“Darien would never touch your daughter,” Kyel asserted finally, defensively. But even as the words passed his lips, he knew that he had doubts. The interplay Kyel had witnessed between the two of them yesterday in the hall made him wonder. For just a moment, it had seemed as if Darien had been on the verge of embracing the girl. Kyel had even felt comforted by the sight; it was a wonderful thing to see him display such a simple, tender emotion. But Darien also hadn’t known what Kyel did now.
He had no idea what kind of fire he was playing with. No idea.
Leaning suddenly forward, the old man demanded, “Why else would Naia run off without even asking me? Without telling me where she was going? She left with him.”
He punctuated the last word with a jarring slap on the desk that made Kyel flinch. Kyel found himself wondering what Darien had done to merit such bitter revile from the old man. He had the feeling that there was more going on than just Naia’s disappearance; something must have happened between the High Priest and Darien that had set the man dead against him.
“I don’t know where he is going,” Kyel admitted honestly. “He didn’t tell me. The only thing I know is that he’ll be at Orien’s Finger on the morning of the Solstice.”
“Orien’s Finger,” the old man echoed as his face went suddenly, alarmingly white. “Are you quite certain?”
“Yes,” Kyel answered, feeling confused and more than a little frightened by his reaction. “Why? Whatever is the problem?”
Stiffly, the High Priest leaned back in his chair and explained in carefully chosen words, “In ancient times there were eight Circles of Convergence. Two were lost to us when Caladorn fell. Three more have been either destroyed or lost down through the years. There are only three Circles remaining that we know of. One is on the Isle of Titherry, in the middle of the Windswept Sea. Another existed in Aerysius, but by all reports that Circle now lies entombed under the ruins of the Hall of the Watchers. The only other Circle of Convergence is on the summit of Orien’s Finger.”
Kyel had already known about the Circle of Convergence. But now he wanted to kick himself for not seeing sooner what had been so blatantly staring him in the face all this time. He leaned his head back, resting it on the high back of his chair as all of the numbers suddenly totaled together in his mind. The Circle. The Soulstone. The Bloodquest. Naia. The cliff’s edge. And on top of it all, Darien had deliberately left him behind. He’d thought at the time that the mage had devised those errands simply as a way of protecting him, of getting him out of the way. He had known that Darien was planning something particularly dangerous. But now he feared it was something more, something much more desperate than he had previously imagined.
Kyel whispered, “He said that two Enemy armies are going to be merging together there.”
“So he intends to use Orien’s Circle to turn them back,” the old man concluded with a voice as chill as a breath of air from the grave. “Your master is an Eighth Tier Sentinel, and Orien’s is a Lesser Circle. It was never designed to focus the vast amount of power he is capable of drawing.”
Kyel couldn’t help the groan that escaped his lips.
“Go,” the High Priest commanded with a wave of his hand. “If you ever see your master again, tell him that he’s a contemptible fool. And tell him I want my daughter back.”
Kyel collected his things in a hurry and fled the High Priest’s study in a rush. Before he even knew what was happening, he found himself being firmly escorted out of the temple by two white-robed priests. As soon as he was outside, the reins of his horse were shoved roughly into his hand and the temple door was slammed shut behind him. Kyel just stood there, his gaze wandering back and forth from the door to the horse. The chestnut gelding whinnied at him eagerly, shoving its muzzle into his chest in greeting. Kyel stroked its head absently, looking back over his shoulder at the verdigris dome of the sanctuary. He wasn’t even sure what had just happened; everything was beginning to go wrong. And he hadn’t even started out yet.
He pulled himself over the gelding’s back and turned it away from the High Temple, following the dusty line of the road that led away from the structure out into the flat floor of the Valley of the Gods. As he rode, Kyel found himself amazed by the differences in scenery he had been subjected to in the past few days. From the stark darkness of the pass he had descended into the verdant Cerulian Plains, then into the shadowy world of the Catacombs. And now this, what looked to be a barren desert landscape painted in muted hues of brownish-red pastel. If Darien had wanted him to become well-traveled, then he was certainly getting his wish. Kyel had never left the region around Coventry in his entire life until his ill-fated trip with Traver, but he felt that in the last few months he’d seen more of the Rhen than most other people would in a lifetime.
His horse took the dusty trail at a canter, eastward toward the other side of the valley. There were nine High Temples in Glen Farquist, one for each of the holy divinities. Darien hadn’t told him where to find the Temple of Om; at least, not really. The mage had said it was on the other side of the valley, but there were bound to be at least five other temples over that way. Kyel hoped he wasn’t going to be spending the rest of the day riding up and down Glen Farquist, trying to find the right place.
Kyel drew his horse up in the middle of the long and narrow valley. Before him, set in the middle of the desolate red landscape, arose a surpassingly strange sight. It was a circle formed by a low wall of piled stone that had obviously been arranged by human hands. At first, Kyel wondered if perhaps it was one of the Circles of Convergence the High Priest had been talking about. But that was impossible; surely, if one existed within a league of his own doorstep, Luther Penthos would have mentioned it. This circle must be something else entirely.
Kyel walked his horse toward it, through an opening in the stone wall. The gelding tossed its head, crabstepping sideways as it fought for the bit. Kyel wound the reins around his hands for a better grip and compelled his mount forward into the circle of stone.
Within, he found that the sight grew ever more bizarre. His horse was moving down a stone path encased by a garden of raked sand. The lines in the sand swirled into complex geometric patterns in a flowing, interlaced design that reminded him of some of the stonework he had seen in the shrine of the Goddess of the Eternal Requiem. At the exact center of the circle rose two enormous standing stones, with another great block set across the top of them.
Kyel dismounted and led his horse toward them until he was standing within the large doorway formed by the stones. As he did, he felt a sudden pulse of the magic field, the rhythm of it quickening in his mind to a driving cadence. Wondering what the link could be between the field and the stones, Kyel put a hand out and touched the nearest one. Immediately, he felt a stir of hidden force that was exciting, like a small charge of shock that crisped the air around him as it traveled through his hand and up his arm.
Stranger and stranger. Leading the gelding, he strode forward to another rock set in front of the stones perhaps fifty paces away. It was shaped into a narrow obelisk, taller than his head, and carved with what looked like a reflection of the patterns traced into the sand. Kyel extended his hand toward it and felt the same strange charge he had received from the stone’s massive counterparts. Trying to resolve the mystery of the circle and the stones, he glanced out across the valley, raising his hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun.
The sun. Of course.
Kyel tied his reins to the pommel of his saddle and trotted back through the opening between the standing stones. About halfway to the far side of the circle he turned and looked back, positioning himself so that he could see the obelisk framed exactly within the opening of the stone doorway. The sun had already risen well above it, but it was still possible to trace its path in the sky back to the horizon above the distant cliffs that rimmed the valley. Kyel envisioned the position where the sun would have appeared at dawnbreak, just slightly offset to the right of the obelisk’s
point.
Kyel laughed, feeling pleased with himself for figuring out the secret of the stones. He had read something once about the Pointer Stones of Glen Farquist that marked the position of sunrise on the morning of Winter Solstice. They were a work of the Temple of Wisdom that had guided the clerics of Om in charting the dates of the calendar. He was standing in the middle of one of the greatest wonders of the land, an expansive undertaking that had been accomplished thousands of years before. Only Om’s clerics paid any particular attention to the position of stars and sky, and the Pointer Stones had been one of their crowning achievements.
Which meant that he must be very close to the High Temple of Om. With a surge of renewed vigor, Kyel jogged back down the path to his horse. Regaining the saddle, he sent the gelding at a gallop out of the circle, following the dirt trail eastward toward the sun. The cliffs in front of him grew steadily larger, rising in soft pastel folds from the red soil of the desert valley. Kyel thought he could make out something set in the sheer wall of rock ahead, like dim, shadowy lines traced into the face of the cliff.
As the gelding slowly narrowed the distance between him and the valley’s wall, Kyel found himself compelled to slow the horse. The image had resolved into the façade of an enormous temple, carved into the very wall of the cliff itself. There was no structure, just a wide stair rising up from the valley floor to the edge of the cliff, which had been carved into the image of the temple’s face. Great stone pillars rose from a terrace at the top of the stairs, supporting a triangular-shaped overhang that projected outward from the cliff. The whole façade was bordered by two enormous images of a bearded man engraved in severe bas-relief, his laurelled head encircled by a halo of sunbeams.
Kyel had seen such a representation before, and knew with conviction that he had reached the High Temple of Om.
The passage was narrow and utterly black, the ceiling so low that Kyel had to duck his head as he moved to follow the hooded cleric. He almost felt like he was walking through yet another tomb. He had to move with his head bowed and shoulders stooped. Before him, the passage angled sharply downward at an almost alarming angle. A cold draft of air from whatever depths the cleric was leading him toward made him shiver. It was hard going; the slope of the floor made him fight at every step to find traction. Afraid that he was going to slip forward into the man in front of him, Kyel walked with his hands trailing over the cold stone walls that felt pressingly too close.
The cleric he followed was not the same man he had met at the temple’s entrance. He had waited by the broad opening in the rock face while another man had been summoned to guide him through the warren of dark tunnels inside the cliff. Since that time, Kyel had been handed off from one guide to another, each leading him a little deeper into the labyrinth. Kyel had thought that the Temple of Om looked massive from the outside, especially when he had stood beneath the carved rock pillars, feeling dwarfed by their circumference. But his journey through the dark passages within had begun over an hour ago, and they still had not yet reached their final destination. In Kyel’s mind, the entire plateau bordering the Valley of the Gods must be hollow to contain the enormous warren that was the Temple of Om.
The acutely sloping passage seemed to go on forever straight ahead and always down. The brown-robed cleric ahead of him held a flaming torch in his hand that was successful at providing a globe of wavering light immediately surrounding them, but the passage both ahead and behind sloped quickly into blackness. Kyel was starting to feel a slight sense of panic as the walls and ceiling seemed to be pressing in, narrowing. He knew it was all in his mind, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being buried alive. And the air was growing gradually cooler, the further down they went.
It would have been some comfort if his current guide would have made an attempt at conversation. But none of the clerics he had met so far had made any effort to speak to him at all. The man who had greeted him at the opening in the cliff wall that served as the temple’s door merely nodded at him when Kyel had introduced himself and asked to be shown to the High Priest. He had since been passed along from one guide to another without a single word uttered. Kyel was starting to wonder if these people spoke at all.
At last, the narrow passage opened up into a broad cavern dripping with natural embellishments. Their path wound around through a maze of cream-colored spikes that groped upward from the ground, some stretching all the way to the ceiling. Kyel stood amazed, staring around at the glimmering cave decorations. Their path wound around serpent-like past columns that erupted from the floor and what appeared to be milky-white waterfalls frozen in time. Kyel found himself having to duck to avoid some of the longer spikes that stabbed downward from the ceiling. Many of the stony icicles seemed to have broken off through the years, falling to litter the floor of the cavern.
All around he could hear the faint sounds of dripping water, and even the air of the cave felt terribly moist. The path ahead arched in a carved stone bridge over a narrow running stream that flowed through the center of the cavern. The water of the stream was dark, its current fast as it made quiet trickling sounds that somehow added an eerie mystery to the cave. As they crossed the bridge to the other side of the room, Kyel found himself staring at a wall that looked to have been made out of tawny marble worked to a fine polish, like fine draperies hanging from the ceiling of a palace. A doorway had been cut through the middle of them, parting the folds of silken rock.
Their path led through that dark doorway and out of the cavern. Kyel felt almost sad as he stepped back into yet another narrow man-carved passage that was even chillier than the previous one. He wondered how far underground they had come, and how much longer they had to go.
Only minutes later they came to a place where the passage was cleaved by a broad corridor, which they followed for a ways before turning onto what looked like a main thoroughfare. Kyel found himself suddenly surrounded by scores of thickly-robed and often hooded clerics who passed by in silent swarms, as often as not laden with armloads of scrolls and manuscripts. The sight was bizarre. What was even stranger was the sound of this busy underground avenue. Other than the soft scrapings of footsteps and the rustling of robes and parchment, the corridor was consumed by total silence. Since passing from the world of light above in the valley, Kyel had heard not one human voice.
At an intersection of another broad road, he was passed off yet again to another guide, this one a young man with the cowl of his thick wool robe pulled up over his head. With only the gesture of his hand, he directed Kyel to follow him down the high-ceilinged lane and through a shorter archway to a door. Kyel stared at the circular door in front of him, wondering at it. That door was the first piece of wood he had seen since entering the temple. The cleric opened it for him and bid him enter with an almost ceremonious sweep of his arm.
Inside, Kyel found himself in what looked like a waiting room. Here, the stone walls had been smoothed and whitewashed, the floor paved with clay bricks. There was a braided wool rug in the middle of the small room, and high-backed chairs had been placed along the walls. Though stark, the chamber looked almost comfortable, compared to the rest of what he had seen.
Unexpectedly, the door closed behind him. Kyel found himself alone in the room, wondering why his guide had vanished without warning. Not knowing what else to do, he removed his pack and quiver and took a seat. His eyes wandered over the barren walls, wondering exactly how long he was going to have to wait. He tapped his foot nervously on the floor, drumming out the rhythm of a tavern reel that had been spinning in the back of his mind all day. He hummed the tune softly to himself, then moved on to another.
At last a door opened and another cleric stepped silently inside, beckoning with a motion of his hand. Kyel rose from the chair and reached for his bow, but stopped at a shake of the cleric’s head. With a hand gesture, the man made it known that he should leave his things there. Kyel shrugged and walked across the room and through the doorway, following the man through a s
hort, white-washed hallway. The cleric paused at another closed door. He rapped once with his knuckles before opening it, then stood back to admit Kyel through.
Kyel stopped as soon as his feet had crossed the door’s threshold, finding himself confronted by two men who looked nothing like the other clerics he had seen. The first man, seated on what looked like an extraordinarily uncomfortable wooden stool, was dressed in the clothes of a simple commoner. He looked to be roughly middle-aged and plump, with thinning brown hair parted over a high widow’s peak. The expression in his red and watery eyes was not unkindly. There even seemed to be the hint of a smile on his lips as he nodded a cursory greeting.
But it was the man with him who drew Kyel’s attention. He was seated in a high-backed chair on the wall adjacent, robed in elegant folds of a rich bronze-colored fabric. He wore a stole over his shoulders of deepest brown, similar to the stole worn by the High Priest of Isap, only varying in color. He was a very old man, his long, white hair streaked with strands of darker silver. His face was covered by a white beard that groped down his chest, ending in a point. The man sat with fingers steepled under his chin, wide blue eyes seeming to contemplate Kyel warily as he lingered in the doorway.
Kyel drew himself up as best he could, thinking of how Darien would have conducted himself in a similar situation. Emulate me, the mage had said. But that was far easier said than done. Kyel had nothing of Darien’s innate self-assurance, though he did find that the black fabric on his shoulders lent him a small amount of confidence he hadn’t been expecting.
“Your Eminence,” he said, bowing his head. He had no doubt in his mind that the man with the stole was the High Priest. Kyel felt a warm flush of satisfaction when the old man acknowledged him with the slightest nod.
Buoyed by his so-far success, he took a step forward into the room, pulling the door shut behind him as he introduced himself, “My name is Kyel Archer. I’m an acolyte of the new Prime Warden, Darien Lauchlin.”
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