Secrets, secrets, he thought, everyone has a secret.
'So be it,' he whispered and got back to his feet, surrounded by distrust and enemies, with more likely lying in wait just ahead. It had been a cold day when Keffrass had entrusted him with the secrets of Shandaular, and he couldn't have imagined the day he used them would be colder still.
Somewhere inside-still hidden and buried, he hoped-lay the folly of Shandaular's desperate king and the true cause of the city's ruin.
He had to find the Shield's secret and ensure its safety.
He had to find its Breath.
Chapter Seven
Nightal2, I376DR, the Year of the Bent Blade
The snow was smooth and unbroken, the wind light and silent. Even the mist thinned as they neared the Shield, giving Bastun a better view of their surroundings as the group made its careful way across the courtyard to a series of rising steps.
The fortress loomed over them, the tops of its towers lost in darkness. High walls bridged one tower to the next, curving the entire structure into a wide embrace of stone and ancient ice.
Keffrass's journals had contained sketches of what he had seen, his thoughts written with a mixture of fear and fascination. Before they'd been stolen along with several other scrolls and maps, Bastun had pored over them, devouring all that he could. The Shield's emptiness, abandoned corridors and silent battlements, had caught his imagination like nothing else he had studied. Standing in its shadow, he could understand his master's apprehension. Frozen in time, it stood in stark contrast to the ruined city surrounding it. He had the sense that it was watching them, bitter and unforgiving; it waited for them with all the patience of a dark mountain.
No guards came to greet or question them. No torches lit their way to the main doors. Each step drew them closer to a truth they dreaded to discover. Seeing no sign of the Creel-or any other threat-only served to make them more wary.
At the base of the steps, Thaena called a halt, ordering two groups of warriors to scout east and west along the walls. Half the fang broke off to follow the command with several of the durthans sellswords joining them. They disappeared into the mist, their footsteps through the snow muffled and then gone altogether.
'Do you think this wise, Thaena?' Duras whispered to the ethran. Bastun turned, trying to appear casual as he eavesdropped. 'We face too many unknowns here.'
'I think we have few choices,' she answered, pacing away from the other warriors. 'If we turn back, we leave the Shield to the Nar and the hathran to their mercies. Beyond that, we have the durthans presence to consider as well. She cannot be left here.'
'The durthan we can deal with,' Duras replied. 'But you're right. We must see to the hathran first, though I must admit I-'
'I know,' Thaena said, cutting him off. 'A timely rescue seems less and less likely.'
With that she turned, motioned for the others to follow, and began ascending the stairs.
Bastun waited several breaths for the scouts to return, though the size of the outer wall might keep them away for some time. Staring after Thaena, he took a deep breath and took to the steps, slick with a thin coat of snow-covered ice.
At the stairs' highest point, twin towers stood sentinel at the end of a large enclosure before the main doors, the gates between them long fallen to dust. Long walls bore ice-encrusted arrow slits angled downward. Bastun eyed those slits closely, imagining the slaughter that might have taken place had an army come to the Shield's doors unprepared. Unfortunately, only one army had ever been this close-and they had been well prepared.
The berserkers grumbled and glared at the high walls, one of which had crumbled halfway down its length. The Rashemi did not care for such stonework and enclosed spaces, preferring the wilds of their homeland and simple lodgings close to the ground.
Their footsteps across the flagstones echoed dully as they neared the large double doors of the citadel. Thaena gestured for Anilya to guard the enclosure's entrance with her sellswords. Judging by Syrolf's glare at Ohriman, it was yet another rare moment where he and the vremyonni agreed-Bastun did not care to have the durthan and her tiefling at his back.
The wind picked up slightly, whistling across the tops of the walls and spilling snow over the sides. Drifts had piled in front of the doors. As Thaena approached the entrance, the fang spread out with weapons drawn, each with an eye on their surroundings, the durthan, and Bastun. Turning away and narrowing his eyes, Bastun focused on his location, withdrawing into the curiosity of a scholar's mind that had served as an escape for so many years.
'What do you see, vremyonni?' Startled, he found Anilya studying the stonework of the nearby wall over his shoulder. 'When you look at this place and all the time written into its stones, what do you see?'
She leaned forward, resting a hand on his arm as she examined the smooth contours of what might have once been a decorative carving, now worn to an indiscernible shape by centuries of exposure. Short, dark hair curled from beneath the edges of her mask, and he caught the scent ofwildflowers as she stood back. Suspicious, he remained silent and wasn't sure she even expected an answer to her strange question.
'Bastun.'
He turned to see Thaena motioning for him to join her at the entrance. Anilya's hand fell away as she continued to observe the ancient walls with the casual grace of an experienced conspirator. Thankful for the interruption, Bastun quickly took his leave of the durthan and her cloying perfume.
'The doors,' Thaena said. 'I detect no wards upon them, but I sense something here that eludes my magic. Can you examine them as well?'
'Of course,' he said. He glanced once again at the durthan who had wandered back to stand with her men. Shaking his head slightly at what to him seemed the greater mystery-the durthan-he studied the doors for signs of disturbance. The wood was new, fashioned in Rashemen and set with large iron bracers, simple and unadorned.
A spell came to mind and he stepped into the drift before the doors in order to reach them. Before he could cast, his boot struck something solid in the snow. Cautiously, he prodded the drift with his staff, causing it to tumble away in clumps from the hidden object. His eyes widened as he pushed away more and more snow.
Glistening white hands and arms reached from the snow, preserved in the pose of their horrible final moments. Faces appeared as he brushed away the snow, each frozen in a screaming rictus, as if pleading with whatever had felled them to either spare them or let them die. Thaena stared at the bodies piled against the doors, then knelt to reach for a dropped necklace of bear claws and teeth. Each of the corpses bore a similar talisman, the trappings and clothing of Rashemi berserkers on each one.
'Bear Lodge,' Duras whispered, though his voice thundered in the silence of the grisly scene.
'The hathran's fang,' Thaena added, turning the necklace over her wrist.
'No surprise that,' said Ohriman, the tiefling approaching nearby and observing the bodies with a disgusted sneer. 'Setting up camp in a place like this, bound to find it a bit colder sooner or later.'
'Hold your tongue, outlander,' Duras growled, 'or I'll hand it to you.'
'These were Rashemi,' Thaena said sternly, though her eyes never left the bodies. 'They certainly did not freeze to death.'
'I didn't mean to imply that they did, Lady Witch,' Ohriman replied with a mocking bow, then added as he straightened, 'Just that there's a reason most folk avoid Shandaular.'
A dark patch on the eastern wall drew Bastun closer, sparking a memory. Kneeling, he avoided looking at the icy body of a young berserker, a man barely old enough to join the fang.
Brushing some snow away from the stone, Bastun found a darker substance mixed beneath it. Pulling his hand back, the familiar scent of brimstone filled him with alarm as he uncovered another sigil of ash, just like the ones that marred the wychlaren's path. A bone-numbing cold stole his voice and he doubled over in pain, rolling away from the wall and struggling to breathe. Once-sightless eyes blinked at him and rolled in their sockets, bits of ice falling away from a furrowing white brow as the dead man's jaw opened to issue a weak murmur of hunger.
