First Rider's Call (9 page)

The captain nodded in acknowledgment. When his gaze fell upon Karigan, he said, “Rider, this Eletian wants to speak to you.” Then his eyes darted away and he muttered to himself, “Must send word to the king.” The two soldiers helped him limp away.

The Eletian turned to Karigan with appraising eyes. “I am called Telagioth. I am
ora-tien,
leader of these
tiendan.
”

The word shone through Karigan’s foggy mind as a bright memory. She had met
tiendan
before—Somial had been one. They were hunters of the king. The Eletian king.

Telagioth, as well as other Eletians who moved about the clearing and encampment, were all clad in the odd, milky armor, though no others possessed spines that she could discern.

At Telagioth’s side was a sword sheathed in the same material as the armor which, she was certain, wasn’t steel. The sword was girded with a belt of embroidered cloth. Lengths of it dangled from the knot at his hip to his knee, the complicated patterns woven into it seeming to move and swim as though alive.

“How do you know me?” Karigan’s cheek was stiff with drying blood, and as she spoke, fresh blood trickled along her jaw.

“We know you,” Telagioth said. “You are touched by Laurelyn’s favor . . . and other things.”

He took her by the elbow, holding a
muna’riel
aloft in his other hand. He guided her around the cairn, taking special care to avoid the dead.

“Where are we going?” Karigan asked, wishing that the whole nightmare would just end and she’d wake up safe and sound beside the campfire and other Riders. Where was Ty? Had he been slain, too? Was she the only one among the Riders to have survived?

The Eletian paused and gestured toward the cairn. A portion of it had been blown outward. Rubble was strewn before a gaping hole. The light of the
muna’riel
revealed steps that descended into darkness. He guided her toward them.

“You—you’re not taking me down there,” Karigan said, backing away.

Telagioth turned to her, the crystalline light of the
muna’riel
making his features smooth and well-angled, and alien. Cerulean eyes, with the transparent depth of blue glass, regarded her with interest.

“You would not enter an empty tomb when there is far more death beneath the open moon?” His demeanor was not hostile, nor was it kind. It was merely curious.

Karigan had no wish to enter that blackness from which the wraith had emerged. She hated tombs.

There were other things that required her attention besides, more pressing needs. “The injured need tending.” And the dead, too, she did not add. She started to walk away, but Telagioth caught her elbow again.

“Come. The air is sound and nothing is below that can harm you. Others shall tend the injured. You must see what lies below, as a witness, so you may tell your king of it.”

Karigan wanted to argue that she had witnessed more than enough already, but she was too weary for argument. And, in a way, his words appealed to her sense of duty, for she knew it was true that King Zachary would want to know the details.
She
wanted to know the details. Just what had been loosed into the world?

She followed Telagioth down the steps through what had been an entranceway, framed out by stone and now-rotted timbers, before the tomb builders had covered it with rocks. They had to clamber over the shattered remains of a stone door. Karigan’s fingers trailed over glyphs as she worked her way around it.

Their descent took them down a rough shaft that had been cut right through the bedrock. The walls glinted with wet and slime. Currents of damp smelling air that had been trapped for too long beneath the earth lifted tendrils of hair out of her face. She slipped on a step and jolted her arm painfully as she fought to regain her balance.

“The black moss is slippery,” Telagioth said belatedly as he helped her right herself.

“Thanks for the warning,” Karigan muttered under her breath.

The
muna’riel
brightly lit the way. The black moss was like a disease that grew on the steps and walls.

“How did you happen upon us?” Karigan asked, perhaps to keep her mind off the tomb they descended into.

“We did not happen upon you,” Telagioth said. “Our scouts were monitoring your scouts and the movements of the delegation. When we realized where your encampment was placed, we knew we must come and make ourselves plain to you.”

Their timing could have been better, Karigan thought bitterly. “Why didn’t you come to us sooner? Certainly you must have known our mission.”

“We did know of your mission, but we are hunters, not emissaries. And once we knew of your danger, we came as swiftly as we could.”

Before Telagioth could speak further, a chamber opened up before them and his feet splashed into water. “Hold,” he warned her. He proceeded forward, testing the footing. “Ai, they delved too deep and the water has flooded in. There are two steps more.”

He held out a hand to help her navigate the submerged steps. Ice-cold water seeped through her boots. It was above her ankles.

The chamber was low-ceilinged and dripped with moisture, sounding like rain as it plinked into the pool of water that covered the floor. In the dancing light of the
muna’riel,
she detected carvings on the walls slimed with more of the moss, and other glistening, moving things.

“This is but an antechamber,” Telagioth said, his voice taking on a hollow sound. “Beware the unevenness of the floor.”

He had to duck as he made his way through the chamber, the ceiling was so low. Karigan hurried after him, feeling the blackness of the subterranean world pressing at her back. She slipped and slid on the uneven floor in her haste and made herself more wet than she wished, but she was across the room in no time, ducking her head beneath a lintel into a tight corridor.

“All of the seals are broken,” Telagioth said. “There should have been one as we entered the corridor.”

The passage elbowed, but the
muna’riel
was bright enough that it offered her light even around the corner. Wet hanging things fell across her face and she wiped them away with a shiver of disgust. Pale spiders skittered into crevices as light found them. Karigan had been, she thought, in better tombs.

The burial chamber opened up before them, much vaster than the antechamber. The darkness of it swallowed the light of the
muna’riel.
Karigan caught glimpses of colorful walls and of a basin of black water with a rectangular stone platform in the center like an island.

Telagioth stepped down, the water now as high as his knees, and he turned to her offering his hand again. “It will not get deeper than this.”

Karigan shuddered with revulsion as the cold water poured over the tops of her boots and soaked through her trousers. It may only reach Telagioth’s knees, but for her, the water came to mid-thigh. Who knew what existed in water that stagnated in a tomb?

The
muna’riel
cast the water with silver light, causing liquid waves of that light to reflect onto wall murals. Though somewhat obscured by layers of moss and oozing slime, the murals depicted battle and death, and images of the gods. The gods, painted larger than life, averted their faces and held their hands palms out, either in warding or in denial. There were Aeryc, god of the moon, and Aeryon, goddess of the sun, Dernal the Fla mekeeper, Vendane the Harvester, and others, except, Karigan noticed, Westrion, god of death.

While Westrion himself was missing, his steed Salvistar was most prominent of all the figures. Salvistar leaped across the wall, black neck arched and mane flowing like the tongues of a flame. His head was tossed back and his teeth bared. The wavering light seemed to lend him motion and life.

Karigan and Telagioth stood in wonderment, their own reflections on the mirrorlike water mingling with that of the gods, the light of the
muna’riel
somehow cleansing the darkness that had gripped this place for centuries.

Telagioth’s cerulean eyes glittered as they followed the walls. Then with a shake of his head he continued across the room toward the stone slab at its center.

“Do you comprehend what has happened here?” he asked Karigan.

Karigan drew her eyebrows together as she trudged through the water after him, remembering all the dead up above. “I think I have a sense of it.”

Telagioth halted before the slab. “Truly?” He gestured toward it.

It was not unlike other funerary slabs she had seen. It was inscribed with pictographs and incomprehensible runes, but unlike the others, it lacked Westrion’s image. Broken, rusted chains lay in pieces across its surface. Manacles. She began to understand.

“This was not so much a tomb,” she said, “but a prison.”

“Yes.”

“The wards . . . ” she murmured. The wards above had been meant to keep “something” in, just as she had surmised when she and Ty found the clearing. Had it been only yesterday afternoon? It seemed like years ago. A prison would explain many things—the covered entrance, the seals Telagioth spoke of, the absence of Westrion’s image, and the chains.

“The folly of your people,” Telagioth said, “released a great evil back into the lands.”

Karigan looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“Your encampment diminished the wardings of the tomb.”

“Those wards were already dying.”

“Yes, but they might have held for at least a time longer, and the tragedy averted.”

Karigan found it hard to believe the delegation alone could have brought such disaster upon itself. She closed her eyes remembering a sensation or force traveling through the forest just before the cairn ruptured:
Varadgrim, Varadgrim, Varadgrim . . .
Had this been the power that ignited the clearing and enabled the wraith’s escape? She was uncertain for her sense of it was more that it had been a calling of some sort. Perhaps a calling that had awakened the wraith. If so, who—or what—had been doing the calling?

“The wards were not maintained, as the D’Yer Wall has not been,” Telagioth said. “Your people believed they would be maintained in perpetuity, but strength, knowledge, and magic faded over the generations, and so did memory. The discontinuity of mortal lives endangers the world.”

So many emotions entangled Karigan, though dulled by shock and exhaustion, and the Eletian had sparked another in her: anger. The wave hovered above her, threatening to crush her with its full fury lest she lose her grip.

“Certainly the Eletians would have done better,” Karigan said. “Yet evidently they did not take responsibility.”

Telagioth did not react to the anger in her voice. Instead his fair features drooped into sadness. “It is true, but we were a broken and defeated people after the Long War. We had not the strength, except to succor our own wounds.
I remember.
Even now as your kind prospers and spreads its influence, we work to recover.”

Karigan hugged herself, not sure if it was against the chill or his words.

“The break in the D’Yer Wall has stirred powers on both sides of the wall, Galadheon. Our own time of tranquility and rest is over, and this you must tell your king. The warning is before us.” He gestured at the abandoned funerary slab and broken chains. “This creature that escaped, it was once a man. A man given an unnatural, unending existence by his master in exchange for his allegiance and his soul. I faced one such as he in battle long ago. And now he has found his way back into the world, as will others. Dark powers are awakening.”

Telagioth shifted his stance and a quizzical expression crossed his features. He bent over and plunged his arm into the water up to his shoulder. “My toe nudged something,” he said. He pulled himself erect, holding at arm’s length, a dripping object. “This is an evil thing.”

Looking more closely, Karigan saw it was the rusted guard and shard of a sword blade, with a broken, moldy wooden hilt. The hilt had probably been wrapped in leather at one time.

“Your people did think to break it,” Telagioth said. “It was a sword used to steal souls, one of this creature’s cruelest weapons. Broken, it will serve him no more.”

The wood of the hilt must have come from Blackveil Forest. Such a weapon would have given the creature the ability to command the dead. Now there was little question in her mind as to who the wraith’s master had been.

Telagioth nodded as though he could detect her thoughts. “Yes, this creature was, long ago, a favored servant of Mornhavon the Black.”

CRANE

When Karigan and Telagioth returned to the world above, gentle summer night air wrapped around them. The scents of fresh forest growth mingling with that of blood and viscera clung to the back of Karigan’s throat, leaving an acrid taste she could not swallow away.

Soldiers called out to one another through the woods, and the chirruping of crickets rose and fell in erratic waves. The startling beauty of silvery moonstones alight in the clearing and among the trees revealed, once again, the carnage. It was too much of a sensory assault after the dank, cold silence of the tomb. It unbalanced her, and Telagioth placed his hands on her shoulders to steady her.