Tabisha rolled her eyes. “Thieves don’t need to know about plants.”
“No? Where do you imagine your most common poisons come from? It’s far easier to drain sap from a dominion vine than it is to milk venom from an adder.” He rode a short distance in silence before adding, “You also have to stop thinking of yourself as just a thief. There are so many things you need to know. You’re a member of the Order of Vigilance now.”
“Why Kri, that almost sounded like concern for me.”
He glared at her. “It would shame the Order if I left them a half-trained apprentice.”
Tabisha laughed, a sound like gold coins clinking together. “Then let your wisdom fall upon me as a dotard’s spittle, O my master!”
Kri screwed up his face and turned around in his saddle. “Check the map,” he said sourly. Tabisha was still laughing as she pulled out a scroll. The laughter faded as she checked it and looked around for landmarks that time and searing magic could not obliterate.
“We should be close to the village,” she said.
“Look for foundation stones,” said Kri. “Rectangular formations will show where houses once stood. We’ll use those to orient ourselves.”
They found the first stones quickly—and after that, the patterns of vanished streets even more quickly. Kri couldn’t help wondering if Tabisha was right. Perhaps the Order’s record of their actions in the valley was somewhat exaggerated. Maybe the destruction of the village hadn’t been quite so complete as the histories suggested. He struggled to keep excitement from his face, but his heart beat a little faster at the possibility. By Ioun’s Book of Insight, he prayed silently, let it be so!
Before the bright glow of the sun had travelled more than three finger widths across the canopy of leaves, they stood before the broken stump of the tower from which Tavit Nance had unleashed the Voidharrow and the Abyssal Plague upon the village.
Kri ran his tongue around a mouth gone dry with anticipation. “We name him traitor,” he said quietly, “but so much we know only because of him. Before the Order destroyed the village, they made certain to loot Tavit’s home and workshop of all they contained.”
Then he turned and put his back to the broken tower. “Which one is the temple of Pelor?”
Tabisha consulted the map, a remnant of the Order’s battle against the plague drawn with an archivist’s attention to detail. She turned and pointed to a ruin that rose a sword’s length higher than those around it. She looked a little shaken. “The Order razed Pelor’s temple?”
“It had been desecrated by then,” said Kri, “and the gods were as silent on the actions of the Order of Vigilance that day as they are on the subject of the Voidharrow.” He crossed what had been the village square and mounted the crumbling stone steps of the temple. It had probably been the only building in the village constructed entirely of stone.
Exactly as he had suspected.
“The tower was Tavit’s base,” he said, “but when the Order brought him down as a plague demon, he was in the temple. The more pious members of the Order at the time suggested he was seeking the forgiveness of the gods for what he had done. The more cynical thought it a final act of sacrilege. I remain amazed that it took four generations of the Order for someone practical to wonder if he were actually just hiding something.” He glanced at Tabisha and found her smiling again. “Most temples like this have crypts beneath them. Look for an entrance.”
They found it quickly: a trapdoor tiled in the same stone as the rest of the temple floor and covered by weathered debris that was swiftly cleared away. If Kri didn’t know better, he’d almost have suspected Ioun was guiding them.
Tabisha produced torches and lit them but hesitated. “What if there’s a plague demon down there?”
“Unlikely. A demon would have tried to escape before now.”
“Then what about the plague?”
He touched the symbol of Ioun around his neck and murmured a prayer. White light shimmered around the symbol, spreading to envelop him and then Tabisha before fading. “The light of the gods will protect us.” Kri reached down and pulled open the door. Stale, cold air trapped for a hundred years puffed up to meet them. Kri took a torch and led the way down short, very steep stairs.
The crypt had been constructed as a series of small chambers connected by archways. There were only four or five crypt chambers, hardly the labyrinth that existed beneath older, larger temples, but it was enough. Small caskets, large caskets, niches filled with bones—there were many places where something could have been hidden. Nor had the crypt entirely escaped the violence of the battle that had raged above. The keystone of one arch, along with the stones to either side of it, was deeply cracked. The stone ceiling of the chamber beyond sagged dangerously.
“What should we look for?” asked Tabisha quietly.
“I don’t know,” Kri said. “Something hidden in haste. Be careful—leave that sagging chamber for last. May Ioun’s eye guide us.”
“Or Avandra’s luck.”
They separated, each picking a bone-filled chamber to investigate. Kri poked cautiously through the old remains. He tried to work methodically, to embrace the patience that Ioun taught. Knowledge didn’t come swiftly. The bones were like pages, Kri told himself, each niche a book that would yield its secrets only with careful study.
It didn’t work. After six niches, the books of bones had become slow reading. He could hear Tabisha in another chamber, cursing in frustration as she searched. Maybe those earlier members of the Order had been right. Maybe Tavit Nance had entered the temple just to seek salvation or commit sacrilege. Maybe it had just been a convenient place to make his last stand. What could he have been hiding anyway? Kri had made the long journey, dragging Tabisha along, in hopes of finding some undiscovered insight into the Voidharrow. Something—anything—that might give him more answers about the mysterious liquid crystal substance. But maybe there was nothing more to find.
His jaw tightened. No. He would not give up looking, just because of a moment of doubt. He needed answers and a moment of frustration was not going to stop him. He would empty the crypt before admitting defeat.
But maybe that wasn’t necessary. The histories of the Order said that when he was defeated, the Abyssal Plague had turned Tavit Nance into a demon, but that he had retained a vicious cunning. Kri sat back and tried to put himself in Nance’s place. He had something to hide from the Order—most likely notes, papers, or a book. The crypt would provide a hiding place that was strong and might survive anything the Order did to the village above. But paper or parchment couldn’t be left out in the open in a crypt. It had to be protected from the damp and vermin. It would have to be inside some kind of wrapping or case, but among the bones, a wrapped bundle or a case would stand out.
So why not put it in one of the cases already present in the crypt?
Kri grabbed the nearest casket and wrenched it open. A yellowed skull surrounded by neatly stacked bones grinned up at him. He threw the casket aside, knocking over a pile of bones and sending them rattling to the ground. “Kri?” called Tabisha.
“It’s nothing,” he shouted back to her. “I’m fine.” He whirled around. There were fewer caskets than there were loose bones, but it would still take time to search them all. A lust for discovery was in him. Whatever Tavit Nance had hidden in the crypt, he needed to find it now. He opened another casket. More bones, economically packed to the casket’s top. There wouldn’t have been room to hide anything inside.
Kri felt a flush of triumph. He had the solution to the puzzle. “Tabisha!” he said. “Look for a casket with its bones dumped out beside it. If Nance was in a hurry, he wouldn’t have looked for an empty casket—he would have made room by emptying one.”
He went to work without waiting for her reply. The chamber he was in had no telltale heaps of bones. The caskets were all orderly, undisturbed except for the two he had opened. Kri hurried to the next chamber. Again, all was in order. He bit his tongue. He couldn
’t be wrong about this. It made too much sense.
“Kri,” said Tabisha, “I think I’ve found something.”
She stood in front of the arch with the broken keystone, outside of the chamber with the sagging ceiling. Her torch, thrust at arm’s length through the dangerous arch, shed just enough light to glimmer on a small casket of white stone against the far wall and the heap of yellow bones in front of it. Kri’s mouth went dry. He would have plunged through the arch, but Tabisha caught his arm and held him back.
“Let me,” she said.
For a moment, blinding rage filled Kri. This was his discovery. He should be the one to open the casket. He pushed the anger back. “You think it’s trapped?” he asked.
“Not deliberately.” She nodded at the ceiling. “But I don’t like the look of that. A lumbering priest isn’t going to get in and out. A light-footed thief can.” Her glance dared him to challenge her.
Kri studied the ceiling and the arch, trying to recall all he knew of the principles of masonry, then nodded at last. Tabisha handed him her torch. “Hold both of them high.”
Under the double illumination, she slipped through the arch and into the chamber. Her eyes, Kri noticed, weren’t on the ceiling, but the ground. At first he thought she was just trying to avoid scattered bones, but then he saw that the stones paving the floor were uneven. Whatever forces had cracked the arch and weakened the ceiling had heaved them up as well. A misplaced foot on a tilted stone could send Tabisha staggering. The impact of her body, however slight, could jar the precarious balance of the ceiling.
But Tabisha reached the far side of the chamber without stumbling. Using her foot, she delicately swept some of the tumbled bones so she could stand directly before the casket. She bent and examined it. “There are claw marks on the stone,” she said, her voice pitched low.
“Nance’s demon claws.” Kri’s heart soared. “Bring out the entire casket.”
Tabisha looked over her shoulder at him. “It would be easier to open it and just bring whatever’s inside. The latch is torn off—”
“Bring out the casket!”
The echoes of his voice brought grains of crumbled mortar drifting down from the ceiling. Tabisha looked up, hesitated, then twisted back around and heaved up the casket. Her return across the chamber was slow and ponderous. She placed her feet with even more care, possibly because she couldn’t see the floor over her burden. Kri could see the strain in her face and arms. His hands shifted eagerly on the shafts of the torches. By the time Tabisha was only a few paces from the arch, he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. He thrust the torches in among piles of bones to support them and free his hands.
She froze the instant the shadows started to dance. “Kri, hold up the torches! I need to see.”
“Let me help you.” He moved through the arch.
“Kri, don’t!”
He didn’t see quite what happened—his gaze was on the casket—but Tabisha shifted suddenly. Stones grated under her feet. She swayed to the side, unbalanced by the weight of the casket. Kri, startled, stepped back from her.
His foot came down on a bone. It rolled and splintered under him. He stumbled, falling against the side of the arch. The stones creaked, then groaned loudly. Kri threw himself back. Tabisha cursed and leaped forward as the cracked keystone gave way and the arch came crashing down.
Dust filled the air, extinguishing one of the torches and reducing the other to a guttering orange glow. The sound of the collapse left Kri’s ears ringing. He groped for the remaining torch and waved it gently until the flame rose again. The dust dispersed the light, limiting his vision. Kri groped his way forward.
The casket rested, miraculously upright, on the ground just a handsbreadth from Tabisha’s fingers. Tabisha herself lay stretched out on her belly. Her eyes were closed, but the dust that drifted around her mouth eddied with each slow breath. Stones lay across her legs and hips, both the smaller stones of the arch and larger ones that must have tumbled from the ceiling. Kri reached for his protégé.
His gaze, however, slid away from her and back to the casket. Had whatever it contained survived the fall? He should check. It would only take a moment. He shifted and reached for the casket.
Tabisha’s eyes flickered and opened. Her breath quickened. Her voice, when it came, was dull and thick. “Kri …”
He hesitated.
And a voice seemed to slip into his head like a manifestation of his desire. Look inside. You want to.
His hand was on the broken latch. His fingers slipped into the grooves the demon claws had made. On the edge of his vision, he saw Tabisha try to pull herself from the rocks. The attempt ended in a gasp of pain. “Kri!” she called again. He lifted the weight of the casket’s stone lid and leaned forward to peer inside.
Cradled in a nest of crumpled paper, a tiny crystal vial gleamed under the light of his torch. Kri squinted and brought the light closer. There was something inside the vial. Something red and crystalline yet liquid, like blood mixed with honey and shot through with faint specks of gold and silver. The joy of discovery filled him, greater than any he had ever felt.
A sample of the Voidharrow. The last remnants of what Tavit Nance had taken from the Order. No wonder he had hidden it! Kri’s hand actually trembled slightly as he lifted the precious vial from its resting place. He held the very thing the Order had denied him—that his god, by her silence, had kept from him. His mind reeled at the secrets he might be able to learn from those few imprisoned drops.
“Kri, help me!” Tabisha’s plea was sharp with agony. “I can’t get out.”
No one can know about this, said the voice in his head.
“The Order would take it away from me,” Kri replied. He felt a surge of bitter hatred at the very possibility. The Order would probably declare the little vial too dangerous to study and give it to Moorin to lock away. They were too terrified at the potential for change that the vial represented.
Show them, the voice murmured, when the time is right.
Exactly. He would tell them when he was ready to. When he could lay the secrets of the Voidharrow out before the Order and rub their collective faces in them. He rose, clenching the vial in his hand.
Tabisha grabbed for his ankle. “Kri, you have to get these stones off me. Find something to move them. Call on Ioun—”
He pulled away from her and climbed the steep stairs. Tabisha’s voice broke into a scream behind him. “Kri, help me! Kri? Kri!”
The old man blinked eyes that were unexpectedly wet. “Dark master, chained lord,” he said. “You were with me even so long ago. You guided me. You brought change when I needed it.”
The words made his throat and lips burn like leather stretched in the sun. How long had he been praying? How long had he been climbing? His legs ached. The arm that held the lantern was stiff. The fingers of the hand that brushed the wall were raw. His stomach was a void.
Kri didn’t stop moving, though he began to wonder if somehow he had missed the doorway to the hall of broken statues and kept climbing past it. Dread set claws into him. “Chained God,” he asked softly, “is this retribution for sacrificing Tabisha to keep the Voidharrow a secret?”
The trapped thief’s cries had haunted him for years. Initially he hadn’t even been able to look at the tiny vial without thinking of the cost of gaining it. Slowly the guilt had faded, as had his unease at hiding the vial within the shaft of Ioun’s holy sign where it hung around his neck. The only time recently that he’d thought of Tabisha at all was when he’d revealed to Albanon that each member of the Order of Vigilance was expected to train one or two others to take his or her place.
“Have you trained new members for the Order?” Albanon had asked innocently.
Kri had mastered his anguish then. It was not so easy to master it in the same darkness that Tabisha had faced, starving slowly as she must have starved. He fell back on the same reasoning that had given him strength all those years ago: if Tabisha hadn’t died, the V
oidharrow would have been revealed to the Order. Her death had been the price of knowledge.
That reasoning, he realized, took on new meaning now. The sense of a need for secrecy that had come on him in the crypt had been Tharizdun’s gaze. The Chained God had made it possible for him to find the Voidharrow.
The Chained God had wanted him to find the Voidharrow. He had been a prisoner of Ioun’s way of thinking. Tharizdun’s gift of change had given him the will to break free, just as the Chained God’s will created the Voidharrow as a means to escape his otherworldly prison. It was all about strength of will.
Kri stopped climbing. Understanding swept over him—understanding of what Tharizdun had shown him in the void before depositing him in the dwarven ruins. Tharizdun’s will had made it possible for him to join with the Progenitor and create the Voidharrow. Even if the Progenitor had turned against Tharizdun, the Voidharrow existed because of Tharizdun’s mighty will.
“And it is the key to destroying the Voidharrow and punishing the Progenitor,” Kri said out loud, and once again echoes rippled up and down the stairs. This time, however, they seemed to come back to him with Tharizdun’s voice.
One comes who will help you turn that key.
A tremor shivered through the rock and ahead of him a sliver of brilliant blue light appeared, as if the vibrations had forced open some hidden door. Hope rose in Kri and he sprang up the stairs as fast as his weak and aching legs would let him. It was a door, with brilliant light and cold, fresh air blowing in from beyond. As Kri thrust his head out into the brightness, he realized with a start that he had been wrong about many things.
From the darkness of the stairs came a final echo. One comes. Be ready.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Smoke lay over Winterhaven like a black, choking fog that persisted despite the breeze and the morning sun. All of the buildings on the north side of the market square—Wrafton’s Inn among them—were on fire. Some efforts had been made to fight the flames before they were abandoned in exhaustion and despair. A few glassy-eyed defenders worked to keep the fire from spreading, but others wandered the village, slowly collecting bodies and committing them to the flames. Wrafton’s had become a pyre. Salvana crouched so close to it that the tears that ran down her cheeks dried before they reached her jaw.
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