creature snorted outraged breaths below him, following them farther into the maze, looking rather murderous for a thing that fed on grass and flowers.
“Not a Wrathic technique, then?” Dariel called back.
It was not the most heroic hunt ever-they made the creature a pincushion with arrows shot from safely above it-but the result was satisfying. That night they fed on thick steaks roasted over a fire and told stories surrounded by an amphitheater of stone. Birke recounted the great Wrathic hunts of old, and of the ancient times when young men were sent alone into the wilderness, to return only if they wore the jawbones of a slaughtered kwedeir draped over their necks. Listening to him, Dariel almost forgot Birke was talking about members of the Auldek clan who had enslaved him, not about young men like himself. He almost forgot that this was not just the hunting trip it briefly seemed. He almost accepted it as an evening spent in the company of friends, with no purpose save enjoyment. Almost.
“So, tomorrow we’ll see the Sky Mount. Why don’t you tell me what that is, and who the Watcher is?”
In the silence after his question Dariel realized how different the night was here from what it had been just days before in Inafeld Forest. Here, in the mountains, the main feature of the near silence was the scrape of wind over the jagged peaks. That and the sound of Mor honing the blade of her dagger on a stone propped on her knee.
“Well?” Dariel prompted.
Anira pulled another strip of meat from above the fire, set it on the small stone she was using as a table, and sliced it into bite-size pieces. When she had a few, she pinched them in her fingers and offered them to Dariel. “The Sky Mount is a palace built by a Lothan Aklun called Na Gamen. He built it long ago, back in the early years after they arrived. We should see it tomorrow, perched atop the highest peak in this area.”
“So what is it that Mor doesn’t believe?”
“That the very same Na Gamen who built it all those years ago still lives in it.”
“A Lothan Aklun lives?”
Anira shrugged. “He may. The elders among the People say that long ago he exiled himself there for his own reasons. He once came down from the Sky Isle and gave them-”
“Promises.” Mor looked up from her work. “He spoke promises and regrets hundreds of years ago, and has done nothing else since. But the elders, in their wisdom, believe that he still sits up there, waiting for something. For you, perhaps.”
“You don’t believe that?”
Mor bent forward and began the rhythmic drag of steel over stone again. “What I believe doesn’t matter. I’m taking you.”
B y noon of the next day Dariel had fixed his attention on a single peak in the distance, one that came in and out of view as they navigated the ridges preceding it. The high clouds that had obscured it in the morning cleared, revealing a ring of snow crusting its peak, the only mountain thus accoutred so far. Or so he thought.
Later in the afternoon, when they mounted a pass and began down the slope facing the great mountain, Dariel realized that the snow was not snow at all. It was cast around the heights in too peculiar a manner. It was actually a solid substance. Though the white draped across the stone like the cellophane nests of certain birds, there was an order to it, a geometric intention within the contours. He had seen such structures before. When he sailed through the barrier isle he had gaped at Lothan Aklun abodes similarly hung from stone. This one, however, was much larger, a fact that grew clearer as they climbed toward it through the lengthening shadows of the aging afternoon.
When they reached the gate, it did not seem they had reached much of anything except a dead end. The path had contoured along the steep precipice. It dropped off dizzyingly to one side. As they came around a corner, the path simply stopped, and a wall of smooth white stone faced them. Though it was obviously a man-made structure and a substance quite different from the rough granite of the mountain, it molded seamlessly into base stone. The mountain curved away out of sight to one side, while a buttress of rock hid any view upward. They could see nothing of the palace that had been so visible from a distance.
Tam asked, “Should we knock?”
Though the wall had no doorlike features, they did just that. Lightly at first, and then with fists and feet and harder objects. The material absorbed the beating, deadening the force of their blows. Anira tried to climb up over the buttress, but only fell crashing back down. Mor scraped the blade of a knife across the surface, searching for some crevice to pry open. Nothing. Not even a scratch left behind by her honed point.
Eventually, the group gave up. There they stood, Dariel with a sleeping pup in his pack and Birke with one in his arms. Tam massaged the knuckles of his hand and asked what they should do now. Anira stood with arms crossed, head cocked, her thoughts trapped in the pucker of her lips. The crimson light of the vanishing sun shone on Mor’s delicate features, somehow bringing out the Shivith tattoos with more vicious contrast than usual. Dariel kept expecting her to say something. She looked like she wanted to, and he wished she would.
Entertaining such thoughts, he was the last to notice that the wall did, in fact, have a door in it. The last to notice that the door not only existed, but was open, and that a figure within had leaned through and was intently studying them.
CHAPTER TEN
Corinn started awake. She lashed out, sure that Hanish Mein was attached to her face and devouring her. It took a moment for the panic to fade and for the solidity of the world to materialize around her. A small, comfortable cabin. Windows open to salt-tinged air, seabirds calling. A flap of sail and a slow sensation of motion. She remembered. She was aboard her transport, heading back to Acacia. The terror had just been a dream. Just the nightmare she had suffered through since she destroyed the Numrek.
“You fool girl,” she whispered. “You almost killed yourself.”
She realized this first on waking in a villa along the Teh coast that had once belonged to Calrach. She had been unconscious for days. Feverish. Helpless. With no memory of being lifted and handled and transported. Touched by unknown hands. The acts of magic she unleashed upon the Numrek had nearly ended her. The same brutality that ripped them apart could either have left her so spent she just ceased to be, or it could have exploded inside her. In the future, she would have to be much more careful. She could only do so much at once. If she misjudged what and how to sing, she could lose everything in the space of a single mistaken note. Why was that so obvious after the fact, but so easy to forget during the moment-when all she felt was power?
She kicked off the blanket covering her. She stood and studied herself in the mirror on the back of the cabin door. For a horrible moment, she could have been looking at her mother in the throes of her illness. Gaunt in the face. Her eyes large and sad. Her body a decaying framework upon which her old beauty hung in tatters.
“Why so morbid, Corinn?” the image asked. “Afraid of your dreams? That’s silly. You’re not silly, Corinn. Don’t act as if you are. Who is that man anyway?”
Corinn stepped closer to the mirror, touched the frame and slid her hand down it, across the glass lightly. She studied the wrinkled face looking back at her, loving it, comforted by it, no matter that it frightened her. “He is nobody. He is dead. He’s the one who tried to kill me, Mother. I am not afraid of him when I’m awake, but in my dreams he has power over me.”
Changing angle, moving to the other side of the mirror, the image said, “Only because you let him. Don’t do that. Don’t give in to weakness in your time of triumph. Remember what you did!”
Corinn did remember. She saw in her mind image after image of the horrors she had unleashed. She saw more in her imaginings than she had seen in the few moments the horrors actually took. It was as if each individual death had been stored within her, whether she had actually seen it with her eyes or not. She watched them all now. The stomach-churning revulsion of it matched the raw, teeth-grinding pleasure of it. That power! She could rip apart the fabric of life like nobody else walking the earth could. She had to be careful, yes, to plan better, to foresee even more. But she had the power of a new Tinhadin.
“And what of that worm beneath the sea?” her mother asked. “Do you still dream of it?”
Whatever that vague, writhing, wormlike enormity had been, it no longer troubled her. She had managed to push it out of her mind, to stop seeing those strange images of it. She had been so worried, in fear for Aaden’s life.
