Son of Thunder (20 page)

“Better yet” Lanaal added, “it may be that this place isn’t sacred to Tapann at all. Rumor has it that his followers keep their own sacred fountains secret, and encourage all others, even their allies, to believe that these are the sacred ones.”

“I wonder what they are then.” Kellin found a pebble at her feet and cast it into the nearest pool. The stone sank, but not a ripple disturbed the pristine surface. “More clear than any mirror.”

“I’ve never looked into a mirror,” Vell said. He remembered a time that a foreign merchant in Grunwald presented a mirror to Gundar as a token of his generosity. Gundar accepted it in gratitude but refused to look into it, and later turned it over to Keirkrad to be destroyed as an affront to Uthgar.

“Vanity is one of civilization’s primary flaws,” Kellin admitted.

“Mirrors don’t always reflect the whole truth,” Lanaal cautioned Vell. “They can mislead. I spent my early life looking into mirrors and seeing an elf staring back.”

“I will look into the pool alone,” said Vell. Acknowledging each of the ladies with a nod, he walked into the cave, to the pools within.

When he was out of earshot, the two women stood alone together for the first time, silently assessing each other.

“In some ways, you are more a mystery than Vell,” Lanaal said. “I can’t understand what compels you to keep the company of barbarians who disdain your very existence.”

“The Thunderbeast chose me,” Kellin answered.

“It called you, perhaps, but you chose to answer. Uthgar is not your god—what is his summons to you? When you set out from the halls of learning, did you truly feel a personal interest in this particular barbarian tribe?”

“Yes… no…” Kellin rubbed her eyes. “My father…”

“Memory,” Lanaal said, as if the word contained all the answers, and she spread her arms wide to indicate their setting. “It can be clear or faulty. It can tell the truth or deceive.”

Taking a deep breath, Kellin walked to the nearest pool and gazed down into the water. And what she saw made her flush with embarrassment, and feel rage in her bones.

The caves had a light of their own, shimmering out from those strange pools. It cast eerie rippling shadows over the low cave ceiling, though Vell could not see any movement in the water itself. This was the kind of mystical place that alternately repelled and attracted the average Uthgardt—repelled him because of unknown magic, yet attracted him for the warm intimacy of the mystery, and the feeling of being wrapped in history. Vell bent over the nearest pool and found himself staring into his reflection.

So that’s what I look like, he thought. He was not so different from any other Thunderbeast, and even his brown eyes did not distinguish him. All faded, and only his eyes remained as the water shimmered and he was looking into another time. It was another face, but somehow he knew it was his, or rather, that of an ancestor who remained tied to him from the spirit world. The sun was shining brightly behind him onto a spectacular white city, and he was garbed in robes of gold marked with ornate symbols.

A wizard. He was descended from a wizard.

The vision told him something else. This scene was surely not one of Ruathym, the rocky isle that was the home of Uthgar’s mortal line. More likely, it was an image of his ancestry from his other line, stretching back to the Empire of Magic. Often he wondered if his brown eyes marked a stronger concentration of that blood. Most Uthgardt tribes denied that history, the Thunderbeasts included; it was a matter of shame to believe that they were spawned by those decadent magicians.

Vell leaned closer. The wizard melted away, and his eyes were set instead into the sunken sockets of a great lizard, one of the Thunderbeasts or behemoths that the tribe used in their art, or occasionally to tattoo upon themselves. It was the creature Vell had become. There was no human intelligence in those eyes—this was an animal, nothing more. It looked closely at him, as if staring through time back at Vell.

It turned and lumbered through a thick forest. The great beast planted a foot next to an oak sapling, struggling to grow within the dense underbrush. Vell realized with a shock that this must be Grandfather Tree. He knew it. While all of the other trees that stood around it, much greater trees, had died and gone, it remained. What force blessed it with such permanence? Before his eyes, it sprouted higher and higher, spreading its limbs wider and wider until they blocked the sky.

Now ripples disturbed the pool, each beginning at the center and bringing with it a new image. The scenes passed with such speed that Vell could not inspect each one closely. He saw images of heated battles, of a wide-shouldered man with coal-black hair. The dark-haired warrior wielded a greataxe and hacked at a shaggy demon on a mountainside. Then came a scene of that same axe cutting the neck of a behemoth on a vast green hill, but in the hands of a warrior with yellow hair and a bright yellow beard.

The axe! Vell recognized it immediately. It had been the weapon of the chiefs of the Thunderbeasts, both Gundar and Sungar. Sungar had disposed of it some years ago after he learned it contained arcane magic. Vell did not know what to make of this—he was not in the Fallen Lands when it happened—though many took this as a signal that Sungar was an unfit leader.

“Tell me more,” Vell said to no one. As if on cue, a new image unfolded—one he knew well. It was Morgur’s Mound on Runemeet. Vell saw himself, the bones of the beast hovering above him. He saw his lips move, and though he had no memory of the event, he knew the words: “Find the living.”

Another ripple, and the axe appeared again. It was in a different hand, an inhuman hand—the hand of one of the huge goblinoid beasts, a hobgoblin, decked out in armor. The pool revealed a purple-robed man and four other men, humans all, together with a small human woman dressed in tight black leather. He knew her. The man and the beast in him both knew her.

Vell clenched his fists in anger. He wanted to jump into the pool. Perhaps it would transport him there and let him crush the woman who had kidnapped Sungar, and who had eluded him on a hippogriff’s wings. But he remembered Tylvis’s words of caution and held his ground.

The party of seven was walking along the banks of a river with forest all around. More water, he thought, as he saw the pristine flow rippling in the sunlight. He recognized the high mountains towering over them as the ones Kellin had named the Star Mounts.

For a long time he stood there, staring at the water which now showed nothing, not even his own reflection. He wondered if he would ever see himself again.

When he stepped outside the cave, Kellin started like a child caught in a forbidden act. She was in conversation with Lanaal, but they both silenced at the sight of him.

“Vell,” Kellin said, trying to appear calm, though her eyes were red and her cheeks stained. “Did you see anything?”

“Yes,” he said, walking over to her. “So did you.”

“No, I…”

He stopped near her. “Tell me,” he said.

“It helped explain why I’m here,” she said, casting her eyes to the ground. “My compulsion to help your tribe.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s atoning,” Lanaal supplied. Her hand stroked Kellin’s shoulder. “Atoning for a wrong she didn’t know of until now.”

Vell shook his head, not understanding.

“I saw Morgur’s Mound in my vision,” Kellin said, her throat becoming dry. “And my father. He read a counter-spell that cut through the magic protecting the place, and he took a piece of the dinosaur bone.” She looked up into Vell’s eyes. “He lied when he said he bought it in Baldur’s Gate. He stole it. He was a—” she choked, “—a vandal and a desecrator.”

“But you’re not,” Vell said.

“But my father…”

“Apparently the blood of mages flows in my veins, but I am no mage,” Vell said.

Kellin looked into his brown eyes.

“Sometimes ancestry is something to be overcome, not embraced,” Vell continued. “All the same, I don’t recommend you tell Keirkrad about this.”

“I should say not!” cried Kellin. She wrapped her long arms around him, something he didn’t expect. He could feel the warm trickle of tears onto his shoulder. “Tylvis was right,” she said. “The Fountains of Memory can show you things you don’t want to know.” Forcing a smile, she asked, “But what did you find?”

“I was fascinated by what I saw,” Vell said. “Few answers and many more questions, but at least now I have seen the faces of our enemies.”

“Truly?” Lanaal asked.

Vell broke his embrace with Kellin and nodded to the elf. “One of them is the woman who abducted Sungar. She travels with a group of companions, and from what I saw, they’re much closer to our destination than we are.” He pointed south to the horizon, to those incongruous mountains.

“They say the gods walk here,” Nithinial said. With each foot planted in the muddy earth edging the Unicorn Run, they might have trod in the steps of the immortals. The thought was not comforting to any of the Antiquarians. This was a place where they did not belong.

They had spent quite some time marching along the banks of the famed Unicorn Run. They made no attempt to conceal their presence, but they saw no signs of life here, godly or otherwise, beyond the occasional shalass fish jumping in the waters. Certainly there was no sign of the unicorns, nor of the numerous fey believed to make this area their home.

Leng walked like he belonged there, or at least as if he thought he did. It was odd that such a dark priest could walk through such a famously hallowed place with no ill effects—the Antiquarians wondered if he were trying not to show any harm to himself, or if he were truly powerful enough to resist the effects. He haughtily sniffed the air as if all of the crystalline beauty of nature had no effect on him, indeed, as if it were disgusting to him. The blue purity of the cool, slow waters might have been like a slap to the face to the rest of them, but not for Leng. He would pollute it, destroy it.

Leng was disappointed that they had not yet seen any unicorns. “I had hoped this place which bears their name would be thick with them,” he said, not so much to his companions as to the Run itself, and whatever ears might be listening. “I sacrificed one in the temple once. My acolytes captured it in the Southwood. Cyric was especially pleased with that offering. I sliced its horn off, ground it to powder, and used it to devise something special. You will see soon enough.”

The fog-shrouded Star Mounts were stretched out before them now, but they still seemed an eternity away—a place they would likely never reach. The Antiquarians had been together for many years and knew each other’s moods well. With Vonelh left to rot in a duskwood grove among a pile of dead fey, killed by a supposed ally, they were certainly at their lowest moment. Royce and Bessick walked slumped, defeated; Gunton could not stop himself from talking; and crazy anger blazed in Nithinial’s almond-shaped eyes. His elf nature, rising to the surface in the presence of the beauty of the Unicorn Run, was the only thing stopping him from a violent act against Leng.

This was supposed to be an epic quest, but this type of epic did not fit their own modest definition. They did not revere Cyric, spending most of their prayers on Shandakul—a fellow wanderer and explorer of ancient dungeons. They recognized in Leng a truly epic evil. If he had epic heroism to match, this could be a terrible time for the North, for all Faerun even. They certainly did not want to die fighting on behalf of the Mad God’s priest, but neither did they want to lose more members to his whims.

What did Ardeth think? A cool mystery, she was obviously not a willing party to this detour, but there was no obvious fear in her face. Unfortunately, they could not draw strength from her composure the way the simple-minded hobgoblin could.

“The fashion in Secomber is to say that at the headwaters of the Run lies the Glade of Life, where the gods live and dance as mortals do,” said Gunton. “Others claim that it’s the birthplace of all the races of Faerun, and that no further race could ever come to exist if the Glade were destroyed.”

A faint roar drew them upstream, the sound growing louder and louder until they rounded a rocky bend to find a true place of legend before them. The roar of the falling water was deafening, yet it appeared as gentle as the mist that softly drifted down from the rocks high above, and the high grassy plateau surrounding it. They all stopped, stunned at the sight of this waterfall. Even Leng stood agape. He merely stared into the rushing waters, the gentle spray misting his strangely calm features.

“The first of the Sisters,” said Royce. The Sisters, a set of waterfalls along the Unicorn Run’s upper reaches, were famed for their beauty and natural majesty. For once, the legends did not lie.

“I thought no sight could displace Highstar Lake as the most beautiful my eyes have seen,” Gunton said, gripping his bearded chin. “The alchemist Amanitus wrote…”

“Quiet, fool,” shouted Leng. The calm on his face vanished as he spun to face the trees that lined the banks. With a quick incantation, a pair of black, disfigured hands appeared in the air before him, disembodied and sharp-clawed, and in a flash they flew out into the green wilds. When they returned, they were clamped around the slender arms of a naked woman with greenish hair. She resisted wildly with flailing limbs, her eyes wide in terror. The claws released the dryad at Leng’s feet, dropping her flat on her face. Leng drew the flail from his waist and brought it down with all his force onto the dryad’s head with a stomach-turning crack.

The Antiquarians winced. The wreck of the dryad’s body shriveled before their eyes and lay motionless.

“Was that necessary?” demanded Royce. “Obviously, they know we’re here.”

“I prefer my women without skin the texture of bark,” Leng hissed, his eyes alighting on Ardeth.

“What threat is this place to you?” Royce pressed, determined to speak, though it might mean his death. “Is it a threat to Llorkh, or the Zhentarim, or to the church of Cyric? You want to destroy this because it is beautiful, or simply because it offends you?”

The twin claws flew over to hover at Royce’s neck.