Sunset of Lantonne (46 page)

Bracing himself for another shock like when he had attempted to study Dorralt, Therec cast his simple magical detection spell, shifting his vision to view auras. What he saw surprised him even more than Dorralt…because he saw nothing. There was nothing at all on the staff. Any magic there was hidden as well as the hiding place where it had rested. He had never encountered any methods for hiding magic in the past, making it all the more intriguing.

Therec shifted his vision back to normal and stared in confusion at the staff. Either Dorus had managed to deceive him in death, or he was missing something that had been cleverly hidden. Another possibility was that both the king and Dorus were entirely mistaken about the staff’s value.

Setting aside the staff, he dug through the drawers of the desk until he found a piece of chalk. Using that, he traced a series of symbols on the floor in a spot he knew could be easily covered with the room’s rug if he was disturbed. The large ring of Turessian rune-words soon covered a ten-foot section of stone, and Therec finished the last symbol with barely a nub of chalk left between the tips of his fingers.

Therec got up from the floor and studied the symbols for several more minutes, searching for any mistakes. He found several minor ones and touched them up with the remnants of the chalk. Once he was satisfied, he placed the staff at the center of the ring, situated such that many of the jagged symbols pointed in at it.

“Show me the truth of the item before me,” he said aloud, putting a hand over the ring of symbols. Then, tracing the symbols in the air as he poured in magic from the spirits, he focused on the staff and waited for hints about what he might be looking at.

Normally, the enchantment would give Therec a glimpse of the magical patterns of the item or a momentary vision of the item’s last owner. These tended to be enough to determine the purpose or powers of a magical item, given a little more research. This time, nothing happened as the spell completed. It was as though the magic fell apart around him. It was not that he had cast it wrong, but the power went somewhere else, flowing from him away into nothingness.

Therec stood there, hand over the staff, trying to figure out what to do next. Then, without warning, the magic he had channeled washed back over him and knocked him backwards. His consciousness seemed to collapse in on itself, forcibly pushing him toward a state of near-sleep.

Blinking, Therec found himself standing in the middle of a snow-covered expanse, though he felt no cold. The world seemed to waver and fade in and out, with details such as trees or mountains in the distance popping into existence as though brought into form as an afterthought.

He turned slightly in place and found he stood alongside a group of five people, all wearing heavy winter clothing in grey or black, complete with thick hoods that covered their heads. Standing behind them, he could see nothing of who they might be, other than the person in the lead held the very staff he had just tried to identify.

Therec knew the vision could end at any instant and concentrated on taking in as much detail as he could manage. The staff and its bearer were his primary focus. Anything else, he would try to make a note of, but could not concern himself too much.

The staff was clearly newer in the vision, the wood polished and undamaged. Brass fittings covered both ends of the staff, engraved with rune-words that Therec could not read, though they did appear to be vaguely Turessian. Like the markings on the walls below Lantonne, these were older than any he had read before and were in a dialect that would take more time to read than he likely had available to him. A simple leather wrap around the grip was the only other adornment he could see on the staff, other than faintly-etched words down the wood.

Having little he could see of the people, Therec tried to walk around them to see better. He had always been taught to minimize interaction when viewing or the spell would likely end. To his surprise, he was able to walk through the snow without having to concentrate on maintaining his spell, as if the staff wanted him to see this.

The first person of the group Therec could see appeared bulky under their heavy cloak. He had barely gotten halfway around that person before he could see it was a woman, though some among the Turessians would hardly call her a “person.” A short muzzle and white fur with black spots marked her unquestionably as a wildling, which would explain the odd fit to her clothing. The fur pattern identified her as a snow leopard from what Therec could see, though he concerned himself very little with the unenlightened races. Once he knew to look, he easily spotted her long tail hanging out below the bottom of her cloak, practically disappearing into the snow. The woman’s pale blue eyes watched the person with the staff unblinkingly.

Continuing around the group—none of whom seemed to notice Therec—he found the largest member of the group to be a stocky orcish man. Huge even by orcish standards, his wide shoulders barely fit into the heavy leather armor Therec could see through the open front of his cloak. What caught Therec’s attention about him was not his size but the fact that he had Turessian markings of rank on his face.

“There are no records of non-humans being allowed to study. Who would mark an unenlightened?” mused Therec, trying to remember as much as he could about the orc. Whoever he was, Therec wanted to find out more when the vision ended. He might have to remember these details until he returned to Turessi and had access to the temple’s library again.

On a whim, Therec gave the wildling woman another look and realized she also had rank tattoos. Neither of these two were marked as being from a clan Therec knew, but he decided that was not surprising, since no modern clan would have accepted them as anything but slaves. Only humans could earn the markings that told of great wisdom and experience. These two would have been executed on sight if they walked into any Turessian camp.

Coming to the front of the group, Therec got a look at the man holding the staff. He stared in disbelief, having seen artistic renderings he believed to be bad guesses at who he now looked at. There were enough details they got right that he recognized the man.

Turess. The founder of a nation.

He was of average build, though his face told of years spent struggling against weather and other adversity. Deep worry lines marred his hard face, despite Therec gauging him as no more than forty years. Unlike the people Therec had known from Turessi, the actual Turess had somewhat long hair that reached his shoulders…a style that would have been considered vain by modern standards.

Therec walked a full circle around Turess, taking in every minute detail.. Aside from his black winter clothing, he wore battered old brown boots and a black mantle that covered him like a jacket, hanging low enough that Therec had initially thought it to be a cloak. Despite how cold Therec guessed the weather to be, Turess wore the top of his shirt open to expose a coin that had been fitted to a necklace, beside several mismatched feathers. His hands were even bare, revealing a matching set of worn gold rings, one on each hand. Never had Therec seen any jewelry depicted in art of the man.

Leaning closer, Therec studied the necklace and the rings, but the wavering of the vision made fine details difficult to make out. He could be sure the items had inscriptions, though he could not see them clearly enough.

Turess’s clothing bore all the signs of a long journey. Mud coated his robes and boots in wide, dry spatters and much of his clothing had been torn or worn threadbare. Like Therec, Turess normally appeared in pictures as clean-shaven, but his face was covered with stubble, something that most Turessian men would not have allowed.

On a second glance, Therec realized Turess was afraid. Whatever was coming had the idol of a nation terrified, though he hid it reasonably well. He was staring straight through Therec to point farther off in the snow as though waiting for something that he dreaded.

The one detail about the man Therec had always seen depicted that was most noticeably different were Turess’s rank markings. Compared to Therec’s own tattoos or even those of the orc and wildling, the man’s face was sparsely marked. The few thin symbols that ran from above his brows to his cheekbones marked him as a married man and a reasonably educated, but nothing else Therec could recognize. In every depiction Therec had seen, Turess was always shown with the markings of a master of all magic and with symbols of every known clan, but this man had none of that.

“My master, when did you have time to have a wife while conquering the known world?” Therec asked Turess, smiling at the idea that the man could not hear him. “The history books said you died alone. How much do we not know about you?”

The wildling woman took a step forward and placed a hand on Turess’s arm, shocking Therec. Beyond the Turessian dislike of public contact, having a slave touch Turess should have prompted a violent attack on the woman.

“Is this wise?” asked the snow leopardess while giving Turess a look of genuine concern. “There may still be time to run.”

“A wildling for a friend, not just a companion,” mused Therec, giving the woman a more conscientious look-over. “The scholars will never believe me.”

Turess shook his head and smiled at the woman, patting her hand before answering, “No, Kharali, I must stay. This is the only way…and how often have you ever known me to run when it is time to face my fate?”

The wilding smiled in return and stepped away from Turess again.

This time, one of the others Therec had initially ignored stepped forward, bowing his head as he approached Turess. “Much as I hate to say it, she’s right, Turess. We should not be here. If this does not go as you planned, we are all dead.”

“I am aware of your concerns. The time for debate is over, Dorralt. I can feel them coming.”

Therec’s skin went cold and he hurried over to follow the man that had just spoken. Though the man kept his face shrouded by his cloak, Therec managed to get a glimpse of him. There was no doubt: this man was the same he had met with in Altis, unchanged even with centuries between the two events.

“What are you, Dorralt? Even preserved dead don’t live over two thousand years. Ghosts are lucky to hold themselves together that long, and you are no ghost.” Therec tried to get a better look at the man. He could not see much, but he did realize several of the man’s tattoos were incomplete compared with how they had appeared in Altis.

A sudden rumble behind him made Therec spin. There was no sound accompanying the vibrations at first, and then a crackle of energy ripped through the air, vanishing again. It seemed as though, much like the scenery, the sound was unstable in the vision and the spell could not maintain it consistently. Then, an eruption of snow and the stone under it burst from the ground, and something rose to nearly fifty feet above the group. With the snow and debris still clearing, Therec could only make out a stone surface.

Dorralt and the orc backed away, quickly followed by the fourth man, but Turess and Kharali both stepped forward with no appearance of fear. This renewed Therec’s awe of Turess, given that, even as a visitor in the vision, Therec wanted to run from whatever stood in front of them.

“Welcome back to Eldvar,” Turess said loudly, taking a knee. “We have fulfilled our bargain. I call on you to fulfill your portion.”

The snow and falling dirt finally cleared enough that Therec could see. Standing before them was the largest elemental creature he had ever seen. Made entirely of mismatched stones torn from the ground, the elemental shifted until the stones had formed into the vague form of a human and the “head” turned to look down on Turess. The creature was so large Therec believed it could have crushed a city in minutes.

“I felt the passing of the servants of air in the east,” rumbled the elemental, its words shaking the ground violently. Each word was slow and rattled Therec’s bones even through the magic of the vision. “You and your servants have done what we have asked. As promised, name your request, and if it is within my power, you will have it, mortal.”

Turess walked toward the elemental, raising his staff as he approached. “You will come to either myself or my heirs when we call you against a foe of our choosing,” Turess shouted, his voice still almost swallowed by the crackling of the stone elemental. “Mark your boon on my staff that I may pass it down to my heirs if I do not call in this favor during my lifetime. Hide this mark from the others like you so they will never know I serve you.”

The human and the elemental stared at one another for longer than Therec felt comfortable with. Surely in the same situation, he would have reconsidered his request long before then.