Scream of Stone

55

20 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Sisterhood of Pastorals, Innarlith

The wall was high, but not impossible to climb. Willem looked up and saw the glow of the broken glass that had been mortared to the top of it, reflecting the wan light of the coming dawn. He dug his fingernailstalons, really, that had grown an inch in one nightinto the space between the smooth rocks. Moving slowly but with purpose, he scaled the wall. When the broken glass tore his trousers and bit into his legs, he didn’t care, and he didn’t bleed.

Willem dropped to the mud between two shrubs and kneeled in the darkness of the wall’s shadow. He moved his head from side to side, and though he didn’t actually draw any air into his lungshe no longer needed to do thathe was sure of the smell of her.

The name came to him once moreHalinabut it faded as quickly as it came, and there was only his quarry, his prey. There was only a goal he didn’t understand.

He crossed the manicured grounds, his chin up, his nose trolling the air for the scent. He found it again, and it was as though a finger formed in the air to point him in the right direction.

He followed the scent to a shorter stone wall, one more ornamental than the high wall that surrounded the place.

Willem didn’t know exactly where he was. He was on the grounds of some kind of building, and there was something about that building, about the ground itself, that repelled him as much as the scent attracted him.

He stepped over the little wall and found himself in a graveyard.

Maybe three dozen stones had been scattered, seemingly at random, on the cut grass. None more than three feet tall, they were simple and carved with names.

Willem sniffed the air again and stepped between the stones.

The sound of a voice drifted from far away, carried on the cool pre-dawn air. Willem looked in the direction he thought the voice had come from, but he saw nothing. Looking into the shadows he felt a sense of impending doom wash over him, so strong he almost fell to his knees.

He shook his head when the scent intruded on himif it even was a scent. It could have been more an impulsea need to find her.

Whatever the mechanism, Willem knew she was close, and he was certain that when he found her, she would make everything all right. She would save him. He didn’t know her name or how they knew each other. He could form no picture of her in his reeling, increasingly dull mind. But he knew her, and he knew she was

There.

Under the ground, buried.

He let a ragged growl tremble unvoiced in his throat, and he fell to his knees in front of a stone. His fingers found the engraving and traced the letters. He blinked but couldn’t see them, and though he wasn’t conscious of being able to read, he knew the letters came together to spell her name.

Halina.

“Who is that there?” a woman called out to him.

He jumped to his feet, his head spinning, and cast about for the source of the voice.

Though so much of what was left of him longed for it to be her, he knew it wasn’t Halina.

“By the Blessed” the woman shrieked.

He saw her step out from behind a tree, just inside the low wall around the cemetery. She clutched at her chest. The light from her lantern lit her face from below, twisting her features into a grotesque mockery of human.

Willem, overwhelmed by the need to kill the woman, moved toward her, his hands poised to rip her head from her shoulders. The woman raised the thing she’d clutched at her neck for and a brilliant white light overwhelmed Willem’s vision.

He couldn’t see any details of the symbol, but he knew what it was. The power of a goddess he was unfit to name rolled over him like a thunderhead rolls across an open plain.

He turned and ran. His legs moved, and his arms bounced at his sides. He couldn’t think. The need to find Halina was gone, the overwhelming necessity to kill Ivar Devorast also fled, and all that was left was the immediate, irrepressible need just to get away.

The woman drove him before her, and he ran all the way to the high wall. He climbed it faster than before, cut himself more deeply, too, but once he was over he ran and ran and ran into the growing light of the awakening city.

By the time he found an abandoned shed behind a ramshackle storefront in which to hide, there was nothing left of Willem Korvan. The man had been erased, and the monster knew only one thing.

Kill.

Kill Ivar Devorast.