Bloodwalk (23 page)

“Sisters,” she whispered, focusing on the materializing image of the pale grove of oaks hidden in the forest.

Their leafy voices emanated from the water, sounding hollow and far away. Though their words were unintelligible, their tone of defiance was unmistakable.

From her pouch, Morgynn produced the Stone of Memnon and held the glossy black stone above the puddle, dipping it to brush the surface. Tiny ripples tore through the sylvan scene. Its effect on the trees was immediate, causing the branches to twist and writhe as they’d done before when confronted with the artifact.

“What do you want, blood-witch?”

She ignored their insult, admiring their tenacity and empathizing with their anger.

“A path. You three together have much control of the forest. I desire that you part the undergrowth and allow my followers to pass. East, if you please.”

They did not respond, but the sounds of a disturbance in the forest served as their answer. Morgynn watched eagerly. To her left, trees parted, roots shifted, and entangling vines and bushes pulled back, revealing a wide road of soft soil.

The leaves in the image of the grove shook and hissed as the sisters spoke.

“Our influence reaches far, but not to the other side. You must forge your own road beyond ours.”

“We shall make do,” Morgynn replied, and dismissed the image in the puddle.

Rising, she brushed mud from her red robes and discovered Talmen standing at the edge of the road, staring into the shadowy avenue that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. She touched a fingernail to her arm in a place corresponding with the dark glyph on his.

Morgynn revealed the true extent of the link she had forged into his skin and spoke, her words resoundingly loud in his mind. “Follow the path as far as it goes. The bathor will clear the rest.”

He nodded, clearly unnerved by the sudden command, then shouted to those waiting behind him.

Morgynn smiled as they marched into the Qurth. She felt the weakening pulse of her children as they moved away from her, leading her army to the gates of Brookhollow and the doorstep of the Hidden Circle.

Sodden grass lay bent and broken across the western edge of the Reach in the wake of the heavy rain still moving southward along the Qurth’s border. In the midst of the swamped plain, a solitary figure paused in her travels and gathered the ingredients of traditional magic. The ancient language of the Ghedia, the grass witches of the Shaar, sang in the air.

Mud sucked at the Ghedia’s bare feet as she circled a pot of boiling water. Floating reeds churned and tumbled on its surface. Her loose clothing rippled in the wind and beaded bracelets dangled from her wrists, clicking like tiny wind chimes as she waved her arms and hummed, working the old magic of the Shaar.

As she hummed, she traced a stick through the mud every so often, writing down what she saw in the boiling pot. Her deep voice continued the casting song of her ancestors, but her mood grew grim as understanding dawned on her.

Her Ghedia sisters had already moved on, wandering the troubled grasslands of the Reach seeking answers and signs, protecting anything sacred as well as the ancestral ground of the Shaaryans. Their auguries had become erratic of late, showing danger and threat from every direction but not revealing the source. Lesani slowed her dance and stopped, her long brown hair falling from beneath her hooded cloak, framing the worried expression on her exotic and mature Shaaryan features. The flames of the fire danced in her deep brown eyes as she gazed upon the muddy runes.

For years, she and her fellow shamans had ignored the aura of darkness around the Qurth Forest, accustomed to its presence in the background of their seeing spells. Recently, it had begun to radiate with a strange magic—magic that grew stronger by the moment and moved sluggishly, as if just awakened.

Yet all the signs pointed south, to Brookhollow.

She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips, and exhaled a long breath. Scanning the darkness and roiling mist on her left, she deliberated silently. She knew her duty, as all of the Ghedia did, but this would not be an easy decision. The Savrathans had long ago broken ties with the old magic of the Shaar and would not readily accept the assistance of those labeled heretics by the Hidden Circle.

If they still lived and had not succumbed to plague or secret foes by now, she thought.

Finding a cure for the blush had been a concentrated effort for the Ghedia lately. The runes Lesani had drawn, though, were clear: Plague, War, Twilight, Blood, and the eye-shaped symbol for Prophecy, the closest rune in the Dethek alphabet for Savras, not yet a god when the language was young.

Lesani thought of Elisandrya, one of the few hunters still friendly to the shaman sisters and acquainted with their ways. She knelt and grabbed a fistful of grass, twisting the blades together, breaking them in half and rubbing them between her palms, staining her hands green as she squeezed them. The spell of the green-fire sprang to her mind.

“If for no one else, then for young Elisandrya.”

She stamped her foot in the mud, chanting the ancient call of the grass witches. The words of the magic were older than remembered time, lost in the history of the Shaar, older than the Shoon Dynasties, and older than the Calim Desert. Her voice was an echo from an age forgotten, passed down from shaman to shaman in the great oral history of the Shaaryan tribes.

Raising her folded hands to her lips, she blew upon them, igniting them with a flickering green light. She cast the crushed grass into the boiling pot, setting the water aflame. Using a stout stick, she upturned the pot’s contents, pouring them onto the fire beneath. The flame sprang to life, whooshing upward in a blazing emerald bonfire.

Lesani stepped back from the heatless flame and began to gather her belongings, the sparse possessions of a nomadic life. The flame would reach beyond darkness and fog, beyond ruins and all obstacles, visible only to her sisters. They would return and they would follow, of this Lesani was sure. Whether they journeyed to war or a funeral, though, she could not say. The green-fire was a symbol of both.

A world of black mist and undulating fog surrounded Elisandrya, carrying winds that froze her flesh almost to the point of burning. The realm they traveled not only bore the shadows of the present—Eli glimpsed apparitions of the past, as if lurking in unknown corners. Her grasp on Quinsareth’s hand had quickly evolved into a tight hug around his waist. She could not help feeling that if she lost contact with him she might tumble away forever into the company of half-seen ghosts. She did not look down—it was enough that she felt her feet walking upon a spongy, half-real surface that flew by at ungodly speed. Through squinting eyes, she could make out a tiny patch of darkness that came nearer as they journeyed through the hidden world.

Their eyes had met once during the swift journey, each sensing the inexplicable connection they’d made, perhaps enhanced by the shadowalk. Her quiet prayer to Savras, finished in this shadowy realm, had given them both an insight they could neither control nor deny. She recognized the connection of consciousness and dream that accompanied her god’s brief and sometimes confusing visions. The shadowalk had somehow awakened that spark of faith within her that called for Savras’s wisdom and vision. Eli had turned quickly away, feeling exposed and vulnerable, but she connected again as Quin’s thoughts and feelings washed over her, a warm wind in the otherwise harsh environment.

She could see both halves of him at once in her mind. The celestial light of his heritage was overlaid by the shadow of who he was in the world, the muted gray hues of the ghostwalker. She could feel ghostly tendrils passing through them both, like connections from one spirit to another. Lost in these thoughts and emotions, she closed her eyes and pressed her face closer to Quinsareth’s chest, feeling the warmth on her cheek that hid behind his shadow and old armor.

Quin’s heart pounded in his chest. Never before had he experienced such a bond in the shadows of his road. A few fleeting times he thought he could sense another’s thoughts, but Elisandrya’s soul had flooded through him, caressing his back and shoulders, flowing down his arms and into his fingertips. Almost immediately, he wondered if she could see him the same way. When their eyes had met moments after the shadowalk began, he knew she could, they both knew.

So much of himself was secret by necessity. Being unknown and near faceless to his enemies strengthened his powers in their presence. He had left his true name far behind him, in the dying ears of the Hoarite priest who’d inducted him to the lone lifestyle of the ghostwalker. It had become a ritual to him, each night before making camp, to reiterate who he was and remember his past, lest he become lost to sword and shadow. He feared abandoning the man he was and becoming like the mindless gemstone golems he’d heard of in legends as a boy in Mulhorand. He had begun this ritual on the banks of the River of Swords, as the small temple that had accepted this strange young man burned behind him. Ever since, the thought of his true name carried the smell of smoke from that fire.

Quin refused to look at Eli, afraid of what judgment he might see in her eyes. Instead, he focused on the shadow road. They had traveled for some time, and he expected to reach Brookhollow at any moment if Eli’s prediction of a three-day journey had been correct. The shadows had grown swifter over the years as he traveled them more and more. Most times, he could complete a day’s journey in less than half the time of this journey. He was anxious to meet this High Oracle Sameska and judge for himself the nature of her prophecy.

He dreaded the action he might take, afraid that the path laid out for him might alienate this woman with whom he felt momentarily bonded. He knew he could not abide, could not accept, the prophecy or the edict it had spawned. This gave him pause, cleared his mind, and made him afraid of a mission that might wield Bedlam against people she knew. The blood of the good was demanded more vehemently than that of evil, for it was often the blood of betrayal.

The shadows thinned around them. Objects became more distinct, inertia settled in their stomachs as they slowed. Each step became truer to the laws of nature. The walls of nearby homes appeared beneath the shadowy twins. Rain fell upon them like a tide and the shadows disappeared completely.

No one witnessed their arrival, no herald or watchman, no merchant packing his wares at the day’s end. The streets were empty and still. Even the rats had sought shelter from the pounding rain, explosive thunder, and flickering lightning.

Quinsareth helped Elisandrya to her feet. The transition from shadow to gravity had unbalanced her and flipped her stomach. A flashing bolt above illuminated their faces as their eyes met.

Quin could feel her arms clinging to him. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She raised a hand to her cheek, catching her breath before answering. “I’ll be fine.”

They glanced about, taking stock of their position. The lightning showed them the curving ivory walls of the Temple of the Hidden Circle, mere blocks away. Both noticed that the storm had grown even stronger. It raged above the Qurth and it moved ever closer, a sure sign that little time remained for conversation concerning their shadowalk.

Quinsareth strode purposefully onward, splashing through the flooded streets. Elisandrya matched his stride toward the temple. They found the structure unguarded, the gates open and banging against the white walls in the icy wind.

The tall double doors at the top of the stairs stood unbarred. They opened easily to give the pair entrance to the long windowed hallway that led to the inner sanctuary.

The domed sanctuary of the temple was eerily quiet and full of dancing shadows as the lightning neared the outskirts of the city. A growing dread wracked Sameska’s senses, and she paced the perimeter of the room, stopping to pause briefly each time she passed the murals depicting the city of Jhareat. She stared at the tower in the old paintings, surrounded by burning buildings and bloody warfare. The tower remained untouched by the fires and acts of war, pointing skyward as if to torture her with her own fears.

She glanced upward warily now and then, as if expecting to find Savras in the clouded sky, looking down upon her through the glass dome above.

“Foolishness,” she told herself each time, knowing it was a commoner’s idea that the gods lived among great cities in the sky. It was small comfort, though, as she strode on weary legs through his temple.

Wild thoughts swirled in her mind, unbidden, crashing into each other and rebounding with ever more questions and doubts concerning her prophecies. The voice in which she had spoken two nights ago made her shudder each time she remembered it, feeling like a violation of her will, but at the same time it was the truest sign of her ability as the high oracle.

“Savras spoke through me. Used me as his instrument,” she said to herself over and over, but the words felt hollow. She wrung her hands almost constantly, the tactile sensation a welcome balm in a world that seemed to be slipping away with each passing moment.

The bloodstained statue of Savras had been covered with a black cloth, the body of Nivael burned in secret outside the walls of the city so as not to incite panic in the commoners. The statue stood like a black shadow of death over her shoulder, drops of blood still visible on its exposed, sandaled feet. Its image was burned in her mind and she had avoided looking at it directly since it had been obscured, but beneath the cloth she knew his eye was trained upon her.

Thus she also avoided the spells she had cast the day nightmares had begun, afraid to call upon the All-Seeing One. The screams and terror of Logfell and Targris still filled her waking moments. She had no wish to see again what could not be changed. The burning eyes of the Hoarite, as he fought viciously against the incursion at Targris, stared at her from memory, accusing in a righteous blend of light and dark. His sorcerous blade called her name as it cut and screamed, swathed in the blood of enemies she’d had no power against.