“They did not create the Gateways, Jikun. Tiras did. Tiras created the Gates as a way for necromancers to utilize their power. In hopes that one could truly resurrect the dead. Before that, only the Realm existed—a solitary pathway to the gods with a single, powerful pull—the pull of what is now the Ninth Gate. No necromancer could dare enter because the tug would be so instantaneous, so powerful, that their soul would simply be swept onward to Emal’drathar.
“So the only souls a necromancer could utilize were sparse. The Guardian—now the First—was swift to gather the dead into the Realm. All that was left were the souls in Aersadore who had not yet passed to Emal’drathar—brief and fleeting in their presences—and those fragments defiant enough to overpower the pull of the Realms with anger, hatred, duty, loss, or regret. These were souls that felt so deeply on an emotion that a fragment of their being remained and haunted our realm—like what the Lost Infantry Unit in The Pass suggests. But with the creation of the Gates, weaker necromancers could feign death with a fragment of their own soul and still manage—if they were even moderately strong—to return unscathed.”
Jikun wondered how long he could manage to remain within the Realms of the Dead so that he did not have to grovel before some asinine god for the rest of eternity. He shook his head and refocused.
“Did you hear me, Jikun? A necromancer even moderately strong can enter and depart through the gates. I am more than a ‘moderately strong’ necromancer. I combated the Beast. I kept Relstavum’s serpent at bay—”
“Have you ever brought back the dead?”
“I am well aware of the details, but I have not had to. …And that is beyond moderate necromancy.”
“You died casting a few spells at the hel’onja.”
Navon ignored his point. “What Relstavum’s skill suggests—merely by the number of souls he has been able to control… by slaughtering an entire city at once—is that he is strong. Very strong. He will not tire. He will not lose focus. And so we shall have to strike him while his soul is occupied… by surprise. Consider the Beast. The closest Saebellus’ creature ever got to killing me was when it attacked me in the Temple of Sel’ari, before the priests and people—when I was unprepared and unsuspecting. That is how we must approach Relstavum. And why you will need me. What can ice or dragons do against the union of spirits? You cannot freeze them. You cannot burn them. This is why you have to allow me to use my magic when—if—we fight Relstavum. ”
Jikun pursed his lips.
“And if the Eph’vi were right—if there is a regiment of dead trapped on this plane by honor—then you will need me again.”
The haunting face of his captain flickered within the memory of smoke. Navon had protected them from Relstavum’s spell inside Dahel, but he had died in their brief battle with the hel’onja. Allow Navon to use necromancy?
He did not believe there had been no cost to the male’s mistake.
Still, without that assistance, Saebellus’ pawn would certainly have killed them all. “I will consider it, Navon.”
As though he had not actually expected to win his point, his captain’s eyes widened.
Jikun raised a hand staunchly to prevent the male from battling for a certain victory. “But do not ask again.” And truly, why should he bother? The Helven would act as he pleased no matter what Jikun said. “So aside from your hope to use your magic against Relstavum… you are stating that these old, duty-bound souls are quite possibly… realistically… roaming about our only escape from this god-forsaken desert.”
Eldaeus’ singing lapsed into a dramatic sigh. “That was his whole explanation!”
“Careful, he doesn’t tolerate ridicule,” Navon warned with a smirk.
Jikun pointed warningly at the Faraven. “Remember that.” He jerked his head toward the prince. “And you are certain there is no other path out of the Aenid?”
Darcarus nodded regrettably, chewing his thumb. “If there was, I would have ended Navon’s rambling while we were still young.”
Jikun heaved a sigh. “Eldaeus, we will allow you to accompany us, but our journey will be far from safe. We are hunting a very dangerous man. Still, I suppose we were fortunate to find this place.” He rubbed a hand over his face. When it came away sticky with blood, he began to question his own sanity. He remembered a prank he and his brethren had pulled back in the army on those who fell asleep during initiation… except they had used ink instead of blood and the symbols had been crude dwarven anatomy instead of the ancient elven tongue.
Eldaeus clutched a hand to his stomach in glee. “Oh, I am the lucky one.” He grinned. “Now, we have only to wait a few hundred years and the staircase shall be complete and we can leave!”
Jikun stared at him. Good gods, was every plan doomed to regress?! “What? A few hundred years? What staircase??”
Darcarus glanced over his shoulder, as though attempting to discern this invisible path. “Do you mean the stones we climbed down from?”
And as Jikun followed the Sel’ven’s gaze, he had to admit that the rocky aggregation did have the vague resemblance of a crudely hewn staircase. For giants.
Eldaeus draped an arm around the prince’s broad shoulders and walked his fingers up the golden buttons on his chest. “There it is. Every few hundred years, a chunk of stone falls from the cavern ceiling. You did walk down that way.”
“Dropped, is a better description,” Jikun replied as Darcarus swiftly brushed the mad elf’s arm away. “And we do not need to wait for that.” He studied the hole in the distance, a mere black smudge on the vast ceiling. “I can build us a staircase of ice. I just need a few days’ rest to recover from our recent trials.”
Darcarus gave him a warning glare. “More than that. I told you: I need you to be more than half-dead if we are going to fight Relstavum.”
Jikun grunted in acknowledgement, but Eldaeus was already eagerly carrying on. “You will also need to scratch out the runic markings on the cavern entrance. I cannot leave so long as they are present.”
Jikun paused, a wary tingle running along the breadth of his arms. The sealing runes… so they were indeed for this male.
Navon frowned, daring to ask the question to which Jikun felt he would rather not know the answer. “What did you do—why could the council not kill you?”
Eldaeus’ face fell ashen, his lips pursing into a line as thin as the markings for his symbols. There was a quaver lurking within his voice as he replied in a hushed tone, “I did a terrible crime. And I am very hard to kill. The first executioner tripped on his way up the stairs and cracked his skull open. The second fell into the floor before me and his collar got caught on a nail and he hanged himself.”
Jikun’s brows raised in astonished disbelief. What in the name of Ishkav…?
“He is hatching dragons from chicken eggs,” Darcarus scoffed.
“They switched to beheading but the executioner was assassinated the night before and the replacement fell on his sword.”
“How—?”
“They tried Ulasum’s Tooth, but I vomited from fatigue and the executioner recoiled. The poison splashed into his eyes and blinded him. The sixth male simply died on the spot. His heart gave out, they said.”
Jikun was not so swift to discount the male’s tales. There was gravity in his eyes now, something glimpsed past the insanity. He felt the chill slide up his arm and down his spine.
“They tried a volley of arrows, but one of the archers tripped and shot a councilmember through the head. The eighth—”
Jikun stared at him numbly. “Eighth?”
He could hear Eldaeus carrying on, but the inanities seemed to blur together now. What in Ramul, Emal’drathar… all the gods above was this male rambling on about? How had he dodged even a single execution? For what crimes were they so determined to kill him? He stared at the suddenly foreboding symbols etched across the elf’s body. And why was he covered in such markings? Clearly they must have been etched before he was “imprisoned”—unless
a vial of jasebulem ink had dropped from the sky “by luck” for him as well.
“At the end of the twelfth they stopped. I am glad that they did, because the next would have been thirteen. And everyone knows how unlucky thirteen is!” Eldaeus’ tone had recovered through the course of his chronicle, and he was now beaming once more in a toothy grin.
“Thir… teen?”
“Yes. Thirteen—ever since the thirteenth son of the human King Rogen of Candoria was born a cripple and infected his family with a plague that drove them all to become insane cannibals.”
“The Cadorian Plague. I remember that story,” Darcarus announced triumphantly.
Navon latched onto the immediate opportunity for superiority. “Couldn’t remember something useful from history,” he muttered.
“Shall I reflect on those questions of yours?”
Navon crossed his arms, endeavoring to ignore the male. “I don’t understand,” he directed to Eldaeus. “If they wanted you dead, why would they have locked you in a place like this? This is an oasis. Clearly you would have—you have had—no problems surviving down here.”
“Oh, they did not know this was here! They sealed me inside the cave and I clawed and dug my way, trying to escape. When I had dug deep enough, the ground below me suddenly crumbled into little, tiny pieces! I fell and fell and fell and thought it was the end, but no! Lo and behold, I discovered this secret oasis!” And then he began to belt out a tune in ancient elven, glorifying his victory.
Jikun could only blink. What had broken his fall if the great, stone “stairs” had not been present hundreds… or thousands… of years ago? “Wouldn’t that attempt have been the thirteenth time?”
Darcarus’ nostrils flared as he pressed his palms to his ears. “Perhaps they confined him here on account of his voice. I would consider it.”
Eldaeus merely grinned as he bounded down the hill. “I have to gather food for our journey!” he sang as he went. “Foooood fooooorrrrr yooouuu!” And then immediately returned to croaking the atrocious ancient elven tune he had been howling during Navon’s lecture.
Navon squinted with similar discomfort. “It is almost as bad as Jikun’s poetry.”
Darcarus’ hands fell away, his lips parting in mock surprise. “What did you just say? A Darivalian who writes poetry? Is the concept even possible?”
Navon leaned over with a whisper of amusement in his little secret. “If you read it, you would know the answer to that question is a resounding ‘no.’”
Jikun scowled, though he did not respond to the insult. “Maybe if he sang something different… Eldaeus!” he barked. “Sing something else! The Ballad of The War of Dragons, Sel’ari’s Blessing, Emerol, or anything, as long as it is not… that or The Ballad of the Seven.”
“Oh, sing The Ballad of the Seven,” Darcarus disagreed. “I despised that song for years, but Hadoream and I sang it near twenty or thirty times on our journey to Dahel. I have grown rather fond of it.”
“Do not dare,” Jikun reproached.
Eldaeus pivoted, prancing backward as he sang, “I do not know that one!”
Giving the Faraven an amused shake of his head, Darcarus laughed. “The Ballad of the Seven? Of course you do. Why count your blessings when men before have lost what they thought they had? Or number your allies in times prewar, when loyalties are not yet bled? Know that the man who stands at your side…” he trailed off as Eldaeus regarded him blankly and paused beneath a fruit tree. “No…?”
Darcarus seemed genuinely perplexed, and Jikun imagined that the True Bloods were reared with even greater indoctrination of Eraydon’s tales than the average elf. After all, it was they alone who had remained on Ryekarayn for centuries after their allied humans betrayed the elven kind. Even after the elves’ trade crumbled and hostilities rose to tear their kingdom down, they had persisted—all in an attempt to honor the hero’s legendary sacrifice.
Darcarus insisted, “With blood they fought the trials north, and with blood they fought to flee, ’til all the dust had settled forth, and seven were left to be?”
A few too many verses had been recited for Jikun’s taste, but he graciously forgave the offense. “Everyone knows that ballad, Eldaeus,” he interrupted before Darcarus could utter the whole ballad. “Unfortunately. …The legend of Eraydon… Tiras, Mesheck, Aura, Riphath, Taine, and Ephraim?”
The Faraven’s shoulders rolled dismissively and he reached up to pluck a fattened fruit. “No. I do not know them.” He spun round once more, carrying on in ancient elven the terrible melody he had previously been squawking. Except now his mouth was full.
“…Doesn’t know who Eraydon is…?” Darcarus mused. “And I thought I was a bad student.”
The brows of the Helven fixed high. “How can anyone not know the tale? Every dwarf, elf, orc, and human who has ever lived knows that story.”
The sea green hair bounced faintly with the Faraven’s hopping. Jikun drummed his fingers against his lower lip. “Everyone who lived after them, you mean.”
With slow realization, Navon’s jaw dropped. “What are you suggesting…? That he is older than them? Jikun, that would make him well over nine thousand. I have only heard of a handful of elves enduring past three thousand since the elves abandoned Ryekarayn. That would suggest that he is—”
“A True Blood,” Darcarus finished. “The Faravi were the only race whose bloodline was never polluted by mingling with the elves who abandoned Ryekarayn—you know, given that they were all massacred before Eraydon’s war. I suppose, when you consider the extent of that tragedy, he is far more likely a True Blood than a descendant of that night.”
Jikun watched Eldaeus frolic once more, the sunlight gleaming down upon his pristine leather armor. Beneath it, the scale armor glittered gold and bronze in equal perfection.
Time seemed to have forgotten the male.
Yet if this bizarre elf had survived that unspeakable night, perhaps some explanation for his insanity was to be had.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was well into Jerah’s day when the cellar door opened. He pushed up from his stomach and rocked onto his wide heels, watching as the torchlight bobbed into view.
“Jerah?” his master whispered softly into the gloom.
Jerah’s eyes shrank to narrow slits as the elf raised the torch above his head.
“Jerah, you are being released,” his master spoke softly, setting the torch into the holder.
Hesitantly, Jerah stood. Released? So soon? He had not been allowed out save for once since he had failed to kill that necromancer in the temple… Master’s master had been furious and that anger had carried over to swift punishment for Jerah. He cocked his head slightly, absently pulling at his knotted hair with dirty fingers. Blood was still caked beneath his nails. “Today?” he asked slowly.
The ring of keys jingled in the elf’s hand as he squinted in the dimness to locate the correct one. “Yes. Now,” he replied impatiently, kicking aside a shard of the broken orange stone.
Jerah hardly noticed. The pounding in his chest rose swiftly as the key turned in the locks, first at his ankles, then his wrists. For a moment, Jerah watched the elf struggle to lift them, then he leaned down and plucked the shackles from his master’s hand. Jerah tossed them behind him. They struck with a crack through the stone and a booming echo in the tiny room.
His master’s brows knit faintly as he glanced at the broken stone. “Jerah, you are to kill Lord Kinraeus of the Noc’olari,” he spoke firmly when their eyes met again. “You are to leave no witnesses. You are to speak to absolutely no one. You are to make certain you are not followed. You are to complete this task swiftly and discretely. And, Jerah, you are to return here immediately after the task is finished.”
Jerah rubbed his raw wrists as he listened. “I am to go to the surface?” The surface. He could not hide the eagerness that crossed his face—the expression that raised the corner of his mouth slightly. His jaw flexed at the thought of the smells that would en
velop him—the tastes that seemed to ride the twisting air.
“Yes, Jerah. The surface. When you leave this place, you will go to the northern bridge—it will be unguarded for a short span of time. You will travel west along the canyon until you reach a great city built into a tree. At the top of the tree is a room with columns of naked bitches at the doors. Kinraeus should be there. If he is not, wait for him to return. He is white-skinned and grey-eyed. His hair is…” He paused, eyes sweeping the cellar until they landed on one of Jerah’s stones. He swept it up. “His hair is the color of this stone and pale grey—can you imagine what this color is?”
Jerah tried to embed pale grey into the rich, dark purple of his stone. “Yes…” he replied slowly. He found his mind had simply swirled the two together, but he wished to go to the surface enough to lie.
“What a smart boy,” his master praised with a twisted smile. “And you are to kill him. Rip him as you did the others. You must be certain he is dead.” His voice soured. “Kinraeus has been plotting with the human king to overthrow Saebellus. We will be attacking their realm soon, but in the chaos of that battle, he might escape. That is why it must be done tonight, Jerah. There is no mercy if you fail.”
It was a simple enough request and Jerah felt his excitement barely contained. “I will do that,” he replied confidently. Then he frowned. “What… are naked bitches?”
His master had opened his mouth to continue, but stopped. His dark brows knit, his eyes rolled, and his thin lips pursed. This expression sent a wave of irritation through Jerah. “Women, Jerah… They look as you and I do, but they are thinner, shorter… they have breasts, here.” He gestured to the front of Jerah’s chest and stopped as Jerah’s blank expression clearly did not inspire confidence. “Like this stone—but larger. Two of them. Fucking Ramul, Jerah.”
Jerah simply gave a single nod. He had more questions about these women-type columns, and why they were also called bitches, but his master seemed to have run out of patience. Jerah could only deduce that bitches were naked.
Heroes or Thieves (Steps of Power 2) Page 18
