Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel (38 page)

The Rhythanko strand, no longer any kind of bracelet or armband, coiled around Kestrel’s ankle and ascended whip-quick up her body, beneath her shift, and emerged at the neck. Kestrel smiled at Lakini, her thin face resembling a death mask. The now-threadlike strands of the Rhythanko nosed at the raw skin around the base of her neck.

To the deva’s horror, the gem-studded thread reared back and stabbed into one of the wounds Kestrel had carved into her flesh. She reached out and tried to grab it, but Kestrel pushed her away, staggering back against the wall.

“It will kill you, Kestrel!” Lakini lunged toward Kestrel again, with the vague thought of throwing her down underfoot and winding the cursed threads inch by inch out of her body.

“It’s not killing me,” Kestrel gasped, wrapping her arms around her body. “It’s becoming a part of me.”

She threw her head back, as if in pleasure, as the last of the Rhythanko and the third gem forced its way into her body. She stretched out her arms. Lakini could see the tiny threads writhing under the skin of her neck, shoulders, and arms, burrowing like worms, and leaving bruised flesh in their wake.

Kestrel relaxed and lifted her arm, watching the Rhythanko move under the dead white, blue-veined skin of her forearm, marred by the scratches she had inflicted and the pool of red and purple-brown where the insistent metal threads were tearing the fascia. She lifted her head and smiled at Lakini with her hollowed eyes. The deva
flexed her hands, feeling helpless. She couldn’t get the Rhythanko out without tearing off Kestrel’s skin.

“They can’t take it now,” said Kestrel. “Not without ripping me apart.” Her gouged face looked lost again. “Do I still have a daughter?”

“Yes,” said Lakini.

“Sometimes I think I killed them all. Lakini?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever killed the innocent?”

Lakini remembered Jonhan’s eyes.

“Yes.”

“How do you forgive yourself?”

Lakini didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t,” she said finally.

The rock knew fire.

It was made in the swell and ebb of fire from the center of the world, born from molten stone that pushed a fiery tide at the surface until it burst forth. The rock pulsed liquid within the volcano that formed there, a mountain’s heart beating slower and slower while it solidified. The mountain slept, and the rock within it, until time and the elements stripped the skin and the sinew and the flesh of the mountain away, leaving the rock naked in black basalt solitude.

Now and then, in the ages that followed, small fires were lit on top of the rock, and the tiny creatures that lit them huddled against the cold. They always moved on, for the rock was a barren place overlooking a desolate plain, far away from anybody’s hearth and home.

Then more creatures came, skilled in sculpting stone to their ends. The rock burned again, worms of fire tunneling deep inside it, deeper and deeper until the delvers burrowed to the root of the mountain. There, beneath the spine of the world, they broke into chambers sealed before the current age was imagined. There they found the raw treasures of the earth—gemstones and rare metals—but also they woke horrors that had coiled there, sleeping. Those few who were not devoured fled for their lives to distant lands, never to return.

More recently a green fire had passed through the rock, not hot but cool as water as it flickered through the long-abandoned passages. The fire came from something small, but, like the sharp tip of a dagger, it had great Power behind it. A human wielded it, locking the substance of the rock and its tunnels to the blood of another, down to the caverns at the foot of the rock, down to the tunnels bored out of the substratum beneath.

But not as far as the voids and passages deeper, which over time had been colonized and abandoned and found again by dark-dwelling creatures rarely thought of by those that lived in the realm of the sun. The green fire sealed off those corridors below, but they remained, like scar tissue deep beneath a healed wound.

The small fires that made a dwelling place for men and their kin—hearthfire, coals for cooking, and torches to light the night at the heart of the rock sparked in it now. And deep underneath, where those who came before and delved too deep had died, beneath the giant anthill of rooms and tunnels, beneath the caves where caravans could shelter, beneath doorways sealed and spelled in
a language men had forgotten long since, more fires burned, cold and smokeless.

The ways and desires of men, dwarves, halflings, or elves meant nothing to the rock—nor did the things they made or bought or sold, or their songs and stories, their good deeds and evil, their lives and deaths. Let them hew out tunnels, cast spells, dwell within, or be cast out by fate or a stronger clan. It didn’t care. It knew only the forces that made it: the liquid center of the world, the thrust of continental plates, the force of a volcano, the slow but inevitable grind of wind and water on its surface. It knew fire.

Now a small cold fire burned in the hand of the deva that walked with Kestrel along one of the deep tunnels, an ancient escape route burrowed in time unimaginable.

“You must leave here,” Lakini had told her. “So long as Lusk knows the Rhythanko, the Key, is here, he won’t rest until he has it. Do you know a way out?”

Past the privy chamber was a tunnel, and the tunnel led deep into the woods. “The children told me about it,” said Kestrel. “Brioni and her friends.”

Her voice choked a little on her daughter’s name. “They play in every part of the Hold. There’s nothing they don’t know. You can learn a lot if you listen to children.”

It seemed like hours they walked the tunnel before a haze of green light showed where a mass of overgrown vines hid the entrance. Lakini closed her hand, stifling her light, and they shoved past the blockage until they were free.

This was a different part of the woods than the place in which she’d almost died the night before. There were
fewer close-growing pines and more birches, so the remaining sunlight dappled the white trunks of the trees.

Lakini breathed in the fresh woodland air.

“You lied to me, Lakini,” said a voice. She whirled, reaching overhead for her sword without a moment’s thought.

Lusk stood a little ways away on a hillock, an arrow to the string of his bow, but he was not aiming it, not yet.

“It appears we’re not in agreement, after all,” he said. “You think I’m an abomination, and I think you’re a fool.”

G
et behind me, Kestrel,” said Lakini. She pulled her dagger from her belt. At this distance she had a chance of bringing Lusk down with a knife throw before he raised his bow.

He lifted an eyebrow at her. “I’m going to give you one more chance to understand.”

“Try,” she responded.

“Listen, Lakini.” He lowered his bow and removed the arrow from the string.

“Before I met you, during the time when you were Lakini and I was Lusk, I found a family, a family of my own. They took me in, thinking I was merely a beggar. Not a warrior, not a celestial. A dirty, smelly beggar from the road, looking, as they thought, for a meal. It did not occur to them they would benefit from taking me in. They weren’t filled with stories of disguised princes rewarding those who succored them. It was because they were that improbable thing—good people. Farmers, very simple folk. I left them with a blessing, and then when
I passed that way again, I had an urge to see them. And they welcomed me in, as before. I never stayed long, and never frequently. But I knew they would always be there. If I had stayed with them longer, I could’ve kept them safe. But no—it’s my nature to wander. You know.”

Lakini, despite her horror, winced at the self-hatred in her fellow deva’s voice. She felt Kestrel shifting in the leaves behind her.

Don’t let him see you, she thought at the woman, although she knew she couldn’t hear. He’ll see the wires beneath your skin and know.

“You can’t know what it was like, Lakini,” continued Lusk, “to know that whatever the time of year, no matter the hour, if it was midwinter or washing day or harvest season, there was always a place for you, a seat at the table. A cup kept especially for you on the shelf. A child, seeing you across the fields, who ran to greet you. In those years, I knew what it was to have a family. My own folk.

“But one spring—it had been a hard winter on the country folk, that one, with frozen crops and flooded fields—I came to them again. I had gifts for the children in my pack, gifts I’d brought from toymakers in the East. Magic things, exotic, unheard of there.”

He was looking past her, not at Kestrel but at the pattern of vines at the mouth of the tunnel, his voice almost dreamy, as if he saw what he narrated.

“I didn’t understand what I saw, at first. The house, half-gone, the rest like a broken eggshell, made of burned timbers. They were still smoking. There was another smell, too—burned meat. I found them all inside the
house, what remained of them. The woman was clutching one of the children to her. I couldn’t tell which one. I found the others, the man, the rest of the children. All save one. I found, later, from the neighbors that a band of halfling thieves had been plaguing the district. So far they’d just robbed houses and crofts in the owners’ absence—a quick raid to steal cattle, or supplies, or the coin under the bed. Nothing like this.”

His face hardened, and his voice seemed to come from a long way away. “Those bandits gave me a great gift. They taught me that the gods care nothing for us. In return, I give halflings, when I can find them, another gift—the gift of oblivion. And each time, I rid the rotten world of another maggot that burrows in its flesh.”

He looked back at her.

“That time, when the messenger came, and I was gone two seasons.”

“Yes.” Her throat was dry as sand. “I remember.”

“He brought word of Darla. She was the littlest, a girl no more than eight, the one I couldn’t find. When I found their spoor, I thought, perhaps, they’d taken one away, a child they could sell. I followed them, but the trail went cold. But I left word with folk I knew—folk who owed me their lives—that I wanted any word of her.

“The messenger brought me word that it was four years since a halfling gang took a few children to be sold at market not a hundred leagues from the slaughter. It sounded too alike to be a coincidence. It took a long time, and many false trails, but I found a man who had bought a little girl, just like Darla, as a maid for his wife.
The child died a year later from the bloody flux. I also found the name of the slaver who bought Darla from the thieves and sold her to the merchant.”

He spat out the word: “Jadaren.”

“No,” Kestrel whispered behind her. “None of us has ever dealt in slavery.”

Lusk ignored her. His faraway eyes focused on Lakini, and his voice became steely.

“So you tell me, Lakini. Where is your good in any of this?”

They looked deep into each other’s eyes for a long moment before he nocked the arrow back to the bow, lifted it, and loosed it straight at her heart.

She was expecting it and had already begun to fling herself to one side, pulling Kestrel with her. The arrow missed, whispering into the leaves at the mouth of the tunnel.

She had to decide, lightning-quick, whether to throw the dagger or charge with the sword before he got another arrow to the bow. Clasping dagger and sword together, two-handedly, she ran up the hillock. He dropped the bow and drew his own sword, parrying her aside as she struck.

She was still healing. But so was he. She ignored the pain in her shoulder as she bore down, two-handedly, again and again against his one-handed defense. Once he managed to push her off balance and struck with the dagger in his left hand. She dodged aside and, ducking, hit him with the hilt of her sword in the back of the leg.