Dreams of Fire and Gods 2: Fire (2 page)

Regardless, Donegh found it sad that a royal
ömem
had come to these circumstances. But he kept that thought to himself, buried behind the mental wall all assassins learned to put up at an early age. Any thought not compartmentalized like this risked being overheard by the
ömem
.

“Take off your tunic,” Nedegh commanded as she returned to the room, carrying a bowl of steaming water and a red-tinted glass phial, as well as a clean rag tucked under one arm. She set everything down on the table and uncorked the phial.

Donegh was just coming into his manhood, and he still felt awkward about baring himself in front of strangers, especially women. But he obeyed the old woman and removed his cloak and bloodstained tunic. “Do you know what it was?” he asked her. “That… thing that attacked me in the forest?”

Nedegh handed the open phial to him and nodded for him to drink. Then she shook her head as she dipped the rag into the hot water and began to clean his wound. “The Dead Forest is poisoned with ancient magic,” she murmured, concentrating on her task. “There’s little point trying to make sense out of anything you come across there. Just pray you haven’t been tainted by it.”

Donegh swallowed the syrupysweet liquid and set the empty glass phial on the table. “Could I become like it?” he asked. The creature had been revolting, seemingly assembled from the corpses of deer and bears… except for one arm. It hadn’t needed an arm, since it already had four legs, but it had an extra arm jutting out at an odd angle from one shoulder—the withered arm of a man, its skin gray and fingernails blue, as if it were dead. But it had moved, clawing at Donegh’s face. Worse, the thing had cast some sort of paralysis spell on him, and only the searing pain of teeth digging into his forearm had brought him back to his senses and given him the strength to slash his way free.

Nedegh screwed up her face in disgust as the extent of the wound became clear to her. “Let’s hope not. You should have stopped in Old Mat’Zovya and allowed Marik to tend to this.”

“The Emperor doesn’t trust Marik.”

Nedegh barked out a short, bitter laugh. “The Emperor
shouldn’t
trust Marik. She’d run him through if she had half a chance. But what is that to you? You’re
samöt
!”

Donegh knew that belonging to the Brotherhood of assassins supposedly guaranteed his help from the
ömem
Sisterhood, but the thought of walking into a camp full of bandits and murderers while he was too injured to defend himself hadn’t appealed to him. He’d chosen to skirt the ruins of the old city and walk the remaining few leagues to Mat’Zovya, where he was guaranteed food and shelter.

“It’s infected,” Nedegh said, clucking at him in irritation.

 

“Can you heal it?”

 

The old woman looked offended. “Of course I can heal it. But you’d do well to stay here a few days to recover.” “I don’t have that much time,” Donegh said. “I have to cross the lake.”

He was reluctant to divulge any more of his mission, even to an
ömem
— especially to one who’d previously been part of the
vek
’s court. But it wasn’t easy to keep information from the Sisterhood. Nedegh regarded him grimly.

“Once you enter Harleh plain,” she said, “you’ll be on your own. No
ömem
can see into that valley, and none of us will be able to communicate with you. I suggest you take the time necessary to regain your strength.”
T
HE
entire valley was shrouded in an eerie bluish light while storm clouds swirled overhead, as if a tornado were forming. But on the ground, everything was still. Only a mild breeze stirred Sael’s blond hair as he stood on the battlements of Harleh keep, looking out at the clouds and the impenetrable forest that had suddenly sprung up from the valley floor beneath them a fortnight ago. The forest had initially overrun the plain to the west of Harleh, but over the intervening days and nights, it had spread, until the circular city-keep resided in the middle of a vast forest stretching out in all directions between the mountains in the north and the rolling hills to the south. Messengers from Sael’s father in Worlen Castle to the east claimed that the forest—and the cloud cover—came to an abrupt end about ten leagues in that direction.

Rising up out of the western forest were slender stone towers, sparkling with thousands of yellow-green lights— windows, most likely, though no one in Harleh had been able to get close enough to see much of the mysterious city that had risen fully formed from the floor of the valley during a battle. On the eve of that battle, as the emperor’s men prepared to lay siege to Harleh Keep, the great plain that lay in the basin of the valley had been just that—a plain. The battle had been short, brought to a halt by the sudden appearance of roots and whole trees pushing up through the ground in the middle of the battlefield. And then all the emperor’s soldiers and sorcerers had mysteriously fallen into a deep sleep. The soldiers of Harleh had collected the sleeping bodies, and they were still unconscious, sheltered under large pavilions near the keep’s outer wall. They appeared healthy, though they had been unable to take food or water for two weeks.

“Your Lordship,” one of Sael’s guards called to him, “Master Geilin requests an audience.”

Sael turned to see his old mentor— now the chief mage of Harleh, since Sael had been forced to give up his apprenticeship and step into his brother’s shoes as
dekan
of Harleh— waiting patiently by the steps.
Well
, Sael thought,
General Meik is waiting for me in the council room, anyway.

He moved away from the crenulated outer wall and strode across the stone walkway. “Master Geilin,” Sael said, restraining himself from bowing as he would have done just weeks ago. He settled instead for a polite nod.

Geilin added to his discomfort by bowing formally. “Your Lordship.”
The old man was dressed in a fine, richly embroidered gold-and-white robe suitable to the
vönan makek
of a royal house, his short white beard was immaculately groomed, and his head had recently been shaved to better show off the tattoo of the Eye of Atnu on his scalp. But Geilin did not look well. His eyes were sunken and he moved with an air of fatigue that worried Sael.

The young
dekan
didn’t need to ask the cause of Geilin’s ill health. Sael felt it too. For two weeks, the supernatural cloud cover had prevented the Eye from shining down upon them during the day, and all those who worked with magic were suffering from this.
Vönan
drew their strength and power from the Eyes —Atnu during the day, and to a lesser extent, Druma at night—as did the priests and the
ömem
. Harleh was now home to twenty fire mages who could no longer cast spells.

“I have been requested to ask for an audience,” Geilin informed Sael.
“Requested by whom?”

“The
vönan
, the
ömem
, and the
caedan
,” Geilin replied. Then he chuckled and added, with mock seriousness, “I can’t recall the last time t he
caedan
grandmaster agreed to a meeting with the
ömem
, so we know the situation must be dire.” The temple priests—
caedan
—had a rivalry with the
ömem
that stretched back six hundred years to the assassination of Emperor Aghren and the birth of the order of the
samöt
.

“They want me to make the clouds go away, no doubt.”
Geilin gave him a small, commiserating smile. “I would suggest granting the audience, Your Lordship, if for no other purpose than to show your concern.”

“Of course,” Sael said. It was an annoying waste of time, since he could do nothing about the situation—at least, not until the Taaweh chose to reappear in Harleh or grant someone entrance to their forest city. Only they could undo the spell they’d cast on the valley. But Sael was learning that much of his function in this crisis was to keep the peace. The people were on the edge of panic, having no idea what the appearance of this forest around the keep meant, and if they were in any danger. The mysterious city in the west terrified them. Sael had been forced to post guards at the gates to prevent a mass exodus to Worlen. Even at that, he was fairly certain several of the families from outlying farms had made the journey. But now that the forest lay to the east as well, few people were brave enough to venture walking through it anyway.

Sael began walking toward the stone steps that would take him down to the street, where his carriage was waiting. Geilin fell into step beside him and the two guards followed a few paces behind. “All the farms and mills have been abandoned now,” he told the old man. “The forest has grown up around them, and the families who owned them feared being cut off from the city. I can’t say I blame them. But without those farms in operation, the entire city is dependent upon the stores we brought into the keep just before the battle. Those can’t last more than a few months.”

“I gather there has been no word from Koreh?”

Sael frowned. His irritation at Koreh’s absence was overshadowed only by his longing for the young man. They’d barely had time to realize how they felt about one another before the Taaweh had demanded Koreh go off with them. Where the ancient godlike beings had taken him, Sael had no idea. He glanced briefly at the illuminated towers of Gyishya on the western horizon, wondering for the thousandth time if Koreh was there.

Does he miss me?
Sael thought
. Is he looking out of one of those windows right now, wondering what I’m doing? I should be furious with him for bringing all this down upon us, but all I want to do is see him again and hold him.

But he had no time for fantasies, Sael knew. General Meik’s scout had returned from the west and told him of a new military camp there, on the far side of the spired city. The emperor had sent reinforcements for the soldiers and mages who had never returned from the battle, and the numbers appeared to be vast.

K
OREH
was still adjusting to life in Gyishya. The lack of staircases within the enormous stone spires was one of the first things that had disconcerted him. The lack of doors to some rooms was another. Since the Taaweh were able to travel from one shadow to another, or simply drop into the ground and reappear elsewhere, moving from room to room or even floor to floor was as simple as breathing to them. For that matter, Koreh wasn’t even certain that they needed to breathe, though they seemed to when they spoke. They had taught Koreh this skill long ago, but being in a room with no doors and only one window that opened out upon a sheer drop hundreds of feet above the forest floor was still disturbing to him.

The spires themselves seemed an oddity, considering the fact that the Taaweh drew their power from the earth, and being separated from the ground weakened them. Yet something in the strange gray-green stone of the spires connected the Taaweh to the ground. Koreh could feel it himself when he concentrated, as if the stone floor he was standing upon was alive with magical energy. Like the circles that had once dotted the landscape thousands of years ago, these spires were stone, yet somehow alive at the same time. It seemed an odd contradiction that the Taaweh would even build structures this high when they were most comfortable on the ground—or in it. From what Koreh had seen, most of Gyishya was in fact underground, in vast stone-walled warrens that extended down for hundreds of levels. But Koreh thought he understood. He might not be comfortable standing in an open window this high above the forest floor, but that didn’t make it any less thrilling and beautiful. And the Taaweh understood beauty.

From here, Koreh could look out at Harleh Keep, as he did every evening upon waking, and wonder how Sael was doing with the duties thrust upon him by his older brother’s death. At least Geilin had remained with him. That had to be some comfort. But Sael had been forced to transform from the pampered second son of the
vek
into a responsible leader in a matter of days. He’d risen to the challenge, but it had to be hard on him. And Koreh longed for the nights they’d spent together in the days before the battle, wrapped in each other’s arms.

“
Iinyeh
Koreh?” a voice asked behind him, and he whirled to face the man who’d appeared in the room. No one could hear the Taaweh approach, because they didn’t approach—they simply appeared. But Koreh had still not gotten used to his senses failing him. He’d depended upon them too much when he lived in the wilderness.

The man was nearly naked but for a knee-length blue skirt, held in place by a black belt made, perhaps, of leather. Outside the city, the Taaweh usually wore strange dark cloaks that allowed them to better blend into the shadows, but Koreh had quickly learned there was no standard dress within the boundaries of Gyishya. He’d seen men, women, and children wearing trousers, skirts, long robes, short tunics, or even nothing at all. It didn’t seem to matter.

He himself was still wearing the plain linen tunic and breeches he’d been given in Harleh—he woke to find them freshly laundered every evening—or the shadow robe he’d received from the Taaweh. The latter was seldom necessary, but Koreh enjoyed wearing it. It made him feel as if he belonged here.

“
Tyeh shyochya
,
iinyeh
,” Koreh greeted the man, bowing slightly. He used the word for “friend,” because he was uncertain whether he’d ever met this Taaweh before. They never used names, as far as Koreh could determine, and in fact he’d never heard one of them use the pronoun “I” when speaking, either in his language or their own. Koreh wasn’t even certain the Taaweh language
had
a word for it. Whenever they addressed him in his own language, they spoke in a convoluted fashion that danced around ever saying “I” or “me.”

“
Tyeh shyochya
,” the man replied, returning the bow. “Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” He’d been forced to adopt a nocturnal schedule since arriving at the city, and every night one of the Taaweh had appeared to teach him more of their ways. Some nights, Koreh found himself learning Taaweh magic; other nights, he learned of their philosophy; and still other nights, he was simply asked to meditate with them. He was absorbing everything they taught him, but Koreh remained frustrated by the gaps in the knowledge he was receiving. He still had little understanding of who the Taaweh were and where they’d come from.