Sacred Fire

head. “I went to Lattakay first. It was closer, and I had little gold for passage, without my fortune. And … I had heard Lord Cathan had kin there.”

He glanced at Wentha, who smiled sadly. Beside her, Tancred and Rath exchanged grim glances.

“And you are sure?” Beldinas asked. “You can vouch it was him?”

“Only the Twice-Born has those eyes, Holiness.”

Sitting across from Varen, Tithian nodded agreement. The act of resurrection had left Cathan that way, as a mark of providence. His eyes were pupil-less and white-like a blind man’s, though Cathan could see. Few could meet his eerie gaze without having to turn away. Tithian himself hadn’t been able to do it. If the man seen by the scholar had those eyes…

Quarath scowled, and Wentha noticed it. “I know your suspicions, Emissary,” she said mildly. “I felt them as well. There have been enough stories of my brother, from every part of the empire and beyond-all of them false. I even sent scouts to the Tears myself once, but to no good. I gave up on finding him years ago. I was sure he had to be dead.”

“So were we,” the Kingpriest agreed, his voice turning sorrowful. “But if this is true ….”

“It is,” said Rath.

“Show him,” Tancred told Varen.

All around the table, eyebrows rose. The acolytes were serving stone bowls of fruited ice with sprigs of kender-mint, but no one paid the dessert any mind. They watched the scholar, who reached into a pouch and brought out a small, oblong box made of grayleaf wood. He started to push it toward the Kingpriest, but Tithian stopped him with a firm hand.

“Open it yourself,” the knight said.

Flushing, Varen pulled back the box, released a catch, and slid back the lid. From inside, he pulled out a small, dark shard of glass. Gripping it between two fingers, he held it up to the light. Tawny rose fire blazed within. Despite years of courtly etiquette, Lord Tithian gave a low whistle as Varen set the fragment on the table.

“Losarcine amber,” the scholar said. “I took it, if you’ll recall, just before I fled. I was half a mile from the cave before I even realized I had it.”

Everyone stared at the shard, glittering in the dying daylight lancing through the manse’s windows. Quarath sipped his moragnac, watching with an inscrutable expression. Wentha and her sons seemed to silently defy anyone to doubt the truth of Varen’s tale. Varen now stared at his hands in his lap. Tithian, meanwhile, bent forward to pick up the glass shard. He turned it in his grasp, watching the honeyed light play within. He’d been at Losarcum, seen vast palaces melted into stuff like this when the Tower erupted. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people trapped in it.

And Cathan was there, too.

“Let me see it,” said Beldinas.

Nodding, Tithian passed the shard down the table-to Tancred, then Quarath, and finally to the Kingpriest. The glass shone like a golden star as Beldinas’s light poured into it. He gazed into its depths, his thoughts unreadable. Everyone else watched him, trying to read them anyway. Finally he clenched his fist around the shard and turned back to Varen.

“This cave,” he said. “Can you find it again?”

Chapter 3

FIRSTMONTH, 962 I.A.

He hadn’t had the dream in years.

It had first come to him a lifetime ago, during his vigil the night before the Lightbringer made him a knight. He’d been kneeling before the moonstone obelisks in the Great Temple’s Garden of Martyrs-and it had struck him as a vision, brought on by a fat monk named Brother Jendle. He had never seen the monk before that night, nor had he seen him since. He was no longer sure the man had even been real, rather than a figment of his sleep-deprived mind.

That one dream had changed the world. When he began his vigil, it had been in preparation to join the Knights of Solamnia, the ancient and honor-bound brotherhood that had served Istar since before the first Kingpriest’s crowning. When he told Beldinas of what he’d seen, however, the plans had changed. Rather than a Solamnic order, he had joined a new knighthood entirely. In the years since, the Divine Hammer had grown strong, ridding the holy empire of evil. He himself had risen to Grand Marshal, the highest post of all…

And then Cathan MarSevrin had fallen from grace.

It was because of, of all things, a woman. Leciane do Cirica had come to the Kingpriest’s court as envoy from the Orders of High Sorcery. She had worn the Red Robes, not the expected White, demonstrating that she followed the path of neutrality rather than good. That caused a scandal in the Temple, but Beldinas had welcomed her, and assigned Cathan to watch her. That was Cathan’s undoing.

Cathan still wasn’t sure if what he’d felt for Leciane had been love; perhaps, if times had been simpler, that might have been clear. When the treacherous Black Robes struck out against the throne, however, slaughtering his men, nearly murdering the Lightbringer as the empire tumbled toward war with the wizards, Cathan’s closeness to Leciane had cast doubt on his loyalties. As a last chance of regaining his standing with Beldinas, he had ridden south at the head of a force to strike at the sorcerers’ Tower at Losarcum.

And she had been there too-whether by design or chance, he didn’t know. But the morning he was to attack, Leciane had found him. She had told him of the wizards’ plans to destroy the Tower-they had already done so in Daltigoth, rather than yielding their secrets to the unschooled, and they would do it again. But the warning came too late; the attack could not be stopped, and the doom she’d spoken of came to pass.

Moments before the Tower destroyed itself and all of Losarcum, Leciane had cast a spell to spirit the two of them to safety, along with Tithian. But she was badly wounded, and did not survive. Maddened by grief, both for her and for the city that had died, he had returned to Istar and renounced the Lightbringer and the knighthood. It was a hard thing, among the hardest he’d ever done, but the dream, which had troubled him throughout his tenure in the Divine Hammer, had not come to him since. In fact, he hadn’t dreamed at all since that day.

Now it was happening again.

He recognized it at once, though it had been so long. There was no mistaking the feeling that came with it, the dreadful anticipation. It began where he slept, in the utterly lightless cave that had become his home. He felt himself hovering, and despite the dark he could sense his own body lying asleep beneath him. He hovered for a time, wondering at himself: gods, he’d grown so old. He was only in his fifties-the passing of years had been hard to track, so he no longer knew his true age-but the physical form below seemed at least twenty years older. Life in exile had been cruel.

Cathan remembered what would happen next in the dream, but the suddenness of it still took him by surprise. One moment he was still, floating maybe a dozen feet off the ground; the next he was rising, falling upward toward the cave’s ceiling. There was no sense of acceleration, no rush of air: it was as though someone had pulled the ground away from him. When he struck the ceiling-or it struck him-there was no impact, no pain. He simply slid through it, like the ghost men said he was.

There was even deeper darkness, for a time, as he passed through solid stone-then he was out in the night, staring at a fissure-ridden jumble of rock and glass that glinted in the light of the red and silver moons. Once, the rubble had been the hollowed-out mesa where Losarcum stood; now it was a mad broken heap, the empire’s largest tomb. The Tears of Mishakal stretched out around it, rocky and barren, threaded with baffling, meandering canyons.

Now he found himself hundreds of feet up in the air.

Now thousands, and there was the Sea of Shifting Sands, its dunes rippling with shadow all around the Tears. There, picked out in sprays of lamplight, were Dravinaar’s surviving cities: Yandol, with its vast, seven-walled bazaar; spike-turreted Attrika, impregnable atop a pinnacle of sandstone; Micah, the City of Glass, its great furnaces white-hot even in the middle of night.

Still he rose higher, and the rest of the empire came into view. In the west, the sight of hilly Taol brought