Aric swallowed and gestured toward Ruhm. “We found it.”
She left her hand where it was a few moments longer. Aric wouldn’t have minded if she had left it there all day, and into the night. Standing this close to her, he could smell her and gaze into her huge brown eyes, the color of distant mountains in the full light of morning sun. She was slender and muscular, with womanly curves that moved under her simple shift. He realized he was staring. As long as that hand stayed on his cheek, he was powerless to stop.
She removed it, as if she had seen the thoughts its presence stirred within him. She didn’t look away, though. “Did you tell anyone else about it?” Myrana continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn’t. Probably for her, the touch had been just that, a touch, not signifying any stronger emotion. He tried to pay attention to what she was asking.
“Yes,” Ruhm said, saving Aric having to answer.
“It’s why we came here,” Aric explained, finding his voice again. “We were sent by the the Shadow King himself to find the metal buried beneath Akrankhot. I was tasked specifically with locating it, because I have a … a psionic connection to all sorts of metals.”
“Interesting,” Myrana said, in a way that made Aric think it wasn’t really.
“Anyway, after we found it, we reported it to the templar in charge of the expedition. It’s being loaded onto wagons now.”
“In my dreams, I saw runes around the cage.” She knelt and etched some in the sand. “Like these.”
“Those were on the door,” Aric said. “And on the stairs, leading down toward the steel. You’re saying that it’s the cage? That whatever is underneath is kept in check only by that?”
“So my dreams led me to believe.”
“And the fact that it’s being taken apart and moved? What does that mean, then?”
Myrana rose again, an effort that made her bite her lower lip. When she was upright, she rested some of her weight on her staff. “Then, I’m afraid, we’re all doomed. Anyone within this city. After that, who knows? Whatever is imprisoned there is powerful indeed, and whether it can be stopped again, I have no idea. All I know is that it was imprisoned in the first place for a reason.”
“We must warn Kadya,” Aric said. “Perhaps it’s not too late. They’ve moved a good amount of steel, but there’s still some left. If it’s still caged, then—”
“We can warn her,” Myrana agreed. “I fear, though, that if much has been taken away, then we’re probably too late. And when that evil force, or being, gets loose, it’s going to be seeking vengeance. Let’s make haste, while we yet live!”
7
When they reached the wagons, after a hurried run across the city, Kadya was overseeing the loading. The argosies had been taken into town, as close to the stairways as possible. A procession of slaves marched to and fro, each carrying either a chunk of metal or helping tote pieces too large for a single one to lift. At the argosies, they handed their burdens to other slaves who stacked it neatly inside. The mekillots had had an easy time of it coming to Akrankhot—on the return trip they would earn their feed, and then some.
Aric pointed to eight wagons with closed doors. “Those are already full,” he said. “Which means they’re nearly done, at least with this trip.”
Myrana turned to the swordsman who had accompanied her. “If I hadn’t been paralyzed by that cistern fiend, we might have arrived in time!” she said. “Those days we lost … I fear we’re too late.”
“Perhaps not,” Sellis said. “We’ll just have to see.”
“I’ll talk to the templar,” Aric volunteered. “She doesn’t like me, but I have the king’s approval so she might listen to me.”
Kadya sat on a small mound of iron bars too long to fit into the argosies. They would have to be cut down, or strapped to the tops of the wagons. In the meantime they had been stacked nearby. Aric hurried to her side. He had a stitch in his side from the run. His face was flushed, and he had not entirely caught his breath. “Templar,” he began. “We must stop removing metal from the cavern at once!”
“Whatever for?” Kadya asked. “Who are those strangers?”
“They’re Myrana and Sellis, of House Ligurto. Myrana has dreams in which truths are revealed. She knew all about me before she met me. And she says there’s something—she knows not what—inside that cavern. Imprisoned there, caged by the metal. Releasing it … well, she says it’s indescribably evil, and tremendously powerful. We can’t know what the result of freeing it would be. But it won’t be good.”
He had managed to get his words out, but the stitch flared up, like a dagger between his ribs. He bent forward, bracing himself with a hand against the iron bars that Kadya sat on. Her left hand rested on the same bar that he touched.
And once again, images swam into his head, blotting out the world around him and replacing it with another. Once again, he saw what he had before, on the stairs leading down to the cavern, when he touched the ancient sword he still carried.
The creature he had glimpsed, all limbs and tentacles and teeth—a demon, Aric knew, although he couldn’t say how—was carried, struggling the whole time, down an almost unending flight of stairs marked with runic symbols. Mystical bonds contained the demon’s form, but not his fury. He was a horrible sight, with thick stubby horns above angry eyes that shone with a sickly yellow-green fury. His gray-green skin appeared mottled with lichen or mold and thick with oozing pustules, not a smooth patch anywhere. His fanged mouth snapped at everything, two long, narrow tongues lapping at the world, and tusks on either side of his long nose were crusted with dried blood. The bonds held his many limbs and tentacles fast, kept his claws from doing damage, prevented him from using his muscular, many-pronged tail, but more important still, they dampened the powers of his mind.
His name was Tallik.
An early Athasian sorcerer had summoned him here from—somewhere else, the words made no sense to Aric even in the context of the vision—but Tallik had proved too difficult for the sorcerer to control. Finally, that sorcerer—working with other, more powerful beings—had been able to capture and imprison the demon beneath Akrankhot, in a cage made of all the metal that could be gathered, because only massive amounts of enchanted metal could hold Tallik fast.
And there he had waited.
Waited for someone to come along, so that he could reach out, take over that one’s mind, use that one to find others, any who could muster the necessary effort to dismantle Tallik’s prison and let him loose.
Aric shook his head, trying to clear it of images from the past and pay attention to what was going on around him. His skin crawled from the briefest contact with Tallik. He wanted to scour himself with gritty sand, to scrub off any traces of the evil he had touched, the vicious nature of the demon coming through Kadya and into him. Tallik feasted on fear and hatred and death. Life and happiness were as repugnant to him as the demon was to Aric. But Kadya was saying something. Aric made himself listen.
“… will look into your concerns, of course, Aric. After all, we have you to thank for finding the metal in the first place. But I don’t believe we have anything to fear. The young lady was probably confused. Not all dreams, after all, mean anything. Even for such a one as her.”
“Good,” Aric said, “that’s good.” But he hadn’t removed his hand from the iron bar, and neither had she. Another thought flashed into his mind—not an image this time, just words ringing in his head with utter clarity. There was no mistaking their source.
It’s past time to have some soldiers kill Aric and his friends—especially these new friends. He’s served his purpose, and now he’s just getting in the way.
The “voice” he heard in his head was Kadya’s. But behind it was something else—something he recognized as the presence of Tallik.
The demon had already possessed the templar. He controlled her now. She was having his cage torn apart as quickly as she could, in order to completely free him.
; And all of this due to Aric’s own efforts. Could he ever be forgiven? Could he ever forgive himself? He should kill her right now. He almost reached for his sword, then stopped. He didn’t know enough about this sort of thing, but he didn’t believe that killing Tallik’s host would mean killing Tallik. It would likely just move into someone else.
Once more, he was faced with the reality that one person couldn’t change anything on Athas; his action, or Kadya’s death—neither would accomplish anything. Her soldiers would kill him on the spot, and the demon would survive.
Uneasily, he drew his hand away from the iron bars. “Th-thank you, Kadya. I-I’ll go now.”
He barely made it through those simple statements, and he turned away before she had dismissed him, hurrying back to Ruhm, Myrana and Sellis. Instead of speaking, he beckoned, and they hurried back into the city. Finding a secure place inside one of the large buildings on the grand avenue, he told them what he had seen.
“You have to put your trust in dreams, Myrana,” he said at the conclusion. “I put mine in steel. If I touch steel, I can often learn things about whoever last handled it. And if I touch it while someone else is, I get a peek inside that person’s mind. In Kadya’s, there’s a terrible darkness, and there’s Tallik, the demon. I could hardly sense Kadya in there at all.”
Myrana sat on the large room’s tile floor, her back against a whitewashed wall that had only browned slightly over the years. “Then we are too late!” She buried her face in her hands. “And now she wants to kill you, because you know!”
“She wants to kill us all,” Aric corrected. “Not just me. Even our friend Amoni, a mul slave who’s helping to bring the metal up from below.”
“Her soldiers will have to kill me first,” Sellis said. “And they’ll find that’s no simple task. Come on, Myrana, we’ve done what we came here for. Let’s get away from this forsaken city.”
Myrana dropped her hands and stared at Sellis in surprise. “Leave now? We didn’t come just to give warning, Sellis. At least, that’s not what I believe. We came to help if we were able.”
“But if it’s too late to help—”
“We don’t know that. If there’s any way to stop this demon, this Tallik, we have to try.”
“I don’t think we can stop him, Myrana,” Aric admitted. “Even if Kadya wasn’t against us. I think he has too great a foothold for that. Too much of his cage has been destroyed, and none of us are sorcerer enough to put it back together.”
“Then all is lost?”
“Not necessarily, although time is short. We need to leave here, race back to Nibenay, and warn the Shadow King.”
“Him?” Ruhm asked. He snorted. “Probably already knows. That’s why he sent us.”
Aric couldn’t allow himself to believe that. “When I saw him, spoke to him, I didn’t have that impression, Ruhm. I think he sincerely wanted the steel, for its own sake. I’m not saying others in his court didn’t know, but I don’t think he did. I don’t even think Kadya did, until we were here.”
“What can he do?” Myrana asked. “If he is willing to help?”
“He’s the most powerful sorcerer in the Ivory Triangle,” Aric said, hoping it was true. “If it takes sorcery to re-imprison Tallik, he’s the one who can do it.”
“Do you know what kind of damage such sorcery would cause?” Sellis asked. “The whole of the Crescent Forest might be destroyed.”
“But if the other choice is a demon as fearsome and powerful as Tallik seems to be, then that’s no choice at all,” Aric countered. “We lose a forest, but we save the world?”
“I doubt the choice is that stark,” Sellis said.
“You haven’t seen Tallik, or … felt him. I think Myrana’s right. He’s unbridled evil, and as strong as any force I’ve ever heard of. If I’m wrong about Nibenay, if he refuses to help—or can’t—then we … I don’t know. We find a Veiled Alliance chapter, and see if they can summon the necessary magics to defeat Tallik.”
“I’m with Aric,” Myrana declared. “We strike out for Nibenay. Should we go now?”
“We need to let Amoni know,” Aric said. “She’s in as much danger as the rest of us. And her strength will help us survive the journey back to Nibenay. We’ll get to Amoni, and then tonight, once it’s dark—that’s when we’ll leave. We’ll slip away from the soldiers standing guard, and they won’t even know we’re gone until morning.”
“Assuming she doesn’t send them to kill you before that,” Sellis reminded him.
“Right,” Aric agreed. “Assuming that. We have no other choice, though, so that’s a chance we’ll just have to take.”
“The other choice is that we leave now.”
“We can’t leave Amoni to be killed. I’m sorry, Sellis. Go if you must. But for me, that’s no choice at all.”
XIII
NIGHT TRAVELS
1
The man had walked to the elven marketplace. For days and days, he had kept his distance. He had started to feel stronger, better able to control the impulses that had led him there so many other nights. For the first few evenings, after the time he had almost been seen, he had stayed at home, surrounded by family, and told himself that this was all he needed. All he wanted.
For several nights after that, he knew he had been wrong. He wanted what he wanted. It was wrong, he knew that too, but he couldn’t help the wanting. All he could do was not act upon the desire. That demanded strength of him, only strength. He was a strong person. He could do it. He could want, and deny himself, at the same time.
Having arrived at that realization, he had been better. For the next days and nights, the elf women and their human companions had barely entered his mind. When he did think of them, it was only to dismiss the idea of acting again. The acts he had committed, that he still wanted to commit, simply weren’t that important to him anymore. His family, that’s what was important. And to have one was to resist the other. If he gave in, returned to the bazaar and watched once again for elves and humans to go together into the dark recesses of the Hill District, then he might lose his family. If he kept his family, it would only be by losing his once-unstoppable lust to kill.
For three days and nights, he had believed himself cured. But then, he had chanced to see an elf female on the street, beautiful, tall and rangy, dressed in attire that showed off her curves and her long legs and her wild, unkempt hair, and he had looked at that face, a face that spoke of pure animal sensuality, and he had known he was not cured at all. He was as lost as he had ever been.
Since then, he had come to the marketplace each evening, before the day’s heat had entirely dissipated. This was when the elf females could show off what they had to offer, when night’s bitter cold had not yet forced them to wrap themselves from head to toe. This was the time of day when the bazaar became a marketplace of flesh as well as of goods.
On this night, a dry, chill wind tore through the alleyways, beating the market’s canopies like drums. The man watched as elf and half-elf women strutted and displayed, and males—human, elf, and other races as well—made their selections and went off with them.
His fingernails dug into his palms. His mouth was dry, his lips bruised from being chewed on. He wanted to act, to strike like a serpent of retribution. Of justice.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t dare. He had risked too much just coming back here. To fall back into that old pattern would invite disaster.
Back home, the other members of his family went about their evening’s pursuits. That’s where he belonged.
With one last look back at a particularly striking half-elf woman, he spun on his heel and stalked toward home.
2
The first night out, Aric thought the cold would surely kill him. In Nibenay, he had shelter at night. There were those early days, after his mother’s death, when he had been on his own, but even then he’d always managed to find some nook or hole to escape night’s full brunt. And since reaching adulthood, he’d had the shop, its forg
e heating it excessively by day but keeping the interior pleasant at night. On the long journey to Akrankhot, there had been campfires and the shelter of the argosies.
Out in the open desert, however, there was no shelter. The temperature started dropping as soon as the sun went down, and once the stored heat fled the desert sand and the nighttime winds howled, every step was agony. They had surreptitiously carried skins of water and their furs and leathers, the same things that had provided relative comfort on the road, from the argosy to a building near the edge of the city. Myrana and Sellis had their own things, carried with them since they had left their caravan. But even they had not tried to travel at night.
As soon as the sun went down, while the others gathered for the evening meal, Aric, Ruhm, and Amoni joined Myrana and Sellis and struck out into the desert. They didn’t know when Kadya might notice they were gone—possibly not until morning. Before that happened, they needed to cover as much distance as they could. Kadya might send a search party after them. It would not be a large one, as she wouldn’t want to spare the laborers. And since the assumption would be that a nighttime trek across the desert would surely kill them, the party would not look hard, or for long.
That was their hope, at any rate. Aric knew that Kadya’s mind was capricious, that she might decide on nothing more than a whim that there was no goal more important than finding them and destroying them, or else imprisoning them and taking them back to face Nibenay’s justice. For all he knew, her magic, or Tallik’s, might allow her to seek them out from the comfort of her own fireside.
So he trudged on, even though he was sure his blood would freeze in his veins. The bits of flesh exposed to the air, around his eyes so he could see where he was going, had gone numb, but not before giving him the feeling of having daggers driven into his brain. The fur over his nose and mouth had frozen where his exhalations had dampened it. His extremities screamed with pain, his limbs protested every effort demanded of them.
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