They were settled well back in the ice caves where the wind and the blowing snow couldn’t penetrate. Only the cold refused to be kept at bay, and there was nothing they could do about that. They were dressed in their all–weather gear, and Simralin and Angel were wrapped in their blankets, as well. A pair of the solar lamps had been placed at the perimeter of their little campsite, lighting the dark interior of the caves. A fire would have been better, but there was nothing to burn except for their gear. Simralin had given Kirisin a sun tab, an artificial heat generator, to place under Angel’s makeshift bedding, but it wouldn’t last for more than three hours and she didn’t have any more.
He smiled at his sister. “You seem better.”
She grimaced and touched her head experimentally. “Don’t be fooled. My head feels like it’s been split open. But the bleeding’s stopped.” She cocked one eyebrow. “Mostly, it’s my ego that’s injured. It never occurred to me to wonder what Culph was doing here, how he had survived his supposed death, or how he had found us. I just accepted it. I thought it was a miracle of some sort, turned my back on him, and gave him a chance to whack me on the head. Stupid.”
“I wasn’t any smarter,” Kirisin admitted. “When I saw you lying there, bleeding all over everything, I thought you were dead. Even after he said you weren’t, I thought you were. I thought he had killed you.”
He was still speaking of Culph as if he really had been an Elf and not a demon, still not quite able to banish the image of the old man who had pretended to be their friend. Culph had fooled them all, manipulating them every step of the way on their journey to these caves. From the moment he had caught out Kirisin and Erisha in the basement archives of the Belloruus family home, he had used them. The memory burned like fire, and Kirisin knew it would be a long time before he could lay it to rest.
“He would have killed us both,” his sister declared, “if he’d gotten his way with the Loden. Me first, you whenever you had finished whatever it was he was trying to get you to do.”
Kirisin shuddered at the memory of how it had felt to be under the demon’s control, hypnotized by the movement of the silver cord and rings the latter had dangled in front of him. He had been deep under the other’s strange spell, unable to help himself, when Simralin, her consciousness regained after the blow to her head, had stabbed the demon through the leg with her long knife, breaking its concentration and allowing her brother to use the Elfstones to destroy it.
To burn it to ash.
Had he known somehow that the Stones could do this? He thought about it for the first time since it had happened. Subconsciously, perhaps. He couldn’t ever be sure, but his instincts had told him that the demon was afraid of the magic, that it had needed him from the beginning in order to control it. Once the boy had broken free of the hypnotic effect of the rings and cord, the magic had been his to summon, and the demon had no defense. That was its undoing.
Old Culph, dead for real this time.
“What was it that it had intended you to do exactly?” his sister pressed.
They had spoken of it only sparingly while he worked to close Angel’s wounds after he had gotten her inside the ice caves. Before that, there had been no time for anything. The demon was dead, his sister was unconscious, and their friend and protector was out there alone in the cold and the night, possibly doing battle with the second demon, the four–legged one that had killed Erisha, possibly injured or dying. He didn’t stop for more than a few seconds once he had regained his senses. He had wrapped himself in his cloak and rushed back through the tunnels, headed for the slopes of Syrring Rise.
It was odd in retrospect that he had known instantly what he needed to do to find Angel. Having discovered the power of the Elfstones to destroy the demon, he had remembered quickly enough that they were seeking-Stones, as well, capable of finding anything hidden from the user. It didn’t have to be a thing; it could be a person. In this case, it could be Angel. He had stood at the mouth of the caves, staring out into the blackness of the mountain’s sweep beneath the star–strewn skies, picturing her face and summoning the magic. It was still hot and alive within him, not yet settled back from his battle with the demon, and it had flared to life instantly. At the crest of its bluish glow, he had seen Angel’s snow–covered form collapsed on the slope not a hundred yards below where he stood and had gone to her instantly.
After that, after finding her and bringing her back inside, he had found Simralin awake, bloody and groggy but alive. Seeing the condition of the Knight of the Word, she had urged him to go to work on Angel at once. While he did so, his sister had cleaned away the blood from her own injury and bound it with a crude bandage, saying little to him while he labored over Angel, not wanting to distract him. Only once had she spoken to him, and that was to ask about the silver cord and rings. Kirisin had explained what they were intended to do, how they were meant to bind him to the demon and would have done so if she hadn’t stabbed it and given Kirisin a chance to use the Elfstones to incinerate it.
“I wish I could have done it myself,” she had muttered before settling back and dozing off.
He had worried about her falling asleep with a head injury, but had been too preoccupied with treating Angel to do anything about it until after he had finished. Now and then he had paused in his healing work to call over to her, waking her from her sleep long enough to force her to grunt angrily and mutter something about leaving her alone. But at least he could be certain each time that she was still alive.
Even so, he had been relieved when she finally woke up for good and began speaking with him again.
“He planned to take me back to the Cintra and use the Loden to imprison Arborlon, the Ellcrys, and the Elves,” he explained. “Once he had all of the Elves in one place, the demons could take them out at their leisure and do what they wanted with them. He would use me as his tool for accomplishing this, and I don’t think anyone would have stopped him. No one would even have known what was happening.”
He glanced down at the bulge in his pocket–the bag that contained the Elfstones. “You know something, Sim. I hadn’t thought about it before, but the Stones are as dangerous to the Elves as to anyone else. The magic doesn’t recognize race or measure intent; it treats everyone the same. All Culph had to figure out was how to find an Elf who could be persuaded to use it.”
Simralin’s smile was tight and bitter. “Don’t be too quick to blame yourself, Little K. None of us understood the rules of the game being played. Not until now. None of us even understood the nature of the magic being put to use. That ghost in the Ashenell, Pancea Rolt Gotrin, she knew. She understood. That was why you were given those warnings. If Angel had died on the slopes and Culph had killed me, you would have been left on your own and not been master of your own behavior. And we almost let this happen. All of us.”
“Well, it won’t happen again,” Kirisin declared softly. “I promise you that.”
“I’ll hold you to your word. We still have a ways to go before this is over. First we’ve got to get back to Arborlon.”
“Wait a minute!” Kirisin exclaimed suddenly, his eyes widening. “I just remembered something. Culph said that he–the demon said that it had summoned an army to Arborlon to make sure no one escaped before it returned with me to imprison the city in the Loden! It bragged about it while it was busy using that cord and those rings to hypnotize me! An army of demons and once–men, Sim! It’s probably already there, waiting!”
Simralin straightened, winced from the resulting pain, and quickly lay back again. “All right. Then we need to warn Arissen Belloruus and the High Council. We need to tell them to get everyone out of there.”