“You have!” The truth of what she had just said spread into Ashi. Her hand fell back. “You changed when you used the power of the cavern. It made you wither. If time has no effect in the Uura Odaarii, then you should look the same as you did when you entered. But you don’t. You’re all shriveled up.”
“What are you talking about?” Dabrak thrust out his hands. “I’m not shriveled. I’m strong!”
“Maybe you are,” said Chetiin. “But you’re wearing gloves.”
Dabrak looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time, then grabbed at the fingers of one glove and pulled it off.
The hand that emerged was like a bundle of crooked twigs with orange skin hanging loose. Dabrak stared at it as though it didn’t belong at the end of his arm. “What is this?” he croaked. The hand crept up to his face, and he gasped as it encountered the wrinkles and folds there. “This is a trick.”
Midian had his arm up to his elbow in his pack. He pulled it out with a flat leather case clutched in his fingers and opened the case to reveal a polished steel shaving mirror. Jumping up onto the side of the chair, he thrust the mirror in front of Dabrak’s face. “Look for yourself!”
Dabrak looked-and screamed. He slapped Midian away. The mirror spun across the cavern. Dabrak stood up, suddenly a strangely ridiculous figure in his loose, flapping clothes. “This isn’t possible! Nothing changes in the Uura Odaarii. Nothing!”
“Maybe it’s your future catching up with you,” Geth said, rising to his feet. His voice was rough and shaky, but the hand that held Wrath was steady.
Dabrak spun around and hurled the rod at him.
Geth snatched the rod out of the air with his free hand. For a moment, he just stared at it in astonishment, then his fingers curled around it and he grinned.
“Yes, take it!” spat Dabrak. “Take what you came for and get out!” He collapsed back on his chair, his body wracked with silent convulsions that might have been sobbing.
No one needed a second invitation. “Twice tak, marhu!” Geth said and ran for the passage that led out of the weird cavern. Ashi followed him, pausing at the edge of the passage to make certain everyone else got out. Chetiin raced past, another torch in his hand to light the way for Geth. Midian, his pack clutched in his arms. Ekhaas and Dagii-Ashi flung herself after them, racing through the narrow twists of the passage. Her frozen torch began to hiss and flare as she ran, and she thought it was possibly the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.
It wasn’t the only sound she heard though. A voice drifted suddenly out of the darkness below. “Wait! Wait, bring it back! Bring the rod back to me!” Dabrak’s voice rose to a roar. “I said bring it back!”
Ashi glanced over her shoulder. The passage behind her was only dark as far as the last twist. Beyond that, a pale green glow was growing.
“Khyberit gentis,” she breathed, then shouted, “Faster!”
Up and down the rises and drops of the passage. Around corners. It seemed as if the darkness ahead wouldn’t end, and every time she dared to look back, the green glow was brighter. Dabrak’s angry roaring was constant-then suddenly it swooped up into a shriek of triumph. Ashi looked back once more and saw the undying emperor racing up the passage. The signs of the Uura Odaarii shone bright on his skin and his eyes were green flames.
Then her feet were crunching and skidding among the offerings left at the grate in the shrine. She almost fell, but Dagii and Ekhaas reached back together and pulled her up. They burst into the little chamber of the shrine. Chetiin was trying to set fire to the pitch pots they had left there. “No time!” said Dagii and swept the goblin ahead of him into the narrow doorway of the shrine. Ekhaas plunged after them.
Ashi paused. Chetiin had managed to light some of the pitch pots. Snatching them up by their leather straps, she whirled them around once, then let them fly back into the passage and the approaching green glow. She spun as soon as the straps left her fingers and thrust herself through the shrine’s narrow exit. Clay shattered, and there was a sudden whoosh of flame. Ashi felt a searing heat on her back, but then she was out and standing on the black soil at the bottom of the pit where the others were waiting for her.
No, she realized. Not waiting. Clustered together, they faced the trolls that crouched like guard dogs on the ancient stone stairs. Dabrak’s voice rolled out of the shrine.
“Bring back the rod!”
Empty-handed, she turned to stare into the firelight that spilled from the shrine’s door-firelight that was swiftly blotted out by an intense green glow. Shining with power, untouched by the flames of the pits, a withered figure filled the doorway. Around it, the fine carvings of the ancient shrine became dull and dusty, as if the long delayed years of its preservation were being drawn away. Green light cast sharp shadows into the bottom of the pit. The low growling of the trolls rose into frightened mewling.
Burning from within like a coal from a fire, Dabrak Riis, marhu of Dhakaan and twenty-third lord of the Riis Dynasty, stretched out his hand. “Give me the rod!” Time shivered at his words.
But Ashi stared at his fingers.
They were shriveling, shrinking away even as he opened them. His arm grew thin. It was a stick, then a switch, then a long, dry twig. Ashi looked up at his face and watched wrinkled skin draw tight over bone that became green ash. Dark hair sifted away. Silk crumbled. Gold flared bright, burning up as if it were paper.
And like a coal from a fire, Dabrak’s power consumed its fuel. Without speaking again, the last living emperor of Dhakaan collapsed in a winking shower of green sparks that were dark before they hit the ground.
Darkness fell over the pit once more, and its silence was broken by the wailing of the trolls as they fled. Ashi and all of the others stared at the black dust that had been Dabrak as it slowly trickled from the featureless ruins that had been a perfectly preserved pre-Dhakaani shrine.
Then they turned to look at Geth. The shifter held out the Rod of Kings. “We have it,” he said.
Dawn came as they climbed back up the stairs from the pit. Like the shrine, the ancient stonework had crumbled, but the same weird stillness remained in the air. The Uura Odaarii still held its power, even if some of it seemed to have been drawn back. Midian even recovered enough to moan about the loss of the astounding artifacts.
Ashi and the others were less interested in the crumbled stairs than in the trees and the forest around them. How much time had passed while they were in the green cavern? Had a night turned into a year as in Geth’s story of fairy glades? It was hard to tell. The air felt different than it had in the night, but that could just have been the breaking day. The forest in the valley seemed as it had the day before, but what was there to tell one day in the forest from the next? There was no sign of the terrified trolls.
The hedge of thorns, when they reached it, still had the fresh smell of trampled plants, though. Above the slope of the valley, the remains of the bugbear camp still smoldered. Marrow was even waiting for them, still licking red blood from her black muzzle. She yipped and growled at Chetiin.
“She says the bugbears have fled into the mountains to the west. She’s disappointed we came back, though. She wanted to find out what a magebred horse tastes like.”
Midian let out a hiss of relief. “One night,” he said. “One night was one night.”
“Cho,” said Ekhaas, “and I don’t want to have another one like it.” She gestured to the south, where they’d left the horses. “Let’s get back out to the Dhakaani road and make camp there. We’ll start back to Rhukaan Draal tomorrow.”
“Wait-how far have the bugbears fled?” Geth asked. He looked at Marrow. “Was Makka, the chief, still with them? Is there any chance we could catch him and get Ashi’s sword back?”
Marrow snarled an answer. “Beyond this mountain,” Chetiin translated. “Beyond the length of the valley before Marrow stopped following them, but they were still running. They probably won’t stop until night falls again. Makka was with them when they left. Whether he is still is uncertain-the pack has turned on the leader.”