Kian glanced anew at the temple. “If none of us saw anything of worth or interest, what is keeping Varis so long? He has been inside at least an hour, perhaps longer.”
“I cannot speak to what he has found that is so appealing,” Hazad said. “But the boy is a strange one, even among Aradaner highborn. All he seems to speak of-when he talks at all-are the lost glories of Aradan, and what could have been had the right men sat the Ivory Throne. I suppose that old book he is always reading from has filled his head full of nonsense. More a scholar than a prince, I say. Worse than a Master of Wisdom of the Magi Order, or a Sister of Najihar. No one should read so much. Bad for the eyes.”
Azuri shook his head. “Pa’amadin grant that your willful ignorance remains your curse alone.” Before Hazad could respond, Azuri said, “Yet about Prince Varis, you have a valid point. The youth seems to have more interest in the forgotten kings, than becoming a king himself.”
“The princeling is far down the line of succession,” Hazad countered. “King Simiis may not be long for the world, old as he is, but Varis’s father, Prince Sharaal, is hale, as are Varis’s brothers. There is no reason the boy should worry overmuch about sitting the Ivory Throne for a good while, if ever. For that matter, I’d say no one is worried about him sitting the throne, given that he was so easily able to take his leave from the king’s city.”
“It is never foolish to prepare for the throne when you are of royal blood,” Azuri said ominously, using his dagger to clean his already immaculate fingernails. “The days are dark in Aradan, and growing darker. Who can say who will stand and who will fall, lowborn or high?”
Kian ran a hand over his still dripping hair. “We need not worry over the dealings of kings and princes of Aradan. Our only task is to see the princeling safe back to Ammathor, and there collect our due.”
Hazad nodded in agreement, but Azuri pressed on. “We tasted war with our mothers’ milk, and as boys supped on the meat of suffering and want. As I recall, neither flavor was sweet. Aradaners, to the last, can rot in the Thousand Hells for all I care, but I will keep a wary eye, and guard against the chance of getting caught up in their rivalries. If that means worrying over the dealings of highborn, in order to know when best to leave this realm, so be it.”
Kian silently vowed that he would not get dragged too deeply into Aradan’s strife. To his mind, he and his friends had earned the right to avoid this kingdom’s brewing troubles, even if they had collected the spoils of those troubles for many years.
“If the prince wants to stay here for a time, very well,” Kian said, “but we need to make sure he has not broken his fool neck, or been bitten by a viper-I daresay a dead prince is an unpaying prince.”
With Hazad and Azuri striding along at his flanks, Kian moved toward the temple. They were a score of paces away from the entrance when the earth shuddered with a low, almost inaudible groan. The trio halted, legs spread for balance. All around, hidden Asra a’Shah called out in alarm. From shaking trees, birds took to the sky in a discordant thunder of beating wings. When a stronger tremor hit, the shaking rumble of grinding stone filled the dank forest and threw the men to their bellies. Through a shifting screen of falling leaves, Kian saw a gaping crack spreading across the closest temple wall, and the domed roof was sagging inward, ready to collapse.
“To the prince!” Kian bellowed.
Before anyone could react, Kian was up and running, each stride precarious on ground that was no longer firm. He had not taken three steps when a blast of azure fire burst through the top of the dome and roared skyward. Those flames melded into a solid column, searing away hanging boughs. A heartbeat later a nearly invisible wall of something like air burst from the temple and sent Kian soaring. A single strand of blue fire, no thicker than his little finger, flicked out of the temple and crawled over him. At its touch a searing cold heat cut through the very fiber of his being, sank deep into his bones. All thought and awareness was blasted away, leaving only agony. Kian began screaming.
Chapter 3
Each of the four sides of Fortress Krevar’s outer wall measured a full mile in length, were a hundred paces thick at the base and tapered to twenty paces wide at the top, and stood over a hundred feet above the dusty floor of the Kaliayth Desert. At one time those walls had been a symbol of the distant Ivory Throne’s power and wealth. Now, with the extended absence of gold from Ammathor’s coffers, those walls were showing the signs of neglect, becoming an omen of Aradan’s looming demise.
Atop the Sister’s Tower, rising another hundred feet above the wallwalks, Sister Ellonlef Khala sat in a simple wicker chair enjoying the last of the cool breeze left over from the night before. For years, she had climbed the spiraling stairs before each dawn to collect her thoughts and prepare for the coming day. Over those years, she had come to understand that Aradan was suffering a slow death brought on by the internal squabbling of the king and his lords. Krevar, and all the other border fortresses, had once been well-supplied, but now the stronghold lay all but forgotten at the edge of the desert, and mostly left to fend for itself. Such freedom and anonymity might have been welcome in places that could sustain life, but built on the verge of the Kaliayth and the Qaharadin, day-to-day survival in Krevar was a brutal taskmaster that uncaringly molded and shaped its inhabitants into a hard and quietly bitter folk.
Dawn had come and gone two hours past, and now sunlight streamed through the four open arched windows ringing the tower’s square crown. As was her habit, Ellonlef sat writing in her journal. Instead of chronicling the goings on of Krevar as usual, this day she wrote that the three moons, the faces of the Three, were in near perfect alignment. At that, she gazed up at the unnerving sign. The moons had merged into what looked like a monstrous eye. The greatest of the Three, the face of the goddess Hiphkos, shone pale blue. Before her hung the middling moon, Memokk, which blazed with an amber light. Least among the Three, Attandaeus, burned a bright crimson that formed the pupil. That eye stared down on the world with undeniable malevolence. Before sunrise it had cast a greenish-red glow of putrefaction over the land. Now, with the sunlight gradually reaching the day’s full strength, the evil glare had waned.
Discomfited, she looked back at the journal. Soon she would deliver the leather-bound volume to King Simiis of Aradan, and another copy she would give to the Mother of the Najihar Order on the tiny island-city of Rida, which lay twelve leagues off Aradan’s eastern coast. From her current perch, home was nearly two hundred leagues distant. It might as well been a thousand, or ten thousand. A year left, Ellonlef thought wistfully, and her term of service and study would conclude.
She set the ink-stained scribing reed aside, sprinkled a pinch of blotting powder across the fresh words sinking into the velum page, then took a sip of tea. After a moment, she blew the chalky powder away. In the desert, ink dried as fast as everything else.
Taking another sip of tea, she supposed that Lord Marshal Otaker would be looking for her by now, no matter that she was guaranteed her quiet time. It was a rule based more on mutual respect than any authority on her part. Other lords of Aradan would not have been so lenient.
For near on a thousand years, since the fall of the Suanahad Empire, the Sisters of Najihar had exclusively served Aradan by secretly gathering knowledge from the other kingdoms of the world, as well as from within the borders of Aradan. Before that, the Sisters of Najihar, a sect solely made up of female scholars, had collected knowledge for knowledge’s sake. During the reign of Emperor u’Hadn of the shattered Suanahad Empire, all that had changed.