“I had them burned, and they’ll be sent back to her family in Skala.”
“I’m glad. She was a dear friend and deserved a far better end than she got in life.”
“She certainly did,” said Seregil.
“And poor Princess Klia, too,” Kordira said, and suddenly Seregil realized she was measuring his response. As far as she knew, Klia was dead.
He dropped his face into his hands and let out a shuddering breath. “Yes. Klia.”
He felt Micum’s big hand on his shoulder as his friend said, “There now, Seregil. We may find her yet. Don’t despair.”
Seregil rose to go. “Thank you, Kordira. You’ve been very helpful.”
“I’m not sure how. That’s all just ancient history.”
“You never know what will prove useful,” said Micum.
Leaving Kordira’s shop, Seregil went into a nearby jeweler’s shop and asked after local goldsmiths.
“There are quite a lot of them,” the shopkeeper replied. “But if you want the best, I’d say it would be Mistress Gora.” He lifted a golden necklace from a velvet pillow on a shelf behind the counter. “This is her work.”
“Very nice,” said Seregil.
“Her shop is in Gate House Street, next to the Red Cloud refinery. That’s the one closest to here.”
That was the one near Lemiel’s cottage and the White Crow. He and Micum rode to Gate House Street, which was lined with artisans’ shops. Most of the work on display in the shop windows was second-rate, but Mistress Gora’s wares showed passable skill. Stepping inside, Seregil glanced over the trays of jewelry and nodded. This would have to do. The workshop was behind the shop, and through a curtained doorway they could hear the musical rhythm of tiny hammers on precious metals and a woman singing.
“How do you do, gentlemen?” said a buxom blond woman. Her face was ruddy, and a black patch covered her left eye. The leather apron over her plain woolen gown was spattered with traces of gold. “Baron Seregil of Mirror Moon, isn’t it?”
“My fame precedes me,” he said with a self-deprecating smile.
“There’s only one Aurënfaie lord on the island that I know of,” she replied, with no trace of ire. “Are you looking for something in particular?”
“I am. I have a custom piece I need to have made and you were highly recommended, Mistress Gora.”
“Well, that’s nice to hear! What did you have in mind?”
Seregil took out a folded parchment and smoothed it out on the countertop. Using the fragment of the rosette he’d gotten from Lemiel, he’d drawn up what it had looked like, including the indentation in which the black opal would fit. The side view showed the spike of gold that would be fixed in stone.
“Interesting,” she said, studying it. “You’re a good draftsman, my lord, but what is this supposed to be?”
“A decoration for a piece of furniture. It’s a family heirloom and the decoration was pried off while it was being transported here. Only a small piece was recovered.” He took out the fragment and placed it on the drawing. “I thought this would give you a clearer idea of the design. Also, I’d like to have this melted and used to make the new one. It’s sentimental of me, I know, but I’d like to think it will make the replacement more authentic.”
“Not a problem, my lord. How soon do you need it?”
“First thing tomorrow morning,” he replied.
“Tomorrow? I don’t know—”
Seregil took out a fat purse of gold and dropped it on the counter. “I realize it’s an imposition, but it’s quite crucial that I have it by then. I’ll pay for the inconvenience, of course.”
“Fair enough. Where’s the stone that goes in it?”
“Stolen as well. I’ve sent to Aurënen for a replacement. I’ll bring it back to you as soon as it gets here.”
“Then why do you need the setting so soon, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“That’s a private matter. May I count on your discretion?”
“Of course, my lord. Come back in the morning and I’ll have it ready for you.”
“What now?” asked Micum when they were in the street again.
“We’ll ride for the camp at first light.”
Micum said nothing during the ride back to the governor’s house, but Seregil could tell that something was brewing in his friend’s head. It wasn’t until they were sorting through the items in the museum room again that he finally spoke his mind.
“Supposing Thero can put the seal together with the stone and this new gold piece, I can’t see any use for it but sealing up the other plane again. And if we can’t get Klia out, then she’ll be shut away forever.”
“You heard what Mika said. Duty is all to her, and it has to be for us, too. Klia made that very clear. Whatever this Rhazat is, we can’t unleash her on the world again.”
“So you’re all right with that? Sealing Klia away with her forever?”
“No, I’m not! Which is why we’re going to do whatever it takes to get her back.”
“I know that. But if it does come to that, do you think Thero is capable of sealing her in?”
“I honestly don’t know, Micum. I really don’t. What if it’s Alec in there, in the end? What if it was your Beka?” He reached to run his fingers back through his hair and stopped himself just in time. Instead he slammed his fist against the wall beside him, making the objects on the shelf below jump. “We’ve just got to keep going, don’t we?”
Alec and Thero rode for Zikara with Captain Brescia and a decuria of riders for support. Everyone had been duly warned about the dangers there, although word had already spread after the last disastrous visit. Ravens still ruled there, croaking and watching them with avid black eyes from the rubble.
“Show me how you entered the town,” said Thero as they sat their horses beside the dry riverbed.
“This way.” Alec led him and the riders around the town to where the back gate of the palisade had been, then dismounted. There were faint traces of a street and he followed it, leading the others carefully as he looked for familiar landmarks among the rubble. He could just make out a marketplace, and imagined houses and tenements standing where their foundations still could be seen.
Following a street that looked familiar, he came to the edge of the bare stretch of ground and could make out some of the paving stones of the courtyard sticking out of the ground at its edge.
“How can this be the same place, but the tower not be here, Thero?”
“You’re sure it is the same place?”
“Yes.”
Thero stood in thought for some time while Alec waited, listening to the ravens muttering among themselves.
“Perhaps I’ve been wrong calling the other place a plane,” Thero said at last. “Maybe it’s more about time—a shard of time split off from the world and caught like a leaf in an eddy.”
“Except for the tower.”
“Yes, except for that.”
“You mean when I go there, I’m somehow going back to the time when this place was inhabited and the tower was here?”
“You’re the one who’s been there. What do you think?”
Alec turned slowly, looking around. “It’s the same place, that’s certain. But it’s so different on the other side. There’s day and night, but no sun or stars there that you can see. The sky is always grey. And like I told you, the people must be ghosts. There was no sign of food, little color. It’s all drab and—it’s like the life has been sucked out of everything.”
“Interesting. According to what Mika told us, the dyrmagnos extracts the life essence of her victims with a kiss. If the people who lived here were sealed away with her, then she must have fed on them until there was no one left to devour.”
“And when everyone was dead? How could she live?”
“I don’t know, but it seems she did.” Thero plucked absently at his beard. “A thousand years. Perhaps she slept, like a caterpillar in a cocoon or a frog in winter mud, and woke
when the outer seal was disturbed. That’s when people started going missing. If she’s feeding again, then she’s growing stronger.”
“But all those centuries she couldn’t feed, wouldn’t she have grown weak?”
“That’s a possibility. Which means the longer it takes for us to confront her, the stronger she becomes.” He looked around, then walked to the center of the barren ground and sat down there. Taking out a familiar linen handkerchief, he held it and closed his eyes and sat motionless for some time. After a few minutes he put it away and lay down on his back with his arms outstretched.
Alec sat on a block of stone, watching over him and listening to the ravens. At last the wizard rose, dusted himself off, and motioned for Alec to join him.
“Anything?” asked Alec.
Thero turned so the soldiers couldn’t see his face and said softly, “No, and that’s interesting.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not surprised that I couldn’t feel any sign of Klia. But when I lay on the ground and tried to absorb impressions of what had been there in the past, there was nothing.”
“The tower’s gone.”
“No, I mean there was no trace of anything ever been here. It’s like someone tore the tower out of time like a rotten tooth and nothing has been here since.”
“But the town is on the other side, too. How can it be both places?”
“I don’t know, Alec. On the other plane the tower and town are both intact, perhaps just as they were the day they were sealed away. Only the tower really moved, if that’s an accurate description of what happened. There is food and water there, according to Mika. Only there, not in the town, as far as you saw?”
“That’s right. Like I said, I didn’t so much as smell a cooking fire.”
“Very strange. It’s like a memory, or a ghost, of the town exists over there, together with the ghosts of its inhabitants.”
“Where did they die, then? Here or there?”
“If that many people perished at once, there would be at least some traces of their bones among the rubble. I did a seeking for those, as well. They’re not here. Only a few animal bones, and not as many of those as you’d expect.”
“Even so, other things must have happened here since that you could feel?”
“Apparently not. The land here is just—dead. Which is significant. Something is still at work here, after all these centuries.”
“If Klia did break the seal on her side, do you think the tower would come back?”
“Perhaps, and if so, then nobody better get in the way of it.”
Alec looked around the desolate town, thinking. “Thero, if that other place is in another time, rather than another plane, then why doesn’t your magic work there and the dyrmagnos’s does?”
“An excellent question. The only thing I can think of right now is that the place is both a different plane and a different time, one that predates Third Orëska magic. In that time and place, my magic did not exist, but hers did and does.”
“But you’re not certain of that.”
“How can I be?”
Alec rubbed his forehead. “All this is giving me a headache.”
Thero sighed. “Me, too.”
Seregil and Micum waited until well after sundown, then changed into dark clothing and found a spade. The governor’s watchmen were not paid to question noble guests and gave them no more challenge than some curious stares after Micum asked them for directions to a good whorehouse.
There was a half-moon in the sky and it lit their way as they rode along the waterfront and out to the burial ground.
“I’ve never liked these places,” Micum said as they dismounted on the edge of it. “How do the souls get free if you don’t burn the bodies?”
Seregil shouldered the spade. “Apparently they do. Come on, our thief is over this way.”
“I just hope you’re right. This is my least favorite sort of work.”
At the grave they both tied vinegar-soaked cloths across their noses and mouth and Micum took charge of the spade and started digging. The sandy soil moved easily, and fortunately for them the sexton here didn’t bother to bury his charges very deep. A few feet down the stench of decay wafted up and grew stronger as Micum unearthed the shroud-wrapped body. Even the vinegar masks didn’t help much.
“There you go,” Micum grunted, climbing out of the grave. “He’s all yours from here.”
Seregil stepped gingerly down, careful not to tread on the putrid body. The handkerchief was definitely nowhere near enough under these circumstances, and he held his breath as he cut through the cheap muslin with a dagger and exposed the bloated belly of the corpse.
He stood up and caught a fresh breath. “You’d better stand back,” he warned.
Bending down again, he inserted the tip of the dagger just below the breastbone, keeping as far back as he could while doing so, and punctured the corpse. As expected, foul gases and matter shot up.
“Bilairy’s Balls, that’s vile!” Micum swore.
Seregil wasn’t about to open his mouth to agree and risk breathing in any more than he had to of the stench. As he’d hoped, however, the dead man’s belly slowly deflated as the fetid humors escaped.
With that precaution out of the way, Seregil began the equally unpleasant task of finding and cutting open the stomach. It was a nasty, slimy, noxious job, but in the end he had his reward. A soft glow was visible through the rotted viscera and he used the dagger to lift it out—it was the black opal, crosshatched with incised spells, just as Alec had described.
Wrapping it thickly in a square of chamois, he pocketed it then wiped his hands and knife on the grass. Micum reburied the body.
“That was a good night’s work,” Micum said when he was done.
“If I don’t wash my hands and face I’m going to die,” Seregil said, trying not to gag.
They walked down to the water and Seregil stripped off coat and shirt and washed his arms up to the shoulder with handfuls of wet gravel, then dunked his head in the water, heedless of the stitches. When he was reasonably sure that he’d taken care of any nastiness he squeezed the water from his hair, lay back on the gravel above the waterline, and tried not to think about anything but the stars overhead.
“Are you not going to die now?” Micum asked, scrubbing his hands in the water.
“I think so, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to eat again.”
Micum regarded him with a grin. “That hairstyle of yours reminds me of some of the rough characters we fought up in the Wolf Fang Pass years back. Remember them? They carried off that look well, but you don’t.”
Seregil flipped him a rude gesture, then accepted Micum’s hand and let him help him onto his feet.
“What about the stone?” asked Micum. “Are you going to wash it?”
“No, I’m not touching it again, after what happened to that poor bastard I just cut it from. Thero will know what to do with it. I hope.”
RHAZAT’S patience and hospitality had worn thin after Mika disappeared in a blaze of red light and force that had knocked both of them across the cave. Rhazat had been the first to recover. Pulling Klia up by her hair, she’d screamed at her, demanding to know what magic she’d used to make the child disappear.
“Illior’s love, I expect.” Klia laughed, relieved beyond measure. Either Mika had gone back to their own plane, or he was dead and beyond the dyrmagnos’s torments.
Rhazat dragged her back to the glowing stone. “Break it!” she hissed, showing her true colors at last, if not her true face. “Break it or I will have my monsters tear the child from your womb.”
“That won’t make me comply,” Klia replied, fighting down her terror at the prospect. “Kill us both now and be done with it. Stay here forever and rot!”
With a snarl of rage, the dyrmagnos summoned a single dra’gorgos, which bore Klia back to the tower and dumped her at Rhazat’s feet outside the dining room. The dyrmagnos pointed down the corridor.
“I think, my dear, that it’s time you did a bit of cooking.”
She pushed Klia, propelling her down the corridor to a door she hadn’t seen before, one that hadn’t been there when she’d searched, she was certain. Throwing it open, Rhazat shoved her in and slammed it shut behind her, leaving Klia alone in an archaic kitchen—a small, windowless room with a single table and a green fire leaping on the hearth of a huge stone fireplace. As Klia’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw that there were haunches of meat hanging from hooks in the ceiling beams. But there was something odd about them: the shapes.
Klia staggered back until she slammed into the door. The haunches were arms and legs. Sedge’s head regarded her with dead eyes from a trencher on the table.
Falling to her hands and knees, Klia vomited up everything left in her stomach, then kept retching until there was nothing but bile to come up. “Illior—Sakor—”
How could she pray with human meat stuck in her teeth?
A nasty chuckle came from the shadows of a corner. Rhazat stepped out into the unnatural light. “Would you like me to tell you who you had for breakfast, my dear?”
“No—please, no.” Klia crawled away from the mess and pulled herself up by the table.
“You’re alive and well fed. Didn’t I serve you your favorite dishes, the ones you wished to see? Wishes are powerful things.”
“Why?”
“What else was I supposed to do, send Zella into Deep Harbor with a market basket? I only eat their lives. I have no use for the bodies. But waste not, want not, eh?”
Klia stood gripping the edge of the table, rocked and sickened by this revelation.
“I’ve been simply aching to eat your life, Klia,” Rhazat said, advancing on her. “How sweet it will taste, so wonderfully tainted. However will you live with the knowledge?”
“You’ve sealed my fate, you know. And your own,” Klia gritted out. “I’ll never eat another mouthful in this place.”
Rhazat laughed merrily at that, the mask firmly back in place. “You are dramatic, and so easily gulled. Look again, Klia, at our larder.”