by B. V. Larson
As the initial pain faded, a deadening numbness replaced the agony. The new sensation was no less frightening.
He walked to the stairway and headed up the stone steps. He touched the next body he came upon. Morcant, who had fallen here with his shovel in his huge hands, was awakened.
Slet howled as he did this. Raising Morcant was as painful as awakening Puck. The effort cost him more of his mind and body and further emptied his soul. He felt this time as if he’d not snipped away his fingertips cleanly, but rather had burned one off with searing, white-hot flame.
Staggered and sweating, he turned. The Shining Lady was at the base of the stairs, gazing up at him.
“You’re doing well,” she said encouragingly. “Continue, my rogue. Awaken them all.”
“I cannot,” he said. “I will be lost.”
“That is of no consequence. You swore to me.”
“I swore to raise the Dead and to slay Morgana. I have raised the Dead, and I fully intend to slay Morgana.”
“You can’t overcome a witch wielding the White with two fresh Dead-things and a sword!”
“Nevertheless, I must do what I can.”’
“You must raise them all! Otherwise you are an oath-breaker!”
Slet shrugged. “You said yourself I was a rogue. As I see it, our deal is done.”
The ghost howled in fury behind him. She cursed him then, in a language unknown to him. But he knew it was a curse, for the tones and the reverberations that struck his heart and mind were unmistakable.
He paused for a moment, confused. His Dead-things stood motionless and ready at his side. Finally, Slet summoned the will to stir again. He looked around, but did not see the Shining Lady. He had no idea where she’d gone, but he was happy to know she’d left.
He forced himself to climb the last stairway. He staggered up the steps. As he approached the entrance, it seemed to him that the sky outside was overly bright.
Confused, he rushed forward stumbling up the last few stairs. Behind him Morcant and Puck shambled, both awkward and off-balance like men who’d slept for days and had only just awakened.
When Slet reached the surface, he knew the truth. He’d known it since he’d seen the bright light but hadn’t been willing to accept it.
The sun shined brightly over the cemetery outside. It was midmorning, he reckoned. The rainstorm of the night before had left the grass wet. A thousand droplets glittered like gemstones on the tip of every green blade. How many hours must it have been since he’d entered the Drake crypt? Ten, at least.
There on the hillside, about a dozen paces from the crypt’s mouth, was a blackened region where the grass had been curled and burnt. Smoke rose from the spot in wisps and curls. The cage was still closed and locked tight. Tiny black claws gripped the soot-stained bars, but the little troll’s hair was all burned away.
Slet understood the Shining Lady’s curse then. The time he’d spent inside the crypt had been warped and twisted, as often happened when visiting with the Faerie.
He fell to his knees and raved. His son had been burned to death. For a second time in its very short life, the troll infant had been murdered. Morgana was nowhere in sight, probably having given up in disgust and left long ago.
In his intense grief, Slet dropped the Scepter. He slumped down upon the grasses and sprawled out. The shock of wielding a Jewel without attunement, followed by the shock of sudden removal, had stunned his mind. Consciousness left him.
* * *
When he awakened again, Slet groaned aloud. At first, he believed he’d fallen drunk and lived a nightmare of lost time and bad dreams. But then, he opened squinting eyes and looked around the hillside.
The two Dead-things were still there. The larger one, Morcant, stood where he’d been left at Slet’s side. He’d not moved a foot since his master had fallen. Without orders, he’d done nothing. The other, smaller dead-thing was much farther away.
Slet noticed the silver cage then. It was open and empty. He struggled to his feet. He did not know what to make of it. He saw the Scepter on the grasses before him, but he shied from touching it.
He crouched and gazed into the cage that had once held his son. He could not see anything there—no slag of ashes and burnt flesh. Where was his son? At least, his child’s body should not be desecrated. This thought moved him to speak. He addressed the Dead-thing that had in life been known as Puck, an elven prince.
“Creature!” he called. “Did you do something with the troll in the cage?”
Puck turned his head to look at him. The sockets were empty, but they still seemed to gaze at him. Seeing this caused a thrill of dread to run through Slet. He wanted to run, but he dared to step forward.
“I made you, you will therefore obey me,” Slet said.
The dead elf lifted a single finger bone to his throat. The flesh crawled there, and the mouth opened, but no sound issued.
“You can’t speak? There is no flesh in your throat to allow it?”
Puck nodded.
“And yet you hear me. You have senses, but no speech. How can you answer my question?”
Puck extended a finger slowly toward the Scepter, which lay in the grass.
Slet looked at it. The grasses all around the spot where it had fallen were curled now, as if blackened with blight. In a similar fashion, Slet’s lips curled from his teeth in disgust.
“I don’t want to touch that rod. It is an evil thing.”
Puck pointed wordlessly to his throat, then to the Scepter again.
Slet took in a deep breath through his teeth. Again, he was bargaining for everything with his soul and everyone he met seemed to want to harm his son.
“Very well, Dead-thing,” he said at last. “I’ll wield the Black again. But after I have your story from you, I’m going to use it to unmake you. I can only hope it pains you the way it has me.”
Slet bent and picked up the Black.
A shock went through him. It was a deathly chill, followed by a wave of numbness. He didn’t feel right when he held this thing. It was as if he was only partly Slet of the Silure clan. The rest of him was a wicked thing that stalked the land and consumed life to feed death wherever he stepped, like a winter’s storm or a fire in a dry forest.
Slet lifted the Scepter to the elf’s throat and touched it there. A shock went through his body, but it was less than what he’d felt when raising the Dead. It was not pleasant, but neither was it agony.
The change in Puck was more shocking to him than the pains he’d suffered to apply magic to the dead elf. Where flesh had withered away almost to dust on Puck’s body it came back to some degree. It grew and covered the neck and face as Slet watched. Puck reached up with his white fingers and dared to encircle the Jewel at the tip of the Scepter with his web-work of bones. There too, flesh grew.
This new flesh wasn’t hale, pink and wholesome, however. It was gray, bloodless and dead. Still, it was flesh, and it did give him a much more natural appearance.
“Ssssss,” said Puck, wordlessly.
The Dead-thing staggered closer to the Scepter, like a frozen man warming himself over an open flame.
“That’s enough!” said Slet, withdrawing the Black.
Puck stumbled, then righted himself.
“Can you speak now?” Slet asked, disgusted.
“Yessss.”
“Then tell me where my son is. Where is the troll that was in that tiny cage?”
“I released it and put it in the grave—there.”
Slet whirled, following the newly-fleshed finger. He saw the small black wound in the earth which he himself had so recently dug. It was his son’s original grave.
At first, he was horrified. But then, he thought that perhaps this was for the best. What else could he have done for the boy? He’d needed to be buried again, and where was a better spot? Here the clan had once grieved for the lost, twisted infant.
But Slet was filled with sorrow nonetheless. Although he told himself not to do
it, he walked to the grave and stared down into the dark hole.
With the sun up and bright at his back, he couldn’t see anything in the hole which was as dark as night. He knelt and peered inside, squinting.
He didn’t see a tiny corpse. He didn’t see anything at all other than mud and a puddle of rainwater at the bottom of the hole.
He turned to accuse Puck of playing him falsely, and was startled to see the other now stood at his side.
“Where is he?” Slet demanded. “I don’t see him. He should be in a proper casket.”
“Trolls can be tricksy when they don’t want to be seen,” Puck said. He pointed off to one side of the grave. Slet stared, and then he sucked in his breath.
There were eyes staring back at him. They were as yellow and wicked as a hunting tomcat’s orbs, and as he watched the pupils narrowed into vertical lines of darkness. A low warning growl emanated from the hole, and Slet shrank back in horror. He’d seen white teeth—thin wicked fangs.
“How is this possible?” he asked Puck.
“Burning is not enough for a strong troll. You should be proud, as your son is a resilient one.”
Slet gazed down again in fascination. “He’s alive then? Why did you put him down there?”
“He was not regenerating in sunlight. So I put him down there, where he has moisture and darkness. Now his flesh has returned like the leaves on a spring forest, but he’s wary.”
“Naturally so,” said Slet, his mind easing. His son was alive! He could not believe it. His eyes glistened with tears.
He turned to Puck then, and nodded to him. “Thank you,” he said.
“No thanks are needed, Master,” whispered the dead elf.
Chapter Six
The Warrior
That very day, while Slet eyed his son hiding in his grave, Trev made his way down into the depths of the Earthlight. The guards at the entrance barely gave him a grunt and a thumbed directive to pass. They were on the lookout for more dangerous things than half-elves. With their red cloaks flapping in the constant flow of air through the gates, they squinted out at the mountainside, watchful for trouble.
The interior of Snowdon was an unusual place. It was unlike anything Trev had seen before. Although he’d heard and read about it, nothing prepared him for the magnificence that was the Earthlight. Much of the interior of the mountain was hollowed out, but although the mountain served as a rocky shell, the shell was by no means a thin one. The solid stone walls were at least two hundred paces thick at the thinnest spots. The entire cavern, if such a large enclosed space could even be called a cavern, was lit by a deep orange-red glow. This was the source of heat that came up into their faces and blew back their hair as they entered the gates.
The structures here were carved from living stone and they dwarfed anything Trev had encountered in the Haven. The buildings of men were inconsequential and insubstantial in comparison.
From the Great Gates a winding path led downward, interrupted along the way by several strongholds. These were castles or towers, carved from the rock of the mountain itself. The Kindred rarely built structures. They preferred to sculpt them with their picks out of the living stone of the mountain. These towers and castles, all seven of them, were placed mostly along the path down to the floor of the great cavern.
There, at the distant bottom, Trev could see a far larger structure had been carved from the very heart of the mountain. It was the eighth and final defensive structure, and he knew it must be the Citadel of the Earthlight. The sculpted citadel served the Kindred as their capital.
The Kindred gave him a passing glance as he marched ever deeper. They weren’t a terribly curious folk under the best of circumstances, and in these years under the rule of Queen Gudrin, they were accustomed to strange folk on their stone streets in any case.
Trev passed unchallenged to the lowest floor. There, on the distant western side of the Great Cavern was the namesake of the underworld: the Earthlight itself. He could see the Great Vents, all three of which stood wide. From these, all the light and heat of the place came, as they opened upon the furnace that existed many thousands of feet below. Magma chambers belched fire, but for the most part the light and heat was even and steady. Trev was awed by the sight.
He reached the Citadel in the center of the cavern after walking for an hour or so. There, he made himself known to a guardsman, who looked him up and down sourly. Finally, the Warrior disappeared into the Citadel to see if anyone might possibly care about the young, rather roguish-looking Trev.
Trev waited easily, leaning against the black basalt wall. It did indeed seem to him that the Citadel had been carved from a single block of softer stone. Just leaning against it left a fine powder of dust on his clothing. He was busy brushing it away when the guard hurried back.
“Trev of the Haven?”
“That’s right,” Trev said mildly.
“This way. You’re wanted immediately.”
Trev followed the huffing Warrior into the dim interior. After winding along low-ceilinged passages, he at last was led to a central chamber.
It was quiet here and the only light came from a window in the west. The light emitted was reddish-orange, the color of coals in a dying fire.
“Trev?” asked a querulous female voice.
Trev turned in surprise. There, in the darkest corner of the room sat a wizened figure. He cocked his head and smiled.
“Queen Gudrin? Please excuse my poor grace.”
He promptly fell to one knee and lowered his head.
“Bah!” said Gudrin, stirring and walking toward him. She lightly batted him on the shoulder. “None of that, then. Stand up, boy. Did your mother teach you to behave that way when around people with titles?”
“No madam,” he said. “It was my father.”
She nodded her old head. Trev could not help but notice she was nearly bald and covered with red and white scarring. He’d heard it was the work of the Orange. The Jewel Pyros loved heat more than those who wielded it. Attunement with that Jewel was reputed to be among the most difficult.
Pyros. It sat there on her chest, glimmering. He could feel the heat of it—emanating seemingly from Gudrin herself. It wasn’t a sweaty, dank thing. Rather, the heat was dry—like that coming from a stone that has been left overnight in a fire pit.
“Trev,” she said, gazing at him. “It’s good to see you again. The last time we met it was a sad day. Tell me this one will be different.”
Trev frowned, gazing into her piercing eyes. They were sharp enough despite her odd, melancholy mood. He knew she was talking about the mass funerals, when they’d laid his very own father to rest in the Haven among many other victims of the Storm of the Dead.
“I don’t know if it is,” he said. He told her then of his interest in the Dark Jewels, and of his visits by Brand, Old Hob and the simulacrum assassin. He left out any mention of the sorceress who’d set him on this quest, as she seemed to be upsetting everyone he met.
Gudrin eyed him critically before speaking. Trev could not help but squirm under her gaze. It reminded him of his mother when she was at her most suspicious and when he had been small. He hoped she wouldn’t ask him how he’d come to be on such a strange mission—and she didn’t.
“All right,” she said. “You want to know of the Dark Jewels. I can see why Brand suggested you come to me. But the truth is I don’t know much about where they lie today. I do believe they exist still, as it is an accepted fact that the Jewels can’t be destroyed in their errant states.”
“Their errant state? What does that mean?”
“That is what we call it when they are apart, boy. Remember, they were once part of a whole. At that point, they were shattered into the Nine. Logically, if that shattering was possible, the Jewels can be altered in form, for at that moment it was managed, was it not?”
“I suppose. But I thought they were the eyes of nine dragons.”
Gudrin shrugged and left him. She walked slowly to the si
ngle window and gazed out at the Earthlight.
“I don’t know about that. Sometimes, people who pass down a tale make things into animals when they aren’t really alive. Or into people. That way, the concept is more understandable to later, simpler folk.”
Trev frowned and followed her to the window. “So, you mean there weren’t really any dragons?”
“Ha!” she boomed. “Far from it! I’ve seen dragons more than once with these old eyes. The last time was barely a decade ago, right here in this cavern. You know about that, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“My point is not that there are no dragons, but that I don’t think the Jewels were ever shaped to look like dragons, or took on dragon form, or whatever.”
Trev nodded, wondering how to steer the conversation back to the location of the Dark Jewels.
“Anyway,” Gudrin said, seeming to sense his mood, “all that matters little now. I just wanted to point out why I think the Jewels are still around—somewhere. And one of the Dark Jewels is in a definite location, am I correct?”
“The Black, yes. It still sits in the Drake Crypt.”
“Damn fool place for it,” complained Gudrin. “But when Brand asked me where it would be better stationed, I have to admit, I was at a loss. He asked me to take it back via caravan to the Earthlight you know. He thought that perhaps I could toss it into the magma and be done with it for a thousand years.”
“What did you say?”
“I politely refused. I have enough on my mind with the weight of the Orange around my neck. This living chunk of flame is heavier than a cart full of gold, did you know that? The last thing I need is to worry about guarding the Black.”
Trev nodded, but he didn’t speak. He recalled hearing Brand was upset about that decision. Many in the Haven wished the cursed object had been taken away. But Trev could see the point of view of others. No one wanted it near. It might cause a fresh Storm of the Dead wherever it was placed. Eventually, he supposed, it would.
Gudrin spoke then, and it was as if she’d heard Trev’s own thoughts. “Like dead volcanoes or calm seas,” she said, “eventually all the Jewels awaken strange passions in the hearts of creatures both weak and strong and cause them to do great harm. No, best that the Black stay where it fell for as long as we can keep it there.”
