“Yes, Mistress.”
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
Wir, the 11th of Sypheros, 998 YK
The Cathedral of the Sovereign Host loomed high above the treetops of the temple grounds, its towering belfry spearing the gray sky and rivaling even the spires of Crownhome. Tallis had seen it a thousand times, but it brought him no comfort now. Men had constructed an edifice in worship of the gods, but where were the gods now? Where was the justice so vaunted by Aureon’s teachings?
In his new guise, Tallis decided it would be best to enter the cathedral through the front door, to visit Aureon’s shrine and speak to the priest like anyone else would.
Tallis couldn’t quiet his mind. Images, conversations, and shared moments streamed through his head in a hundred disjointed pieces. Lenrik, the humble elf priest who’d given Tallis’s family an extra loaf of bread when food was scarce back home in Teryk. Lenrik, who’d risked his life time and again in skirmishes upon the Karrnath-Cyre border just to heal the sons and daughters of Karrnath … and occasionally the orphans of Cyre. Lenrik, who’d brought Tallis himself back from death innumerable times.
That he could be party to the murder of innocents was unthinkable. Lenrik had known Gamnon as well as Tallis, and he was less likely to bear a grudge against the arrogant Brelish captain.
How could he be tied to this construct, this … nimblewright? To the Ebonspire murder? Lenrik hadn’t known Tallis would even be anywhere near the Ebonspire that night, not until Tallis himself had told him about it the next day.
But he had known Haedrun, hadn’t he? She’d mentioned being approached by an elf before the assassin attacked them at the docks. Was that Lenrik, after all?
“Fury’s madness,” he swore, anguished at the thought. Perhaps it had all been some horrible coincidence.
What was Soneste playing at? Anger surged through him when he thought of the Brelish inquisitive’s argument, for seeding this doubt within him at all. He didn’t know her, and she couldn’t possibly know him or Lenrik. So she’d found “evidence” in the Tower of the Twelve? Perhaps the Twelve, with its great influence, had instigated the whole event, fabricating evidence to redirect blame.
But why Lenrik?
Adopting the confident bearing of a Lyrandar guildsman-feeling none of it himself-Tallis strode up the steps of the cathedral and passed through the main doors. He nodded to the Vassals who greeted him, but he couldn’t offer a smile in turn.
He marched down the central aisle of the worship hall, heedless of the great pillars he passed and the Sovereign scripture carved upon them. Above him, a magical panorama of the night sky and its unclouded moons drew the eyes of visitors and priests alike. Tallis had stared into its mystic depths many times before, somehow finding a modicum of comfort in its terrible beauty. The dark firmament made Eberron and all its wars seem so small.
Not today.
A spiraling stair on one side of Aureon’s sanctuary led him down to the undercroft. Therein lay the caretaker’s personal chambers, where none but Lenrik or Prelate Alinda were officially permitted.
At the bottom of the steps, he passed adjoining rooms-study chambers, a vestry, and the eminent Archives of Aureon. It had been a place more comfortable for Tallis than any other in Korth.
“Lenrik?” Tallis called out, hearing only his own echo return. From its hiding place in the vestry, he retrieved his hooked hammer. It felt wrong-blasphemous-to wield a weapon in this place. At last he entered the spare room that Lenrik had converted to a healing chamber, where Tallis and Soneste had both woken with mended wounds in the last few days.
Once inside, Tallis set about examining every corner, every detail, as if it were the scene of a crime. He looked at their game of Conqueror in the corner. Tallis’s chancellor had been deposed by Lenrik’s general in an unexpected maneuver and now lay discarded off the board. The elf’s king was poised for a final strike against his own. Tallis felt a chill.
“Tallis,” a voice said softly, and he whirled with his hammer ready to throw. Soneste stood there, her hands held out to show she meant peace.
“I told you-” he began.
Soneste pointed to the wall. “Look. The tapestry.”
He followed her gaze, expectant. When he didn’t move, she walked across to stand in front of the Aerenal tapestry. She slipped her fingers behind one edge, peeling the layered fabric away from the wall to see behind it.
Tallis stared at the violet, red, and gold threads and the beauteous spiraling patterns they formed. For a moment, Tallis succumbed to the glamer, but his trance ended abruptly when the tapestry shifted.
“Help me with this,” Soneste said, trying to push her way behind the heavy fabric.
He pulled the bottom of the tapestry up and away, giving her room. She prodded delicately at the smooth worked stone-looking for something? Some hidden niche in the wall? Tallis stared in shocked silence as one of Soneste’s fingers disappeared into the masonry. She reached tentatively further, until half her forearm had disappeared.
“Illusion,” she murmured, more absorbed by her work than the discovery itself. “It’s not warded or trapped. It’s just … a disguised door.”
“How did you know this was here?” he asked. Tallis had learned over the course of his career how to identify and even disable many magical traps and hidden doors. Most of the time, one didn’t need magical expertise so much as an aptitude for disrupting someone else’s, yet in all this time, he’d never found this.
“I didn’t.” Soneste sounded honest. “When I was here with Lenrik this morning, I just imagined it was possible there was a door behind this.”
The art of possibilities. Soneste seemed to excel at that.
“Slowly, now,” she said. She pulled a silver metal circlet from her haversack and slipped it around her head. Immediately, a white ball of light formed in the air above her shoulder. She stepped through the hidden door and vanishing from sight. For some reason he didn’t understand, Tallis did not want to enter. He didn’t want to know what Lenrik had hidden away.
But circumstances demanded it. He followed, finding that he had to push aside a heavy curtain that lay across the unseen threshold. As he did, Tallis breathed in a spicy, souring aroma which seemed to cling to the fabric but had not drifted into the bedroom behind him.
The chamber in which they found themselves was small, unremarkable in itself with a low, vaulted ceiling like many in the undercroft. It would take time to study all of the room’s strange contents, but Soneste found her eyes drawn immediately to an array of masks hanging from another, less exquisite tapestry on the left-hand wall. There were easily two dozen of them, crafted of wood and bone and painted to resemble grinning white skulls and visages of the animate dead. They stared back like gruesome sentries through empty eyes.
Aerenal death-masks.
It didn’t surprise her too much to see these here. Many elves in Khorvaire harbored at least some remnant of their homeland culture-as evidenced by the Aerenal tapestry itself-but unless he’d deceived everyone, Lenrik worshipped Aureon and the Sovereign Host exclusively-not the Undying Court of Aerenal.
“Oh, Khyber.” There was dread in Tallis’s voice.
At his words, Soneste looked beneath the assemblage of masks to what appeared to be a shelf of very old, desiccated skulls. Between a pair of liquid-filled goblets was a human head propped up to face them, the skin ash-gray and plastered tight against the skull beneath. The brown hair was lank, trailing only inches over the lip of the shelf. She stepped closer, needing to know … and she smelled the astringent stench of embalming fluid.