sneeze had given them away to Sedir as they spied upon him in his hideout.
“We’re drifting to the south end,” Myrene said. “I wonder what awaits us there.”
“A waterfall.”
“A . . . ” Myrene was clearly too stunned to go on.
“It’s the outlet of the lake. It drops into a gorge. That’s the current pulling us along.”
“How deep is this gorge?”
“Pretty deep,” Tiphane replied. “You know the Great Windslo Tower?”
“Yes . . . ”
“This gorge is deeper than that tower is tall.” The tower was the tallest ever built, hundreds of feet high.
Myrene groaned. “That’s just fine and good, isn’t it. If we aren’t grabbed by ghoulish hands and drowned, we’ll go over the waterfall and be broken to bits at the bottom.”
Myrene was not known for her subtlety, and Tiphane knew her comrade blamed her for their current predicament. It was Tiphane who had insisted they follow the trail of deaths made by Veidan Sedir, leading to his hideout in the mountains.
Sedir and his adherents practiced magic that went against the laws of nature and Givean Herself. He was no favorite of Myrene’s either, but she had preferred the option of lying low in the valley until winter forced Sedir from the mountains. It was safer, she argued, than tracking him into his own territory.
And here we are, Tiphane thought, because I couldn’t wait. She supposed Myrene had
the right of it, but she just couldn’t have lived with herself if she’d allowed Sedir to run amok among the innocents who sheltered in tiny villages in the shadow of the mountains.
“We can’t let Sedir wander the countryside doing blood magic at his leisure,” Tiphane murmured more to herself than to her partner. “It goes against all our precepts.”
“Your precepts. You’re the Givean priestess.”
“And you are my sworn Shield. Therefore you must uphold the same principles as I.”
Myrene grumbled something unintelligible and sneezed, sending rings rippling outward from their coracle. Had they not been bound in chains, and had they not been floating on the Lake of Souls, it might have been an enjoyable excursion, for the scenery was breathtaking and the air, with the bite of oncoming winter in it, was exhilarating. An eagle soared through the clear sky above and screeched. Tiphane ached for its freedom.
Myrene abruptly straightened, rocking the boat.
“Can’t you sit still?” Tiphane asked. Myrene tended to be all action and little thought, and it grated on more than her nerves, especially considering they were currently attached.
“I thought I saw something moving along the shore.”
Tiphane craned her neck and scanned the shoreline. It was jumbled with talus from some long-ago rockslide and thick with low-growing shrubbery. Some spindly evergreens grew up between the rocks.
“I don’t see anything.”
“By the big boulder.”
Tiphane rolled her eyes. There were hundreds of huge rocks, some the size of a shepherd’s cot. “Which big boulder?”
“The one . . . The one . . . Damnation. I’ve lost it now.”
Tiphane sighed in irritation, and as they drifted, she thought about how many tight spots she and Myrene had gotten themselves into over the years, ever since her mentor Radmiran had brought them together. They’d met the night she had taken the Oath of Givean, which had occurred after ten years of study and prayer. She had relinquished her family, friends, and all worldly goods to serve Givean.
The world was a dangerous place, and every priestess who chose the path of wanderer was paired with a protector. When Tiphane was in her last year of study, Myrene, a warrior who had been sold by her family to a mercenary company at a tender age, had been found among the dead after a terrible battle. Broken, bloody, and unconscious, she had been mistaken for a corpse until one of the gravediggers noticed her shallow breathing. She was brought to the Order for healing, a healing that almost failed because of her odd response to the use of magic. The priestesses had to depend mostly on conventional methods to save her.
While Myrene healed, she learned much about the good works of Givean. That, coupled with her brush with death, moved something deep within her mercenary spirit, and she changed her course in life to help others as she herself had been helped. By swearing to protect Tiphane, she swore herself to Givean.
It was understandable their tempers flared from time to time. Myrene, a woman of action, was helpless in her fetters. There was no constructive way to direct her rage, no way to lift a sword and cut down the bastard who had put them in this position, the same bastard who left the broken and shriveled bodies of people—men, women, children, the young and old alike—in his wake to foster his own powers and pay homage to Drakdorn, the god of unraveling and chaos.
Tiphane was likewise fettered, unable to touch her own magic for fear of drowning them. Of course, sooner or later, the water would take them, either in the clear, cold depths of the lake, or in the churning, whirling water pounding at the base of the waterfall.
“There it is again,” Myrene said, chains clinking as she leaned forward. Water sloshed about the coracle at her sudden movement.
Tiphane scanned the distant shore, and this time she, too, saw something—someone—moving about the gigantic boulders.
“No doubt it’s Sedir coming to watch us die,” she muttered. “It is his kind of entertainment, us becoming one of his sacrifices.”
“I would like to sacrifice him,” Myrene said.
“You do have truly violent urges, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Myrene said, her voice filled with conviction.
Tiphane kept her eyes to the shore, watching for more movement. “That is not a very Givean attitude. Perhaps you should meditate on it, for Givean is the force of life, not death.” Which was what made Sedir’s depredations all the more loathsome to her and her Order.
Myrene snorted. “Since when has meditation saved you from bandits wielding clubs and swords on the road, hmmm? I don’t think meditation is going to unlock these manacles either.” She rattled the chains for emphasis.
“It has occurred to me that violent urges are not helping—”
“Look,” Myrene said, cutting her off. “There are three of them.”
Tiphane saw them then, a flash of bright white, which could only be Sedir’s robes, followed by two darker figures, one of which seemed to be struggling.
“One of the others must be Cha’korth,” Myrene said. Cha’korth was her own counterpart—Sedir’s Shield.
“How much would you wager the third is another sacrifice?” Tiphane said. “It would be a good day for Sedir, you know, tormenting us by holding the sacrifice in front of us, before we die ourselves. He wants us to feel as helpless as possible.”
As if to affirm their suspicions, Veidan Sedir called to them, his voice carrying easily across the water.
“Greetings, ladies! Such a lovely afternoon for boating, is it not? I thought, perhaps, I might offer you a diversion from your own forthcoming deaths.”
There was a scuffling along the shore and the flash of a blade, and a scream that resounded off the mountains. When it faded, Sedir continued, “A first offering of blood to give Drakdorn a taste of what is to follow.”
Myrene snarled.
“The victim looks small to me,” Tiphane said, narrowing her eyes against the glare of the sun on the water. “A young boy.” The boy was putting up quite a fight despite whatever injury Cha’korth had inflicted upon him. “I can’t simply sit here while they commit blood magic right in front of me, and we drift to our deaths.”
“Have you a plan?”
“No,” Tiphane admitted. “You?”
“Maybe, and maybe not.” Myrene fell into a long spell of silence before she spoke again. “We are drifting in a current that is taking us to the waterfall, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What if we got out of the current, or at least tried to get out of the direct path of the waterfall?”
Tiphane watched as Sedir, his Shield, and his victim picked their way toward the lake’s outlet. Preventing their own dive over its edge would solve one problem.
“What do you propose we do?” Tiphane asked.
“If we seesaw the coracle—”
“We’ll swamp it.”
“Not if we’re careful.”
“All right,” Tiphane said, “and what happens if we make it to shore?”
“You’re the one with the magic.”
“Hmm. I was afraid you’d say that.”
She sighed, noting that their current moved more swiftly now. Sedir paused by the lip of the waterfall, looking over the area as if to decide which rock would best serve as a sacrificial altar. Myrene’s idea, she decided, was better than doing nothing and helplessly awaiting their fate.
“Let’s try it,” she said.
Myrene and Tiphane started rocking back and forth, slowly building up momentum. Tiphane sweated with the effort, and Myrene’s mail shirt abraded her back. They banged heads more than once, but they kept at it. They succeeded in splashing a lot of water about, and very nearly did swamp the boat. They gave up after that, realizing their course remained unchanged.
Tiphane grimaced as cold water soaked into the seat of her trousers.
Sedir’s laughter bounced off the mountains. “Good try, ladies.”
It appeared he had found his altar—a big, flat rock. Cha’korth was securing the victim to it, and Sedir was unrolling the cloth in which he stored his ritual knives. He glanced up at them, and now Tiphane could clearly see his sharp features as they drew closer.
“My robes shall be dyed in blood before I’m done,” he yelled to them. Then he set about laying out his knives. Different knives for different parts of the body.
The bile roiled in Tiphane’s throat. She growled in memory of the lives of the innocents Cha’korth and Sedir had cut short, and at the cruel wound the Shield had given Myrene that almost took her life a year ago.
“We need to try something else,” Myrene said.
Tiphane envied Myrene her seemingly boundless determination. Maybe it was all those years she served in the mercenary company, where there was no choice but to fight or die. Tiphane, in contrast, knew they were doomed, doomed to ride over the edge of the waterfall only to be dashed on the rocks below.
Then the boat jolted and lurched without warning, and Tiphane jammed into Myrene’s back with a cry, her end of the coracle rising skyward.
“What . . . ?” A hundred impolite words rushed through her mind, but she couldn’t sputter a one for the fear that enveloped her.
“I’m using my feet,” Myrene explained matter-of-factly. “Don’t move or we’ll both end up in the water.” There was a loud splash, and Tiphane pictured Myrene’s feet, ankle, manacles and all, plunging into the lake. She whimpered, feeling certain the boat would flip over.
There was a lot of splashing as Myrene kicked, her efforts to move the boat far more effective than their previous attempt.
“Ick!” Myrene cried. “My feet! Help me get in—they’re grabbing my feet!”
Tiphane didn’t need to ask who was doing the grabbing. She knew. They scooched and wriggled until Myrene’s feet were safely in the boat.
“You did it,” Tiphane said, both amazed and grateful they weren’t on the lake’s bottom.
The Dream Gatherer Page 4
