The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (8 page)

Pyla began to stammer, but was saved from speaking by his chief’s raised hand, asking for silence. Londih said, “I think the Old Stargazer already knows who should go, has already decided for us. And whatever he decides, I will decree.” He looked again at Pyla, whose cowardice infected the meeting, stained their purpose. He shook his head again, regretted again that long ago decision that had put Pyla at his right side. “Including sending you, Pyla.”

The Old Stargazer closed his eyes, as if thinking, but even Nergei was not fooled by the ruse. His master
had always known the meeting would come to this, had always known what he would say when it did, and now he was saying it: “Yes, Pyla. You will go, to lead this expedition. We cannot spare Orick or Londih—you yourself pointed out that they were too valuable to send—so I will send with you Londih’s boy, and also Orick’s, both having proven themselves in battle, as we see here upon this table.” Pyla began to object, but the old man did not give him room, continued turning the councilor’s words against him. Londih saw the Old Stargazer was smiling, his eyes twinkling again, not with stars, but with some other joy. “The adults are needed here, so we will send these youths, ones who dispatched this kenku for us, so bravely.”

The Old Stargazer said, “Pyla, Kohel, and Padlur will go.”

Nergei could feel the disappointment growing at being left behind, being left again, but before it could manifest across his face, it became fear instead, fear of at last being given the chance to prove himself he had so desperately wanted.

“Kohel, Padlur, Pyla, and my boy Nergei too—he is no warrior like the others, but he has my teachings, and they will not prove useless upon the journey.” He turned to his apprentice. “Go, my boy. There is much else for you to learn, and I have no time to teach it to you, not before you might need it.” The
Old Stargazer sighed, tired again, as he so often was. “But let us hope that time is farther away than I fear it is. Go to the city with the others, and hire those who would fight for Haven so that you might not have to—not yet, not too soon.”

And the fear did fill Nergei. It filled him from toe to tip, so that he was not sure he would have been able to remain standing if it were not for the applause of the council—those supposedly brave men, happy to be rid of the responsibility of saving themselves for at least a little while longer—and also the cries of Pyla, tricked into going by his own cowardice, which he could no longer hide inside, but let escape in great sounds of protestation, so loud and pathetic that they balanced Nergei’s own fear. For—as scared as he was—he was at least brave enough to keep it to himself.

I
s your faith strong?”

A voice from the shadows of the temple’s main hall startled Temley, who was deep in prayer, prostrate before a carved ebony image of the Raven Queen, and wearing only a thin black robe.

“Is it, Brother?” said the voice. It rasped as if spoken through a throat that had not known water in a century.

“I am naked before my mistress,” said Temley. “I am resigned always to my fate.”

“Good,” said the voice. Temley rose slowly, deliberately. “You are trained, though, to exercise more care around strangers, are you not? You are the edge of the Queen’s blade. You are the punishing hand that reaches out from the shadow realm. But I have snuck up on you, and my head remains here, attached to my neck where it was when I entered the room.”

Temley turned to the voice. “In the hall of my queen, I give myself over to her utterly. If it is her decision that I die before her, I do so willingly.” Temley cinched closed the robe and stepped toward the figure. “In any other place, any room other than this one.”

“I understand,” said the voice. Out from the shadows came Temley’s mysterious interlocutor, a dark man with gray skin and black within black eyes. “Temley, my brother, the Queen has need of you.”

Upon seeing the dark man, Temley lowered his eyes and bowed his head. “You are of the Shadowfell. You are of my mistress’s realm.”

“Yes, Temley. You may look at me.”

“I apologize. I have … I have never had the privilege of meeting one of your kind. One of—”

“One of the revenant. We are rare.” The man stepped into the shadow of a column and began to fade as Temley watched. And then, he appeared again, stepping out of the shadow Temley cast on the ground and wall. “And we are elusive.” The man wore thick black leather and a curved blade at his belt. Temley took in the measure of him, and when the man noticed, his confidence seemed to ever so briefly wane, and Temley noticed as he reached into a belt pouch and pulled a dried sage sprig from his pocket, which he rubbed against his neck and wrist.
Was he attempting to cover the scent of the grave? Temley smelled only earth and sage.

“You speak to the mistress?”

“I hear her. I do not presume to expect a response when I reply.”

“Of course,” said Temley. “Her voice?”

“Nearly impossible to describe. She sounds like the first snowfall smells. She sounds like the dimming eyes of the dying looks. She sounds like these things, but also not at all.”

“One day, to hear her voice,” said Temley, closing his eyes and relaxing completely. “One day to stand in her presence. One day to feel the endless, gorgeous melancholy of the forever gloaming.”

“She cares not for your poetic soul, Temley. She has need of you. We must speak of this.”

“Whatever she asks.”

“In the mountains to the east and north of here is a village called Haven.”

“I have never heard of it. A village to the northeast? Dangerous country. How does it survive?”

“It has remained safe and quiet since the fall of the last great human empire because it has a protector. An ancient spellcaster who allies himself with an ancient power in the stars. An old man who has given away much of his soul for power and for longevity.”

“Spitting in the face of death. Spitting in the face of the mistress.”

“Yes, Temley. And the Queen asks you to relieve him of the great burden of his age. The Queen can no longer allow him to defy her the part of all of us over which she has ownership—our deaths. Go to Haven and kill him, Temley.”

Temley nodded.

“I have sent a small army to Haven, a band of our lady’s kenku. They are, as we speak, poking at the old man’s defenses, surrounding the village and distracting him from her larger scheme. Their attacks will intensify until we weaken him completely. You will go and wait for the right moment to strike. I will go with you to the camp to tell you all we know of the old man, but I will leave you then. I have duties elsewhere.”

The man put his arm on Temley’s shoulder, and it made him shudder. There was an energy from the man—a wave of chill that pulsed out from his bones. “What shall I call you?” asked Temley.

“Oh, of course. My manners are not what they were in life. I am Erak, Temley.”

“Erak,” said Temley. “It is my honor to serve the Queen through your commands.”

“And it is my honor to be in the presence of a man of your devotion, Temley. You were chosen for a reason. If it is possible for the Raven Queen to have
favorites, I believe you are one of them. There is a quality to her voice when she talks to me about you, Brother—a quality that I have never heard before. And it borders on something like pride.”

Temley felt his legs buckle at the notion. He reached out for the revenant and grasped him by the shoulders. Erak’s chill filled Temley’s body, but he was not overcome. He felt himself embrace the man who had filled his soul so completely with joy, and weep gently into his shoulder.

Erak pulled Temley in to himself, and rubbed his hair.

Temley returned to his cell to gather his belongings—his vestments and traveling gear, his emblems, and his sword. There, surrounded by his meager possessions—his wooden bowl, his thin mattress, his chair—he thought of his arrival at the temple, so many years ago.

The Raven Queen’s temple, where Temley was raised and trained, was built against a sheer rock wall in the shadow of the Dusk Peak Mountains. The high priest had told Temley that primitive hunters had used the high wall of rock and the bowl of a valley beneath it as a trap for the plains beasts that lived and fed nearby. “They chased them, herded them toward the
wall, cornered them against the impassable rock, and slaughtered them for their meat and hides and horns,” he said. “The blood of the creatures consecrated the ground to the Queen, then not even a member of the pantheon of worship.”

The worshipers gathered at the table for dinner, and the high priest would relay nightly the story of their Queen’s temple’s origin. “She was the primal personification of death, the one who brought it to the world, and the great number of beasts who had fallen on that spot of land made it a place where her power was focused.”

“Years later, when she had deified herself, she inspired a group of her followers to build there, on the soil that was filled with the pulverized bones of the mass slaughter,” he would say, forking lamb or fish to his plate.

In the valley, it always seemed to be dusk. It always felt like autumn. The Raven Queen’s power was so strong there, a little bit of the Shadowfell leaked in. To her worshipers, it was paradise. It was where they would train her assassins and her punishers—her elite and deadly hand in the world.

The high priest would sit with Temley, and even though he never asked, the man would tell him how he came to the temple. “You were sold to the temple as a young boy,” he would say. “Your family were refugees
of a broken peace that had led to the broken gates and walls of a keep on the northern borderlands, the outlands of the last human empire. They fled a horde of demihumans, lanky, gray-skinned goblinspawn, who swept south and took scalps as they went.” Temley would look away from the high priest, hoping he would stop telling the story, but knowing he could not ask him to.

“Your family and a small band managed to stay ahead of them, I was told. But through a mountain pass on their way to the relative safety in the south, they were ambushed. Most were killed.”

The older priest would smile at that point in the story, inspired by the way the Raven Queen’s plans seemed to work, how often tragedy was simply a step on the way to a greater purpose. “Your age—just beginning to walk on your own—made you valuable alive. We paid gold for orphaned children back then and did not ask questions.”

When Temley was brought to the high, wooden temple door, carried over one of the bandit’s shoulders, he was examined by a priest who saw in his tiny frame and frightened eyes the potential for the zeal they needed to bring out of every child in their care. “It was me who found you. Your eyes were wet and you trembled as I turned your face from side to side.” The high priest would wrap his knuckles on the arm of his chair at that point.

“You were dirty and your nose was oozing blood and phlegm. But your core,” he would say, jabbing a finger into Temley’s chest, “was a pillar of ice. Your mind, under the fear and the confusion, stored a biting winter wind. I knew training would solidify the core. Training would turn the wind into a blizzard.” The priest could see it in the shadows that surrounded his eyes, hidden to all but those who knew what to look for.

First, though, Temley learned to walk. He learned to say “As you wish.” He learned to look down at the ground, down to his naked and bruised feet, when an elder priest approached. He learned to thank the Raven Queen for the scraps of food he was given. He learned to sweep and he learned to read. “That was what we taught you first.” Temley would nod at that. He remembered those days as difficult, but he was not ill-treated through his early years. He was simply taught his place. He was given enough food to sustain him. He was given enough attention to keep him focused. There were other children his age there, but games and songs of childhood were discouraged. There was discipline and servitude. There was study. There was no corporal punishment for misdeeds. Instead, the priests of the Raven Queen used solitude and neglect to foster in Temley a desire to obey and stay in line in order to continue feeling a part of his new family.

“Praise to the Queen that I learned so well,” said Temley, grabbing the last of his gear and heading to the entry hall to meet Erak. They were to leave immediately.

A
lthough Nergei had no love for Pyla, he had still thrilled at hearing the council member nominated to lead the expedition into the city, because he instantly suspected—and rightly so—that Pyla would bring Luzhon along. She was his only child, and he had been widowed many years, and he would not have entrusted her to anyone else. So it was that the Stargazer’s mandated expedition swelled by one, thus Nergei once again found himself in closer proximity to Luzhon than he had previously dared imagine.

Unfortunately, that also meant new proximity to Kohel, who had only increased his taunting of Nergei in the aftermath of the battle with the kenku.

The council had provided the five with a sturdy cart, a nag to pull it, and all the provisions they would need for two weeks, a public display of support for
what quickly became a nearly secret mission. There had been rumors in the days before they left among the other villagers of bird men and worse, but the council members had tried to suppress those, to suggest instead Pyla taking the teenagers to the city was no more than a trading trip, meant to acquire the few things that Haven could not supply for itself. In that way, Nergei thought, it was not a lie; Haven had no true warriors of its own, but supposedly the city would have idle swords in abundance.