avalanches unleashed by the shadowroc’s screech. It had to be.
After his dive, the shadowroc did not pluck Brianna from the trail, did not screech at the loss of his nephew. He remained silent, and the clatter of falling rocks continued to reverberate up the canyon. Finally, the queen opened her hands.
The shadowroc was not in the chasm. In his place stood Lanaxis, once again fully cloaked in robes of purple gloom and holding a blood-soaked mass of pulp and rags in one hand. His damson eyes were turned down the canyon, and Brianna saw no sign of either despair or anger on the profile of his murky face.
The titan tossed aside the rat-child’s pulverized body, then turned to Brianna. “Enough of this nonsense,” he rumbled. “Your son has need of us.”
Lanaxis plucked Brianna from the trail, then descended the slope. It took him less than a dozen strides to pass the tarn and reach the top of the waterfall. Not far down the canyon, dozens of twisted silhouettes were clambering up a ridge, and Brianna heard her son’s voice growling in the wind. There were no other sounds: no more clattering boulders or bellowing echoes, no clanging steel, no hint that Avner was anywhere near.
“They have killed your servant.”
Brianna let a groan slip past her lips and felt warm tears streaming down her face.
Lanaxis made no move to descend the waterfall. “What do you wish me to do?”
“What?” Brianna gasped. “Can’t you save my son?”
The titan nodded. “There is still time. The fomorians have not reached him yet. But I cannot save your son from you. A child needs his mother, or so I have heard.”
“Save Kaedlaw!” Brianna ordered. “Kill the fomorians!”
“Then there will be no more of your willfulness?” Lanaxis pronounced. “You accept his destiny?”
Brianna had no idea where her son was, but the fomorians were already well above timberline. Assuming Avner had been trying to circle around them, she doubted the young scout would have climbed much higher than that.
“I want Kaedlaw to live,” the queen replied.
“So do I-but it will take both of us to accomplish that,” Lanaxis insisted. “There can be no more escape attempts.”
Brianna looked toward the distant figures of the climbing fomorians, then swallowed once. “There’s no other safe place to go. I am done with escaping.”
“Then let it be so.”
Lanaxis’s words kindled a cold tingle deep within Brianna’s core. The sensation seeped up through her stomach and into her heart, and she knew that she was as bound to her word as any firbolg was to his.
Lanaxis muttered a few syllables in the ancient language of his magic, then took a long deep breath and spewed it down the canyon. A howling cloud of purple murk shot from his mouth and billowed over the fomorians, sweeping their disfigured silhouettes off the ridge and hurling them into the ravine beyond. The titan jumped down from the waterfall as easily as a man would leap off a meadow fence. He walked calmly down the valley, his steps booming off the walls, the bedrock cracking beneath his immense weight. He waded through the debris of an avalanche fan and climbed the ridge, sending the warped shadows of a dozen fomorians scuttling back into the thin forest.
Lanaxis set Brianna near Avner’s fallen body. “Gather up your son. I will see to our enemies.”
The queen had no trouble finding her growling son. He lay on the lee side of a boulder, swaddled in blood- soaked wool. Brianna unwrapped the child and found him cold and hungry, but otherwise uninjured. She bundled him up and turned down the slope.
Lanaxis was standing at timberline, glaring into the trees. As Brianna climbed down to Avner, the titan plucked a spruce out of the ground, then tossed it over the forest. Embers of violet fire danced among the boughs; then the tree burst into amethyst flame and shattered into a thousand blazing splinters. Wherever the slivers fell, geysers of purple fire shot high into the sky. All that lay beneath their light erupted into damson flame.
Holding Kaedlaw beneath her arm, Brianna knelt beside Avner’s body. The young scout lay facedown in a pool of frothy blood, with his sheathed sword beneath his body. The tip lay over a hollow where a boulder had once rested.
“No one could have done better, Avner-not even Tavis.” Brianna’s voice broke as she said the words. The queen touched the young scout’s neck, checking for a pulse that was not there. “I wish I could repay your courage, but even Hiatea’s magic cannot bring the dead back to life.”
Avner’s spirit lingered with his body long after the titan took the queen and left, until long after his flesh had frozen as solid as the stones it lay upon. He did not stay because duty demanded it-he had never been much for such folly and certainly did not feel bound by it now. Nor did he stay because unfinished business tied him to the world-he had died valiantly, and an honorable death always cuts such fetters.
He stayed for vengeance. The fomorians had started to scream almost as soon as Lanaxis set the forest alight, and the agony in their voices had been music to Avner’s dead ears. They had continued to wail all through the night, some of them until long after the last tree had burned. Even now, the dead scout-he had lived more of his life as a thief, really, but he had died as a scout, and he wanted to be remembered that way-even now, with the gray dawn light revealing the charred and barren landscape of the canyon, he could still hear a few of them moaning. Avner would always remember Lanaxis kindly for this favor, at least.
But the dead scout knew that he must soon forsake even this final pleasure. Already, he could feel the pale sunlight scorching his gossamer spirit, burning away the last airy threads by which he clung to his lifeless body. The time was fast approaching when he would have to let go and begin that terrifying journey every spirit makes alone. Avner saw no reason to wait. He loosened his hold, and his ethereal substance started to sink.
Then he heard a familiar voice coming up the ridge. Avner grabbed hold of his body-with what, he was not exactly sure-and held tight.
“Up here!” The voice belonged to Tavis Burdun, the firbolg who had changed him from a thief to a scout. “They came this way!”
“I’m coming Tav-” The speaker suddenly fell silent. Avner recognized this voice as his friend Basil’s. “Stronmaus save me! What is that there?”
“Avner.”
A pair of large, hot hands-they felt as fiery as forge irons-slipped between the young scout and his body, then lifted the remains off the ground. Avner struggled to stay, but there was nothing for him to hold to and he began to sink.
“Now will you listen to me?” Though Basil was screaming, his voice was fading fast. “Now will you use Sky Cleaver?”
Avner did not hear the answer, for he had already settled into the emptiness between the stones.
14
Tavis skirted a monolith the size of a castle tower, then clambered up another as large as an entire keep. He and Galgadayle were following Basil through the swarthy depths of Annam’s Hallway, an icy gorge running straight as a lance through the heart of Split Mountain. A thousand feet of jumbled talus boulders, some as enormous as hills, covered the canyon’s floor. Its sheer granite walls soared more than a mile upward, narrowing into a pair of jagged, needle-tipped peaks that could have been mirror-images of each other. According to Basil, Annam the All Father had created the chasm a hundred centuries earlier, when, exasperated with Othea’s faithlessness, he had hurled Sky Cleaver into the mountain.
The runecaster stopped atop a monolith, then slipped his divining rod from his belt and held it before him. The glowing tip bent downward at nearly a right angle.
“We’ve found it!”
“Not so loud!” Tavis urged. Though Orisino and the verbeegs still trailed a hundred paces behind, the high
