Leah woke up to silence. Gray light trickled in from the mouth of the cave, and the smell of smoke still lingered, but the fire was dead. Lund slept next to her, his giant chest rising and falling slowly, and she sighed and waited for her galloping heart to slow down. The dream had been so real. She knew that the dark man and his demons meant to destroy the world. She shivered in the cold morning air.
The camp came awake slowly. Men stirred, muttered to themselves, got up to fetch water and start the fire again. Lund awoke a short time later and smiled sleepily at her, and Leah felt warmth for him begin in her chest and spread through her limbs, dispelling the chill. She didn’t know why, but he made her feel safe, as if his great strength could protect her from harm. At the same time, his mind was like a child’s, and he had nothing to hide. She liked that.
She looked around the cave for Uncle Deckard and found him deep in conversation with the man named Egil, two others from the camp she did not know (a tall, thin man with glasses and a shorter, round one with no hair), and Mikulov the monk. The old man’s face was deeply lined and gray, his eyes ringed with dark circles. Their voices were low, but she heard the words ennead and ammuit, or something similar; they kept gesturing over a book they passed back and forth, arguing over its contents. Then Cain took out a strange, square object from his sack, pointing to its carved, wooden surfaces as if they held some great mystery. It looked like just another box, and she turned to Lund, who was sitting up, the smile on his face so wide she could not help smiling herself.
“This is yours,” he said shyly, bringing something out from behind his back. It was a tiny bow made from a sapling and antelope sinew, with half a dozen arrows whittled to points blackened by the fire and topped with blue feathers at the other end.
Leah took the bow from him and held it as she might cradle a baby in her arms. Ever since she had seen him shoot his arrow through the tree trunk, she had been fascinated by his bow, the way the arrows whistled, cutting through the air, the low twang the string made as it was released. But she’d been unable to budge the tough wood when she tried to draw back the string and had finally given up in frustration after she’d almost toppled over just holding the huge weapon.
This bow was just her size. “Can we try it?” she asked. “Please?”
Lund nodded at Uncle Deckard. “Ask him first.”
Lund took her out into the clearing and taught her how to stand with her feet firmly planted on the ground, how to notch an arrow to the string and sight down the shaft, squinting, then draw straight back toward her eye with one elbow bent, the other locked. Her first few arrows wobbled terribly and flew into the woods or into the ground; but on her eighth try, the arrow flew straight, missing the target Lund had painted on the tree by mere inches. Lund clapped and jumped up and down like a small boy, then ran and collected the fallen arrows for her to try again.
By lunchtime, Leah had hit the target three times. The muscles in her arms ached, her fingers had grown raw and sore, and her hands trembled, but she did not want to stop. There was strength in the bow, a way for her to take control of her fear, even master it. With a weapon like that, she was no longer powerless against the darkness.
She imagined the huge, dark shape of the crow before her, its beady eye the target. Lund showed her how to let her breath out in a long, slow hiss and hold it while she released, keeping everything else still. This time, her arrow hit near the center of the circle, and Lund finally convinced her to quit for the day.
The camp was busy, the smell of cooking thick in the air. Uncle Deckard had more men around him, and he was talking loudly and gesturing while the others watched intently, nodding or shaking their heads. They pointed to passages in books, looked at maps and objects from Uncle’s sack, drew designs in the dirt. There seemed to be two different groups arguing with each other. The fat, short man with no hair (his name was Cullen, she believed) was saying something about an army of ghouls—feeders, he called them. The way he gestured, his face growing red as his voice grew louder, made her shiver. Lund took her hand and led her away.
Before dinner, they all took turns bathing in the stream that ran below camp, the frigid water making Leah gasp and raising goose bumps on her skin. She used a bar of goat’s fat and flower oil that Lund gave her. It felt good to scrub away the dust and grime that had accumulated on the road, and she dipped her head under the water briefly, her breath catching in her chest, and emerged feeling reborn and new again.
At night they all ate around the fire again, and there seemed to be even more men this time, all of them focused on Uncle Deckard as he told stories about the Horadrim and their great battles from many years ago. Leah listened to the descriptions of Jered Cain and Tal Rasha, two warrior mages who battled monsters like the crow and skinless beasts from her dreams, and worse; she grew sleepy as Cain talked about the town called Tristram and what had happened there, then described his search for someone he called the Dark Wanderer and the battle at Mount Arreat with a monster called Baal.
The men listened intently. Some of the stories should have been scary even to them, but they seemed enraptured by Uncle Deckard’s skill at telling. For some reason, Leah wasn’t afraid anymore either. Uncle’s voice soothed her, and Lund’s presence made her feel as if nothing bad could possibly happen here. The fire in Caldeum, the strange village, and what had happened in Kurast all seemed so far away.
She fell asleep leaning on Lund’s shoulder, more content and safe than she could remember feeling in weeks.
“There has to be more,” Cain said. “The key is Al Cut. The tomb of Al Cut—what does it mean? He was mentioned in a book of prophecies I found in the Borderlands, in reference to an army of the dead. And the name was written at the bottom of the drawings of a boy haunted by feeders just a short distance away in Kurast. How are these things connected?”
The day had dawned gray and cold, the sun hidden behind a thick layer of dark clouds, and as the hours had passed, Cain’s newfound enthusiasm and energy had begun to wane. Ratham was only two days away, and time was running out. The order had listened raptly to his stories around the fire the night before, and he had felt a connection growing with them; but there was so much left to learn, and so much to teach, that he felt overwhelmed and lost.
At least there had been some attempt to recreate the Horadrim in a similar way to their founding, centuries before: the fledgling scholars had dedicated a person to each of the main mage groups, just as the original Horadrim had consisted of mages from each school of magic, and these so-called leaders had taught others within their ranks in the ways of the Ennead, Ammuit, Taan, and Vizjerei. But their teaching had been erratic and often completely wrong, and Cain had found himself spending as much time correcting misconceptions about transmutation, illusion, and prophecy as he did finding out anything useful.
They had already been over everything they had in their possession, but it wasn’t much. Egil had explained that before the group had escaped the town, Rau had already begun to gather hundreds of creatures around him, some of them the drained husks of the citizens of Gea Kul and surrounding areas, others much darker and more threatening. He had become a mage of considerable skill and training by then, summoning things from the netherworld that none of the other mages had ever seen or heard of before. Some of these creatures, the things they had called feeders, had spread out across the land, draining strength from the populace in a way that the rest of the order had not fully understood.