Blackveil

  HAURRIS

  Once more in Tower of the Heavens, Alton carefully placed Merdigen’s tempes stone back on its pedestal. Immediately the mage materialized to life beside him.

  “Ah,” Merdigen said. “Very good to be home, and unscathed.” He strolled about, swinging his arms and stretching.

  Perhaps Merdigen had returned unscathed, but Alton had been battered by his encounter with the creature in Tower of the Earth. Somehow the creature had reached through his shields and scored claw marks on his chest, and the tussle had left him banged up and bruised. Estral’s care and concern had taken his mind off his hurts for a time, but now he was stiff and sore.

  “Do you want me to take Haurris’ stone out?” he asked.

  Merdigen did not reply. He was gazing up toward the tower ceiling.

  “What is it?” Alton asked.

  “Do you notice anything different in here?”

  Alton glanced around. Now that Merdigen mentioned it, something did seem different, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He gazed upward like Merdigen. Daylight filtered through the hole above, and then it hit him.

  “That hole,” he said. “Is it smaller?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Merdigen replied. “Not only that, but other damage appears to be mending.”

  It was true. The tower chamber looked tidier, as if all the minor debris and stone dust that Alton hadn’t yet touched had been cleaned up. The major damage remained—the toppled column, other chunks of masonry on the floor.

  “How?” Alton demanded.

  “The guardians are happier,” Merdigen replied. “In harmony and cadence. Who do you think put them in that state?”

  “Estral,” Alton murmured, his surge of joy tempered with slight jealousy that it was not his own doing. It was everything he had been working for—to fix the D’Yer Wall—and yet she succeeded where he had not. He wondered if her music had affected the damage at the breach, too. He’d have to go back and take a closer look.

  “You must tell her to keep singing and playing the song of the guardians,” Merdigen said, “to keep reversing the damage. It won’t fix the breach itself, but it can mend what is still standing.”

  “What about that line of music from the book of Theanduris ?”

  “She must work on that too. It may be what fixes the breach.”

  Alton was ready to run out of the tower right then to grab Estral, hug her, and tell her.

  “However,” Merdigen continued, “even if the wall is made secure again, there is another problem Theanduris apparently overlooked.”

  Alton stilled, heart pounding. “The creature,” he said.

  “Yes,” Merdigen replied. “Eletians are free to travel through the towers. I would conjecture this was because the Eletians were staunch allies during the Long War and they wanted to be able to travel forth into what was once Argenthyne. Or they wanted an escape route for the Sleepers should they awaken. Perhaps both. Just theories, mind you.”

  Alton found a chair and slumped into it. “ ’Ware the Sleeper.’ That’s what Haurris said. That creature was an Eletian Sleeper, wasn’t it? How did it get to be that way?”

  “Again, theories. I can tell you Sleepers are Eletians who take a rest from their unending lives. They become part of the forest, a grove of them tended by those still wakeful. I can only guess Blackveil’s influence penetrated the grove, corrupted this Sleeper of Argenthyne.”

  “How many?” Alton asked, his heartbeat quickening again. “There must be more than one. How many do you suppose are still there?”

  Merdigen shrugged. “Hard to say. Hundreds, thousands. The largest grove would have been at Castle Argenthyne.”

  “Oh, gods,” Alton said, nearly overcome by the image of thousands of corrupted Sleepers descending on Tower of the Heavens. “An army of those things and they can pass through the towers . . .”

  “Impossible to know if they’ve all been turned, or if they can even be awakened like the one in Haurris’ tower. Let us see if we can get more from Haurris.”

  With a sense of foreboding, Alton returned to the center of the chamber and gingerly removed Haurris’ tempes stone from his saddlebag and cushioning blanket. The stone had been chipped and cracked when the creature knocked it from his hands. The color of the tourmaline remained muddy, dead.

  Alton nested the blanket next to the pedestal and placed the stone on it. Haurris did not appear at first, but after some anxious moments, his pale form materialized, his image distorted, fractured.

  “ ’Ware the Sleeper,” he intoned.

  “Haurris,” Merdigen said standing in front of him. “Haurris, can you hear me? See me?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Tower of the Heavens,” Merdigen replied.

  “I am gone, I am gone . . .”

  “Look at me, Haurris, it’s me, Merdigen.”

  “Bridges. I destroyed bridges. I am sorry. Strengthened tower to protect ...” Haurris did not speak directly to Merdigen, but only from the dimmest edge of awareness, a ghost.

  “You did well, Haurris,” Merdigen said. “The Sleeper is dead.”

  “Sleeper . . . Sleeper . . .”

  “How did it come to your tower?”

  “She asked me.”

  “She who?” Merdigen demanded.

  “Help them. She asked me . . .”

  “Haurris,” Merdigen coaxed. “Who? What did she ask you?”

  Haurris’s figure blurred, then redefined itself. “Help them. The queen, she asked.”

  “Queen?” Alton interjected. “What queen?”

  Merdigen gestured at him to remain silent, but Haurris turned his head to stare at Alton. His eyes were dark hollows, his cheeks sunken like a corpse’s. His robes hung tattered and frayed from his shoulders. His image flickered out, and after several breathless moments of fearing they’d lost him altogether, he reappeared.

  “The Queen of Argenthyne,” Haurris said, his voice distant.

  “Laurelyn,” Merdigen whispered.

  “I failed. I . . .”

  Haurris vanished again, and a longer period passed before his faint image reappeared. Like a dying candle flame, it sputtered and faded.

  “... woke the Sleeper. Tried to . . . am sorry. Found me . . . tried to trap. Inside.”

  The flame that was Haurris died. He did not reappear and a crack resounded through the chamber. His tempes stone split in half, the tourmaline blackened.

  Merdigen sighed, his shoulders sagging. “I’m sorry, too, old friend.”

  Alton covered the halves of Haurris’ tempes stone with the blanket, then stood. “The Queen of Argenthyne? Laurelyn? How did she talk to him?”

  “We shall probably never know,” Merdigen replied.

  “Haurris was awake and corporeal longer than the rest of us, but it does not add up, for Laurelyn was lost when Mornhavon took Castle Argenthyne so very long ago.”

  “He seemed to think she told him to help with the Sleepers. He must have awakened the one somehow.”

  “But he was not able to leave the tower,” Merdigen said. “None of us were, even when we were corporeal.”

  “You’ve left the tower plenty of times,” Alton reminded him. “When you went looking for the mages on the other side of the breach, or to talk with Booreemadhe and the others in their towers.”

  “But—”

  “And I took you out of your tower to go to Haurris’.”

  A mortified expression crept over Merdigen’s face at the last. “Yes, you did, but the other times, I did not leave the tower in the conventional sense and my tempes stone remained here. I will have to think on what may have happened, but we probably will never know the how or what of it with Haurris gone. What matters most is that the influence of Blackveil has corrupted Argenthyne’s Sleepers, and if they are awakened . . . well, we have seen the result.”

  Alton shuddered, remembering the spidery limbed creature leaping on him.

  “They can pass through the towers, my tower,” Merdig
en continued. “And I no longer possess the magic to trap them as Haurris did.”

  “Karigan is in Blackveil, with Yates and Lynx and the Eletians,” Alton said, thinking that if even one of those creatures was abroad in the forest, it made their expedition all the more perilous.

  “Yes.” Merdigen stroked his beard. “It makes me wonder ...”

  “What?”

  “It makes me wonder why it was so important for the Eletians to go in there at this time. I hope they were not planning to awaken the Sleepers.”

  Alton felt the blood drain from his face, and even Merdigen looked pale.

  “My boy,” Merdigen said, “we must find a way to fortify the towers.”

  THE QUEEN’S RIDERS

  “The first thing I must do is see that the king is informed,” Alton told Merdigen. He swung away and strode toward the wall.

  “Where are you going?” Merdigen asked.

  “To get Dale ready to ride out.”

  “Did you not tell me there was one with mind sense among the Riders you’ve stationed in the towers?”

  Alton’s cheeks warmed. In all the excitement over finding out the truth about Haurris’ tower, he’d forgotten about the other Riders. Mind sense? He must mean Trace.

  “Right. I’ve sent her to Tower of the Ice.” He had taken two more steps toward the wall when Merdigen loudly cleared his throat.

  “Now what?” Alton demanded.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To send Dale to Tower of the Ice to inform Trace to—”

  “You are not thinking, my boy,” Merdigen said. “I can contact Itharos much more quickly myself.”

  Alton brushed his fingers through his hair and gave Merdigen a cockeyed smile. “I keep forgetting. Trace may not have reached Tower of the Ice yet.”

  “Tell me exactly what you’d like your message to the king to say, and I shall relay it to Itharos, who will in turn pass it on to Trace as soon as she arrives.”

  Alton did, and when Merdigen vanished, he left the tower thinking that centuries ago, when the Green Riders had been at full capacity, there must have been a number of Riders who could speak mind to mind like Trace and Connly, and who enabled messages to be conveyed almost instantly. In that long-ago time Riders wouldn’t have had to saddle up and rush off in a cloud of dust.

  Depending on the pace Trace had set, it could be a day or two before she reached Tower of the Ice, and waiting to hear confirmation that his message was received was going to feel like years, no matter that it was being delivered at the speed of thought.

  Instead of waiting around and fretting, Alton left the tower to share his and Merdigen’s revelations about Haurris and the Sleeper with Dale, Estral, and Captain Wallace. Estral was more determined than ever to work out the measure of music in the Silverwood book, and he knew enough not to get in her way when she ran off to fetch her lute.

  “I hope the king will send us more troops,” Captain Wallace told Alton. “Especially now that we know each tower is a potential passage to these Sleepers. I haven’t the manpower here to watch the breach and all ten towers.”

  “Nine,” Alton said. “Haurris left defenses around Tower of the Earth that should keep any Sleepers out, or at least trap them.”

  “Do you want to rely solely on the tricks of some old, dead mage?”

  “Point taken,” Alton replied. “Tell me what you need, and I’ll put in a request.”

  Alton also took time to inspect the cracks in the wall radiating from the breach to see if Estral’s music really was having an effect. Since the summer he’d been taking periodic measurements and recording changes in his journal. He discovered incremental improvements—the cracks appeared to be diminishing, if only minutely. The changes were not dramatic, but were, all the same, miraculous.

  When he returned to the tower encampment, he searched for Estral, eventually finding her in the dining tent. To the amusement of all, he lifted her off her feet and twirled her around and kissed her soundly.

  “What was that for?” Estral asked when her feet were again on the ground. He liked that he’d made her blush.

  “You are amazing,” he said.

  She gave him a coy smile. “You’re only just noticing?”

  He laughed and twirled her around again. Later on he would show her just how amazing he thought she was—without the audience. But first he wanted to check on the tower to see if Merdigen had heard back from Itharos about Trace.

  When he entered Tower of the Heavens, he found not only Merdigen awaiting him, but Itharos, too. The two broke off some deep discussion when he arrived.

  “I take it Trace has arrived at Tower of the Ice?” Alton asked.

  Itharos bowed with a flourish of his cloak. “To my delight, she has indeed arrived, and I conveyed your most distressing message.”

  “And?”

  The mages glanced at one another, then back at Alton.

  “Trace has some news of her own,” Merdigen replied. “We suggest first that you have Rider Littlepage join us, and Estral Andovian as well.”

  Neither Merdigen nor Itharos offered any hint of the nature of the news, but it must have been of great import if they wanted Dale and Estral present to receive it, too. Quickly he returned to the dining tent and found Estral, and together they searched for Dale, finally locating her at the pickets, running a currycomb over Karigan’s Condor.

  “I promised I’d look after him,” she said, patting the gelding’s neck.

  Condor nudged Dale’s shoulder to encourage her to continue, and she chuckled.

  “How is he?” Alton asked. It was not a casual question. Messenger horses possessed an uncanny sense of knowing when their Riders were in trouble, and Condor, Lynx’s Owl, and Yates’ Phoebe had been edgy since their Riders entered the forest.

  Dale settled her hand on Condor’s withers. “Fretful,” she replied thoughtfully. “Phoebe, too. More than they were. Owl seems much the same.”

  As if to punctuate her observation, Phoebe started digging her hoof at the ground. A sizeable trench had begun to develop there, evidence of her anxiety.

  The three humans, in turn, fell into an uneasy silence. What, Alton wondered, and not for the first time, was going on with the company? How did the Riders fare? He was seized by another flash of regret at how poorly he and Karigan had parted. He shook himself. Whatever was happening on the other side of the wall was beyond his control, and he had problems of his own to contend with.

  “Right,” he said. “We are all needed at the tower.”

  “That sounds dire,” Dale replied.

  “Trace reached Tower of the Ice and has some news for us.”

  “Don’t worry,” she told the horse. “I’ll be back to finish.”

  He swished his tail as if to say she had better be.

  “What is it about?” Dale asked as they set off.

  “I don’t know,” Alton replied. “They wouldn’t say until I got you two.”

  All three of them picked up their pace, which carried them rapidly across the encampment and into the tower.

  “This must be the esteemed Estral Andovian,” Itharos said when they entered the tower chamber. “I am honored to meet you, my lady.” He bowed.

  “Estral, meet Itharos of Tower of the Ice,” Dale said.

  “It is good to see you as well, Rider Littlepage,” Itharos said. “All three of you. In fact, a party would—”

  “Not now,” Merdigen interrupted, an irritable counterpoint to Itharos’ flamboyance. “Rider Burns has received some news that you must hear.”

  “Well?” Alton said.

  “I’m not going to tell you,” Merdigen replied. “There is a way you can communicate with Rider Burns directly, as the wallkeepers once did. Itharos and I assume it will work anyway. It’s been a while since it was last done . . .”

  “There’s a way to do this and you didn’t tell me?” Alton demanded.

  “Didn’t seem necessary since you’ve never had anyone stationed in
the other towers before.”

  Alton wondered fleetingly what other interesting details Merdigen had chosen not to reveal.

  “You must all go to the center of the chamber and place your hands on the tempes stone,” Merdigen instructed. “Itharos and I will do the rest.”

  Alton wasted no time and Estral and Dale were right behind him. They placed their hands on the tempes stone. At first nothing changed in the grassy plains at the center of Tower of the Heavens. Then Merdigen and Itharos, who stood nearby, vanished. Silvery runes came to life in the air, pulsating with light, circling them.

  Alton heard Estral’s sharp intake of breath beside him. “Don’t break contact with the stone,” he told her.

  “I won’t.”

  The runes merged and shimmered until a human form materialized, Trace suspended above the ground, a corona of green light flashing around her, the green of tourmaline.

  “There you are,” she said, her voice sounding as if she were right there with them. “Thank the gods.”

  “Trace?” Alton said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes, yes I can. I can see all three of you, too.”

  “Merdigen says you have something to tell us.”

  “I do, though it wasn’t easy to get it out of Connly. I don’t think he wanted to worry me—us—but when I contacted him to pass on your news about the Sleeper to Captain Mapstone and King Zachary, I could tell something was wrong.”

  “And?” Alton pushed.

  Trace’s shoulders sagged. “When I finally got him to talk, I found out ... I found out there was another assassination attempt on King Zachary, and that this one may yet prove successful.”

  “No . . .” Dale murmured.

  Estral’s free hand found Alton’s.

  Trace explained how the assassin used an arrow tainted with poison and successfully impaled the king, and how Ben tried to heal him but was in turn overcome.

  “The king has survived thus far,” Trace said. “And each day buys more hope, but Connly does not know how much of the truth he’s getting from those closest to the king.”

  “It isn’t like the captain to hide the truth from her Riders,” Dale said.