“How useless to have such powers, such gifts as we have, when they cannot be employed in the sparing of Rhapsody’s life, the saving of the continent from the scourge of another demon,” Achmed had mumbled in a rare moment of speech at the campfire’s edge one night.
Ashe sat silently for a long time, watching the twisting patterns of the flames.
“We shall just have to employ the tools of ordinary men, our wits, our endurance, and our luck, should we be fortunate enough to have any fall from the sky into our laps,” he said, his voice dull with exhaustion. “For in the end, our tides, powers, and lands asides, that is all we are—ordinary men.”
“Speak for yourself,” Achmed retorted, draining his battered tankard and settling down to sleep that was less than restful.
By the eighth day of their journey from Sepulvarta, those tools, both ordinary and extraordinary, were put into use: Achmed’s skin-web sensitivity to vibration feeling the change in the air, a sort of dusty heaviness on the already-thick summer wind, Ashe’s dragon sense picking up the newly caustic feel of the world around them.
And both of their noses inhaling the scent of fire, rancid, odious fire that reeked of the Underworld.
Gerald Owen burst through the doors of the Great Hall, startling the Lord Marshal from his paperwork, with Gwydion and Melisande close behind.
“Lord Anborn! There is smoke hanging in the air over Tref-y-Gwartheg! Word has come from the coast in north Avonderre that two of the fishing villages are in flames, and that the fire is moving this way. Word also has it that armed men have been seen up and down the coast, just before each of the blazes has broken out. They are burning wantonly, starting at the shoreline and moving inward toward the forest.”
The General turned his upper body toward the tall windows behind the chair.
In the distance he could see it as well, the gray haze that hung over the treetops at the horizon, a bellwether of encroaching fire. He had seen it before.
But never with the dark tint it left in the sky.
There was something more ominous than the obvious warning signs of a moving brushfire that was spreading to a forest. Something about the fire.
He turned back as quickly as he could.
“Owen, evacuate the keep,” he said, reaching his strong hand out to Melisande; the trembling girl ran to him and buried her face in his shoulder. “I will deploy our forces to assist the Invoker in containing the fires, and hunting down whoever it is that is setting them. Send word to Gavin by avian messenger.”
The elderly chamberlain nodded and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Anborn instructed. “Summon the captain of the guard for me, and have him send the message. You take Gwydion and Melisande and leave immediately with the civilians for Bethany. I will send part of the force to clear the local villages as well. But get the children out of here.”
“I am not a child, and I am going nowhere,” declared Gwydion Navarne. “I am duke of this province, thank you, and will stay here with you to defend it.”
The look on the General’s face was an odd mix of fury at being defied and affectionate admiration.
“You’re not duke yet, lad,” he said sternly, though his eyes twinkled in the deep lines of his face. “My nephew, your guardian, is still regent of your lands, as well as both of our sovereign. It was he who told me to defend the Alliance in his absence, so your authority is null. Your responsibility—your duty—is to your sister; now take her and get out of here.”
“But-”
“Do not argue with me, cur!” the General roared. “Take your sister, and go with Owen to Bethany, or I’ll set fire to you myself!”
Silence fell heavily over the Great Hall. Then, after shaking off his shock, the young duke-to-be nodded distantly and put his hand out to his sister.
“Come, Melly,” he said.
Anborn gently separated the sobbing girl from his shoulder, patting her back encouragingly. Gwydion Navarne stepped forward and put his arm around her, leading her from their late father’s keep without so much as a backward glance.
The seneschal stood between the gusts of sea wind in the shadow of the great stone edifice at the shoreline of the sea, watching as darkness crept in from the horizon. He felt the warmth of the lanterns on the rectory and other buildings behind him come to light, the people inside them doubtless eager to combat the windy dusk that loomed at the edge of the sea, gray beneath low-hanging clouds heavy with rain to come.
The dark beauty of the coming storm hovering over the architectural marvel before him gave him pause, silencing the demon that had been cackling in glee at the destruction they had left in their wake.
The temple reached up out of the darkness of the crashing wind and surf, its oddly angled spire pointing away from the fallowing sea. The base of the mammoth structure was built from enormous blocks of quarried stone, gleaming gray and black in the light of the setting sun, irregular and purposefully shaped, mortared together around tall beams of ancient wood. Carefully tended walkways, formed by great slabs of polished rock embedded in the sand, led up to the front doors, which were fashioned from planks of varying lengths.
The entire cathedral had been designed to resemble the wreck of a ship, jutting from the craggy rocks and sand of the beach at an ominous angle. The immense entrance doors, with a jagged notched pattern at the top, appeared to depict a vast hole torn in what would have been the keel. The crazily angled spire was the representation of a mast.
The colossal ship had been rendered accurately, down to the last nautical apparatus. The moorings and riggings, detailed in exquisitely carved marble, were a half-dozen times their normal size.
The seneschal whistled in admiration, wondering what had inspired such a strange and magnificent undertaking.
Farther offshore behind the main section of the basilica was another part of the cathedral, an annex connected to the main building by a plank walkway. It was evident to the seneschal that the annex and the walkway were only visible at low tide, as now, submerging into the sea when the current flooded back in. This additional part of the temple evoked the wreckage of the stern. A gigantic anchor, lying aslant on the sandbar between the two buildings, served as its threshold.
The seneschal shuddered involuntarily. With Faron out on the sea in a ship, he did not enjoy viewing the celebration of a major traumatic shipwreck, if that’s what this building was constructed to represent.
Despite the care that had been taken by whatever architect designed it to elicit the feeling of an off-balance wreck unevenly resting on the sand, it was obvious that the enormous edifice was sound and solidly built. It stood, undisturbed, amid the churning waves of the raging sea, giving no quarter, no inch to the sand.
The seneschal turned to the quartet of soldiers on horseback behind him, awaiting his orders.
“Search the rectory and the other buildings,” he said, his eyes darting around at the lights flickering off the rolling waves. “Perhaps they are giving her shelter. Then, if you don’t find her, burn the priests alive. There are bound to be more of them than you, so when you are ready to go in, let me know, and I will assist you.”
The soldiers nodded and set about preparing for their maneuver.
The seneschal opened the great doors of the basilica and looked inside.
His eyes took in the cavernous basilica, its ceiling towering above him, the distant walls arching up to meet it. Great fractured timbers of myriad lengths and breadths were set within the dark stone. It looked a little like the fragmented skeleton of a giant beast, lying on its back, its spine the long aisle that led up forward, ancient ribs reaching brokenly, helplessly upward into the darkness above.