A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) (9 page)

Angelica didn't know what to think of that. Joya was from the Holy Realm; her stigmata should be white. No one's stigmata changed color like that. Besides, there wasn't any realm denoted by gray stigmata.

A sudden commotion in the ranks of hecklin brought Angelica back from her musing. Angelica saw her sister's back go rigid, and Joya sat down in the dirt, a perplexed look on her face.

“Something is coming,” Joya whispered, a note of panic in her voice.

“What?” Uthia said. “What do you sense?”

“The hecklin are calling to something that isn't put off by the Haunted Graveyard.” Joya started to stand and made her way toward the glowing mausoleum in the center of the graveyard.

“Stop!” Uthia tried to restrain her, but Joya shrugged her off.

“I know what I’m doing. Follow me,” she told them.

“Here we go.” Jovian raised an eyebrow at Angelica, who sighed, shrugged, and fell in line with her sister. Angelica brushed the dirt off her hands onto her pants and drew her aunt's lapis-hilted shin-buto. Jovian followed suit with his own blade.

There was no denying Uthia thought there would be a battle, and she let Cataresh grow out of her arm again until she gripped the pommel of the wicked wooden blade in her stick-like fingers.

The ground dipped down as they neared the center building of the Haunted Graveyard, like the ground was soft and the building heavy, causing the area to sink in. The light of the sunflowers covering the building was so bright that Angelica was having a hard time seeing anything, and she thought if the gargoyle was to come alive she would have the element of surprise on them. Angelica could barely make out the outline of the moss-covered statue crouching on the altar, bat-like wings spread high and menacingly open above her head.

But Angelica was wrong; when the gargoyle started to wake, she was aware of it. It sounded like stones tumbling against one another, grating together in a way that put her teeth on edge. One wing fell heavily to the altar, the stone sloughing off onto the ground, leaving a wing that stood out inky black in the pure light of the mausoleum.

Joya strode toward the gargoyle while the rest of them readied their attack, but there wouldn't be one. Joya touched the statue's cloven foot.

“Be still, Guardian of the Dead,” she whispered.

The statue seemed to nod, a simple dipping of its large stone head. As if they were watching a lake suddenly freeze, the gray of stone rapidly spread across the black of her wing until it was stone once more.

Joya left the statue and headed straight for the mausoleum.

“I've already checked, it's locked,” Uthia said.

Joya frowned and reached for the door. When her hand touched the handle the double doors swung open, as if in response to her flesh.

“Everyone grab a bunch of the flowers,” Joya said, taking a bundle for herself, not bothering to comment on why the door opened for her. Once separated from the rest of the bush, the flowers in her hand dimmed, but still produced enough light to be used in place of a torch.

Without question, they grabbed bundles of their own and followed Joya into the dark mausoleum. The eerie white light of the flowers ebbed and flowed over the interior of the tomb like ghost lights. Angelica shivered.

There was one stone casket inside; it rested against the right-hand wall, in disrepair and covered in dust. Heavy cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. Angelica would have hated to see the spiders that made them.

“What now?” Uthia asked. Besides the casket, a north-facing barred window, and a small table with a vase of dead flowers in the back, there was nothing inside.

Joya held up a finger, hushing Uthia.

“Do you see the name and date here?” Angelica asked. “This person was very old when she died.”

“Most likely a sorcerer,” Uthia answered. She came to Angelica's side and looked over the name.

“Beatrice Forester. She died twelve years ago…” The dryad read the copper plate inlaid on the wall behind the casket. She was looking for something, and evidently found it. Uthia looked out the window, understanding coming to her face.

“What is it?” Jovian asked.

“This is the resting place of the Realm Guardians.” She placed a bark-covered hand on the top of the dirty casket.

“How did she die?” Angelica asked.

“How else can a sorcerer die?” Jovian asked.

“Well, obviously I know she was beheaded, but why?” Angelica wondered.

Jovian leaned in to read the copper plate, but it was in a strange block-like language he couldn't decipher.

“Figures: the Realm of Shadow has a different language too.” Jovian grumbled.

“It says she died in the Frement Uprising. Apparently a battle of some note here,” Uthia said.

“What are the frement?” Angelica asked.

“A race of cat people,” Joya mumbled. “They are always at odds with the ooslebed.”

“And they are?” Jovian asked.

“Dark elves – those that fled with the first daughter from the Mountains of Nependier,” Joya answered.

“Alright, this is getting weird,” Angelica said.

“Getting?” Jovian asked. “You’re just now thinking it’s getting weird?”

“It's this place,” Joya said, looking around. “In here I feel this information just pouring into me. Like the Guardian residing here for all eternity is giving to me her knowledge of the realm.”

They were all too stunned to answer.

Joya started walking along the edges of the room, when necessary leaning over empty caskets without name plates so that she could touch the wall. Her hand was flat along the stones, rubbing and occasionally patting them with a solid slap of flesh on granite.

And then, in the back, behind a table, the slap of her hand on stone block sounded hollow instead of solid.

Joya set her bouquet of sunflowers down, slid the small table aside, and pressed one hand firmly on the back wall. Again, at the touch of her flesh, the mausoleum came to life. The stone wall slid back and to the right. Beyond the wall was a winding tunnel. The light from torches set into sconces flickered cheerily off the moisture clinging to the walls and floor. It wasn't a rough tunnel, chiseled out of the stone, but instead a corridor that certainly led to some place much more civilized than one would expect to find the entrance to in a place of the dead.

“Are we ready?” Joya asked them, and all they could do was swallow hard before stepping into the dank hallway.

When Jovian thought of tunnels in the earth he often thought of the one they’d taken from the Temple of Badock — a rough tunnel appearing to have been shoveled out in haste, used only for emergencies. But this tunnel put even the stairway to the underground dwarven city of Dellenbore to shame in its expert craftsmanship.

Perfectly square, it was fashioned of equal-sized gray granite blocks, interlocking in geometrical patterns Jovian’s eyes could barely follow.

The most pleasing aspect of all was the natural color of the firelight on the gray stone. Golden light, flickering all around him. How long had it been since he had seen natural light? Something that reminded him that he wasn't in a world all that different than the realms he knew? It had only been a couple of days, but it seemed an eternity.

Benches were set here and there along the walls, as if this hallway had been used for leisure. A silent pilgrimage from a rich estate to the dwelling place of their fallen leaders? Jovian didn't know, but he felt immediately at ease inside the hallway, despite the strange circumstances that brought them here.

There was a probing sense that came to his mind, like the wyrd of the border when it was testing him. But this time there was no pain, no suffocation. The wyrd delved into his mind, and when it had apparently found that he meant no harm, it moved along.

He shook his head. This wasn’t a tomb of fallen family members, but of Realm Guardians. Whatever connected with the other end of this tunnel wasn’t going to be a rich estate.

Ahead, Joya walked with purpose, back straight, shoulders back in a commanding way he had never seen his older sister use.

He tried not to think about his sister right now. She was acting too strangely, and his family had gone through enough already. So many changes to all of them, and now this. Jovian wasn’t sure he could take it all in. Maybe when they got home, it would all be better.

But how? Life on the plantation never changed: people went about their routines, and things like this never happened. Maybe that was why he was having such an issue — he wasn’t used to change. But even so, all of this was so much!

Jovian frowned. He’d imagined going home would be a happy time, seeing his father and friends for the first time in ages, but now he thought that all of the changes would only be made that much more evident in contrast to the ease with which life flowed there. Would he ever fit in with that again? Would he be content with going home to the life of a farmer?

He took to studying the tapestries that covered portions of the wall now. They were unlike any tapestries he had ever seen before, and looked like still-life images rather than paintings. So real were the images that Jovian thought he was looking out a window at something actually happening outside the tunnel, but that was absurd.

“What are those metal…
things
?” he asked Uthia.

The dryad shrugged. “They look like some kind of machine,” she told him.

The same huge machines were in many other tapestries, billowing smoke out of a chimney affixed to the top. The group drew to a halt, and they studied the picture.

“Powered by…?” Jovian asked.

“Wyrd?” Angelica wondered.

“I don’t know,” Uthia said. “It would have to be, right?”

They looked to Joya, but she only shrugged.

Beside the metal monstrosity walked creatures easily seven feet in height, and oddly feline.

“These must be the frement,” Jovian said, rubbing fingertips over the fabric picture. They stood like men, were even shaped like men, if slightly thinner than was natural for a human, but their faces were odd. Their mouths were shaped like a cat’s, protruding slightly from the rest of their face, their lip split up toward the base of their nose. Long whiskers protruded from their cheeks, close to their mouths.

And their color. Not the colors one would see in humans, and none of them were really the same. Their fur was cut short, close to their skin, but in varying shades that marked each one of them as individual. They wore armor such as Jovian had never seen, each piece looking like a work of art, with carvings of symbols and words he didn’t understand. He didn’t see any armor the same, either; some had cloaks fastened over shoulder pads that arched up like miniature wings, while others were fastened at the base of their shoulder blades, and some didn’t wear cloaks at all. If this was an army, Jovian didn’t know how they determined rank, because it didn’t seem to be depicted by any form of uniform.

“How strange,” Angelica mumbled.

“Look here,” Joya said from a distance farther down, studying another picture. They hastily moved to see what she had found.

“What in the realms?” Angelica asked.

“The ooslebed,” Uthia said, crossing her arms. The tone of her voice suggested the dryad didn’t care for the race.

“This must be First Daughter,” Joya said, eyes roaming over the wall hanging. At the mention of the First Daughter, Jovian remembered the tale he had heard while with the Elves of Nependier. First Daughter was filled with sin, and left her family of elves to make her way north, where she started the tribe of dark elves, or ooslebed, as they were called here.

The dark elf was the prettiest woman Jovian had ever seen. Her hair was long, black, and much more like silk than any hair he had ever seen, shining in some green light like satin. Her skin was dark blue, with bursts of green that (despite being in a picture) seemed to move along her skin in a constant blush, like hot breath blooming across cold glass.

She wore a regal outfit, most unlike anything Jovian would have imagined the Elves of Nependier wearing. The robes hugged her body tightly, in shades of red and purple. A long pipe was held in her hand, wafting pink smoke into the black air around her.

Her eyes were larger than her counterparts in the Holy Realm, and all pupil rather than iris; her ears were slightly stunted, turned down at the tips. She reclined on a large violet toadstool. On her lap rested a slender blade.