by Guy Antibes
“No call to the Goons, yet,” Pol said cheerfully as he sat down.
“They are trying to trip you up,” Venit said.
“Who?”
“Dorrok suspects you’re a treasure hunter. Most who come to be priests are treasure hunters. They try to enter the priesthood to get inside information about Demron’s Cave. You’re not, are you?”
Pol laughed. “I’m not interested in any treasure. I don’t believe the stories anyway. Why would Demron leave a treasure in a cave when he could seal what he wanted within his chamber? He would rise with ready access to his treasure.”
“I never thought of that.”
“It seems logical to me,” Pol said.
“Are you going to open the resting place?”
“How am I going to do that? I’m sure it was tried plenty of times. So many times that the priests feel safe leaving him asleep out in the open.”
Venit shook his head, a little exasperated. “You have an answer to every question.”
Pol didn’t tell him that he had the advantage of working with a pattern that easily produced the answers about an artifact that hadn’t been significantly disturbed in millennia.
“I’ve been told I’m smarter than other people.”
“But in a farming village that’s not very much of a compliment,” came a voice from behind Pol.
Wissem put down his own tray. “You told me the same thing.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” Pol said.
“I still think you’re a treasure hunter,” Wissem said.
Pol ignored the comment and began to eat.
“No objections?” Wissem said.
“I’ve already said what I think of the treasure to Venit. I don’t believe in a treasure.”
“But you believe in a cave?”
“That might be something I could believe in, although it wouldn’t be an ordinary cave. Are you familiar with any Shinkyan legends?”
“Shinkya. That’s a fair distance from here.”
“On the other side of Phairoon,” Pol said. “They claim they worked for an alien race. Something happened to the aliens, and the Shinkyans left northern Volia and ended up in what is now Shinkya.”
“Are you saying Demron is an alien?” Venit said. His eyes were wide open.
“A race of gods,” Pol said. “Demron is the last. Why would they put him in a chamber, or even more of a question, who put him in a chamber?”
Wissem looked at Pol with narrowed eyes. “That’s not mentioned in the red book.”
“But doesn’t it make sense?” Pol said. He could already see that Wissem knew it.
“Why aren’t the Terilanders powerful godlike creatures?” Wissem asked.
“I don’t know. The magic died out somehow though, didn’t it? That’s why there aren’t many magicians from Teriland.”
Wissem nodded.
“It didn’t end among the Shinkyans, nor did it end as men populated more and more of Phairoon. The trait of being able to tweak patterns is still alive and passed on. In Shinkya, men who have more power die young.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a rumor I picked up.”
“Where are you really from?”
Pol knew he’d get nowhere if the priest suspected him of being a treasure hunter, so he decided to tell the truth.
~~~
Chapter Thirty-One
~
“I’m from the Baccusol Empire. I’m on a personal trip to find my ancestors. My mother was told that powerful magicians born in the north of Volia died young. My own father died when he was about twenty. I never knew him, and I think he was from Teriland. I found a healer who could repair my defective heart. He succeeded.”
“Are you a powerful magician?”
“Powerful enough. I’ve already been tested,” Pol said.
Wissem nodded. “I know. You astounded the priest who tested you. We’ve never heard of this location talent you possess.”
“You aren’t who you seem, either,” Pol said.
Wissem smiled. “My name is Wissem, but I am one of the aides to the High Priest. You were tested in my office today.”
“And you cleared out the offices to see what I’d do when I encountered them empty?”
“Did you use location?”
Pol shook his head. “I am more experienced than my age may indicate, and it seems I’m getting more experience every day.”
“What about the cave? If you give me some hints as to where it is, I’ll find it for you,” Wissem said.
Venit pointed at Pol all of a sudden. “You were the rider with the conical hat!”
“I was, but I bought that hat far to the south. It was a startling coincidence.”
“It almost makes me think that Demron has told us of your divine origins. How did you disappear?” Wissem said.
“Just taking off the hat and moving through the crowds was enough.” Pol knew that answer was weak, but both of them nodded.
“You don’t look like a god.” Wissem narrowed his eyes.
“Not any more divine than you, Wissem.”
“But you don’t deny you are descended from gods?”
“I think Terilanders are all descended from them.” Pol plucked his white hair. “I’m unsure about Shinkyans, though.”
“We can’t have you in our midst. You understand that, don’t you? I won’t guarantee your safety if you go poking around the Penchappies looking for caves.”
Pol pursed his lips. “I won’t guarantee the safety of your Demron Defenders if they poke their noses in my business. I am not one to be trifled with, even at my tender age.”
He looked Wissem in the eye until the priest looked away. It appeared that dinner was over. Pol retrieved books from his cell and left the extra robe in the nightstand. No one said anything when he left the Annex through the door to the alley.
He tweaked invisibility and waited until a few priests tumbled out the door, Venit among them.
“He’s already gone.”
“What were you planning to do?” Dorrok said. “He’s a powerful magician and you’re a Goon spy.”
“I am not.”
“Then why are you hanging around Wissem all the time?”
Venit pouted. “Can’t I be a friend with the Defender leader?”
Dorrok snorted. “I’d leave the kid alone. That’s what I say to you and what I’ve already said to Wissem. He should have just let the the Terilander be. Now he’s made an enemy.”
Pol was tempted to say that Wissem hadn’t, but he had heard enough and slipped away.
~
In The Prophet’s Wake stable yard, Pol changed his hair color and took on Nater Grainell’s face. He found a thin blanket and removed his orange robe and rolled it up in the blanket with his books.
He found Fadden sitting in the lobby, reading a local newssheet.
“Stay there. I’ve got to put this in my room.” Pol did as he said and returned.
Fadden chuckled. “They caught you, didn’t they?”
Pol shrugged. “The priests suspected me of being a treasure hunter when I first walked in the cathedral door asking to be an acolyte. I went through all the motions until the head of their version of the Hounds began sending me on errands. The force is nicknamed the Goons.” Pol smiled, “He masqueraded as a functionary.”
“So your mission failed.”
“Failed? No, I think we learned a lot. My mother told me the truth about the Terilanders. Shira filled in the rest. Wissem, the Goon leader, confirmed everything with his questions and responses to mine.”
“So where is the cave of treasure?”
“If there is one. I think it is a place where the last aliens died or where they first came to Phairoon.”
“Then you think they are gods?”
“Maybe to the people when they arrived, but no. I think they are a race very similar to humans, but not human. The face in that chamber is not quite like us.”
“This Wissem t
old you all that?”
“He didn’t deny it.”
“So what do we do?”
Pol thought for a moment. “Staying in Fassin won’t be productive, but going to the Penchappy mountains may be dangerous. From this point on, the tour becomes my personal quest. I can’t demand everyone to come with me to Teriland. Everyone must agree to come, or we’ll leave for Duchary in the morning.”
“You don’t really believe that. Everyone is with you. We’ve all come so far on your mission. If we quit now…” Fadden put his face closer to Pol. “Are you losing your courage?” Fadden patted the seat beside him.
“Not mine, but we won’t be running away from danger, we’ll be running towards it. I don’t want to be responsible for someone getting killed.”
Fadden laughed. “I thought the sixteen-year-old would eventually emerge. Just how would you take responsibility if Kell didn’t make it back to Eastril?”
Pol began to respond, but bit his lip. He didn’t know. “Apologize to his father?”
“Weak reply,” Fadden said. “This doesn’t fit my pattern of you. I know what you are really going to do.”
“What?” Pol already had Fadden’s advice bouncing around in his brain.
“You are going to tell them what we face, and you’ll ask them to come along. All of them will, including me, because you are our leader. It’s a polite way of saying we are riding into danger. But what else are you going to tell them?”
“I’m not going to tell them that it’s for me,” Pol said, already realizing that he was. “Alright, I don’t think I’ll need to convince them of anything.”
“Accept it. Leaders do that. The difference between a leader and a tyrant is that a leader has willing followers, and a tyrant doesn’t.”
Pol had had a similar discussion with Farthia Wissingbel a few years ago. “And a leader becomes a tyrant when he crosses the line from requesting to demanding.”
“Not quite. A leader can demand, but the people are willing to let the leader lead.”
“Ah. I do know the difference. Hazett is a leader and Namion is a tyrant.”
“Namion is rarely in the position to be a tyrant, but if you gave him a dukedom, that’s what he would become.”
Pol took a deep breath and sat, looking across the lobby while Fadden returned to finish his newssheet. He folded it in half and put it on the little table between the chairs. “Are you interested at all in what we learned while you had your adventure in the cathedral?”
“What?”
“A good part of Fassin’s revenue comes from people coming through to look for the treasure. It is a Gekelmaran industry. I bought three treasure maps today.”
“Three?”
Fadden nodded. “All different, of course. Paki can’t wait to start.”
“But that means the Penchappies are crawling with treasure hunters.”
“All the time,” Fadden said. “So we will have to take a different tack. You are still interested in traveling to Teriland?”
Pol nodded. “Then let’s start with that and see if we come up with something else along the way.”
“That’s a better attitude. As long as we stay on the main road to Teriland, we should be out of danger.”
“I have one bit of danger to face before we leave,” Pol said. “I’m going back into the cathedral one last time. There might be information on the treasure that just came in. It may all be a ruse, but I’m going to see if there is a meeting after their dinner tonight. It’s a long shot, but maybe we can find an edge.”
“Don’t get caught,’ Fadden said.
~
Pol slipped into the cathedral behind a small family. He had already tweaked invisibility, so no one noticed him as he made his way towards Dorrok’s station. No one guarded the stairs, but the twilight had darkened the priest’s area. Pol located a few monks in the basement, but the second floor offices were truly empty.
He padded up the stairs and slid behind the tapestry that had the spy hole in the conference room. There were eight dots in that room. Pol looked through the hole, but could only see the feet of the priests. He sat back and tweaked the sound so he could hear. It reminded him of eavesdropping on monks at Tesna. That now seemed like ages ago.
Most of the talk centered on offerings, souvenir sales, and staffing the churches throughout Fassin. They talked about deteriorating relations with the King of Gekelmar, whose castle shared the same city as the cathedral.
He picked up Wissem’s voice talking about intitiating a royal assassination as a man might relate an argument with his wife, slipping in anecdotes here and there. They all laughed. Even with their sense of humor, Pol concluded the leaders were as arrogant as the Tesnans.
Pol just monitored the rest of their discussion until the very end, when another monk brought up the new information that the Goons had extracted from a treasure hunter. The cave might have been located thirty-one miles south of the pass, close to the village of Pekkar. He had heard enough, but he stayed in place.
He located two dots coming down the stairs and two coming up. Could they have found him out? They had trapped him, but had they?”
Pol crammed himself to the end of the alcove and tweaked a very hard air shield in front of him, facing the tapestry. The dots converged on his listening post. The curtain was thrown aside and two of the guards didn’t hesitate to push their blades into the dark space.
Their tips grated against Pol’s shield. A guard thrust a magician’s light into the alcove. “He’s not here.”
“Probably never was. You can tell Wissem that he was wrong for once.”
The guards chuckled and left. Pol turned his attention back to the meeting. They had timed their assault in the middle of their discussion on the treasure cave, to ensure Pol would be listening to every detail, which he was.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and stayed where he was. The priests were engaged in small talk.
Someone had entered the conference room. “No one.”
“I was sure the boy would try something,” Wissem said. “If he somehow evaded both of you, he’ll be walking into our trap. The information wasn’t correct anyway.”
“It wasn’t?” one of the priests said.
“Of course not,” Wissem said, a bit testily. He must have been disappointed. Good, thought Pol. “A recently discovered rumor alludes to the cave lying on the Teriland side of the Penchappies.”
“That can’t be right. Our scriptures definitely state that Demron was discovered on our side.” One of the monks said.
“And where does it say he was discovered close to the treasure cave?” an older voice spoke.
“It…I see.”
Pol had heard enough. The priests had no idea where the cave really was. Going to Teriland to find his relatives and perhaps look for the cave remained the best and safest path. He had heard enough and slipped down the stairs, past two armed guards, and out the double doors behind other worshippers.
~~~
Teriland
Chapter Thirty-Two
~
Nothing untoward happened on their way to the Penchappy Mountains. It seemed that the treasure hunters’ money kept a number of inns in business. They were strung every few miles all the way to the mountains, so Pol’s group didn’t spend one night outside. The Goons, as Pol now thought of the Defenders of Demron, operated off the roadway according to the treasure hunters’ common room talk of run-ins with them. There were plenty of confrontations and fines being extracted from the treasure hunters, but few talked of killings. The thought of riding into danger was overblown in his mind, as long as they stayed on the road.
Pol looked down at his map and figured that the distance from Fassin to the Teriland border was nearly the same distance as from Missibes to Fassin, but the riding had been easy, and the trip seemed much shorter.
As he rode, he realized that for all of them, the trip from Fassin was more like the tour Pol had originally envisioned. Kell and Loa began to inc
lude Paki more in their village strolls, but Shira didn’t give Pol another Shinkyan nugget. When he informed her that he told Wissem about young Shinkyan magicians dying, she didn’t speak to him for half a day, but after a few pinches, she returned to her normal self.
Pol took that all in stride. As long as she kept pinching and kicking, he knew she cared for him, and Pol would enjoy it as long as he could. He’d miss her when she left him for her home, but that wasn’t for months yet.
The Penchappy Mountains finally appeared on the horizon.
“Getting anxious?” Fadden said.
“I don’t know what to be anxious about. We’re going to look for a man who left Teriland more than seventeen years ago. I don’t know his full name and have no idea what he looked like.”
“That’s no way for a Seeker to think,” Fadden asked.
Pol chuckled. “I know. I’ve been thinking about him. He likely lived closer to the mountains. If he purposefully traveled to Listya, he probably made it to Eastril the same way we’ll return, through the Duchary port of Ducharl. Otherwise, he would have headed south to Port Molla.”
“When do we start to look?”
“The first good-sized city is Sakima. If the map is correct, it sits in the foothills,” Pol said.
~
They spent their last night in Gekelmar. The Penchappies dipped low at the pass, making the entry into Teriland an easy one. By midday tomorrow, they would be riding the streets of Sakima.
“So the real Seeking begins tomorrow,” Shira said as they sat in their inn’s common room.
“I have to tell myself not to expect too much,” Pol said, more to brace himself for disappointment. He didn’t exactly expect failure, but he didn’t underestimate the nature of their task. He felt the darkness of a black mood at the edges of his emotions.
Paki came in soaking wet. “It’s a downpour, just like when we approached Fassin. How do you do it, Pol?”
“A hidden talent,” Shira said, punching Pol. “You are great at attracting bad weather and misfortune.”
