Umber

“My patience is rapidly exhausting.”

Mahlanda had a difficult time imagining the individual sitting across from her having any patience at all to exhaust, but she sensibly held her tongue. She had been in Urik with Klavicus for over a week now, and each day he grew more ill-tempered, but there were never any strikes accompanying the hisses and she was beginning to suspect there never would be. As long as she was prudent.

It was not difficult for her to summon to mind the terrifying sight of him – flame-wreathed and eighteen feet tall – towering over her, or the dread feel of the vessel containing preserver Rennick’s ashes – carefully gathered after his obliteration and deliberately left for her to find – cold between her hands. She still couldn’t say to a certainty why, when the portal had opened behind her and the balor had given her the opportunity to leave, she had instead chosen to stay.

Perhaps at that moment it had come down to ego. He was unimaginably ancient and unfathomably alien. He moved in the company of equally alien beings such as the Galeb Duhr and, even her thoughts stuttered to think of it, the Avangion. And although he bore no resemblance to the whispered accounts of the legendary Preserver beside whom she and all other preservers were merely pale pretenders – supposedly a man of infinite serenity, kindness and goodness – he was so plainly not a defiler and it was so impossible to imagine a preserver more powerful that she thought it must be him. Not serene, not kind, not even a man, but still the Preserver and therefore at his core good. And he had chosen her; for what, she did not know, but nevertheless she was chosen.

He had left that very night, saying he would be gone for some weeks and asking her to remain until he sent for her. Before he left he had adjusted the elemental altars so they would show her nothing of the world outside. The portal was still active – she could have stepped back to Tyr at any time she wished and gone in search of news – but intuition warned her that the daimon would know, and a test would be failed, and few failures – and perhaps no willful ones – would be tolerated.

And so she remained, reading her way through the list of books he had left, preparing her simple meals and, increasingly as the days passed, sitting and watching the desert world through the cleverly hidden windows. It changed more than she expected: she had always reviled it as relentless and uniform in its inhospitality and cruelty, and the slow understanding that it was surprisingly varied and merely indifferent was revelatory.

As the weeks passed she began to feel more akin to it than to her own kind, a rock wearing smooth as the wind-driven sands washed over her like water, washing her clean of anxiety and striving. One day at noon she even thought to walk out into the desert, become the rock, truly end the striving, but she remembered that he would be sending for her and let the moment pass.

He met her out in the desert beyond the limits of Urik when she came, and she didn’t understand why until they passed through the gates and the noise and bustle, after weeks of silence and solitude, hit her like a kank charge. He spirited her away to the largest suite in the most expensive inn in the city without requiring her to utter a word to a single individual and barely spoke to her himself for several days, although he often sat with her and read.

By the time she felt able to join him in the common room for meals she no longer thought of being chosen. She barely thought of her long, tightly held allegiance to the Veiled Alliance. There was only this moment and its task, and the next, and the next. The feeling began to fade as she returned to the demanding webs of communal life, running errands, sending messages, purchasing goods, but she tried to hold onto some core of the detachment and self-possession that grew so elusive around fellow mortals. She wondered if that had been his intent. But she didn’t ask.

“It’s bad enough they spend two weeks lazing about in Tyr,” he grumbled, “at fetes and taverns gorging themselves on free food and ale, but now they’re days late on top of it.”

“Three days,” Mahlanda said mildly, picking at the last remnants of her own food. “Couldn’t we,” she leaned forward so as not to be overheard, “see what they’ve been doing?”

“We could. But we’ll have to go back out in the desert. I’ve been forced to delay so long,” he scowled, “waiting on others’ leisure, that what remains of Urik’s magic users after the conflict with Tyr have begun trickling back into town. I don’t mean to be unmasked before I’ve even begun.”

And so midnight found them some distance from Urik, in the desert wastes sitting beside a fire, watching the progress of Skarp’s youths. They left Tyr in high spirits, riding the kanks King Tithian had gifted them; each kank bore a distinctive staff strapped atop its load. “Staves of the Gallant,” Mahlanda explained at Klavicus’ quizzical look, “for extraordinary service rendered to Tyr.”

A momentarily raised eyebrow was his only response. There was a soft glow around each of them, visible to those with a certain sight: the nascent glow of magic. Seeded by Barunus, by the druid of the Vale, and by Klavicus himself, it would only grow stronger with time. Skarp had finally managed to meld strength and prudence into enough bodies to form a force, and fate or fortune had enabled them to emerge from their chrysalises without being crushed beneath the boot heel of a dragon king or his minions. It would take more than casual misfortune to extinguish their rising stars now.

Their riding flickered in the flames as the memory of Air sampled excerpts of the journey in the fire. Heeding the counsel of their Jura Dai friends they traveled at night and rested by day, and the journeying was uneventful until they came upon a sign. Mahlanda leaned forward to examine it more closely. “What is a signpost doing in the middle of the desert? East – ” she paused as she puzzled out the second half of the word, “brook? What is that?”

“Something that should not be,” Klavicus growled, growing more intent. “I passed that way. There was no such sign.”

“And no such place, that I’ve ever heard of, anywhere. What a strange name.”

“A ‘brook’ used to refer to a small body of naturally running water,” he replied absently, watching as rain began to fall on the youths.

They looked about, puzzled at first and then increasingly discomfited. Regan held out a hand, put a wet finger to her lips and shouted to the others, “It’s blood!” Beside Klavicus, Mahlanda gasped, but the young people pressed on as the rain fell harder and bits of flesh dropped from above like hail. First they tried to escape, but as lightning split the sky, driving them on the path to the mysterious Eastbrook they finally succumbed to the inevitable and rode toward a light in the distance, the only thing visible in a dense fog that swirled around them.

It was then that Klavicus’ fire died, as completely as if water had doused it. Spitting guttural phrases in a language Mahlanda had never heard before, he rapidly spoke one word of command after another, finally waving her to a distance before he snarled more syllables in that alien language and thrust a hand gone suddenly aflame into the few weak embers. Flames leapt ten feet into the air, engulfing the daimon and forcing Mahlanda further steps back from the heat. They subsided to a more normal height just moments later, with Klavicus sitting unscathed beside what was now a cheery fire.

It took him some moments more to reestablish the image, and when he did it had taken on a strange, sepia tinge. “What’s wrong with it?” Mahlanda asked.

“Memory,” he muttered. “As if they were trapped in a memory. But that’s impossible…” He uttered a few more words, and color wavered in and out as he frowned in concentration and then with a final flare reestablished itself.

Mahlanda stared with mouth agape at the scene that confronted her. The bloody rain had stopped, the fog dissipated, dark night turned to late afternoon, and those were the least of the jarring alterations. The sandy ground had turned an unnatural shade of green that hurt her eyes to look at. The youths were riding among trees that loomed too tall for belief, also in profligate emerald shadings. The kanks were gone, replaced by tall animals with improbably slender legs supporting impossibly rounded bodies. It made her feel uncomfortably like her world were a flaccid balloon, the one in which they traveled its turgid sister.

As they emerged from the trees into what she supposed was a village the sense of dislocation deepened. It residents were dressed in strange styles and fabrics, their sturdy houses made of lengths of some foreign, smooth substance laid out in overlapping planks. In the afternoon sky the sun and one pale moon – one! – sank toward the western horizon. “What are we looking at?” she breathed.

“A different time,” Klavicus replied.

“A different place,” she added, wide-eyed. “It must be a different place.”

He looked at her with cool pity. “A different place. Of course.”

The youths looked around them in confusion as a man wearing a surplice with an embroidered sun on his chest herded the residents toward a tall white building at the end of the village square. He paused briefly to speak to the strangers, seemingly unperturbed by their prominently displayed weapons. “You had better come along too. It’s not safe outside after dark.”

Glancing suspiciously behind them into the forest and up at the clear sky darkening from cobalt to indigo, they dismounted and followed the man inside. Mahlanda watched the unfolding scene in puzzlement. Hoping to shed light on their own situation the young people moved among the villagers, asking questions about the town, its people, and the strange phenomenon that had been driving them nightly into the church, apparently for years. “Why isn’t anyone demanding to know who they are?” she said. “Why are they so free with information to strangers?”

“Why, indeed?” Klavicus murmured.

The unfolding story was a peculiar one. A woman, Annalee, and her three-year-old son Evan lay at the heart of it. They had moved to the village a few years prior, when she was pregnant with the boy, she and her mild-mannered husband Jonas who made his living as a scribe. One day, for no reason anyone could comprehend, Jonas went mad and attacked her, claiming their unborn son was possessed by an evil spirit; the guard had no choice but to kill him, and his vengeful ghost had lingered ever since – with effects the adventurers were now experiencing themselves.

Every window in the church was boarded up, the single door barricaded from the inside, and every board and barrier was tested repeatedly by whatever lurked outside. Villagers driven to exhaustion slept fitfully, but the rest jumped and gasped at every rattle and knock. Po paced restlessly among them. “Let’s go back out,” he urged. “Confront whatever it is.”

The town elder protested that he had no intention of opening the door for anyone, and several of Po’s companions suggested trying to understand the situation before leaping headlong into who knew what. They looked disturbed by what they’d heard so far, and Zane was particularly skeptical. “And why wouldn’t he be?” Mahlanda wondered aloud. “The idea that an entire village would hide in a church, night after night, for years – it just doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they band together and do something?”

“Onwaal had softer sheep than you are accustomed to in these times…imagine kanks with no carapaces,” he amended when she looked at him blankly. “Still, they have a holy man.”

Kerac and Regan were chatting with the cleric, who identified himself as a priest of a deity called Pelor, the Sun Father, the Shining One. They looked as confused as Mahlanda felt at his description. “An extinct god?” she asked Klavicus.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. Certainly not – here, at present.”

The elemental priest and the avenger seemed puzzled at the Pelorite’s inability or unwillingness to confront the unquiet spirit lurking outside – they both had some small means to deal with such things – but let the matter lie and joined their companions quizzing the town elder, who was speaking of Jacob and Annalee’s predecessor in the house. “A strange one, he was,” he admitted. “I didn’t live here then, mind, but the story is that he was run out of town. Stealing livestock, using them in strange rituals. We’re good folk here, devout worshippers of Pelor.” His mouth thinned to a line. “We don’t hold with the evil gods, devils or demons,” Mahlanda cast Klavicus a sideways glance, “or their like.”

“Perhaps the man unearthed something he shouldn’t have,” Mahlanda said, “and the poor scribe was corrupted as a later side effect.”

“Perhaps,” Klavicus said, watching Zane. The psion was staring at the little boy Evan, who seemed a normal enough child to the casual eye. Perhaps a little less disturbed by the eeriness around him than he should have been, but small children often didn’t understand danger, especially when it became a fact of life.

The other youths were just coming to the same conclusion as Mahlanda, and asking for permission to investigate the town. It was freely given – perhaps too freely, Mahlanda thought – and after obtaining it they settled down to wait for morning.

Annalee had told them that the trouble started when the baby was close to arriving and they had decided to convert Jonas’ study to a nursery and a part of the barn to a workroom for the scribe. “He was never the same, after that,” she’d said, her eyes wide and sad. “I don’t know what happened. I wish I did.”

Morning came, and the rattling and hammering stopped, and the town elder and the Pelorite priest opened the door to the rising sun. Skarp’s brood hurried to Annalee and Jonas’ barn to investigate in the safe light of day, only to discover that daylight wasn’t safe at all. A thin, bespectacled man sat behind a tall desk reading a book open before him and making notes with a kind of desperation, and though the book was solid enough the man was decidedly not.

He flew into a rage when he saw them, then vanished, and before anyone had time to say what their faces expressed – oh, that can’t be good – Po had drawn his blade and turned on them. They subdued the paladin quickly, but bereft of a mobile host the ghost merely jumped to Reign. As the situation spiraled out of control Zane called for everyone to leave the barn, quickly, but Saphira stood her ground and spoke to the spirit in soothing tones, offering friendship, understanding and whatever aid they could offer if only he would leave off his attacks.

And the spirit of Jonas left Reign and spoke to them more calmly. When they asked why he tarried, he returned to the book open on its stand. “I have to help her,” he said, paging through it helplessly. “There’s something wrong with her, and I have to fix it.”

“Did you attack her?” Kerac asked.

“Attack her?” he looked at them in shock. “I could never have done that. I was trying to help her, yes, but then the guards came, and cut me down, and I…I have to help her.” He pawed at the tome. “I have to help her.”

Cautiously they examined the book, entitled Dark Doorways. It was written in a strange language whose script they did not even recognize. The ghost pointed to a smaller book alongside it. “That is the translation key.”

When they asked where he obtained the book he told them that a trader had sold it to him, along with some other tomes as well, also piled on the table. “He said they had belonged to the former owner of our very house, in fact. Odd coincidence, that.” The youths cast one another sidelong glances; not so very odd, perhaps.

“Where is the truth?” Mahlanda asked the flames, so intent on the unfolding drama that she had quite nearly forgotten Klavicus. “Was there something wrong with the woman, or the child, or the man? Why are the young people handling the book so gingerly? Surely a mere touch or glance at a page could do no harm.” The demon shook his head at her naiveté, but said nothing.

Even as they were asking – delicately – what proof he had that something was wrong with his wife, Annalee’s image appeared alongside Jonas’. Carrying a broom in her hand, she was more translucent than the ghost, and went about her business as if she were alone in the barn. Humming softly to herself, occasionally touching a hand to her belly as a pregnant woman will, she swept hay back toward the stable stalls. Then her broom caught on something. Bending down she swept aside the straw to reveal an iron ring, then an entire trapdoor. Smiling with happy curiosity, murmuring in a half-joking tone of lost treasure, she tugged on the ring. The door opened easily, revealing steps leading down into the darkness; after only a moment’s pause she set aside her broom and was soon lost to sight down the stairs.

Jonas watched them expectantly as they retraced her path to the stable, moved a few hay bales and swept aside the straw to reveal – an iron ring, and a trapdoor. “Let’s see what’s down there,” Po suggested.

Regan shook her head. “Not yet. We need more information.”

As they turned back toward the ghost the vision resumed. Annalee emerged from the darkness, her pretty features distorted now; there was a smugness, a play of unholy glee about them. Carefully she closed the trapdoor, carefully she covered it over, first with loose hay, then with bales, so that no sign of it remained. Picking up her broom, she left the barn.

“Is it real?” Mahlanda asked Klavicus. “Could the ghost have forced false visions upon them?”

“Let us see.” His eyes were narrowed and the corners of his mouth tight, as if he tasted something bitter, and she did not ask him anything more.

“Do you know what happened to her?” the youths were asking Jonas. “Have you found a solution in your reading?”

“A solution?” he asked, drifting back to the tome, distracted. “No, not yet. The cause? Perhaps…the book speaks of something – an unholy scion – skilled at possession. It could have taken her, and then the boy, perhaps both – ” agitation was growing in his translucent eyes again and the young people backed away, promising to help if they could. “Thank you,” he said, then returned to his seat, took up his pen, and resumed his feverish reading.

Zane grunted in satisfaction as they left the barn. “I thought it was the child. I knew it was the child.”

“We have to be certain though, don’t we?” Regan said. “I’d like to talk to Annalee before we decide – what to do.”

“And say what?” Zane demanded. “That we suspect her of consorting with some kind of evil being?”

“If he’s telling the truth and the guards killed him for no reason,” Po put in, “who knows how much of the town is involved?”

Regan gave them an irritable glare. “I’m not planning on saying, ‘Hi, we think your son is possessed by an evil spirit and you’re covering it up.’ I just want to ask if she came across anything unusual while they were converting the barn. If she says ‘no,’ that tells us something, doesn’t it?”

The question was asked, a denial received, and the adventurers’ sympathy shifted from a frightened town to its erstwhile haunter. “I don’t understand,” Mahlanda murmured. “It’s like some kind of vicious game.”

“Yes,” Klavicus muttered. “Yes, it is.”

Reign and Po wanted to investigate the space beneath the stables, but Regan urged one more night within the church. “Listen to the paladin and the warrior,” the daimon snarled at the flames. “Kill the damned thing and be done with it. Your presence is required elsewhere.”

“Kill what?” Mahlanda asked, but he offered no reply.

Caution – pointless dawdling, Klavicus called it – prevailed in a vote, and if the night’s stay brought no final resolution it did offer some certainties and new oddities. Zane, cautiously tracking flows of magic as the hours passed, ascertained that the pounding on the walls and shaking of the boards had no natural source but was magically created. His secret intrusion into the villagers’ surface thoughts revealed terror in all but one: the young child Evan, who was laughing. A budding hypothesis – that it somehow suited whatever had attached itself to the boy to feed on contained fear night after night – withered in the face of Kerac and Regan’s discovery that the so-called holy place in which everyone hid possessed not a whiff of sanctity or sacrament about it: not the ground, not a single chalice, not the Pelorite priest’s holy symbol.

“What is going on?” Mahlanda said, echoing the youths’ own perplexity.

When morning came again they made their apologies to the town elder, offering their regrets that they were unable to resolve the village’s problems but alas, they had other responsibilities. Then they made their way into the forest and hid until twilight drove the townspeople into the church for another night. Saphira and Regan snuck into the town, up to the church and discovered – as they half-expected – nothing. No vengeful spirit raged outside; the villagers huddled in their terror for no reason at all.

The young people briefly considered calling to them to come out, or greeting them cheerily when the elder unbarricaded the door come morning, but the peculiarity of the situation and lingering uncertainties regarding how to tell friend from foe made them conclude it would be be safer to confront whatever lurked beneath Annalee’s stables. Klavicus watched impassively as they were pelted by automated crossbows at the base of the stairs and pursued by undead; when their numbers grew unwieldy Kerac jammed a hand axe in a door to hold them off as Zane tracked an underground magic source with the tenacity of a hound. Mercifully for the youths, the zombies seemed too stupid and weak to follow.

“Where are they all coming from?” Mahlanda asked.

The daimon regarded her coolly. “Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?”

Her eyes widened. “But how? Why?”

He waved a hand toward the fire. “Observe. The answer will doubtless be revealed – one way or another.”

Down and down they made their way until they found the room they desired. A desiccated corpse was sprawled on a dais, and more undead – smarter and stronger than the zombies – confronted them. “Now there’s an interesting wrinkle,” Klavicus remarked.

“What is that?” Mahlanda asked, staring at the corpse, which she could have sworn moved, just a little bit.

“It’s called a lich.” At her uncomprehending stare he said, “A defiler, of sorts, from another time. A wizard who engaged in certain highly unnatural rituals in a bid to achieve immortality.”

She wrinkled her nose. “And this one failed?”

“Oh, no,” he replied blandly. “That’s considered a rousing success.”

“If he – it – is immortal, how are they supposed to kill it?”

Klavicus echoed the very lecture priest Kerac was giving his companions. “As part of the rituals a lich must seal his mortality away in a vessel – a phylactery. That’s his Achilles heel.”

“What kind of a heel?”

“Never mind,” he sighed. “Suffice to say that if the phylactery is destroyed, the lich’s mortality rebounds into his physical body.”

The youths engaged the undead. It was a hard fight, hard enough that Po counseled retreat to the stairs, and though Regan snapped that she had no intention of cowering behind him while she still had strength to swing her blade they did withdraw into a tighter formation. The lich was definitely stirring now, and just when the situation seemed as if it couldn’t get any worse they heard the sound of hoof beats approaching behind them. A beautiful young man riding a terrified horse descended on them, a child’s rage contorting his otherwise smooth features. “You’re breaking my toys!” he shouted in a petulant tone.

“What is that?” Mahlanda asked. “Its face looks like the boy’s – if he were an adult instead of a child – ”

“That is the unholy scion of which the scribe spoke,” Klavicus replied, “taking another form. Still not his true one, I expect.” Hatred, revulsion and even a measure of pity warred within his gaze as he watched the scene. “This world makes us all smaller, but to be reduced to that…”

The young people recognized him at once, and though the lich behind them grew ever more animate they threw the fury of their assault at the unholy scion, cutting down first his mount, then he himself. Regan spied a small object fitting Kerac’s description of a phylactery spilled out from a saddlebag; she snatched it up and tossed it to the cleric.

One enemy defeated left them in no way out of the woods; there was still the lich to contend with. Kerac, Zane and Regan hurled everything they had at the phylactery and finally succeeded in shattering it while Po, Reign, Saphira and Sugar Primrose turned to worrying the lich. It was a close thing, in the end; just to stand in the abomination’s presence was to suffer injury and Reign, already hurt from engagement with the other undead, was forced to retreat or fall. Just before Po and Regan would have been forced to follow her, the lich collapsed.

“They’re lucky it was weakened,” Klavicus mused, “or I doubt if any of them would have escaped with their lives.”

“That was weakened?” Mahlanda asked.

He eyed her sternly. “You have no idea. But somehow the unholy scion must have found the phylactery, and used the lich’s life force to power his little – game.”

The youths tended their wounds and then made their way to the surface, past corpses they themselves had created and others that they hadn’t. Deprived of the unholy scion’s animus, all of his puppets had collapsed. “But what was the point?”

“The point? You should know the answer to that. To feel powerful. To feel – ” his voice trailed off to a near whisper, “alive.”

“But it was so petty,” she objected. “And it wasn’t – real.”

He rested his chin on his hand, watching as Skarp’s brood emerged into the light of day. The residents were gone, the village nothing more than ruins. “What ever is?”

Picking through the remnants the young people found a few items of interest, including Jacob’s books, which were mysteriously undamaged. Klavicus’ eyes gleamed with possessive interest as they talked about finding a buyer to whom they might appeal; his mouth twisted into a smile as Regan, when she was convinced no one was looking, tucked both Dark Doorways and the translation key into her personal pack before sweeping the other books into a communal sack. “Does she read, that one?” Klavicus asked Mahlanda.

“I believe she does, yes.”

He tapped a finger against his lips. “Interesting.”

They retrieved their mounts – kanks again – from the collapsed remnants of the stables and rode away from the village. Their images were swallowed by flame and vanished as Mahlanda turned to Klavicus. “I don’t understand. What did that – thing – want from them?”

“Want from them specifically?” he seemed only half-attentive to her words. “Nothing.”

“Then why were they drawn into its orbit?” she persisted.

“Because he was awake when they passed, when he hadn’t been before. And there was nothing left for him in this world but to play his last trick, over and over again.”

“What about them awakened it – him?”

“I passed that way,” he muttered, and she saw his hand now clench into a fist. “I could have had the pleasure – ” he forcibly relaxed his hand. “No matter. He’s gone.” Seeing her fidgeting beside him, he added, “In another time – another place, if you will – there were more beings like me, named demon, and beings like him, called devil. Our hatred for one another knew no bounds. Stronger than Urik’s hatred for Tyr now, stronger than the hatred of the dragon kings for the Avangion, stronger than any hatred you can imagine was our hatred for one another. Strong enough that if this devil were in some state of hibernation, my merely passing through the vicinity would have sufficed to rouse him.” He laughed softly. “I have created my own delay, this time.”

“So it was only happenstance,” she mused. Then her brow creased in confusion. “But if he sensed you, why didn’t you sense him?”

Scowling, the balor picked up a fistful of sand in a massive palm and threw it onto the fire. He rose to his feet and extended a hand to Mahlanda. “Why, indeed? Let us go back. We know now that they are on their way.”