Of Truth And Beasts Part 53

Then he saw the bones.

There were so many, and they were so old that they blended with the loose stones and rubble on the cave floor. Some were still embedded at the base of the far wall, and he wondered how this could be. Had the rest that were lying about been dug up? Curiosity quelled frustration as his thoughts turned to what little he knew of this place.

Beloved's forces had breached the seatt, and then a catastrophe struck. The mountain peak had collapsed, killing both sides during the siege. He had wondered over the centuries what could have created such devastation.

Sau'ilahk had seen no more bones along the tunnel, but he was deep down now, and the bones here were numerous. Something had happened here, something had been . . . dug up? Turning one hand corporeal, he began digging, scattering loosened debris and bones. Then his fingers sc.r.a.ped something hard and dense.

Calling up his reserve of consumed life, he turned his other hand corporeal and began tearing away more loose rubble and dirt. He kept clawing and sc.r.a.ping on something hard as stone. The more he dug around it, the more he felt it was too round and almost smooth.

He frantically brushed the dust from its gritty surface.

It was a globe slightly larger than a great helm, made of dark, near-black, stone. Though faintly rough, its rounded surface was too perfect to be natural. The large, tapered head of a spike protruded atop it. When he rolled it slightly in the rubble, he saw the spike's tip sticking out through the globe's bottom. Spike and globe were one, chiseled from a single piece.

Waves of joy inside him mixed with an unexpected outrage.

Made by his G.o.d, by Beloved's own will, the orb . . . the Anchor of Spirit had been left like forgotten rubbish among dirt and bones. Perhaps the catastrophe had caught the Children who had brought it. That they had been buried among Beloved's minions, his tools, brought some satisfaction to Sau'ilahk. And the anchor had remained where it had fallen in a long-forgotten time, waiting for him to claim.

He would be beautiful again and forever young. The promise made to him so long ago would be fulfilled. This time, he had not been betrayed.

Beloved, he whispered with his thoughts.

Through that whelp of a sage, his G.o.d had led him to his own salvation. Drawing deep on his reserves, he turned his whole body corporeal and picked up the heavy orb, finally, after a thousand years. As his cloth-wrapped arms closed around it, he just stood there, and relief made him almost wearier than anything else.

He looked down at what he held and went numb inside.

In those ancient days, he never actually touched the anchors. Only the Children were so privileged. He had seen one on rare occasions when one of them carried it out for a purpose his G.o.d had commanded. But he knew of them, all five, each one an anchor binding one Element of Existence. Each one enslaved a different primal component for his G.o.d's bidding.

Although the orb lay dormant in his arms, he should still be able to feel its essence. Through his Beloved, through his own nature as an eternal spirit, he should feel the core of its elemental nature and the spark of Spirit trapped within it.

The spark was not there.

Sau'ilahk stared at the orb in his arms. He sensed something from it, but its presence felt deeply . . . grounded? There was nothing within it close to his nature as a pure, undying . . . spirit.

He looked about the cave. Anguish returned, swelling into horror.

Those reptilian creatures must have dug into this place in the seatt's bowels. The state of the bones suggested something else had happened here. Beloved's forces must have tried to dig in under the seatt, to come in from beneath before anyone here realized. But in the end, they must have been discovered.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Beloved's forces had died here, buried under the mountain along with their enemies. And here was the orb.

But what would the orb of Spirit be worth in this place? Nothing, now or then. This was not the orb of Spirit. It was one of the others, perhaps the orb of Earth? He had been following Wynn all this time . . . only to find the wrong orb.

At that truth, Sau'ilahk began to moan.

Dust and dirt stirred as conjury-twisted air gave a voice to his pain. He began weeping, and his growing rage turned into a wail. His shrieks filled the deadend cave with so much wind that pebbles scored the walls and bones rattled across the floor.

Sau'ilahk screamed, Betrayer!

He had been cheated again by the half-truths of his G.o.d, as he had a thousand years ago with the promise of eternal life.

A hissing whisper rose in his thoughts. Do not despair.

Sau'ilahk was beyond caring if he offended his G.o.d, and he screamed back, Wellspring of lies . . . of deceits!

He dropped the orb. Rubble and bones crackled under its weight, along with a metallic clang. Hope of beauty and eternal youth withered, and the pain of renewed loss was too great to bear. He screamed at his G.o.d once more.

The sage is dead, burned to nothing! What would you have me follow now!

The hiss a.s.sailed him again.

She lives . . . but if you choose to no longer obey, servant, then seek on your own.

Sau'ilahk's shrieking wind died. If Wynn lived, why would his treacherous G.o.d allow him freedom to do as he pleased? What could he do that he had not tried already in a millennium of searching? He was done with this place, and his misery made him wish to be gone.

That whisper like reptilian scales sliding over sand tore at him again.

Every anchor has its chain, its handle, by which to haul it, just as every portal has its key by which to open it. Did you not hear the key speak?

He was too anguished to care about more taunting hints, but Beloved went on.

Since you no longer hear me, servant . . . perhaps you will remember having heard it.

Sau'ilahk stood still, suspicion growing within him. What was this nonsense about chains, handles, or keys . . . for the anchors of Existence?

He looked down at the one he had dropped.

The orb just lay at his feet, but there had been a sound when it fell that was wrong. Not the dull crack of stone upon stone, or even bones, but a metallic clank. He crouched, forcing one hand corporeal again, and shoved the orb aside.

In the depression its bulk had made was a spot of ruddy golden hue.

Sau'ilahk quickly slapped away dirt and dust until it was fully revealed. Before him lay a thick and heavy circlet of a rusty-golden metal, neither bra.s.s nor gold. Its open ends had protruding k.n.o.bs pointing directly at each other. Its circ.u.mference was covered in engravings, though he could not read those marks.

Sau'ilahk remembered seeing such an item before. Once when he had witnessed one of the Children departing with an anchor, an orb, it had worn just such an open-ended circlet about its pale neck.

He glanced toward the orb and saw something more in the tapered head of its spike.

There were grooves about the right size for the circlet's k.n.o.bs. Was this key, this handle, how an orb was truly used? Even so, what good was it to him? This...o...b..was not the one he desired.

I need no key to a place I do not wish to go, he projected. Nor a handle for something I do not want.

This time, no answer came-and Sau'ilahk heard the footfalls echoing down the tunnel.

There was more than one pair, and both were too heavy to be Wynn. If one of them was Chane, Sau'ilahk was too weak to deal with that irksome undead.

Frustration made him hesitate, and then he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the circlet. He had no way to carry it without remaining corporeal, so he turned to the cave's rear wall.

The last of his energies fueled one final conjuration as a maw opened in the stone.

Sau'ilahk shoved the circlet in, to be retrieved later.

As the maw closed, leaving only raw stone, dormancy took him completely, and he vanished. For now, he was done with this place . . . this tragically disappointing place.

Wynn was lost in loathing inside the memories of Deep-Root. She was shaken back to awareness when the elder stonewalker's furious cries were suddenly cut off. The blackness of stone enveloped her again, and all she heard were the gale of whispers inside Deep-Root.

. . . they are coming . . . not one but many . . . soon they will find you . . .

A dim glow rose all around as the leaf-wing pushed the whispers down once more.

Ignore them, and hear only me.

Wynn-Deep-Root-stood in the dim phosph.o.r.escence of the caves holding the honored dead, but he didn't move an inch. He kept twisting his head rapidly, looking about, and the glimmering walls and shadows whipped too quickly in Wynn's sight.

She didn't understand what had happened in the hall of the Eternals. How had this ma.s.s murderer escaped the insane older stonewalker?

Deep-Root took a slow step, placing one foot carefully, and then another. He was trying to be silent. Then he crouched amid the calcified dead, placed his hand on the cave floor, and grew still.

Wynn felt-heard-distant sounds, as if his hand could pa.s.s them directly to her ears or her thoughts. She-he-was listening through stone, as Ore-Locks had in the tram tunnel.

Running boots pounded, and Deep-Root twisted to his right.

Wynn saw only a crushed wall beyond columns made of joining stalact.i.tes and stalagmites. More footfalls sounded, more running feet, and Deep-Root twisted farther around.

The sound suddenly cut off as he looked to the wall he'd come through.

"Honored Ones," he whispered. "Give me sanctuary!"

Wynn wanted to scream at him for such a plea, but she had no voice. The leaf-wing came instead.

They cannot. Cling to me against the madness. . . . Come to me.

"Silence!" he snarled. "You are nothing but more of this plague upon my people."

I am only with you since my coming. I hold this piece of calm, of silence, anch.o.r.ed within you.

"Get out!" he shouted, forgetting all caution.

I am what gives you this respite, free of what eats at all others. You already cling to me for this.

"You are the worst of what has come! Leave me alone!"

The leaf-wing seemed to fade, but not completely. It was still there, somewhere, holding off the gale. But the moment of near silence left Wynn lost as to what any of this meant.

Then kill me . . . if you can.

That one crackling utterance smothered Wynn's despair and stoked fear in its place. What was that voice trying to do in goading Deep-Root? Then she heard a loud, wet smack.

Deep-Root whirled about as a thrum rose through him from the cave floor. Wynn felt it as she spotted the shadowed form of another stonewalker in the next cave opening. He had just slapped his hand against the stone.

She'd seen that before in the underworld of Dhredze Seatt, but she'd never known how the Stonewalkers' signal for alarm truly worked. It was like a rapid quake running through her, and she could actually follow its sound through stone to its origin.

Heavy boots struck the cave floor, and Deep-Root turned again.

Yet another Stonewalker rushed at him from out of a cave wall.

I wait beyond the farthest place to fall. Can you live long enough to reach it?

Deep-Root bolted, and Wynn heard the shouts of his pursuers echoing through the caves of the Honored Dead. He ran straight through calcified columns and walls of wet stone, swerving each time he reappeared to leap into another wall. And then one time, the blackness of stone didn't pa.s.s in a wink-it went on and on.

Wynn felt her lungs might rupture before she-he-took another breath.

What was the "farthest place to fall"? Or was it truly a place one could go?

Besides Deep-Root, there was one thing lower than this worst of traitors; that was the enemy-Beloved, il'Samar, the Night Voice. Was it speaking to him, toying with him through a false protection from the madness that ate through this seatt amid a siege? Where were those other whispers coming from?

Blackness broke, and Deep-Root exhaled, though not with the exhaustion Wynn suffered in the stone. It didn't affect him at all. Perhaps it didn't affect any Stonewalker. He turned in the near dark, feeling along the wall.

His hand settled on something made of crisp angles and smooth surfaces, and he stroked it once. Amber light rose all around.

Wynn looked upon the Chamber of the Fallen.

Deep-Root's eyes locked on something that was wrong in this place-or was wrong to him. A great gash showed in the hall's far end-exactly like the one Wynn had found. But he hesitated, stiffening, as if he had never seen it before.

"I am coming for you!" he threatened, walking slowly, watchfully, toward the gash. "I will tear you out of my head."

And I have been waiting . . . since I came for you.

Wynn didn't want him to go anywhere near that gash. Something inside there was trying to use this murderous traitor for its own purpose. One malevolent force was manipulating another in this place, and she could do nothing to change it.

Deep-Root leaned through the gash, looking up and down the tunnel beyond it.

A heavy footfall echoed through the chamber, and he began to turn.

"Hiding among the Fallen?" someone shouted. "Running to your own . . . you traitor!"

The pound of their boots echoed like war drums. Three stonewalkers charged down the hall between the great basalt coffins.

Deep-Root fled into the gash, at first turning left. But something there glowed in the dark, like coals heating up under a harsh breath. He whirled and ran the other way down the raw tunnel-the direction that Wynn had gone herself.

She heard the footfalls and shouts of the others now in the tunnel. Deep-Root halted, listening to them coming nearer. He took a step toward the rough sidewall.

A soft, red glow rose in the tunnel's distance behind him.

Wynn heard a crack like breaking stone echo down the tunnel. Again and again it came, faster and faster, as it drowned out the pounding echoes of heavy boots. Three silhouettes of stonewalkers up the tunnel halted and looked back.

A hissing roar hammered Wynn's-Deep-Root's-ears and made the stone vibrate. Deep-Root sucked a breath as flame erupted up the tunnel.

It engulfed those three silhouettes before he could s.h.i.+eld his eyes against the glare. Screams rose and were quickly smothered by crackling fire, and then the roar faded. Wynn saw one broad form aflame throw itself at the wall. It didn't pa.s.s through but toppled back, crumpling like the other two. She watched them come apart like cinders under a hot blaze.

The blast died away, and the only light left came from burning bodies and the scant flickering flames clinging to the floor, walls, and ceiling, as if they'd been splashed with oil. Beyond the dwindling flames, something came striding forward. The tunnel shuddered under its heavy, rhythmic steps.