“Back to the Hells with you,” Cain said to the sudden emptiness as the portal snapped shut again. His entire body ached.
Akarat, my son, forgive me.
He climbed slowly to his feet and regained his staff. The blue glow was nearly extinguished now. The demon was gone, but so was his companion, and they had found nothing. Akarat had perished in vain.
Deckard Cain climbed the stone steps alone, squeezing his way back through the narrow passage and out again into the open, where a storm had come up over the ruins and now threatened to drench everything in sight. He carried Akarat’s sword, along with a heavy heart. He had failed once again to do enough to keep those close to him from dying.
Dark clouds hovered overhead, and the wind tugged at his tunic. The light was fading swiftly.
I must hurry. There still might be something to salvage from this trip, and he would do anything in his power to honor Akarat’s memory by finding it. Cain skirted the edge of the ruined main building, following more footprints. In the back, among the broken columns and shards of stone he found a path to what might have been a garden of some kind many years before. In the center of an open space stood the remains of a fire, along with abandoned packs and three broken walking staffs.
Cain’s pulse quickened. Whatever had happened to those who had come before him had happened here; whether they had lived or died was unclear, but they had clearly brought up whatever they had found in the basement chamber and made camp before being interrupted.
Something fluttered in the wind, half buried in a drift of sand. He walked over to find a spellbook. Vizjerei. Demonic magic, Bartuc’s work. Old enough to be from the temple. There was something important here, after all.
He scanned the sand for more. A few steps away and near a partial design drawn in the sand he found another, this one a book of Horadric prophecies.
He stood for a moment in shock. Horadric texts, here, in this place? How? The pages were torn, pieces missing, the words barely legible. Cain cradled it tenderly, with reverence, as he did all texts. They were precious to him, all of them like his children. But this one stood above the rest.
A crest of arms appeared, burned into the first of the pages like a brand. A sign of a great lineage, and a testament to the text’s immense value. It appeared to have been written by Tal Rasha himself, one of the first Horadrim tasked by the archangel Tyrael to hunt down and imprison the Prime Evils.
Cain flipped through it, his heart thundering in his chest. What was still legible told of another war coming between light and dark, one that would make all others pale in comparison. And the High Heavens shall rain down upon Sanctuary as a false leader arises from the ashes . . . the tomb of Al Cut will be revealed, and the dead shall lay waste to mankind—
A noise made him turn. A sand wasp flew about ten feet away, its heavy abdomen and stinger hanging low as it ducked and darted across the ground, hovering near the abandoned packs. Cain remained still until it moved on, then went to see what had drawn it there.
Inside the packs was rotting food, which had surely brought the wasp, but also more texts. He set the stack gently on the ground and looked through the texts one at a time as the sky rumbled overhead, the moist wind bringing the scent of rain. They were an odd mixture of Vizjerei, Horadric, and Zakarum writings, and he could not make sense of how anyone would have gathered such a collection—or why they would have left them here.
Cain read through them, a familiar rush of excitement building as he flipped the fragile pages. As he lifted the second one from the bottom, it felt different in his hands. This text was much more recent: a reproduction of a spellbook, barely a year old by the looks of it. The workmanship was sound, the pages newly bound and transcribed. It also appeared to be from the Horadrim.
(Look around you, at the footsteps, the missing scrolls. Others of your kind have been here, and failed . . .)
Deckard Cain’s mind raced. There had been a lot of false Horadric texts spread across Sanctuary over the years, but this one appeared to be more authentic than others he had seen. He studied it more closely, paying attention to the prose style of the words, the music of the language itself. He became aware of the energy held within it, the book seeming to vibrate at a pitch just beyond normal human perception. The more he read, the more confident he became that this was an accurate reproduction of an original text. Finding it with the other, much older volumes made this even more likely.
Who could have had access to these books? Was there some kind of organized effort to bring the mage clans’ magic back to these lands?
He thought of something else the demon had said. Your savior is so close, hidden among thousands in plain sight not three days’ journey from here. The closest place of thousands was Caldeum, the largest trade city in Kehjistan. That was also a place where a book of such quality might have been manufactured or sold. And there was something else, someone else, in Caldeum—someone he had been meaning to check in on for a long time. A friend from the dark days of Tristram, a responsibility he had been avoiding. This would give him a good reason.
You must go to Caldeum.
The voice was so strong that for a moment Cain saw Akarat standing there in plain sight, golden armor aglow, his eyes shining with an inner light.
The fate of this world lies in the balance. You must go.
Cain blinked, averted his eyes, and looked back again. There was nothing before him but the wind whispering across the rock, as the first, fat droplets of rain began to fall.
Deckard Cain took Akarat’s sword, its weight strange and awkward in his hands. He was no fighter, and a blade like this was useless to him. He stuck it deep into the sand, leaving it standing like a small monument for others to see. Then he gathered the texts he had found into his satchel and made his way through the strengthening rain out of the Vizjerei ruins, climbing the sand dunes as quickly as his old body would allow. He thought of resting for the night, but a voice kept urging him on. There was no time to waste.
The battle for this world had begun.
3
The City of Caldeum
The girl, bone-thin and barely older than eight years, emerged from a rusted sewer grate as the sun touched the tops of the streaked copper domes and tall spires of the city. The world was drifting down toward night. Brown hair hung in strings across a pretty, pixie-like face streaked with dirt, bangs cut short to ease the time between already infrequent washings.
She crouched in the shadows of an alleyway. The wind shifted, and a fine mist from Caldeum’s man-made waterfalls touched her face. The water thundered in the distance. She muttered something under her breath, and a young woman passing by gave her a startled look and a wide berth, clutching the folds of her peasant’s dress to her waist; she had been so still among the shadows that the woman hadn’t noticed her there. The girl glanced at her with little interest. She was used to others avoiding her presence, as if the very sight of her made them shiver.
What was happening nearby kept her attention. The girl watched the activity around the trade tents that had been pitched in the sand beyond the city walls. Her mother had told her not to come here, but the trade fascinated her, so many different kinds of people milling around shouting at each other—peasants with carts loaded with fabric, vegetables, and meat; city guardsmen standing watch with heavy swords and shields; merchants bargaining for lots; nobles in their silk robes; and servants trailing behind tending to their needs. Caldeum was a city full of color and heat, despite the tension that people seemed to feel lately, as if something terrible was about to happen. But she, alone and filled with a restlessness she could not understand, lived apart from them, among very deep, dark shadows of her own.