I looked at her to find her looking pale, but determined.
“Give me a minute,” she managed to say. “I’m going to craft something more potent, and something for you as well.”
I had been looking forward to a satisfying meal, but I contented myself with chewing on a dried apple and drinking some water while Cara worked.
First, she took from her belt a little thing that looked like a hard, dried nut. When she spoke some quiet words over it, it shimmered and expanded to become a gleaming mortar and pestle. It was small, but it took hold much more than it should.
She added some fresh herbs, some dry powders from a flask at her belt, and then unstoppered a potion bottle from her belt and poured the contents in. Pale yellow light shone up from the bowl and lit her beautiful, intent face. Her full lips moved silently as she worked.
“The bowl is magical,” she explained. “I add the ingredients to it, plus some of the potion I want to replicate. So long as I get the combinations of ingredients right, the contents of the bowl should combine into a larger amount of the potion I’m trying to create.” As she spoke, she took three empty bottles from her pouch and carefully decanted the yellow liquid into them. There was a little left in the bottom of the bowl.
“Incredible,” I said as I watched her craft the potion. “Will it take long to finish? I fear for what might have happened to the worshipper.”
“Not long, no,” Cara replied. “Besides, we must be prepared for whatever evil lies in wait in the temple.” She drew a blue flower from her bundle of gathered herbs. “Let me try something with what’s left. If this plant is what it looks like, it should create...”
I leaned in closer, intrigued despite my desire to make for the temple.
There was a flash of blue light from the bowl, and she smiled grimly. “That worked. It’s a potion to turn an enemy’s own power against it. The flower that’s the critical ingredient is incredibly rare in Saxe, but here in Yamato, it seems to be everywhere.”
She decanted this last potion into an empty vial and stowed it in her belt. Then, with a wave of her hand, she transformed her mortar and pestle again. Where the shining bowl had been, there was now nothing but a little dried brown pellet like a nut. With a glance at me and a smile, she slipped it into her pouch. The rest of her bundled herbs she stowed in her pack.
Then she drank half of a potion bottle she had just filled. “It makes me immune to the sickening, terrifying effect of the Festering,” she explained as the pale glow of the potion’s effect suffused her and then faded. She looked at me consideringly. “You’re already immune to the Festering’s influence. What would happen if you took some of this potion?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect it might interfere with my ability to sense the Festering from a distance. That wouldn’t be wise.”
Cara put the half-finished bottle back in her belt. “That makes sense.”
I turned and walked along the edge of the cliff. Not far away, I could see the beginning of a path winding down to the flat land. “Let’s get down there. I don’t like the idea that the Festering can hide itself from my special senses here. It’s clear that we’ve arrived in Yamato not a moment too soon.”
We made our way quickly and carefully through the edge of the woodland and onto the path. I considered switching back to my full armor build but decided against it. I would look less intimidating to any civilians who we met, and perhaps less of a threat to any enemies. Long ago I’d learned that if you have an advantage in a fight, it was often better to conceal it until the very last moment.
The path was made of yellow gravel, well-used and well-maintained. It wound up steeply from the flat lands beside the temple. By each side, the bushes and vegetation had been clipped back, creating a tidy effect.
Cara gestured to the neat edges. “I wonder who does this?”
“These lands are cultivated by their people,” I said. “I’ve not even met any of the inhabitants yet, but already I’m starting to feel as if I like the people of Yamato.”
“All the more reason to deal with the Festering.”
We reached the flat grassy tableland at the base of the cliff without incident, but I felt tense and wary, and I could tell Cara felt the same.
Not being able to sense the source of the Festering put me on edge. Since childhood, I’d always been able to feel the Festering at the edges of my consciousness... I reined in my thoughts, away from that memory. I’d have to tell Cara about it at some point. For now, I had to keep my thoughts on the task at hand.
The shrine lay in a little clearing at the base of the cliff we had just descended. Flowering shrubs had been clipped into the elegant shapes of sitting foxes on either side of the path leading up to the shrine. Short rods of wood with woven red ropes joining them made a decorative fence bordering the approach. The grass had been fastidiously cut, creating a neat lawn all around the shrine.
“Foxes seem to be important to this shrine,” I said to Cara in a low voice, pointing out the fox motif included in the detail of the building and the approach.
The top of each wooden fence rod was carved with a fox’s head, and the same figure—a leaping fox—was carved into each corner of the shrine. The shrine was a roughly square building with walls made from vertical wooden planks. The whole building was raised up three feet off the ground on solid wooden stilts, leaving a dark gap underneath. These stilts, too, were carved to resemble sitting foxes.
We were approaching the
