Usually Faeterus avoided direct sunlight, keeping to the shadows like some hulking insect, but not today. He remained where he was, hunched over the parchment as the sun rose higher, bathing the Stair in heat. Often Favaronas could hear him mumbling and muttering, and occasionally he would burst out with sudden vigor, shouting unintelligible phrases, then lapse back into more subdued gibbering. Favaronas could make no sense of any of it. The words sounded like Elvish but larded with unintelligible phrases and garbled by a truly barbarous accent. Favaronas couldn’t tell whether Faeterus was reading the foul-sounding stuff from the scroll or simply talking to himself. Frankly, he no longer cared. His lust for knowledge and his resolve to stop Faeterus had died beneath the sorcerer’s effortless cruelty. All he wanted was to escape and warn his people. Perhaps the Speaker could send his warriors to overcome the sorcerer. Maybe it was already too late. For all Favaronas knew, Faeterus could be reciting his final conjuration at that moment.
As he struggled to yank dead wood from a narrow rock crevice, he tried to remember the verse Faeterus had recite from the ancient scroll. He had an excellent memory, trained by decades of practice. He ceased trying to free the piece of dead wood and closed his eyes, allowing the words to echo again in his memory.
Did the first line mean the release of the valley’s power had to take place after sunset?
“Sun’s black eye” sounded like an eclipse, but there were no eclipses expected for many months.
Favaronas shuddered. That certainly sounded like a goal Faeterus would embrace.
More obscurity. If the Holy Key was “broken” (whatever that meant), would life be restored or forever blotted out?
Although Favaronas didn’t know it, his theories about the valley were running along the same lines as his Speaker’s: that it was the location of the Pit of Nemith-Otham, where five dragon-stones containing the essence of five evil dragons had been buried. The stones had been dug up later, but Favaronas thought it logical that their power could infect the area where they had lain.
The walk back to the bonfire was a long one. Every strike of his heel jarred like a blow. Faeterus had stopped mumbling. He sat silent, chin on his chest. Favaronas’s footsteps slowed, grew more stealthy. If Faeterus were asleep, he might have a chance to get away. He circled wide of the unmoving sorcerer and wondered how to dispose quietly of the wood cradled in his arms.
“Put it on the fire.”
He jerked in surprise, dropping several pieces of wood. He snatched them up and deposited the entire bundle next to the fire.
“Fall down,” Faeterus said, quite matter-of-fact, and all feeling left Favaronas’s legs. He dropped flat on his back. His legs weren’t fused together, but they were paralyzed. Unable to sit up, he rolled over onto his stomach and began dragging himself across the rock ledge. Faeterus chuckled.
“Save your strength. Before the sun sets again, you will see the greatest release of power since the Cataclysm. You wouldn’t want to miss that. As a royal archivist of Qualinesti, surely you want to witness firsthand the final obliteration of the elf race?”
The paralysis in Favaronas’s legs was creeping upward. His belly went numb. With a last, desperate heave, he rolled himself onto his back so he might see the brilliant sky before all went dark.
“Do you see smoke?”
Kerian and Taranath were taking a short rest, leaning against a low monolith. Hytanthas’s question brought them to their feet. He was returning from filling their water bottles at a nearby spring. All three shaded their eyes and looked high up on the mountainside.
“That’s our target,” Kerian declared.
Taranath was skeptical. “How can you know? Anyone could’ve made that fire.”
“Faeterus thinks he’s killed the khan’s bounty hunter,” she said. Taranath had told her of his patrol’s rescue of Robien, from Faeterus’s magical trap. “He’s finally begun whatever it was he came here to do, so he doesn’t care whether the Speaker’s warriors find him either.”
