The D'Karon Apprentice (44 page)

Now the murmur was clearly to the
affirmative.

“And if he were to commit acts unbecoming of
a Tresson commander, is it proper to assume that these acts would
be done exclusively by his most trusted men?”

They gave another affirmative response.

“And if through his choices or failings a
Tresson commander should allow his fellow Tressons to come to harm,
should he face judgment?”

“Yes!” came the reply, this time in one
voice.

“And if through his actions he should choose
to hide those choices or failings, what shall be done to uncover
them?”

“Anything necessary to find the truth!” they
proclaimed in unison. More and more it seemed this was a practiced
refrain.

“And if the truth is certain and the actions
are unworthy of a Tresson subject, what is the price for such
deeds?”

“Death by exile!” they answered.

“I, as a Tresson soldier of equal or greater
rank, mean to have the truth. If I seek it, will any of you stop
me?”

“No, Dragon Rider!”

Grustim turned to Myranda again. “You have
your ways, Duchess, and we have our own. I do not ask you to
embrace them, but I ask you to respect them.”

Myranda looked him in the eye. She saw much
there. Intensity, hate, righteous fury, but more than anything, she
saw resolve. He would see this through, not out of cruelty, but out
of duty.

“Do what you must,” Myranda said quietly,
lowering her head.

As Grustim continued to the infirmary,
Myranda sat beside the fire and tried to steel herself for what
would come next. Deacon sat beside her and tended to the flames and
food.

“You placed Brustuum in a healing sleep, did
you not?” he said.

“I did.”

“It will take considerable… force to awaken
someone in such a state.”

“I believe Grustim is prepared to apply
whatever force is required to get the job done,” she said.

Myranda tried not to think of what Grustim
would do, or how he planned to do it. But the more she tried to
push those thoughts away, the more she felt worse thoughts drift in
to replace them. He’d spoken of a heart of stone, those willing to
do the unthinkable in pursuit of a cause. In a way, the description
fit Ether well, but the shapeshifter was not the person she’d
thought of when he made such a suggestion. He may as well have been
speaking specifically of Lain. Myranda held the fallen hero close
to her heart, and held him in the highest regard, but he of all
people would never have wanted her to forget what he was. By his
own choice, Lain had been a killer. So much of their quest would
never have been possible without the dark deeds he was willing to
perform. Somehow she’d been able to set that aside.

A yelp of pain, followed by a muffled howl as
it was forcibly silenced, heralded Grustim’s swift defeat of her
nurturing sleep. The sound instantly forced to mind what sort of
similar things might have been done in the name of peace in the
past.

Perhaps sensing the dark directions her mind
was headed, Deacon spoke up. “Myranda, the pad from my pack seems
to be missing,” he said.

She turned to him, taking a moment to shake
herself from her thoughts. Doing so instead reminded her of
something equally unpleasant.

“Grustim had it… Deacon, the portal to the
north? It
was
in Castle Verril. And there must have been a
second one out of there. Damage was done to the castle. People are
missing. People may have been killed.”

He took a breath and placed a hand on her
arm. “We knew it was a possibility. Do you have the pad now? Was
there anything more?”

“No. He took it with him. I have to assume it
was taken when they stripped him of his weapons and armor. It may
even have been destroyed.”

“They would have to work fairly hard to
destroy one of
my
books, and if they’d done so, I would have
known. I’ll have it in a moment.”

Deacon stood and paced to the rubble, gem in
hand. He stood at the edge of where the door had once been and
gazed over the shattered stone of the mighty stronghold. After
working out roughly where he wished to focus his efforts, he raised
the gem. The powerful light of the sun made the polished egg of
crystal seem to glow brilliantly even when at rest, but as he
focused his strength through it, it came alive with its own cooler
glow.

“There… I see it.” he said quietly.

He spread his fingers, and the smallest of
the stones began to shuffle obligingly aside. It took more effort,
but not long after, the larger of the stones followed. Brick by
broken brick he excavated a sloping path down into the rubble,
ending in a mound of lacquered green armor battered on the floor of
a former cell. Deacon let his focus lapse. A few of the smaller
stones tumbled back down into his cleared passage, but it remained
otherwise intact, allowing him to step down into the ruin and
gingerly push aside the topmost plate of armor to find his pad. It
was badly creased and partially torn, but otherwise quite
whole.

Deacon fetched the bundle of pages. Another
pulse of light within his gem suggested he’d worked an enchantment,
and slowly the torn pages began to mend, the creases eased away,
and the ground-in dust drifted off in the breeze. In seconds the
book was perfectly repaired with no evidence of so much as having
been dropped to the ground, let alone suffering through a building
collapse.

He flicked through the pages, as usual quite
unaware of how astounding it must have looked to the soldiers who
witnessed the event.

“This is… very distressing,” Deacon
commented, his eyes darting over the contents of the final page.
“Have you read this?”

“I only saw a glimpse,” she said.

“Here. The woman has found her way to another
of the D’Karon forts. There was a clash with Ivy. We know more
about her now, but most worrying are her plans,” Deacon said.

Myranda squinted as the light of the setting
sun glared off the page. Though her fair skin was ill-suited to it,
she’d not taken refuge in the shelter of the wall. The soldiers
sheltering there were enough on edge without having to share space
with Myranda and Deacon. This was particularly true when
considering Myn’s unwillingness to leave their sides for more than
a few moments at a time. The thought of her faithful friend
lumbering up and frightening off the troops she deemed to have
settled too close to Myranda was enough to persuade her to endure
the sun for a bit longer, even if it was already baking her.

Myn soon noticed the difficulty and settled
down between Myranda and the sun, casting her friend in a cool
shadow and setting her paws protectively on either side. She
glanced at Deacon, who was still standing in the brunt of the
sunlight but too distracted scribbling down his recent findings in
a larger book to notice. Reaching out with a paw, she nudged him
closer until he was beside Myranda, sharing the shade. Then she set
her paw down again and craned her head in contentment, huffing a
breath of satisfaction. Myranda placed a hand atop her paw in
thanks.

“She wants to bring the D’Karon back? Is that
even possible?” Myranda asked.

“They were brought here once… And if it is
indeed the case that she was the one who brought them here the
first time, then it isn’t a matter of possibility, it’s a matter of
time. I admit, I’ve not studied the portal spells as closely as I
might. They are precisely the spells those of Entwell resolved
never to study. Even looking upon their workings makes me
uncomfortable. But the spell is not a complicated one, merely a
potent one. It would take monumental amounts of mystic strength.
The combined might of the Entwell masters during a blue moon
ceremony might
just
be enough. But given enough time and the
proper focus, even a novice wizard could work the spell.”

“How much time?”

“For an individual gathering power on a scale
subtle enough to have gone unnoticed until now? Not less than a
century. Likely much more. Three hundred years wouldn’t be outside
the realm of reason.”

“One hundred fifty years of war, plus however
long it took the D’Karon to start the war… if she set her mind to
the task immediately after the last one…”

“She could be quite nearly ready,” Deacon
said. “As with the D’Karon, any new and potent supply of power
could speed the process enormously.”

“And what would happen then? Would it be
another portal, like the one we closed at Lain’s End?”

“No. This would be small,” he said. He held
his hand out toward his pack and called a book to it, flipping
through and revealing page after page of otherworldly writing. “It
would allow spirits through, not even flesh. But that would be
enough to allow beings like the D’Karon generals to pass back into
our world and take form.”

“That looks like D’Karon writing…” Myranda
said, eying the pages as he scanned through them.

“It is. I’ve transcribed the D’Karon spell
books we’ve found into my personal grimoire. We can’t hope to
combat their workings if we don’t understand them.” He continued
looking over the page, muttering to himself. “It was foolish of me
to avoid studying their portal spells. They are forbidden
precisely
because they are the greatest threat. If they
already exist, then there is no wisdom in avoiding the knowledge
any longer…”

“We need to be certain of how much time we
have, if any. We need to know the urgency of the situation,”
Myranda said. “Is there any way we can detect that?”

“With the full portal, perhaps, but not with
this initial one. It seems to have been
designed
to be
virtually undetectable. It would certainly stand to reason, as it
is doubtless the most fragile spell they have.”

“So if we find it, we could undo it?”

“Well, again, the D’Karon do not work their
craft with the expectation of ever undoing it, but the keyhole, at
least until it is finally cast, is in most ways just a very well
hidden reservoir of energy. It can be sapped, drained, dissipated.
Ideally the power would be relinquished slowly, or else we’d have a
situation much as we faced in the Dagger Gale Mountains a few
months ago.”

“That
must
be avoided. We lost a large
portion of a mountain range. If that were to happen within Tresson
borders as a result of something we or another Alliance subject has
done, it could only be considered an attack on an unprecedented
scale. We may already have passed the point that peace might be
salvageable. If a swath of their land were to be consumed in a wave
of chaotic energies, I doubt the resulting war would ever end.”

“We could condense the energy, I suppose.
Gather it into some manner of artifact until it could safely be
dealt with.”

“Wouldn’t that do little more than postpone
the problem?”

“Sometimes postponing the problem is the best
we can do at a given time. It will certainly be the swiftest and
safest way to reclaim the stolen energy. With the energy gathered,
the keyhole spell would collapse harmlessly and the solution of how
best to return the energy that went into its creation could be
addressed at our leisure.”

“Let us suppose we chose to do such a thing.
Can it be done at a distance? If we were to learn the location of
the keyhole, could we gather the energy from here?”

“No. The nature of the spell makes
interaction from afar at best unstable, and at worst impossible. We
would need to be able to physically touch the point in space that
is being prepared to open. If the wording here is any indication…
finding the keyhole might be
very
difficult. It cannot be
seen with the eyes, steps have been taken to make it nearly
undetectable through magic… It is a fairly simple spell, but much
of what little complexity there is in casting it is tailored to
make its presence known only to its creator.”

“What if Turiel is no longer able to fuel it?
Does it matter if we leave the spell half-cast?”

“I would strongly advise against it. Like
most D’Karon spells, it will drink up energies around it even
without the hand of a wizard guiding it. That’s one way we might
find it, but without knowing how it has been tended to thus far, we
don’t know how strong or weak that draw might be. If it is very
strong, it will be simple enough to find, as it will present itself
as the same withering lifelessness that characterizes their gems.
If the draw is weak, it might lay hidden, quietly sipping at the
ambient magic for… perhaps
thousands
of years. But it
will
eventually drink its fill, and then the keyhole will
open.”

“So if we do not deal with this now, there is
the very real possibility that we will have guaranteed that at some
point in the future a door will open again, and perhaps at a time
when we won’t be there to defend against the D’Karon.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Our goal is crystal clear, then. As
important is it is to find the woman who has been tending to it, it
is
more
important that we find the keyhole,” Myranda
said.

“Yes…” Deacon said distantly.

He continued to flip through the pages of his
books while Myranda silently watched the meat cook and considered
the path ahead. Every few moments another muffled howl of agony
echoed out from the infirmary. Myranda began to wonder just how
much this peace would ultimately cost. Rather than let the sounds
of Grustim’s work bore into her mind, she plucked up the pad and
stylus and began to compose a message to the others.

#

“How much longer before we have the materials
to seal the hole?” Croyden asked, gazing up through the fault in
the roof as a pair of workmen stood beside him.

“Three more days to have the stone cut,” said
the first.

“Another day to bring it here,” said the
other.