Kathryn glanced behind. Most of the crowd had shuffled in and seats were packed up to the edge of the domed roof. A majority of knights, like Kathryn herself, wore their shadowcloaks, casting vast swaths of darkness over the tiers.
Gerrod continued. “There is no law requiring the castellan to be present at the ceremonies. Most seem settled that she has taken ill. They plan on proceeding as soon as—”
His words were cut off as the deafening reverberation of the Shield Gong echoed off the roof and across the open space, silencing all in a breath. Its voice also traveled along a series of echo tunnels behind the gong, to be heard throughout all of Tashijan, above and below.
“So it begins,” Gerrod mumbled as he took his seat.
Kathryn sat straighter, tense.
The head of the Council of Masters stood from his seat to the left of Ser Henri’s old chair. Master Hesharian was as wide as he was wise, his girth swelling the brown robe of his standing. Firelight shone upon his bald pate, tattooed like Gerrod’s own. He bore eleven disciplines, second only to Gerrod in number.
His voice boomed across the hall, carried upon the natural acoustics of the amphitheater and accentuated by the Graces smoking from the Hearthstone pit. “We are gathered here where ancient kings once stood to carry on the traditions of Tashijan, to raise high one of our own to lead us.”
Murmurs of excitement met his words.
“We stand upon the cusp between the old and the new, the past and the future. As throughout time, stones have been cast and counted.” He nodded to the circle of seats on the lowest level, the Council of Masters, who had tallied the ballots. “And a new warden will rise this night!”
Clapping met his words. Calls for a name were raised as was tradition and spread throughout the galleries. Master Hesharian simply stood, bathed in the cheering and chanting. Finally he raised an arm, and the swell died down.
“A name you ask for! A name you will hear!” He raised his other arm high. “Stand and greet your new warden.”
As one, the crowd gained their feet. Kathryn did so reluctantly.
Master Hesharian searched the tiers, though clearly he had to know where the victor sat. He pointed an arm. “There stands the one cast in stone by your own hands! Warden Argent ser Fields!”
Cheers erupted before the announcement was past Hesharian’s lips. Argent’s name was shouted and chanted. And a few among the crowd, those already into their cups, called out, “One Eye! One Eye! One Eye . . .”
Flogged by the pounding enthusiasm of his brethren, Argent ser Fields climbed down out of the knights’ tiers and past the masters’ levels to finally reach the floor, greeted by hand and a kiss upon each cheek by Master Hesharian. He was led to the center chair. He acknowledged the warm reception humbly and with a generous smile.
Argent ser Fields was two decades older than Kathryn, but he could pass for her younger brother. His deep auburn hair, worn long to the shoulder, bore not a hint of gray. And age had done nothing to his strength or skill. For as long as Kathryn had been at Tashijan, he had not been bested at swords or daggers. But that was only half the man. His face was hard, but more often than not, softened by good humor. He was known to be generous with his well wishes, yet justly firm in rebuke when affronted. As such, he had earned the respect of all, master and knight alike.
The only blemish to his striking figure was the patch worn over his left eye, a small plate of bone taken from the skull of a raving hinter-king, the same fiend who had blinded him during tortures meant to loosen the knight’s tongue. The flaming poker had taken the sight from his eye, but it never weakened his will. Freeing himself, he eventually slew the king and opened the way for victory during the Bramblebrier Campaign.
Kathryn stared at him, wondering if this same hero could truly be the head of the Fiery Cross, Ser Henri’s murderer. She began to wonder if Castellan Mirra was mistaken. Just this morning, Kathryn herself had been planning to cast a white stone in his favor.
Argent ser Fields raised a hand to quiet the crowd, but they were slow to respond. He kept his arm raised, patient, still smiling. Finally the crowd broke to his will, and quiet spread over the hall.
Argent stood straighter, lowering his arm. His smile faded to a more serious and austere countenance. “I accept this mantle with a heavy heart. For it is tragedy that brought me to stand before you, opened this seat that I must take. But take it I will!”
Clapping met his words, but he waved for silence.
“Troubled times face Tashijan, the Nine Lands, and all of Myrillia. Strange and dire tidings rise both from our neighbors and from afar. Rumors of skirmishes and raids along the fringes of the hinterlands. A surge in the practice of Dark Graces. And now one of the Hundred slain in the south.”
Argent shook his head. “We stand at a moment in history like no other. And Tashijan must be the beacon that rallies all. We must be at our strongest, at our most united. We will be the light to lead the way! The flame in the darkness!”
More clapping and cheers met his words. It was what they all wanted to hear, an end of the uncertainty, a firm path to follow.
Still, for Kathryn, those same words trailed an icy path through her: a light to lead the way . . . the flame in the darkness . The imagery was too strong to be mere chance. Were they hints of his ties to the Fiery Cross?
She noted Gerrod glancing back at her. The same worries had not escaped him.
Argent continued, booming over the clapping, “Tashijan will be a new beacon to the future! We cannot, will not fail!”
The crowd stamped boots and pulled swords. Argent’s name was shouted to the roof. He settled back to the seat, hands on the granite armrests. He waited for the crowd to tire itself.
Gerrod twisted toward her. She leaned in closer. “He has won them surely,” Gerrod said. “Both heart and mind. Even if what Castellan Mirra stated is true, there may be nothing we can do about it. It may be too late.”
Kathryn refused to accept that. She stared down at the man sitting in Ser Henri’s seat. Around her, the crowd slowly settled.
Argent remained seated, but he spoke again. “It seems there is an order of duty required of all new wardens. The naming of a new castellan to serve on my right side.”
There was a stirring of surprise through the Council of Masters. Such an important decision was usually made a few days after the Naming Ceremony.
Argent stood again. “We dare not delay. As the chair to my right is currently unoccupied, we should fill it this night, so we can be united from this day forward.”
Kathryn fought a sneer, struggling for a dispassionate expression. She searched the ring of masters. It was tradition for one of the Council to be picked. She wondered which had plied Argent enough to gain this coveted seat. Even Master Hesharian stirred his bulk uneasily. Though he already occupied the seat to Argent’s left, the right held more power.
Argent stared at the empty castellan’s seat for a long moment. “As we face a new time, it is time for a bold move on this first day of my service to Tashijan. We must not be blinded and ruled by the past and its conventions.”
He turned from the chair and faced the Council of Masters and its many hopeful faces. “If we are to be a beacon in the dark days ahead, let us look to a new path to the future.” His eyes drifted upward, past the ring of masters.
Kathryn tensed. What new treachery was afoot?
Argent’s eyes settled, turning her blood to ice. “I name my right hand this night. Rise and join me, my new castellan—Kathryn ser Vail!”
A hushed shock spread through the gallery. Kathryn felt herself falling back into her seat, but Perryl’s hand clutched her elbow, holding her steady.
“I don’t understand,” he whispered as tentative clapping arose and grew firmer. Her name was called out . . . then again and again.
She glanced down at Gerrod. His armored face was unreadable, but his eyes were bright with shock and worry.
She stared back toward the floor. Argent fixed
her with a steely, one-eyed stare. There was no enmity there, only open invitation. He lifted his arm and beckoned.
“You must go,” Perryl urged at her shoulder.
Around her, others added the same encouragement, but more exuberantly. Kathryn found herself half-carried down the aisle to the stairs. Perryl followed, sheltering her as best he could. But once they reached the steps, she was on her own.
On numb legs, she mounted the stairs and began the long descent toward the floor. Her welcome among the master’s level was polite, but not nearly as enthusiastic. The castellan position was always filled by one of their members. She felt like some thief slipping through them.
But for the moment, they were the least of her concern. She reached the central floor. She had stood here only twice before: first when she had been granted her cloak and sword, then when she had given testimony against Tylar.
This final memory gave her pause. Did any of this have to do with Tylar, with her connection to him?
Before she could ponder it further, Argent crossed and grasped her hand in his. He leaned in close as if to kiss her, but he merely whispered, “Welcome, Kathryn . . . or should I say, Castellan Vail. It seems we have much to discuss.”
He led her to the seat that neighbored his, still holding her hand. Once in position, he raised their joined arms to the roar of the gathering. She searched for her friends—Perryl and Gerrod. They were lost in the masses. She was alone.
Finally, he allowed her arm to drop, giving her hand a final squeeze. She felt something hard between their palms, something he held. It was left in her grip as his hand slipped from hers.
She stared down at it. It was a balloting stone. A black balloting stone.
Kathryn knew it was the same one she had cast earlier. But in the firelight, she noticed it had been defaced. Upon its dark surface was etched a perfect circle, bisected by two perpendicular lines, all painted a flaming crimson.
The symbol of the Fiery Cross.
7
FATHOM
“WE’RE BEING HUNTED.”
“Have you spotted sails?” Tylar asked as he hurried after Rogger up the ladder to the open deck. It was the fourth ship they’d ridden since leaving the Summering Isles—from a deepwhaler, to a sea barge, to a limping frigate—only one step ahead of their pursuers. They’d been three days aboard the Grim Wash, a wavecrasher out of Tempest Sound.
“Not a ship,” Rogger answered as he shoved through the hatch out to the stern castle of the ship.
“What do you mean?” Tylar asked, climbing after him.
Rogger didn’t answer as he led the way to the starboard rail. Tylar craned around. The wavecrasher’s crew scrambled in the rigging, working sail lines. The black-skinned captain of the Grim Wash stood by the great wheel, flanked by a pair of steersmen at the lesser wheels. All their faces were etched in stern lines.
“Haul your arses, ya blooding bastards!” the chief mate screamed across the middeck, rousing the sailors to a quicker pace.
“What’s happening?” Tylar asked.
“See for yourself.” Rogger pointed an arm out toward the empty seas behind the ship.
Tylar shaded his eyes against the achingly blue sky. Clouds scudded in vague smudges. Sunlight glared off the rolling seas. The waters of the Meerashe Deep lay empty. “I don’t understand what—”
Then he saw it. Words died as horror iced through him.
A wide wake surged toward them, a V-shaped churn of white water, cutting through the blue swells like a sword through a sow’s belly. It was still a full reach away, but it was rapidly closing the distance. A massive pale form hummocked up momentarily, breaching between the arms of the wake, corpse bright against the blue seas. Its surface flailed with fleshy appendages and tentacles. Then it was gone again, rolling below, leaving only the wake of its passage as it flowed below the surface.
“A miiodon,” Tylar gasped out at the impossibility.
“Jelly shark,” Rogger agreed, using the more common name.
“But they don’t hunt these cold waters.” From all Tylar had been taught, miiodons lived only in the equatorial seas, below even the Summering Isles. “What’s one doing all the way up here?”
“Maybe you’d best jump in and ask ’im,” Rogger said, tugging at his beard.
Tylar felt the deck buck slightly as the wavecrasher’s speed increased. New sails snapped into the steady breeze. He watched the crew’s frantic efforts, their eyes tight with fear. Their only hope lay in outrunning the beast. The Grim Wash was not outfitted with the Chilldaldrii ice harpoons necessary to defend against such an attack. The beast would tear the ship apart, snatching free what bits of flesh it could glean with its poisoned tentacles.
“She’s diving deep!” a cry called from the crow’s nest atop the center mast.
“Below!” shouted Captain Grayl, a black-skinned Eighth-lander whose shipping-guild tattoos were bright crimson on the nape of his bulging neck. The crew obeyed their captain without hesitation, sliding down ropes and leaping to the deck. Hatches crashed open as the evacuation commenced.
The captain waved off his two steersmen. “I’ll man the wheel. Try to keep her in the wind as long as possible.”
Rogger tugged Tylar toward the open hatch, but Tylar shook free of the old thief’s grip and marched toward Captain Grayl.
“What are you doing?” Rogger asked, heeling after Tylar.
The captain noted them. “Get below!” he shouted.
“You’ll need someone to guard your back,” Tylar said, sliding free the sword he had stolen from Darjon ser Hightower.
Grayl eyed the sword, then grunted. “It’s your hide.”
Rogger stepped to Tylar’s other side and nodded to the sword. “That’ll do you little good against a jelly shark. But what about that smoky beastie of yours? Mayhap it could defend the boat.”
Tylar had already guessed that this was the reason Rogger had called him out on deck. He fingered the loose shirt that covered the black palm print centered on his chest. He sensed the savage beast lurking behind the stain. Since their escape, he had not dared attempt to call forth the black daemon . . . the dred ghawl.
Still he balked. On every level of his being, he feared what dwelled inside him. He remembered the crush of his fist under the torturer’s hammer, the pain as his body broke apart, crippling once again. But that was not the worst. He also sensed the bloodlust, savagery, and raw hostility in the daemon, along with a foreignness to this world that felt deeply wrong, an affront to the very existence of wind and stone, blood and flesh. And while connected by the dark umbilicus that tied palm print to beast, Tylar had felt himself drawn into that wrongness.
He was loath to feel it again . . . even if it meant his own death.
Past the ship’s stern, the waters remained empty. Tylar was not deluded enough to believe the miiodon had fled. It had simply dived deep, tight on the trail of its quarry, preparing to launch its dramatic attack.
At the great wheel, the captain grumbled, “I’d give my left stone right now for an ice harpoon.”
Rogger shook his head. “You’d have a hard time making that deal. One stone doesn’t sell as well as it used to. You’d probably have to give them a matched pair.”
“Aye, I’d if I still had the other,” the captain bantered grimly, one eye on the seas behind them, one on the sail. “My first wife still has it in a glass jar on her mantel.”
“That’s why I always stick to sell-wenches,” Rogger said. “While they may lighten one’s pocket, they take little else.” The thief kept his stare fixed on Tylar, awaiting his decision.
Tylar took a deep breath. It wasn’t only his life in danger. Belowdecks hid an entire ship’s crew, with families in ports scattered across the Nine Lands.
“How . . . ?” Tylar had to clear his throat. “How do I loose the daemon? I don’t have a hammer handy.”
Rogger kept his voice low. “I wager it takes only a single broken bone to unlock the cage that holds the
beast. Like a snapped finger. It’ll break free on its own from there.”
Tylar watched the seas. Break free on its own . . .
“Here it comes!” the captain shouted.
Beyond the ship’s stern, a flurry of bubbles preceded the miiodon, boiling up from below as if a deep-sea volcano had opened on the ocean floor. Then it appeared, shooting straight out of the depths.
The miiodon’s roiling tentacles had fused, narrowing its form to a sleek arrow almost half the size of the Grim Wash itself. As its bulk cleared the waters, the mass of tentacles unbraided from its streamlined form and billowed out around it. Tylar had witnessed fire-sky displays exploding above nighttime festivals. This was the same—only instead of fire and lights erupting, here exploded a horror of flesh and poison.
A plume of water showered the deck as the creature sailed over the stern masts. A trailing tentacle, its footpad, struck the mast’s sailcloth. Poison burned through, allowing it to reach the mast’s wooden pole. It latched on and used this toehold to bring its bulk crashing into the middecks.
The sudden weight drove the boat deep into the waves. Seawater sloshed across all decks. Screams rose from below, echoing up through the planks. The center mast cracked with a thunderclap and went toppling sideways, a tangle of sailcloth and ropes.
Tylar fought to hold himself upright by gripping one of the lesser wheels. The captain hugged the central great wheel and kept the ship from swamping completely. It was a skilled effort. The Grim Wash bobbed back up, lolling back and forth.
But the boat could not escape its new passenger.
The miiodon lay spilled across the middle of the ship, filling the space between the stern and forecastle. It was a forest of snaking tentacles around a central mound of pale, watery flesh. A pair of black globular eyes, as large as pumpkins, gazed from deep within the translucent mass, protectively buried in the center.
Tylar felt those eyes gazing toward the trio of men. Tentacles wormed in their direction. Easy meat.
“Below!” Grayl bellowed. He waved them toward the hatch in the stern castle.