the center of her abdomen. Owden placed his hands over the snake bite and chanted his spell, and Chauntea’s healing magic began to warm her chest and surge through her veins behind the snake’s poison.
A dozen dragoneers appeared next, gaping over the war wizards’ shoulders and gasping at the obvious signs of the princess’s pregnancy. Head clearing, Tanalasta reached for her torn robe, but found herself still too weak to pull it across her abdomen. Alaphondar appeared at her side and began to shove the circle back, chiding the gawkers for neglecting their fellows who were busy fighting the battle.
As the chastened crowd backed away, Queen Filfaeril finally broke into the circle and saw Tanalasta lying on the ground. Her eyes grew as large as saucers. She looked from Tanalasta’s face to her belly, back to her face again, then to the thin pink blood dribbling out from beneath Owden’s hands.
“Why is my daughter still here?” Filfaeril demanded, speaking to no one in particular. She grabbed the nearest war wizard and shoved him toward Tanalasta. “Back to the palace-at once!”
17
The cavern reminded Vangerdahast of what starry nights once looked like, save that these stars hung down around the height of his belly, winking and blinking in the radiance of the ball of lightning dancing atop the ghazneth’s finger. The ghazneth-Vangerdahast still found it difficult to think of him as Rowen Cormaeril-had brought him into a strange warren of narrow passages and soaring chambers packed with thousands of small, goblin-sized iron racks. The racks looked eerily like goblin scarecrows, with anywhere from one to a dozen crooked iron arms hung with jagged scraps of metal, broken spectacles, brass buttons, bits of colored glass, anything that might glitter or gleam. No paths or trails twined through the peculiar little legion, which stood in such close array that Vangerdahast could not thread his way through without constantly stopping to unsnag his tunic hem.
The ghazneth seemed to suffer no such difficulty. He slipped through the jagged hordes swiveling his hips to and fro, sidestepping and pivoting past the little scarecrows so quickly that it was all Vangerdahast could do just to keep up. Presently, the foul stench of rot and mold began to fill the air, and the scarecrows grew so thick that even Rowen could not slip through the host without dislodging a chain of brass buttons or knocking a string of tin scraps to the slimy floor. Whenever this happened, he paused to return the object to its place, arranging it more artfully than before. Vangerdahast tried to move more carefully, but said nothing about the long string of displaced trinkets his own passage had left strewn behind.
Finally, they came to a dark clearing, and the stench grew so overbearing that Vangerdahast had to cover his nose. The ghazneth stopped at the edge and put out an arm to prevent Vangerdahast from going farther.
“Can you jump across, old man?”
“Across?” Vangerdahast glanced down and saw that he was standing on the edge of a foul-smelling pit. “By the wand!” Rowen raised his hand, and the lightning ball expanded until Vangerdahast could see the far side of the pit, perhaps four paces away. “Can you jump that far?”
“When I was twenty,” said Vangerdahast. “Now it would take magic.”
“Not wise,” said Rowen. He took Vangerdahast’s arm and clasped it above the wrist. “Grab hold.”
Vangerdahast eyed the distance and frowned. “Why don’t we just work our way-“
The wizard’s suggestion dissolved into a cry as the ghazneth sprang, jerking him out over the reeking pit. Vangerdahast caught a glimpse of sheer, irregular walls caked with a thick layer of brown… something, then his knees buckled as he and Rowen crashed down on the opposite rim.
Rowen pulled him to his feet and said, “You’re the one who asked for my help. Do not insult me by refusing to trust me.”
“That might be a little easier if you let go.”
Vangerdahast cast a meaningful glance at his wrist, where the ghazneth’s hand was sliding down toward the ring of wishes. Rowen let go so abruptly that Vangerdahast nearly fell and had to catch hold of a bauble rack.
“Let’s go.” Rowen backed away, his dark brow arched in horror, then started through the scarecrows again. “Once you have the scepter, we are done with each other. Take it and hide someplace I won’t find you.”
“I’m not going to do that. I can’t.” Before following, Vangerdahast allowed the ghazneth to advance a few extra steps. “Our chances are better together.”
“Until my hunger grows too strong.” Rowen was moving so fast that Vangerdahast began to fall behind. “Then I will steal your ring and drain the scepter. When that’s gone, I’ll turn on you.”
“You won’t,” Vangerdahast said. “I can feed your hunger.”
“But never satisfy it,” said Rowen. “The more you fill it, the more it will grow. It is like your thirst for the crown.”
Vangerdahast stopped and stared at the ghazneth’s back. “My what? I have no thirst for the crown.”
“No? Then you did not claim to be king when Boldovar wounded you?”
Vangerdahast was too astounded to reply. He had told Rowen about being wounded by the mad king but not what he had hallucinated-the wizard barely remembered that himself.
A few steps later, Rowen stopped and turned to face Vangerdahast. “It was a guess.” His tone was gentler now, almost sympathetic. “But not a terribly hard one. We all have a dark seed in our hearts, and it is from that seed that a ghazneth’s power sprouts.”
“And what was your seed?” Vangerdahast demanded huffily.
“Fear,” Rowen said. “Fear of never seeing Tanalasta again.”
Vangerdahast was not nearly as astonished by the admission as he was by his own reaction to it. During their travels together in the Stonelands, he had considered Rowen’s affection for Tanalasta a danger to the crown and done everything he could to discourage it. Now here he was, relying on that same affection to insure a ghazneth’s loyalty and protect himself from feral hungers he could only guess at. The irony was not lost even on Vangerdahast. He knew the real monster between them.
Vangerdahast laid a hand on Rowen’s shoulder and said, “You’ll see Tanalasta again. We both will.”
“And that is what I fear now.” Rowen shrugged the wizard’s hand off. “This is not how I want her to remember me.”
“She won’t,” said Vangerdahast. “What is done can always be undone. I’ll see to it when we escape.”
“If we escape, wizard. Be careful of your arrogance.”
Vangerdahast started to object that it was confidence, not arrogance, then thought of how long he had been in the city already. “Good advice. If we escape, then.”
Rowen nodded, then started forward again. “And if you do escape, you must never tell her what became of me.”
“If I escape, I pray you will be there to tell her yourself.”
Vangerdahast’s reply was careful, for there was a danger in making promises even a royal magician might find impossible to keep. He followed the ghazneth across the immense cavern, past another dozen pits-at least judging by the smell and the irregular crescents of dark clearing-and untold thousands more iron scarecrows. The chamber narrowed to a small passage crammed full of racks and baubles, with a long sliver of a black pit running along one wall, then opened into an immense room where the scarecrow legion stood even thicker.
The ghazneth threaded his way through the darkness into the center of the chamber, then stopped at the edge of another pit. This one was so large that the far side remained swaddled in darkness, even after Rowen doubled the size of the lightning ball on his fingertip.
“Down there.” Rowen pointed into the rancid hole.
Vangerdahast dropped to his knees and peered down. The wall dropped away more or less vertically, though it was hard to be certain beneath the thick layer of brown gunk clinging to the sides. Somewhere below-he could not tell how far in the flickering light-lay a tangled mass of what looked like… sticks?
“Do you see it?”
“Not without better light,” Vangerdahast said. “I can’t be sure what I’m seeing.”
Rowen dropped to one knee and thrust his arm down into the pit to illuminate the bottom, plunging the rest of the cavern into darkness.
A loud chime rang out behind them, as though the sudden murk had caused someone to stumble into an iron scarecrow.
