given its size and composition. His hands tingled from its enchantment.
'What's all that writing mean?' Jyme asked.
Nix shrugged. 'I can't read it.'
'How in the Pits do you rob all these tombs if you can't read Afirion?'
Egil shook his head. Nix sighed.
'Jyme, robbing tombs, as you so genteelly put it, involves avoiding traps, crawling through dirt, picking locks, and sometimes, sometimes, killing guardians. As a rule, poetry readings are not required. I can read enough, but not this. It's an older dialect, I think.'
'I… I only meant…'
'Just shut up, Jyme,' Egil said.
Rakon and Baras crested the rise, leaving the horses behind them. Rakon stood his ground atop it. Baras continued toward them.
'Do you have it?' Rakon called. He shifted from foot to foot. 'The horn? Do you have it?'
'We have it, you bunghole,' Nix muttered.
Jyme chuckled.
'My men?' Baras asked, looking up and down the beach.
Egil shook his head. 'They didn't come out.'
'Sorry, Baras,' Nix said.
'Shite,' Baras said.
'Do they have it, Baras?' Rakon called again, his voice tense.
Baras's face flashed irritation, but only for a moment. His eyes fell on the horn Nix held. Over his shoulder, he called, 'They have it, my lord.'
'Well done! Bring it to me, Baras.'
Nix handed the instrument to Baras.
'It damned well better work after all this,' Baras said softly, eyeing the horn. 'Good men died for it.'
'Uh, take anything else out of there?' Jyme asked. 'Anything valuable?'
'Our lives,' Nix said irritably. 'But maybe you meant something else?'
'No offense meant,' Jyme said. 'Just asking, is all.'
'It's forgotten,' Nix said with a sigh. 'I'm irritable, is all.'
'Hurry, Baras,' Rakon said, his voice greedy with anticipation. The sorcerer looked to the sky, the setting sun turning it red. 'Hurry!'
Baras jogged the horn over to Rakon. Egil, Nix, and Jyme started for the rise. The moment Baras handed the horn to Rakon, Nix felt a sharp pain in his abdomen, as if he'd been stabbed. He doubled over, groaning. Egil did the same.
'What is it?' Jyme asked. 'What's wrong?'
Nix tried to speak, but the squirming in his guts allowed him to do nothing but heave. He put his hands on his knees and puked bile, then a long, thick stream of sputum that seemed to go on forever. Beside him, Egil did the same.
'There's something wrong with them,' Jyme called to Rakon.
'There's nothing wrong,' Rakon said. 'They completed their charge and now they're free of the spellworm.'
The heaves went on for some time, Egil and Nix purging themselves of Rakon's compulsion. When they were done, twin snakes of greenish-black phlegm lay glistening in the sand.
'That's unpleasant,' Egil said, wiping his mouth, kicking sand over the mucus.
'Seconded,' Nix said.
'You all right?' Jyme asked. He'd lingered while they'd puked.
'As well as can be,' Nix said. 'Come on. Time to take our leave, I think.'
By the time they reached the camp, Rakon and the eunuch had already laid his sisters on the ground. The horn hung from Rakon's neck and his satchel of needful things from his shoulder. Baras stood at a distance from Rakon, watching with a curious look on his face.
'What is he doing?' Jyme said.
Nix shrugged. 'Breaking the curse, maybe? That's what this was all about.'
'Was it?' Egil said.
'You have a thought?' Nix asked him.
'Suspicions,' the priest answered. 'Let's hold here.'
'I want to get supplies and get clear,' Nix said. 'We're done. I'm done.'
'Just hold,' Egil said.
Baras walked toward Rakon and the eunuch. 'My lord, your sisters need to be strapped to the horses for the return journey to Dur Follin. Unless you intend to lift the curse here?'
Rakon did not turn. 'We won't be taking the horses, Baras. I cannot spare the time to return on foot. The Thin Veil is near.'
'The Thin Veil, my lord? I don't understand.'
'Of course you don't,' Rakon said. He nodded at the eunuch and the huge man took Baras by the arms and steered him away from Rakon and his sisters. Meanwhile, Rakon rummaged through the pack on the ground until he found what he sought: a wristthick candle. He stood it in the sand, uttered the words to a cantrip, and a flame sprung from his finger. He touched it to the candle and thick black smoke rose into the twilight air.
'You've done me a service,' Rakon said over his shoulder to Egil and Nix. 'I won't soon forget it. Nor will I forget that all of this was necessary to begin with only due to your interference in matters beyond your ken. Tomb robbers and thieves almost brought down the house of my forefathers.'
'You blather, man,' Nix said. 'We had nothing to do with any of this. At least I don't think we did. Did we, Egil?'
Egil didn't answer. He had his eyes on the sorcerer, his hand on a hammer. Jyme stood with them, lingered at a distance.
'And now those same imbeciles have saved it,' Rakon said.
'Imbeciles!' Nix said.
'What's he doing?' Jyme asked in a hiss.
Nix shrugged.
Jyme said, 'I thought you learned magic before dropping out of the Conclave?'
'He was expelled,' Egil said absently.
Nix pointed an appreciative finger at his friend.
Smoke spiraled from the candle in a thick black line. The smoke smelled of burning flesh, pungent and foul. Rakon looked up to the darkening sky, held his hands aloft, and began to incant.
To Nix, the words Rakon used sounded much like the Language of Creation, but the inflection was off, the pronunciation harsher. Nix knew none of the words, but he didn't have to. He could see the result.
The wind picked up, swirled in tiny vortices around Rakon, sent sand churning into the air, a fog of grit.
'Maybe we should, uh, leave?' Jyme said.
Nix was thinking the same thing, but just as he was about to suggest as much, Rakon's incantation intensified, the candle wick flared, and the candle burned half its length in a flash, sending a column of foul black smoke into the whipping air. Rather than dissipate, the smoke lingered in the swirls, outlining a nebulous, shifting shape. Nix heard a voice in the wind, the words too soft to make out, a high-pitched, otherworldly titter similar to the one he'd heard back in the Wastes when he'd awakened from a dream.
'A sylph,' Nix said. 'I should've guessed before.'
Rakon pointed at the air, where the smoke gathered and hinted at a huge, winged form. 'Carry my sisters and me back to the prison, spirit.'
The wind whispered in answer, the words audible only to Rakon.
Gusts formed a wall of whirling sand around Rakon, the desert orbiting him and his sisters. Baras pulled his cloak over his face and turned away. Egil, Nix, and Jyme shielded their faces. Only the eunuch, standing just outside the wall of sand, seemed unbothered. Rakon and his sisters sat in the center of the winds, untouched by the swirling sands.
