Dawnbringer

Chapter Fourteen

JADAREN HOLD

1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

Walking the mile or so down the crushed-lava road to the oak, Lusk remembered the halfling thief in Cormyr, and a smile curved his mouth. How naive Lakini was about it.

He had felt the slight tug of the thief’s sly fingers on his coin pouch.

The deva turned on the unsuspecting thief, quick as thought. The halfling found himself gripped around the throat, his air cut off before he could react, then lifted into the air and shoved hard against the rough, slick stones of the alley wall. His eyes widened as he stared into the eyes of his erstwhile mark, the golden eyes and the slanted streaks across the face. What was this creature? He had taken it for an oversize half-elf.

The little thief grinned ingratiatingly. The deva was stern but would turn him over to the tender mercies of the city watch. Day watch would be problematic, but dusk watchwas well bribed by the guild and would let him go for a reasonable fee and a few light cuffs for show. The deva might be angry, but he wouldn’t harm him. The creatures were ridiculously law-abiding.

Nothing could express the little thief’s astonishment when the deva’s knife pierced his entrails, deep, ripping up, up, up. Lusk leaned close to the halfling’s ear, his lips almost touching it.

“In your last few moments of life, maggot,” whispered the deva, “it will be my duty and pleasure to teach you a very valuable lesson.”

It was only a minute before the halfling was beyond all education.

The sun had long passed its apex, and the figure under the tree stood in a pool of shade. Lusk’s fingers itched for his bow, but the figure didn’t move, and he forced himself to relax.

He climbed the slight rise to the base of the oak, passing without a glance the small shrine of lava rock that had stood through all time and weather.

Lakini stepped forward to meet him. Despite himself, Lusk stopped, shocked at the sight of her face.

The pale band was still across her eyes. But now she was further marked. It was as if her face were a porcelain mask that had been dropped and shattered, and then repaired, leaving a pattern of cracks.

“By the Sea, Lakini,” he whispered, forgetting for a moment his anger at his once-companion. “What happened to you?”

Her expression remained placid, but she lifted a hand to her face, tentatively touching it as if she could feel the cracks. He saw her sleeve was brown and stiff with dried blood.

Her hand fell back to her belt, to the hilt of the knife he had given her, now her only weapon. It was an automatic gesture, not meant to be offensive, so he didn’t react to it.

“I began to die, Lusk,” she said. “After I got away, I went to the woods.”

“We tracked you to the edge,” he said. “There was a lot of blood.”

“Why didn’t you go farther?” There was a genuine curiosity in her voice.

He paused, frowning, unable to answer. The truth was that he thought he had killed her. And although they had become enemies, he couldn’t bear the thought of desecrating a deva’s death, which was simply the beginning of the process of reincarnation, by hunting her down like a wounded deer.

After a long pause to allow him to answer, she went on.

“I started to die, Lusk. I felt myself dissolving. And then, when it came to it, I refused my reincarnation.”

“You-” Lusk swallowed and looked past her shoulder, at the rough patterns in the bark of the oak, at the ancient letters carved there. “How?” he asked.

“It’s hard to remember everything,” said Lakini. “But I was … scattering, I suppose you’d call it.”

Her voice grew bitter. “You can’t remember, because they take that memory away from you, don’t they? All the memories of living and dying. How it must have maddened them that we remembered enough to come together within each lifetime. How it must have gladdened them that we turned against each other.”

Frowning, Lusk looked into her shattered face, searching it. “Who?” he queried.

“The gods, Lusk, that make us play this game of life and death. When it was time, I told them no. I refused to reincarnate. And since they made me to be reborn, they couldn’t let me die.”

A corner of Lusk’s mouth turned up. “Were they angry?”

She toughed her face again, as if self-conscious. “Yes. They were very angry.”

“Why, Lakini?” His voice was stern. “Why did you defy them?”

“Because I realized you were right.”

Unconsciously his hand brushed the hilt of his own knife. “Are you speaking the truth?” There was a thread of hope in his voice.

“I’ve been well marked for speaking the truth,” she said. “These human families do nothing but sell the same goods back and forth until everyone forgets what they have and buys more. I know now why you were sent here.”

She nodded at the dark stone eminence over his shoulder. “That bracelet. Shadrun needs it, and I know where Kestrel hid it. I saw her. Let me go inside and get it.”

“Where did she hide it?”

She shrugged. “Nowhere original. A box on her dresser. I can find it for you, Cserhelm. For Shadrun.”

He tilted his head, dubious. “How? They’re well organized now, and fortified. And they still have …” He hesitated, then went on. “The bracelet. The Rhythanko, it’s called. It’s the source of the warding. It holds the spells about the place together, lock and key.”

That’s why it was so important to Kestrel, thought Lakini. She was its keeper. She was acutely aware of the slight weight of the Rhythanko about her neck, although it wasn’t moving now. But then, if the Rhythanko was the lock and the key to Jadaren Hold, how was it Lusk and his forces hadn’t been able to move right in?

Perhaps some of its Power remained with Kestrel. Whatever the truth of the matter, she had to get inside the Hold, by any means in her power.

Even if it meant lying to another deva.

“They’ll let me in,” she said. “Last they saw, we were going over the side together. Tell your men to fight me, and I’ll break through their line and make for the Hold. They’ll let me in.”

He considered her a long moment.

“Your sword is somewhere up there.” He waved an arm at the top of the Hold. “You have your dagger, but … how will you fight convincingly?”

“I am a deva, and they are but men,” she said. “But tell them not to press too hard. I don’t want to hurt them.”

Lusk grinned then, a sharp-toothed smile.

“My mother? You want to see my mother, who killed my father and my brothers and would have killed me if she could?” Brioni Jadaren demanded.

The surviving daughter of Kestrel and Arna paced the stone floor of the chamber. Lakini had been stunned and amused to find that she had organized the defenses of the Hold the night before, taking advantage of the confusion caused by Lusk’s and her tumbling off the top of the monolith, for despite the wings Lusk had been able to conjure out of thin air, many thought both devas had been killed. Under her command, the Jadaren guards had been able to push back the forces of both the Beguines and Saestra, and although the wards that Lakini now knew the Rhythanko controlled were compromised, much of the magic lingered.

“I do want to see her,” said Lakini calmly. “I didn’t make my way past the Beguine guards for a lark.”

She had learned that a body healed of horrific wounds wasn’t as quick as one newly made, but he had managed to get by five of Kaarl vor Beguine’s best men without lasting injury to either side. And they’d put on a good enough show-eager hands had helped Lakini over the doors into the caverns, and archers had discouraged the Beguines from coming closer.

The girl flashed her an odd look, and Lakini knew it was because of the crazed pattern on her face.

Brioni bit her lip. “You can imagine that it’s not pleasant to know that the woman who gave birth to you is a traitor to the core.”

“I don’t think she was.”

Brioni’s head snapped around at her. “Really? Killing my family and letting the enemy into the heart of our Hold was not the act of a traitor? You have strange ideas, Lakini.”

“I suspect, Brioni, that she was under a spell.”

“How can a spell make you hurt your children? I saw my baby brother. She smothered him in his cradle. She killed his nurse.”

She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, a gesture that recalled to Lakini how very young she was. “The men won’t let me see my father or my brothers. I did see the blood.”

“Fifteen years. What spell lets you live with a man fifteen years, and bear children with him, and then slaughter them all one night?”

“A very evil spell,” said Lakini.

Brioni blinked rapidly and looked down. “I’ll let you see her. I’ll take you there myself.”

Lakini nodded and turned to go.

“Wait,” said Brioni, and went to a corner. She lifted a white-wrapped bundle from the floor.

“It’s your sword,” she said. “We found it on the summit, afterward.”

The girl, older than her years, studied Lakini’s shattered face as she nodded her thanks and unwrapped the sword, examining the blade for cracks and the edge for nicks before slinging it into its accustomed place across her back.

“How did you live, Lakini?” Brioni asked finally. “You fell all that way. I saw the two of you, like a ball of fire falling past a window. And the men say you were hurt very badly.”

She studied the bloodstain on Lakini’s shoulder with frank curiosity.

Lakini waited until the girl’s eyes met her own.

“I’m a deva,” she said simply. “It’s not my nature to die.”

She followed Brioni down a series of passages. Now and then they passed an armed guard, each of whom nodded at Brioni and touched his or her forehead. She recognized some of them, and some greeted her by name.

“What’s the deva doing with Mistress Brioni?” she heard one guard say to another, both of them thinking they were too far up the tunnel to be overheard.

“Maybe she’s here to exact divine justice on that filthy bitch,” responded the other guard, with considerable venom.

Lakini’s keen eye caught Brioni shivering.

“Why hasn’t she been killed, Brioni? Emotions are running high.”

Brioni shrugged. “No one understood, at first, that she had let in the attackers and killed my father and my brothers. She was in her bed, lying next to my father. She wouldn’t speak, and we thought she was in shock from what she’d seen. But she had the knife in hand, and she didn’t deny it.”

She had left Lakini at the top of a passage that led down to Kestrel’s prison and a guard, gnarled and taciturn, led her the rest of the way.

They’d put Kestrel in a chamber on the lowest inhabited level of the Hold. There were lower tunnels, carved from the rock when the place was still called the Giant’s Fist, but no one ventured there, and despite the tales the children whispered to one another at bedtime, no subterranean horrors came crawling out from beneath. The prison chamber was, like the rest of the quarters at Jadaren Hold, hewn out of the living rock. The walls down here were rough, not smooth and finished, and the room was ten paces wide in either direction.

A woman sat against the wall, her hair hanging over her face, her hands folded on her tattered skirt. From a small subchamber to the side came a smell that showed it served as a privy.

Lakini stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Kestrel to notice her. When the woman made no movement, she finally spoke.

“Kestrel.”

Kestrel looked up. Lakini started in shock. Kestrel’s gentle brown eyes looked at her from a ruined face that was torn all over with scratches and gouges. In the witchlight that hung from the ceiling, she could see that her arms were similarly marked.

Lakini felt a flare of anger. No prisoner, no matter his or her sins, should be treated like this. It would be better to kill the individual and have it over.

Then she saw Kestrel’s nails, broken and stained, and the dark semicircles of dried blood and tissue beneath the nails. She had done it to herself.

“Have you come to kill me?” croaked Kestrel hoarsely.

“No,” said Lakini, and crouched down so the woman wouldn’t have to strain her neck looking up.

“Why don’t you kill me, Lakini? I should have died. She should have died.”

“Who?”

“The woman who did it. Who opened the wards, who took the Key, who killed”-she swallowed painfully-“who murdered my children. She was in me, so how else could you kill her but by killing me?”

Lakini crossed her legs in the posture of meditation. “Can you tell me what happened?”

There was another long pause, while Kestrel looked down, rocking back and forth slightly. The silence stretched out, and Lakini waited patiently, without moving a muscle.

“It was as if I were imprisoned in a glass chamber, while an alien creature possessed my body,” Kestrel began, her red-rimmed eyes staring at the wall past Lakini’s shoulder as if she saw the dreadful scene reenacted as a lantern show. “At first I didn’t understand. I thought it was one of those dreams, those half-awake dreams, where you lie paralyzed while shadowy figures creep about the room. But I realized I was watching myself, my own body, from a place just outside of it. I couldn’t stop it. But I could see everything. I-” Kestrel stopped and shook her head as if to clear it. “It was a gift from my uncle Sanwar, that knife. He was so very angry about my marriage. He’s one of those Beguines who hate anything to do with the Jadarens. But for my birthday this year, he sent me a box. It was a puzzle box, he said, and I’d have to figure out the solution-or smash it open. I laughed, and promised him I’d never break it apart.”

Kestrel looked at Lakini suddenly, hard, the intensity of her gaze like a blow.

“Where were you? You had sworn to protect me, and you left me helpless. Against her, against the thing I was forced to be. Why did you go? You came to me only when it was too late, when it was over.”

“I am sorry,” said the deva, and meant it. Sorry for that. Sorry for Jonhan Smith. Even sorry for lying to Lusk.

“The knife was in the box,” said Kestrel. “Why would Uncle Sanwar send me a box?”

Sanwar.

“The Key,” continued Kestrel. “Something told me to find and take the Key, and give it to the other, the deva with the tiger stripes. Lusk. But I didn’t, did I?” Her ravaged, bloody face looked suddenly panicked. “Where’s the Key? Do you know? I mustn’t lose it. Niema told me, before she died, that I must know where it was, always.”

“It’s safe,” Lakini told her. “You gave it to me.”

Kestrel shut her eyes.

“I remember you there, and giving you the Key. And then I was very tired and just wanted to lie down with Arna. He was very still, and cold, but I lay with him, anyway.”

“Kestrel, you said your uncle Sanwar gave you the knife. Did he give you anything else?”

Kestrel looked puzzled. “No.”

“Anything? Ever? A wedding gift.”

“I remember now. He gave me a charm. A charm against harmful magic. My mother made me promise to wear it always.”

Kestrel looked away. “Uncle Sanwar married my mother, did you know that?”

“Where is the charm?”

Kestrel reached for something at her breast, then screamed.

“It burned,” she said, gasping. “Something searing over my heart, liquid fire. It hurt, but a pain like a hunger, distracting.”

Her torn, bloodstained gown was fastened up the front with simple bone buttons, and she pulled at the closure, tearing two of them away. Beneath the cambric, the smooth skin of her breast was fearsomely scarred. Either glass or metal so hot as to be liquid had poured on her. Embedded in her skin were blue and green fragments of glass. The charm had melted into her as it fulfilled its true, diabolical purpose.

“Sanwar,” said Lakini. “He gave you that and saw that you would wear it always, until it suited his purposes to activate the trigger. He planted you as an innocent weapon in the heart of his enemy’s fastness. But there’s something behind him. He didn’t know it, but he was being used himself, by a being that considers us nothing but puppets. It’s using Lusk, too.”

Kestrel blinked.

“Yes, I know. It was …” She shut her eyes tight like a child trying to remember a lesson. “Fandour.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t know. It’s a name that’s come to me, an echo from the magic of the Key. I know it sounds strange, but I don’t think that even the Key knows who Fandour is.”

The chain around Lakini’s neck stirred and unwound from her. Lakini grabbed at it, but it dodged through her fingers, stretching still thinner as it went. Completely animate now, it landed on the stone floor and wound its way to Kestrel’s feet. By the time it reached her, it had thinned to the diameter of a bowstring, and the links were gone. It was as if a child had taken a figure made of soft clay and rolled it thinner and thinner between his palms, until it had lost all shape and feature. The three red gems along its length winked dully in the grass, spaced unevenly.

The Rhythanko strand, no longer any kind of bracelet or armband, coiled around Kestrel’s ankle and ascended whip-quick up her body, beneath her shift, and emerged at the neck. Kestrel smiled at Lakini, her thin face resembling a death mask. The now-threadlike strands of the Rhythanko nosed at the raw skin around the base of her neck.

To the deva’s horror, the gem-studded thread reared back and stabbed into one of the wounds Kestrel had carved into her flesh. She reached out and tried to grab it, but Kestrel pushed her away, staggering back against the wall.

“It will kill you, Kestrel!” Lakini lunged toward Kestrel again, with the vague thought of throwing her down underfoot and winding the cursed threads inch by inch out of her body.

“It’s not killing me,” Kestrel gasped, wrapping her arms around her body. “It’s becoming a part of me.”

She threw her head back, as if in pleasure, as the last of the Rhythanko and the third gem forced its way into her body. She stretched out her arms. Lakini could see the tiny threads writhing under the skin of her neck, shoulders, and arms, burrowing like worms, and leaving bruised flesh in their wake.

Kestrel relaxed and lifted her arm, watching the Rhythanko move under the dead white, blue-veined skin of her forearm, marred by the scratches she had inflicted and the pool of red and purple-brown where the insistent metal threads were tearing the fascia. She lifted her head and smiled at Lakini with her hollowed eyes. The deva flexed her hands, feeling helpless. She couldn’t get the Rhythanko out without tearing off Kestrel’s skin.

“They can’t take it now,” said Kestrel. “Not without ripping me apart.” Her gouged face looked lost again. “Do I still have a daughter?”

“Yes,” said Lakini.

“Sometimes I think I killed them all. Lakini?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever killed the innocent?”

Lakini remembered Jonhan’s eyes.

“Yes.”

“How do you forgive yourself?”

Lakini didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t,” she said finally.

The rock knew fire.

It was made in the swell and ebb of fire from the center of the world, born from molten stone that pushed a fiery tide at the surface until it burst forth. The rock pulsed liquid within the volcano that formed there, a mountain’s heart beating slower and slower while it solidified. The mountain slept, and the rock within it, until time and the elements stripped the skin and the sinew and the flesh of the mountain away, leaving the rock naked in black basalt solitude.

Now and then, in the ages that followed, small fires were lit on top of the rock, and the tiny creatures that lit them huddled against the cold. They always moved on, for the rock was a barren place overlooking a desolate plain, far away from anybody’s hearth and home.

Then more creatures came, skilled in sculpting stone to their ends. The rock burned again, worms of fire tunneling deep inside it, deeper and deeper until the delvers burrowed to the root of the mountain. There, beneath the spine of the world, they broke into chambers sealed before the current age was imagined. There they found the raw treasures of the earth-gemstones and rare metals-but also they woke horrors that had coiled there, sleeping. Those few who were not devoured fled for their lives to distant lands, never to return.

More recently a green fire had passed through the rock, not hot but cool as water as it flickered through the long-abandoned passages. The fire came from something small, but, like the sharp tip of a dagger, it had great Power behind it. A human wielded it, locking the substance of the rock and its tunnels to the blood of another, down to the caverns at the foot of the rock, down to the tunnels bored out of the substratum beneath.

But not as far as the voids and passages deeper, which over time had been colonized and abandoned and found again by dark-dwelling creatures rarely thought of by those that lived in the realm of the sun. The green fire sealed off those corridors below, but they remained, like scar tissue deep beneath a healed wound.

The small fires that made a dwelling place for men and their kin-hearthfire, coals for cooking, and torches to light the night at the heart of the rock sparked in it now. And deep underneath, where those who came before and delved too deep had died, beneath the giant anthill of rooms and tunnels, beneath the caves where caravans could shelter, beneath doorways sealed and spelled in a language men had forgotten long since, more fires burned, cold and smokeless.

The ways and desires of men, dwarves, halflings, or elves meant nothing to the rock-nor did the things they made or bought or sold, or their songs and stories, their good deeds and evil, their lives and deaths. Let them hew out tunnels, cast spells, dwell within, or be cast out by fate or a stronger clan. It didn’t care. It knew only the forces that made it: the liquid center of the world, the thrust of continental plates, the force of a volcano, the slow but inevitable grind of wind and water on its surface. It knew fire.

Now a small cold fire burned in the hand of the deva that walked with Kestrel along one of the deep tunnels, an ancient escape route burrowed in time unimaginable.

“You must leave here,” Lakini had told her. “So long as Lusk knows the Rhythanko, the Key, is here, he won’t rest until he has it. Do you know a way out?”

Past the privy chamber was a tunnel, and the tunnel led deep into the woods. “The children told me about it,” said Kestrel. “Brioni and her friends.”

Her voice choked a little on her daughter’s name. “They play in every part of the Hold. There’s nothing they don’t know. You can learn a lot if you listen to children.”

It seemed like hours they walked the tunnel before a haze of green light showed where a mass of overgrown vines hid the entrance. Lakini closed her hand, stifling her light, and they shoved past the blockage until they were free.

This was a different part of the woods than the place in which she’d almost died the night before. There were fewer close-growing pines and more birches, so the remaining sunlight dappled the white trunks of the trees.

Lakini breathed in the fresh woodland air.

“You lied to me, Lakini,” said a voice. She whirled, reaching overhead for her sword without a moment’s thought.

Lusk stood a little ways away on a hillock, an arrow to the string of his bow, but he was not aiming it, not yet.

“It appears we’re not in agreement, after all,” he said. “You think I’m an abomination, and I think you’re a fool.”