Aric was shocked. “Just the two of you?”
“We were three.” Myrana looked at the road, and he could read sadness in her stance. “Now two.”
“I see. Did you see anything else in these dreams? What made you decide to follow them?”
“Nothing specific,” Myrana said. “Except you. You’re half-elf—I didn’t realize that until last night.”
“I am.” Dreams or no, anybody could reach that conclusion, looking at him.
“Your father was human, and your mother died when you were very young.”
“That … that’s true.”
“I know. As I said, my dreams are somewhat more meaningful than many people’s.”
“But what did you expect to find here?”
“That I never knew. Only that I would discover the purpose after I arrived.” Her skin, darkened from exposure to Athas’s sun, reddened slightly. “I thought that perhaps you were the only purpose. Meeting you. But I knew there must be more to it than that.”
Aric decided to trust her. As long as he had Ruhm by his side, ready to act if that decision proved ill advised. He shoved the big sword into its scabbard. Sellis did the same with his. Ruhm couldn’t put his club away, but he rested the heavy end on the ground.
“That’s all?” Aric asked. “Now that you’re here, do you have any other idea as to the purpose?”
Myrana brushed long, black hair off her cheek. “Last night, the dream changed again,” she said. “I know it’s strange, telling you these things so soon after meeting you, but … I feel I must. Do you understand?”
“Not really,” Aric said. “I’ve never had such dreams. But I suppose I’d had strange things happen to me from time to time, and heard about more. So go ahead. Tell us, and we’ll try to believe you.”
“It was about this place,” she began. “Does it have a name?”
“Akrankhot.”
“Yes! I knew that, in the dream, and then forgot it upon waking. Akrankhot. There is something foul here. Something evil, and terribly powerful. It’s buried beneath the city, and protected by a magical structure of some kind, like a huge cage.”
Aric turned as cold as if day had suddenly become night. The pile of metal, that force he had felt, trying to get into his head. The way Damaric had attacked them.
Myrana’s brow furrowed, and she limped right up to Aric and rested a hand gently against his cheek. “You’ve seen it,” she said. “Haven’t you?”
Aric swallowed and gestured toward Ruhm. “We found it.”
She left her hand where it was a few moments longer. Aric wouldn’t have minded if she had left it there all day, and into the night. Standing this close to her, he could smell her and gaze into her huge brown eyes, the color of distant mountains in the full light of morning sun. She was slender and muscular, with womanly curves that moved under her simple shift. He realized he was staring. As long as that hand stayed on his cheek, he was powerless to stop.
She removed it, as if she had seen the thoughts its presence stirred within him. She didn’t look away, though. “Did you tell anyone else about it?” Myrana continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn’t. Probably for her, the touch had been just that, a touch, not signifying any stronger emotion. He tried to pay attention to what she was asking.
“Yes,” Ruhm said, saving Aric having to answer.
“It’s why we came here,” Aric explained, finding his voice again. “We were sent by the the Shadow King himself to find the metal buried beneath Akrankhot. I was tasked specifically with locating it, because I have a … a psionic connection to all sorts of metals.”
“Interesting,” Myrana said, in a way that made Aric think it wasn’t really.
“Anyway, after we found it, we reported it to the templar in charge of the expedition. It’s being loaded onto wagons now.”
“In my dreams, I saw runes around the cage.” She knelt and etched some in the sand. “Like these.”
“Those were on the door,” Aric said. “And on the stairs, leading down toward the steel. You’re saying that it’s the cage? That whatever is underneath is kept in check only by that?”
“So my dreams led me to believe.”
“And the fact that it’s being taken apart and moved? What does that mean, then?”
Myrana rose again, an effort that made her bite her lower lip. When she was upright, she rested some of her weight on her staff. “Then, I’m afraid, we’re all doomed. Anyone within this city. After that, who knows? Whatever is imprisoned there is powerful indeed, and whether it can be stopped again, I have no idea. All I know is that it was imprisoned in the first place for a reason.”
“We must warn Kadya,” Aric said. “Perhaps it’s not too late. They’ve moved a good amount of steel, but there’s still some left. If it’s still caged, then—”
“We can warn her,” Myrana agreed. “I fear, though, that if much has been taken away, then we’re probably too late. And when that evil force, or being, gets loose, it’s going to be seeking vengeance. Let’s make haste, while we yet live!”
When they reached the wagons, after a hurried run across the city, Kadya was overseeing the loading. The argosies had been taken into town, as close to the stairways as possible. A procession of slaves marched to and fro, each carrying either a chunk of metal or helping tote pieces too large for a single one to lift. At the argosies, they handed their burdens to other slaves who stacked it neatly inside. The mekillots had had an easy time of it coming to Akrankhot—on the return trip they would earn their feed, and then some.
Aric pointed to eight wagons with closed doors. “Those are already full,” he said. “Which means they’re nearly done, at least with this trip.”
Myrana turned to the swordsman who had accompanied her. “If I hadn’t been paralyzed by that cistern fiend, we might have arrived in time!” she said. “Those days we lost … I fear we’re too late.”
“Perhaps not,” Sellis said. “We’ll just have to see.”
“I’ll talk to the templar,” Aric volunteered. “She doesn’t like me, but I have the king’s approval so she might listen to me.”
Kadya sat on a small mound of iron bars too long to fit into the argosies. They would have to be cut down, or strapped to the tops of the wagons. In the meantime they had been stacked nearby. Aric hurried to her side. He had a stitch in his side from the run. His face was flushed, and he had not entirely caught his breath. “Templar,” he began. “We must stop removing metal from the cavern at once!”
“Whatever for?” Kadya asked. “Who are those strangers?”
“They’re Myrana and Sellis, of House Ligurto. Myrana has dreams in which truths are revealed. She knew all about me before she met me. And she says there’s something—she knows not what—inside that cavern. Imprisoned there, caged by the metal. Releasing it … well, she says it’s indescribably evil, and tremendously powerful. We can’t know what the result of freeing it would be. But it won’t be good.”
He had managed to get his words out, but the stitch flared up, like a dagger between his ribs. He bent forward, bracing himself with a hand against the iron bars that Kadya sat on. Her left hand rested on the same bar that he touched.
And once again, images swam into his head, blotting out the world around him and replacing it with another. Once again, he saw what he had before, on the stairs leading down to the cavern, when he touched the ancient sword he still carried.
The creature he had glimpsed, all limbs and tentacles and teeth—a demon, Aric knew, although he couldn’t say how—was carried, struggling the whole time, down an almost unending flight of stairs marked with runic symbols. Mystical bonds contained the demon’s form, but not his fury. He was a horrible sight, with thick stubby horns above angry eyes that shone with a sickly yellow-green fury. His gray-green skin appeared mottled with lichen or mold and thick with oozing pustules, not a smooth patch anywhere. His fanged mouth snapped at everything, two long, narrow tongues lapping at the world, and tusks on either side of his long nose were crusted with dried blood. The bonds held his many limbs and tentacles fast, kept his claws from doing damage, prevented him from using his muscular, many-pronged tail, but more important still, they dampened the powers of his mind.