“Of course I do. And I will, if he doesn’t go away.” She checked the hilt of her sword instinctively. Only she, Tig, Adom and Paya carried weapons, and they were the swords of Jackals slain by the strange man who saved them.
Elaya felt the muscles of her horse tighten, so she pulled the reins and lifted herself off the saddle. Much relieved, the black stallion swished its tail and shat.
“Not a bad place to take a breather,” Adom said, nodding his chin at a tree with a bounty of walnuts in its boughs.
Elaya scrutinized the area. She figured they were fifty miles out of Haeglin by now. She’d preferred woodlands to cover their tracks, but the Pyres—the land which stretched from Haeglin to Horn Lake some hundred odd miles westward—wasn’t terrain that afforded shelter and concealment. Legions of thin golden stalks clustered together to form what looked like pillars of fire under a summer sun, separated by long swaths of rich soil in which, curiously, nothing thrived. Occasionally a wayward tree would pop up, as if it’d been banished from a forest for bad behavior.
It’d be another two days before they would escape the Pyres. “Good a spot as any,” Elaya said. She wheeled her horse around and told the Eyes they’d be making camp. As the mercenaries clambered down from their saddles, she searched the darkness behind them with the corners of her eyes—you stare at blackness head on and your mind plays tricks on you. It obfuscates subtle movements and amalgamates shadows.
There you are. I see you.
“Don’t tell the old man about what happened here,” Laythe had cautioned before breaking Lavery’s chains. “Some sorcerers have powers of persuasion. They make men, like these guards here, go against their better judgment. Use of them is frowned upon, but trust I do not indulge in such powers lightly.”
That was probably the linchpin for Lavery’s distrust. If Laythe had those powers, what stopped him from using them on Lavery and Baern? Maybe a couple weeks ago, Lavery would have believed that a good conscience was reason enough, but life had jaded him since then, and he had learned that some people—maybe all people—would do bad things to get what they want.
And what, exactly, did Laythe want? He hadn’t been clear about why he’d been sent to free Lavery. All he’d said was that they would go to the island, and there they’d be safe. Of course, getting there would be quite impossible if lightning were to strike them down this very instant, which seemed more than plausible.
“I’ve never seen a storm like this,” Lavery said.
Neither Baern nor Laythe made a comment.
As the three walked up the sloping lawn of the manor, rain began pelting them in the face. The wind roared and the sky bellowed, thunder seemingly inches above their heads.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Lavery said. No one seemed to hear him. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t care.
A stone windmill centering the manor spun furiously, its blades a blur. A bucket skipped across the cobble streets, slamming into a fence.
“Why,” Lavery asked, shielding his face from whirling leaves and stinging rain, “are there chickens in that wagon? And look, here’s a crateful of apples.”
“Look out!” Baern cried, hitting the ground. A strong gust blew through, bringing with it metal scraps from a smithy’s furnace. They scraped along the cobbles, chewing into dirt and clattering off wagons. He got to his knees as the wind slowed. “Best find some shelter till this passes. The barn will—”
Another gust, this one ripping the barn door right off its hinges and sending it halfway down the sloped lawn. It splintered and broke off into hundreds of tiny pieces.
“Will not do,” Baern said, completing his thought.
“Look,” Lavery said, “there’s a cave.”
Laythe had apparently already seen it, as he was striding toward it determinedly. Inside, Lavery and Baern found him crouched, examining something shiny on the floor.
“Penknife,” Laythe said. “Not dusty. Not dirty. It was dropped recently.”
“Maybe someone’s in here,” Lavery said.
“Or,” Laythe said, standing, “someone left.” He faced Baern. “In a hurry.” He nodded into the deepening mouth of the cave. “It goes down quite far, if the pebble I threw is to be believed.”
Lavery went unnoticed as he slipped by Baern and around Laythe. This cave reminded him of the Valiosian tombs. The air was dank and warm, and a serene stillness loitered like a summer haze. He imagined himself breaking free from Maren O’Keefe’s sight, running madly into the mausoleum and burrowing into the hole, jumping down into the blackness of the tombs.
He pictured cobwebs breaking against his face and the sound of chittering mice fleeing to the edges of the rooms. He could hear the voices of his friends, reassuring him that he would be a good king, telling him that time unravels and hammers out all the kinks of life, that worrying is a senseless use of energy and frustration a useless emotion.
He was faintly aware of other voices too, more immediate ones—Baern calling out for him, the sky bellowing as an uninterrupted roll of thunder drummed against the walls and ceiling. He didn’t care about them. Something pushed him deeper into the cave, an almost innate, primal need to explore. To discover. To, perhaps, uncover.
Lavery kept his hands in front of him as he walked blindly into the darkness. He had learned to do this after once miscalculating his route in the tombs and greeting a pillar of rock with his nose. This is also the story of how his nose became and remained slightly crooked.
“Lavery!” Baern called. He was far away, but coming closer. “Bloody hells, boy, now’s not the time to rebel.”
Maybe Lavery would have answered him had his only thoughts not been wow, oh wow, and oh my goodness. He’d seen icy streaks, thin as blood vessels, climb up the walls in certain places as he’d descended, but he hadn’t given them much thought. Caves, he knew, had lots of intricate, mysterious designs, often the result of frozen water. The floor at his feet, though, was unlike anything he’d ever seen and like nothing he’d ever expected to see.
It’s glass, he thought. Black glass with brilliant blue veins beneath, spidering in all directions, like ice that’d been shattered and frozen in a stasis. Fire seemed to dance on the surface too. Lavery realized after far too long that the fire was actually the reflection of twin torches a few feet in front of him. They sat before a sheet of chain hanging from the ceiling.
He approached the chain, pushed it aside and went through, only to find another blocking his path.
“Have you gone deaf?” Baern hollered. He was bent over, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees. “You don’t just go runnin’ off into only the gods know where. Caves have cliffs. Drop-offs! One wrong step and”—he smacked his hands together—“you go splat.”
“Sorry,” Lavery said sheepishly. “I was just… I don’t know. Really curious, I guess. It reminded me of the tombs.”
“Interesting pattern,” Laythe remarked, arriving at the core of the cave nonchalantly. He scooted the toe of his shoe across the glass, then shrugged. “Torches still lit. Yes, I’d say someone left in a hurry.”
Baern fingered the chain sheet. “Double doors. Hmm. Only you’d reason you’d have those is to—”
“Keep something in,” Laythe said. He shouldered past the first door and then the second. Lavery followed at his heels, eager to see what else awaited them.
Lavery’s head slowly arced from one shoulder to the other as he took in the room that lay before him. Smoke wisped throughout, the burnout of candles both hanging from the ceiling and affixed to the walls as sconces. Many were still lit and they burnished the room in a fiery glow that licked high up stalagmites and climbed to the tips of stalactites.
He wrinkled his nose as he sniffed a pungent odor. “Yuck. It smells like—” He shook his head and gagged.
“Like rotten meat,” Laythe suggested, holding the severed foot of a chicken.
Lavery pulled his shirt up over his nose. “That and a chamber pot that’s never been
emptied. Oh. I think I know why.”
Against a wall, behind a stout stalagmite, lay a brown, soppy pile.
“Now that,” Baern said, “is a mountain of dung. Lavery, stay close.”
Lavery mumbled that he would, he just wanted to look around. There were empty tables and overturned pails, strange symbols carved into flat chunks of slate, a vast perch made of driftwood, and… what was that he kicked? It spun across the floor, into an unlit corner.
He chased it, despite Baern calling his name as he vanished into the darkness. On his hands and knees he searched.
“There you are,” he said. He held his prize tight to his chest and emerged into the light.
“Would you please stop vanishing like that?” Baern said. “What do you have?”
“I’m not sure.” It was blue and smooth and quite hard; that was all he knew.
By the time Lavery managed to peel his eyes away from his discovery, Laythe and Baern were standing overtop him. Baern looked disturbed, Laythe delighted in a morbid sort of way, like a savant viewing his patient’s guts hanging outside his body.
“Dragon scale,” Laythe said.
Lavery traded glances between Laythe and his hands. “I’m sorry. What?”
“They fall off whelps.” Noticing the blankness in Lavery’s eyes, he added, “Juvenile dragons.”
Lavery massaged the scale, dumbfounded. “This must be ancient, then. Five or six hundred years old, right?”
“Er,” Baern fumbled, scratching his ear.
“Maybe even a thousand years,” Lavery considered.
“A day at most,” Laythe said. He placed his hand on it, attempted to gently scoot it out of Lavery’s clutch.
Lavery tightened his grip. “That’s impossible. Dragons don’t exist anymore.”
“If you’re a farmer and your only cow scurries away and you never again see a cow in your life, do cows no longer exist?”
It was around this time that Laythe seemed to loom larger, and the gray steel in his eyes sharpened like a newly whetted dagger.
Lavery wrenched the scale away and stumbled backwards.
“Forgive me,” Laythe said, raising his hands. “The stress of my travels, of freeing you—it’s clearly influencing me for the worse. I do not know what this place is, but someone lived here. Many people lived here. And now they’re gone. Didn’t even bother smothering the fires or taking their chickens. It makes you wonder what scared them so, doesn’t it?”
If the mind was a wheel—which hamsters who have visited graveyards have determined it is not—Lavery’s would have been spinning out of control. He traced invisible designs on the scale with the tip of his finger as a far-out stare seized him.
Another candle expired, and the room got just a little darker.
Just a little colder.
“If there’s a dragon, then the vision I had…” His mouth opened and shut, and he folded his lips in.
“A Wraith Walker’s visions are not pure, flawless precursors to the future,” Baern said.
“Stop,” Laythe snapped. “The time for coddling him has passed. It passed a long time ago.”
Baern crossed his arms and jerked his head dramatically. “You think this is coddling? He hasn’t been a Wraith Walker for—well, he hasn’t known he’s been a Wraith Walker for more than a couple weeks. If he goes around believin’ every vision he has is a clairvoyant look into the future, well, let me tell you, that’s trouble to be had there.”
“Um,” Lavery said, his head inclining.
“Allow me,” Laythe began, “to remind you that he saw a dragon. That is a dragon scale.” He parted his hands in an add-them-up-and-what-do-you-get kind of way.
“He saw a dragon ending the world. So maybe the dragon part’s true. Maybe the winged bastards are coming back.” He paused, thought about the scale that Horace Dewn had given him those many weeks ago. He had a plan and he had put it into motion, but perhaps he hadn’t moved fast enough.
“The world,” Baern continued, “survived dragons once, and by the gods or without their blessing, we will survive again.”
Dirt fell into Lavery’s face. “Do you hear that?”
They didn’t hear Lavery speak, much less the subtle thump somewhere high above.
Laythe steepled his fingers. “We did survive. But do you recall how, Baern? The Keeper would be remiss to forgo the truth as the books and tales of yesteryear have.”
That remark slapped a pained look on Baern’s acorn face, as if it’d gutted him.
Lavery half-listened to the conversation. Under normal circumstances, he might have chimed in with a probing question about Laythe’s enigmatic riddles. But when you’re in a cave and it sounds like something is pounding on the roof of that cave and lance-like stalactites above you quaver, there’s more meaningful discussions to be had. Such as, what the hell is that noise?
Baern and Laythe heard it too, finally. Or maybe they felt it.
Lavery backed away from the pinpoint of a loosely hanging stalactite. “What is that?”
“Nothing reassuring,” Laythe said.
“Sounds like scraping,” Lavery suggested.
Uneasy, Baern stroked his beard. “Oh, good mama’s cooking.…”
Lavery looked at him queerly. “What?”
“It’s a saying.”
“I’ve never heard that saying.”
“You’re eleven. Kids now, they’ve got all sorts of new sayings. None of ’em as good as in my time, mind you.” The ceiling rumbled. “I think, in the name of life and the pursuit of living, we should move. Quickly. Skedaddle. Now.”
Baern’s recommendation had already been taken up by Laythe, who was between the two chain doors and in the process of pushing through the second. The old man and Lavery jogged to catch up.
“Maybe it’s a cave-in,” Lavery said.
“No,” Laythe said, resolute and cocksure.
“It could happen. I’ve seen cave-ins before. Well, not with my own eyes. I’ve seen drawings and heard stories.”
“Stories contain as much truth as the author is willing to part with. You’d be wise to not put your faith in them. But, yes, cave-ins happen. This is not a cave-in.”
Lavery shook his leg in attempt to chase away a shooting pain in his calf. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because cave-ins are not preceded by the click-clack of nails. Or, in our unfortunate case, talons. Hear that? Storm’s passed.”
Lavery listened. “You’re right. Or maybe we can’t hear it yet.”
“I see the light,” Baern said. “And unless my ancient eyes betray me, that’s a sunny sort o’ light.”
Lavery took four more steps toward that light before he went stiff. There was a noise unlike any he’d heard before. The unfamiliarity wasn’t in the pitch or the rhythm, or the stress or pattern, but rather the localization. It seemed to originate and terminate within his skull. It consisted of three words.
She’s not here.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. “We all heard it,” Baern whispered.
Laythe pressed himself against a wall, sliding along it toward the cavern mouth. He crouched suddenly, as if an arrow was flying at his head.
Lavery heard the voice again. She cannot be far. One does not uproot a village while settling a new one across the world in a fortnight. We will search for her.
No. I did not endure the past six years of excruciating and painful sleuthing to give away our position now. Our spies will inform us.
If you had the authority to make that decision, then—
I damn well have a voice in it. And… Drol, what are you doing?
An emphatic snort startled Lavery so badly he fell back onto his butt. Laythe came running his way.
“We’ve a problem,” the bony man said.
I smell something.
He nodded over his shoulder. “That’s the problem. Dragons from both Evanescence and Crimson Clutches. Might be more, but that’s all I see.”
The word move echo
ed inside Lavery’s head, then he heard another snort.
He’s not wrong. There’s something living in there, but not an entire village.
Livestock.
Have Drol scorch it, lest a farmhand hears us and brings word to the Gravendeers.
What if it’s Oriana in there? And our whelps….
Take a sniff, you wench, and tell me if you smell our whelps. You think I wouldn’t recognize the scent of our own? Oriana’s not in there. Yovet is right; scorch it, Drol.
“Keeper,” Laythe said, flippantly, “now would be the time to show the young Wraith Walker what you’re capable of.”
Baern closed his eyes and put a fist to his heart. “May Louravil bless me once more and may Courel seize the sick and old, leave the hearty and young be as they are.”
Laythe grabbed Baern by the wrist. “Prayers on another day, what do you say?”
Baern pursed his lips. “You don’t understand the costs.”
“I do.”
“Mm. Maybe. But you don’t care.”
“I don’t. I care about continuing my existence here, on this world, in the flesh. That won’t happen when we’re turned to ash in about six seconds.”
Baern flexed his fists. No matter which fragment of the restorative realm one taps into—and Baern tapped into them all, from the gift of rebirth to salvation—the heavy consequence of death follows. It’s the way of sorcery: there is always a reaction to every action.
Cheating Death, as Baern prepared to do, meant someone—or in this case, three someones—somewhere would perish. And the fault was his. Maybe they’d be children or babes. Maybe they’d be old and decrepit murderers. One doesn’t get to pick and choose; one must simply accept the outcome.
And Baern accepted it. There was no other way. “Gather up,” he said. “Closely, now. We walk together, understand?” He huffed. “Right.”
A warmth overcame Lavery. And while the cavern walls were still black and the air wet, he sensed a brightness filtering in. These feelings weren’t only skin deep; they tunneled into his very core, burning away all his fears and worries. He felt that everything would be okay, that the universe itself watched over him.
The Dragon Thief (Sorcery and Sin Book 1) Page 23
