The Jewel of Turmish

CHAPTER SIX

"You're sure this is the place?"

Eyes burning from only occasional restless sleep over the last three days, Cerril glanced up at Two-Fingers's hoarse, whispered question. He stood on trembling legs only from sheer force of will and a desire to survive. Leaden-gray fog rolled in from the Sea of Fallen Stars and carried a cold mist that had already dampened Cerril's hair and skin. The young thief pulled the thin blanket more tightly around his shoulders and shivered again.

Another of the small cemeteries that pockmarked Alagh?n's surrounded them. Headstones and markers, tumbled and disheveled, offered visual proof that most-if not all-of the families that had left dead there in the past had long since died out or moved away. Rampant weeds and untrimmed trees formed living walls that subdivided the land of the dead.

"Is this the place?" Two-Fingers asked again. "Is this the cemetery you dreamed about?"

Cerril peered out at the piles of broken markers and shattered crypts. Nightmares-vibrant and bloodcurdling-had haunted what couldn't have been more than a handful of hours of sleep during the past three days.

"Perhaps," Cerril said.

"Perhaps?" Hekkel sounded restless and angry.

Before he realized it, Cerril took a step toward the smaller boy and gripped the haft of his knife.

Hekkel stepped back, tripping over a toppled headstone and sprawling in the greasy loam that had been left from the rain earlier in the day.

"Don't touch me!" the smaller boy yelled.

Two-Fingers gripped Cerril's shoulder. "He's not who you're here to be mad at, Cerril." Two-Fingers spoke gently, and there was a trace of fear in his voice.

For a moment, the blanket flying around him and rage boiling inside him, Cerril considered shrugging Two-Fingers's grip off and leaping down on Hekkel, except he knew he wouldn't be satisfied until he'd cut the boy's heart from his chest. Instead, Cerril made himself turn away.

Two-Fingers drew away quickly. Wan starlight blunted by the thick cloud cover formed a dulled sheen on his round face.

"I'm sorry, Cerril," the bigger boy mumbled.

Hekkel slowly, warily, got to his feet. "Maybe we should forget this," he suggested.

Drawing the sodden blanket back around him, grateful for even the small amount of warmth he drew from the cover, Cerril shook his head. His hair was so damp it stuck to his face, but that wasn't entirely due to the weather. A fever had plagued him, along with the nightmares.

"No," Cerril said, turning to look out over the time-ravaged cemetery. Rats scurried among the stones, their red eyes gleaming in the darkness. "We finish this tonight."

During the course of the two previous nights, Cerril had led them through over a dozen cemeteries. They'd been chased from three of them by the city watch and by a couple of gravediggers preparing a plot for a burial the next morning.

Until the dreams had sent him into the cemeteries of Alagh?n, he hadn't known how many graveyards there were in the city. He still didn't know an exact number, but he had garnered a better sense of the city's long history from his endeavors.

Even before Turmish had become a nation, Alagh?n had existed as a trade port to the Sea of Fallen Stars. Nomadic tribes traveled from the Shining Plains to trade with seafaring merchants who stopped over during their journey to the southern lands. Even the dwarves of the Orsraun Mountains came down from their digs and cities to barter gold they'd clawed from the clutches of the earth.

As the trade port became a city, growing by leaps and bounds as successful trade ventures encouraged hew business, death followed. Besides war and robbery, plagues claimed the lives of the settlers. The Year of the Clinging Death took nearly half the populations of the entire Vilhon Reach. War with pirates and other nations followed, lasting hundreds of years. Alagh?n stood as a city despite the worst of it, but citizens fell and were buried, sometimes in mass graves. The Plague of Dragons in 1317 began in Alagh?n and spread throughout the Vilhon Reach.

The Time of Troubles had followed forty years after that, and none of Faer?n remained untouched. Gods had walked the lands, and death and destruction had followed. The building of more gravesites had followed as well.

Knowing that the other boys in the group were on the verge of deserting him, Cerril plucked Malar's coin from his belt pouch. The gold coin glinted dully under the overcast night sky.

Effortlessly sliding the gold coin on top of his thumb, Cerril sent it flipping through the air with a practiced toss. Even heavy as it was, the gold coin twisted and twinkled, making the most of the available light.

At the apex of its flight, the coin seemed to catch a brilliant streak of light. The gold burned reddish-yellow for a moment, like it had suddenly caught fire or was freshly hammered from a dwarven forge. Noticing the effect, Cerril feared for his hand as the coin plummeted. Over the last three days, he'd felt nothing but evil from the coin.

The fire died out in the coin as suddenly as it had come. It fell heavily into Cerril's palm. Even if he'd deliberately tried to miss the coin, the cursed thing would have landed in his hand. Despite trying to lose the coin over the past few days, even to the point of luring pickpockets to snatch it from him, Cerril had been unable to get rid of the thing.

Cerril gazed at the coin lying against his palm. The heavy heat of the coin weighed against his palm. Breathlessly, he curled his fingers over it.

"That was a sign," Hekkel whispered.

"We're in the right place," someone else added.

"Where, Cerril?" another boy asked. "Which way do we head?"

For a moment, Cerril was afraid to answer, certain that the coin was only fooling with him. He felt a burning grip seize his heart and tug him forward, and he took a stumbling, protesting step. For a moment, the pressure around Cerril's heart eased, but it immediately tightened again, drawing him forward.

"This way," Cerril said in a squeaking voice that surprised him.

He raised his hand with the coin in it, as if the coin was now leading him. The others couldn't feel the pressure around his heart, but they couldn't miss the raised arm.

"It's pulling him!" one of the boys crowed excitedly. "The damn thing is leading him."

Cerril stumbled through the graveyard, feeling the pressure inside his chest increase even as he fought against it. He grew more afraid. Malar was a dark god, given to vengeance and bloodlust. During the Time of Troubles, Malar had tried to invade Gulthmere Forest and destroy the Emerald Enclave druids there. Nobanion, the Lion God of Gulthmere, also known as the guardian of the Reach, had turned the Stalker away from the forest.

The viselike grip tightened around Cerril's heart, urging him on. Drums sounded in the boy's ears, and for a moment he thought someone was beating them in the graveyard, then he realized that the sound came from the panicked rush of blood pounding through his own head.

Cerril's pace quickened from a halting stride to an uncertain-footed trot. He listened to his own footfalls smack against the rain-drenched loam. Weeds rustled as they pulled at the blanket he wore around his shoulders. Dead branches scraped through his hair and against his skin like a beast's claws.

High-pitched squeaks erupted from the dozens of rats that ran in front of Cerril. Several narrowly escaped getting trampled beneath the boys' feet as they pursued Cerril. Their excited whispers echoed in his ears.

Propelled by the anxiety that filled him and pressed against his heart, Cerril ran through the thickets of brush and fallen trees. Cheaply-made grave markers shattered beneath his feet. Here and there a few graves stood partially open, their denizens strewn across the ground. Grave robbers plied their craft in Alagh?n, but most stayed away from the burial grounds of the wealthy due to the wards that guarded them. None of them were brave enough to attempt robbing the grave of a wizard.

Perspiration poured from Cerril, forced out by the fever that filled him onto his chilled skin. Black spots swam in his vision as he rounded a freestanding tomb that had its roof partially caved in by a lightning-blasted oak.

A dozen crypts stood against the cemetery's back wall. Vines covered the wall. Flowers and leaves along the vines shivered as the cool wind raked its talons through them. Most of the crypts were in various stages of disrepair. Some of them were only a framework that had folded down onto the stone coffins.

Cerril's eyes lit on the largest of the crypts.

There, he told himself, and he knew he was right. Malar's coin pulsed strongly within his closed fist.

Cerril glanced across the rear section of the graveyard. His eyes focused on the squat, broad building that tucked into the graveyard's back wall. The roof was angled just enough to keep rainwater from collecting on it. Despite the building's obvious age, the roof remained intact, covered in wooden shingles that had to have only been replaced a few years before. None of the other crypts had a roof in such good repair.

"Is that it?" Two-Fingers asked.

"Yes," Cerril said, unable to stay back any longer.

The grip on his heart was too firm, too sure. He followed an overgrown path between rows of graves littered with rubble. No ornate markers or statuary occupied the graveyard's rearmost section.

The crypt was less than ten feet tall and was easily forty feet across. Though he couldn't accurately judge how far back the crypt went, Cerril felt certain it had to have been as deep as it was wide, if not deeper. Cracks tracked several of the layers of stone used in the building's construction. Weeds and saplings jutted from the cracks, seemingly growing from the building's corpse. A short flight of steep steps led up to a wide entrance where splintered wooden doors sagged from broken hinges. The thin veneer of stain and lacquer had worn away in places.

"Do you know what this building is?" Hekkel asked in a hushed voice.

"What is it?" Two-Fingers asked.

"See?" Hekkel pointed, just barely visible from the corner of Cerril's eye. "If you look hard under those creepers and vines, you can see a symbol there."

"It looks like the head of a goose," Two-Fingers said.

"Not a goose," Hekkel said. "That's a picture of a stream or a river pouring down into a lake."

"You think this is a well house?" Two-Fingers asked. "Or a bathhouse where the dead are cleaned?"

A couple of the boys cursed as they considered that possibility.

Cerril knew he almost lost part of his group then, and he didn't want to face alone whatever lurked inside. "It's not a bathhouse for the dead. That sign belongs to Eldath."

"Who is Eldath?" one of the younger boys asked. His name was Aran, and he'd only arrived in Alagh?n a few months before, an immigrant from the Whamite Isles that had been nearly destroyed during the Serosian War. Legend had it that the Taker, Iakhovas, had caused the destruction of the Whamite Isles. Now, according to reports, only the undead remnants of the island populations lived there.

Steadily feeling the pull from inside the building, Cerril reached the top of the short flight of stairs and walked into the crypt. Shadows cloistered in all the corners and it was hard to keep from imagining them moving.

"Eldath is a goddess," Hekkel whispered as the group followed. "They call her the Quiet One. She's a healer, and she serves Silvanus and helps the druids of the Emerald Enclave."

One of the boys cursed and spat. "My brother works as a logger. He hates the damned druids because they keep interfering with his work and making things hard for everybody."

"So this house belongs to Eldath?" Aran asked.

"No," Cerril answered. "It belongs to the Temple of the Trembling Flower. They represent Eldath in Alagh?n."

"I've never heard of it."

"The temple is small," Two-Fingers answered, surprising Cerril by even knowing of it. "Not many people are interested in worshiping a goddess who preaches that peaceful intentions can overcome a sword blow."

"So why would a coin bearing Malar's symbol call us here?" Aran asked.

The question, Cerril knew, was a good one-one that Cerril had been entertaining since he'd recognized the structure for what it was.

"Malar directs his believers to destroy the followers of Eldath as a show of faith to him."

"Bet that would make Eldath's priests take up a mace or a cudgel," Aran said.

"No," Cerril replied as he brushed away the cobwebs that blocked the entrance to the building, "it only makes for fewer worshipers for Eldath."

He peered inside the structure and saw cheaply made caskets crumbling on iron-studded shelves. Several of the caskets had broken and moldered away, revealing bits of skeletons wearing scraps of clothing.

"Damn!" Hekkel swore. "Skeletons! Those Cyric-blasted things could be enchanted to come alive and attack anyone who enters this place."

Cerril turned when he heard the footsteps of the group halt behind him. The fever burned within him again, pulsing at his temples.

"Those skeletons aren't going to rise," he said.

"There's no reason for us to be here, Cerril. You can go the rest of the way yourself. Malar's geas was laid on you, not us."

"Then I'll go myself," Cerril said, and his words echoed throughout the building.

"You just want us along because you're scared," Hekkel said.

Cerril was scared, but he struggled not to show it and to keep his voice normal as he said, "Gold and gems divide much easier when there's only one person."

Hekkel took a step forward, baited as surely as one of the rats they caught for the blood games in some of the sailors' taverns.

"What gold and gems?"

Flipping Malar's coin again, Cerril deftly caught it from the air. The gold slapped against his palm.

"Malar called me here," said Cerril, "to this place of Eldath. I've already told you how the Stalker sets his believers onto those who worship the Quiet One." He paused, knowing he was about to tell his biggest lie ever. "Do you think that Malar would call me here, to this place claimed by Eldath, and not reward me?"

Hekkel's response died on his lips as the possibility locked into his brain.

"I'm sure," Cerril said, turning back to continue through the rooms of broken caskets and dismembered skeletons dressed in rags, "that there's enough here to take care of us all, at least for those among you brave enough to see this thing through."

"Cerril's right," Two-Fingers agreed in a stronger voice. "Whatever Malar's giving him for this service, he's being generous enough to share it with us."

"Cerril's not a generous person," Hekkel objected.

But no one was listening to what Hekkel had to say anymore, Cerril noticed. The lure of gold and treasure was too much for the other boys. Alagh?n was a city filled with small treasures that had been hidden away and found many years later, and it was filled with still more stories of those forgotten treasures left by wealthy merchants, pirates, thieves, and nobility that had visited the Jewel of Turmish. Inventing the possibility of another such treasure was no stretch at all.

"What was this place?" Two-Fingers asked, following Cerril through the doorway into another room.

Cerril followed the pounding in his chest, going straight back and avoiding the other rooms that lay off the first one. He brushed more cobwebs from another open doorway.

"This was a charity crypt," he said. "People who die without kith or kin to bury them, or those who wander into Alagh?n and get killed but go unclaimed, end up here."

"The priests say they care about these people?" Hekkel sounded doubtful.

"No," Cerril replied, stepping through another doorway and across a broken skeleton that was sprawled on the floor, "the Assembly of Stars pays the temples. Other rulers paid them in the past."

"Why?" Two-Fingers asked.

"Because," Aran put in, "corpses that don't have a proper burial sometimes rise and walk again. I heard stories about that."

"You should be real familiar with that," Hekkel said, "after what happened to the Whamite Isles. Heard there's a lot of dead up walking around over there."

"Take that back," Aran said angrily. "Take that back or you'll be sorry!"

"Oh yeah?" Hekkel said. "And why will I be sorry?"

"Because I'll catch you sleeping," Aran said. "I'll catch you sleeping and I'll cut off your ears. You'll never pass a mirror again without realizing how sorry you were for saying that."

"You little runt," Hekkel said.

Cerril considered turning around and slapping them both down-their strident voices whipped the pounding between his temples into a renewed frenzy-then the closed door at the back of the charity crypt caught his eye. He stared at the wooden marker embossed with the flowing river of Eldath on it. "Quiet," Two-Fingers ordered. "Cerril's found something." Instantly, all other noise inside the charity crypt stopped. Cerril could almost hear the group stop breathing behind him. He stepped forward and tried the door. The handle refused to turn, and the door wouldn't budge. Cerril stepped back and raised his voice. "Two-Fingers." "Yeah." "Open the door." Two-Fingers moved forward, almost big enough to fill the front of the door. "Do you want it all in one piece?" he asked. "I don't care." Bracing himself, Two-Fingers slammed a shoulder against the door. The old, rotted wood shattered. Instead of the door breaking open, though, a hole appeared and Two-Fingers accidentally staggered through. The bigger boy turned around, shocked by his own success, and said, "It's open." The door opened onto a small room that once must have housed a record keeper's office. A scribe's inkpot lay shattered on the stone floor, and moldering books lined shelves built into the walls. "Light a candle," Cerril said as he stared around the room. Someone took one of the candle stubs from a mounting on the wall and lit it. The wavering yellow flame filled the small room with light and hard-carved shadows that danced on the walls. "I don't see any treasure," Hekkel commented. Cerril went through the books, not knowing exactly what it was that he hoped to find. There was nothing in the book stacks, and equally nothing in the small desk against the wall. He knelt down, checking under the drawers because he'd learned that people often stuck secreted items there. None of the drawers had anything stuck under them. He noticed a shattered inkpot on the floor. The small, fragmented glass pieces reflected light from the candle. The ink had been spilled dozens of years before and had dried to a solid black spot. However, the pool of dried liquid inscribed two fairly straight lines that ran perpendicular to one another. Cerril knee-walked over to the lines. Seeing the way the ink seemed to have suddenly stopped in both places, he drew his dagger and traced the blade's sharp point along the edges. "Two-Fingers," he said, "there's a hidden entrance here. Can you open it?" Two-Fingers removed two L-shaped shims from his clothing. Holding them tightly, he hooked the shims into the floor, getting in behind the concealed trapdoor. Growling with effort, he lifted a section of the floor away. Hekkel pushed forward the lighted candle he held. The flickering flame chewed down through the darkness that filled the opening. "It's a passageway," Two-Fingers said. "I know," Cerril said, then eased down into the opening, following the spiral staircase down into the bowels of the graveyard.