But there seemed to be no immediate danger here, and inside the largest cave, torchlight flickered brightly against the walls as the smell of smoke filled the air. As the members of the order directed the travelers to sit on piles of animal furs around a cooking fire and handed them mugs full of cider, Lund lumbered in with an antelope carcass over his giant shoulder, an arrow still buried in its chest. “We eat well tonight!” the big man shouted, a grin plastered across his face, and several others cheered and clapped enthusiastically, causing Lund to do a little jig before laying the antelope down and beginning to dress it with a knife. A man named Farris, who was the leader of the group that favored disbanding entirely, grumbled at first, but then even he reluctantly joined the others.
As the celebration grew more raucous, Mikulov took the opportunity to slip out into the cool night, and he stood for a moment in the shadows of the cave entrance, tasting the air. There was a sentry stationed in the trees, and another somewhere above the cliff face. His senses had been finely tuned over years of focused meditation and training; he could hear the sentries shifting on their haunches and smell their strong male scent on the breeze, although they had not noticed him.
Summoning the power of the gods was no small matter, but Mikulov was an Ivgorod monk, and he felt their power flowing through his limbs like water over rock. It lifted him as he moved with blinding speed, so quickly that a blink of a human eye would have missed it.
The sentries never even turned in his direction. In seconds he was in the trees above the cave, climbing effortlessly up the steep slope until he reached the top. He looked out over the valley below, aglow in the moonlight. Gea Kul lay on the edge of the sea in the distance like a rotting carcass washed up by the black waves, and to the right, a tower rose up out of the rocky shoreline, dark and silent.
Mikulov remembered standing on a cliff like this one only a few days earlier and staring out over the trees at Kurast, imagining what was to come. Cain and Leah had been strangers to him then, yet he had been filled with a confidence that seemed curiously absent now.
He felt the weight of centuries beneath him, anchoring him to this place as Ratham approached. He knew that he would be challenged by something terrible. His destiny had been preordained since the moment of his birth; what role he would play in the looming battle was unclear to him, but it would come, whether he was prepared for it or not.
It was not the way of his people to question their duty, yet he couldn’t help wondering what would happen if he simply slipped away, into the night, leaving all this behind. Would his path change? Or would he simply be forced back here by some circumstance beyond his control, ending up at the same place in the end?
Were his masters right? Was he too headstrong, too selfish, too eager to leave the Ivgorod monastery without their blessing? Was he not ready for this challenge?
Would his pride be his downfall?
No. Mikulov shook his head. Now was not the time for misgivings. He had spent years preparing for this. He had studied the ancient texts of Ivgorod, and when those had not shown him enough, he had traveled across Sanctuary to find more, some of them nearly as old as time itself. A thread had connected them all, if one only knew where to look; he had picked up that thread, following it through the centuries, a common theme that predicted the rise of a great evil, and a battle that would make all others pale in comparison. It had brought him to Deckard Cain, and he had led Mikulov to this place.
The gods would show him the way.
In the distance, above the mist that clung to the shore, the stone tower seemed to sway like a cobra about to strike. For a moment, Mikulov imagined tendrils of smoke slithering outward, writhing through the air, and he heard something whisper on the wind, words that he could not understand. The text from one of the ancient scrolls came back to him, signs the Patriarchs had interpreted about a sickness in the skies and the ground, the screams of tortured souls rising up against the gods themselves . . .
A shriek split the night, shredding entire trees in its wake, rolling forward with gathering speed, a hurricane of rage that flattened cities and emptied the seas and struck the stars from the sky. Mikulov’s eardrums shredded, popping against the pressure; his eyes bulged outward, breath ripped from his chest, the blood boiling in his veins. He felt his skin begin to peel away, muscle stretched from ligament and bone, his organs squeezed like ripe fruit until they burst, and the wind took it all until there was nothing left but empty rock in an ocean of blackness.
Mikulov came to gasping like a drowning man, clawing at the ground with his fingernails. The night was silent and still. He climbed to his feet, looking around him, feeling his body as if to make sure it was whole. He was unharmed, at least physically. But he had been badly shaken.
He shivered. He had never felt such power, had never had his own body and mind possessed in such a way. He felt as if the black smoke had wormed its way inside his lungs and he was now tainted by its touch. Something within the great darkness was coming after him, and it was huge, and grinning, and wanted to swallow him whole.
He knew who was responsible for this. It was the man inside the tower: the Dark One.
Inside the caves they sat on furs around the fire, languid and slow after their heavy meal of venison. Several of the other men were cleaning up; others were asleep, but a smaller group remained awake. Lund sat cross-legged like a monstrous child, licking his fingers, Leah next to him watching open-mouthed as the giant man grinned, his mouth shiny with grease. The conversation had taken many different paths and eventually had wound around again to why they were here tonight.
This was the so-called important meeting Egil had been promising him.
Cain sighed and rubbed his itchy beard. The order was nothing like what he had expected. He needed a bath, and clean clothes, and a good night’s sleep. What he had learned during the past several hours was enough to fill his heart with dread, and he needed some time to think it all over and decide what to do.
Everything Egil had told him seemed to fit, more or less, with what Hyland had said. The order had grown up out of circumstance, more than anything else. The discovery of a cache of hidden texts in an abandoned, secret Horadric meeting place in Gea Kul had intrigued a small group of scholars, who had taken ownership of the crumbling texts and attempted to get them reproduced. They had brought the texts to Garreth Rau, a litterateur in Kurast, and a chain of events had been set in motion that would prove to be their downfall.
Many years before, Rau had worked as a servant boy to a member of the Taan mage clan in Kurast, and he had his own obsession with ancient texts, after he had discovered his master’s libraries. The magic held within these texts was powerful, the prophecies they foretold astonishing; Rau had studied in secret, learning how to create new books out of the old, eventually leaving the sorcerer’s employ and starting his own business. The books that the Gea Kul scholars had brought him had been like the finest wine to him, and although they had only the barest understanding of what these texts contained, he had seemed inspired by what he read. Something had clicked into place, and Rau had made a pact with them: they would return together to Gea Kul, and the scholars would swear oaths to uphold the tenets of the Horadrim, to seek out more knowledge and form an official order.
Rau had been a natural leader, and he had quickly taken over. They reclaimed the ancient Horadric meeting hall, which had given them a place to gather, organize nightly study sessions, plan trips outside the town to search for more texts and artifacts, and attempt some of the spells within the books they had found. Rau had encouraged them to learn the Horadric ways, but he had a raw talent and power none of the others had possessed. The litterateur had understood the depths of knowledge that these ancient texts plundered. The more he had studied them, the more convinced he had become that he could use them for personal gain.