Chapter Thirty-Six
J3efun lay on a bier of fresh leaves and flowers. The creatures had carried him here. Trussed in vines like a caterpillar in its cocoon, Berun had not even struggled as they grabbed him and bore him up the stairs. Up and up and up to the roof atop the Tower of the Sun. Open to the air as it was, still the scent of rampant vegetation permeated the air. A stone table lay near the northern ledge. There, they laid Berun upon a bed of new leaves and blossoms, his head cushioned by soft larch branches.
He had been too stunned to resist, to even wonder where they might be taking him and why. Over and over again, he saw it in his mind and heard the words. Chereth, his beloved master, the man who had restored him to life-and more importantly taught him how to live-standing there saying, Welcome to my tower.
… my tower.
… my tower.
And then, Bring him.
And the creatures had obeyed.
… my tower.
It couldn't be true. Chereth was master of the tower. Impossible. And yet it was the only explanation.
All he had been through in his life-both lives-An orphan in Elversult, living as a thief, scrabbling for survival. Fighting. Beating and being beaten. Running. Hiding. His first kill.
Alaodin, the Old Man of the Mountain, finding him and taking him in. Giving him a life. A life of murder.
Sauk. The brother he'd never had. One to fight beside. One to die for. And kill and kill and kill and kill…
Talieth. Love? No. Neither Kheil nor Talieth had really known love. But they had known passion, had connected in a way that Kheil never had with any other woman.
And then death. Death by Chereth's word. And life. Again by Chereth's word. And more importantly, a way of life. Something to believe in. Something to strive for. Meaning. He became Berun.
But Chereth had left him. Left him to… to what?
'Questions,' said a voice. Nearby. Very close. Chereth's voice. 'You have questions, I'm sure.'
Berun felt the vines around him loosen, heard the rustle of the leaves, then they fell away.
'Your questions shall be answered,' said Chereth, still unseen but very close. 'And if the answers spawn questions, those shall be answered as well. But first we must see to your wounds. Sleep now. Olirith.'
The last word held the tinge of magic, and Berun's awareness fell away.
Berun slept beyond dreams, but he did not sleep for long. Slumber fell away from him. He heard thunder shaking the sky far away, and he opened his eyes. It was still dark, but wispy, glowing orbs filled the air over the roof, floating like cottonwood seeds on a breeze. Berun sat up. His shirt was gone, and all of the cuts he'd taken under Sauk's assault were no more than lines of white scar tissue. Runes and holy symbols covered his arms and torso. The paint, smelling faintly of pine resin, was still damp. He could feel more on his face and forehead.
Berun took in his surroundings. Kheil had been here many times, the rooftop that was the highest level in the Tower of the Sun. The Imaskari had named it the Eye of the Four Winds, for standing at any of the waist-high ledges, one could see for miles in every direction. The stone tubes that wound their way up the tower connected to portals deep beneath the mountain-portals that opened to the elemental planes. With the proper spells, one could funnel both fire and water to the heights of the tower, so that in high summer, the fountains were always fresh and cool, forming falls that went over the heights of the tower. In the cold of winter, fires burned for light and heat.
Water flowed, giving off a clean scent, its song inherently soothing as it bubbled out of fountains, one at each corner of the roof. Fires burned, not from the tubes, which sat quiet and cold, but from a few braziers and several lamps, their flames low, their glow an orange as a dusty sunset. The light cast as many shadows as pools of light. In the nine years since he had last been here, the Eye of the Four Winds had been filled with vines, fruit trees, flowers, bushes, ivies, creepers, and even long strands of moss drooping off the stone.
'It is good to see you again, my son,' said a voice behind him.
Berun turned, and Chereth emerged from the shadow cast by the arm of an oak that grew from the floor and spread its branches over the ledges and up to the sky.
'Master?' said Berun.
Chereth had been old when Berun had last seen him, and he wore the past nine years heavily. His hair had lost none of its thickness, but it was bone-white and flowed well past his shoulders in a wild mane. Leaves and flowers peeked out from the strands, and Berun thought some of them might actually be growing there. Chereth leaned upon his staff, and his posture had a stoop to it that Berun had never seen before. Even his gait was slower. Not quite a shuffle, but it was the pace of a half-elf much closer to his grave than his birth.
The old druid came round the bier and stopped before Berun. He placed his free hand on Berun's arm and squeezed. 'My heart rejoices to see you, Berun. Truly.'
'Master Chereth… I…' Berun didn't know what to say.
Chereth smiled at him. 'Many, many questions, yes?'
'Yes, Master.'
'Our time is short, my son,' said Chereth. 'But tonight, all your questions must be answered. I have long waited for your coming, and the rest of this night I give to you. All must be made clear before we finish what we began.'
Berun felt suddenly weak. He feared his legs would not hold him, so he sat back on the bier. 'Finish what, master?'
'That should be your last question, I think,' said Chereth. 'Better for your understanding if we begin at the beginning, yes?'
'I… I don't know where to begin, master.'
'I should begin before you came to me,' said Chereth. 'Before you were Berun. Before you were even Kheil perhaps, for I have walked this path many long years. It began when I was not much older than you are now. As a child of the Oak Father, I served among the Masters of the Yuirwood for many seasons. We saw many victories and many defeats. Many defeats, both in the Yuirwood and in other places where my service to the Oak Father took me.
'Always I saw blight, corruption-both natural and arcane-assaulting the woods so beloved to our god. Every year I saw the forests grow a little smaller-if not in one place, than another. Villages, towns, cities… as they prospered and grew they dumped their filth into our rivers, our lakes. They fill the air with their smoke and stench. They cut and destroy and do not replant. Kings and their nobles hunt for sport, leaving animals to rot where the hunters' arrows take them.
These nobles will retrieve their arrows, but they leave bears, foxes, and wolves to rot, their death meaning only a moment's amusement for pampered fools.
'I swore my life to the service of the wild. To communion with all living things. Yet year by year I saw the wild shrinking. Saw it polluted. Defiled. And so the Masters of the Yuirwood and other Circles sought to heal, to repair, to foster the wild. But over the years, after so many defeats, I saw this for what it was-a long defeat. For every grove we preserved or fallow field we filled with trees, ten groves were cut and the wild grew ever thinner.
'I began to search for an advantage. What the assassins of this place might call 'an edge,' something that would allow our efforts to go on the offense for once. Traveling through many lands, I sought lore, artifacts, relics, items of power of any sort, and allies to aid my work. 1 met many whose wisdom added to my own. I found the ancient works of the Imaskari, who were masters of the portals, using them to travel vast distances as if crossing the room. But they also used them to travel to other worlds-some strangely similar to our own, and others different beyond our imagination. Such… power this offered.
'The ancient histories all agreed that one of the greatest of the Imaskari wonders lay in the Endless Wastes. My studies led me to believe that this was none other than Sentinelspire itself, and all the scrolls I studied and tales I gleaned spoke of a fortress hidden on the mountain. And thus I first began to learn of the Old Man of the Mountain and his… cult of assassins.
'Perhaps two years before Kheil and I first crossed paths, I found some of Alaodin's contacts in Glarondar.
