First Rider's Call
Page 18

“All of the seals are broken,” Telagioth said. “There should have been one as we entered the corridor.”
The passage elbowed, but the muna’riel was bright enough that it offered her light even around the corner. Wet hanging things fell across her face and she wiped them away with a shiver of disgust. Pale spiders skittered into crevices as light found them. Karigan had been, she thought, in better tombs.
The burial chamber opened up before them, much vaster than the antechamber. The darkness of it swallowed the light of the muna’riel. Karigan caught glimpses of colorful walls and of a basin of black water with a rectangular stone platform in the center like an island.
Telagioth stepped down, the water now as high as his knees, and he turned to her offering his hand again. “It will not get deeper than this.”
Karigan shuddered with revulsion as the cold water poured over the tops of her boots and soaked through her trousers. It may only reach Telagioth’s knees, but for her, the water came to mid-thigh. Who knew what existed in water that stagnated in a tomb?
The muna’riel cast the water with silver light, causing liquid waves of that light to reflect onto wall murals. Though somewhat obscured by layers of moss and oozing slime, the murals depicted battle and death, and images of the gods. The gods, painted larger than life, averted their faces and held their hands palms out, either in warding or in denial. There were Aeryc, god of the moon, and Aeryon, goddess of the sun, Dernal the Fla mekeeper, Vendane the Harvester, and others, except, Karigan noticed, Westrion, god of death.
While Westrion himself was missing, his steed Salvistar was most prominent of all the figures. Salvistar leaped across the wall, black neck arched and mane flowing like the tongues of a flame. His head was tossed back and his teeth bared. The wavering light seemed to lend him motion and life.
Karigan and Telagioth stood in wonderment, their own reflections on the mirrorlike water mingling with that of the gods, the light of the muna’riel somehow cleansing the darkness that had gripped this place for centuries.
Telagioth’s cerulean eyes glittered as they followed the walls. Then with a shake of his head he continued across the room toward the stone slab at its center.
“Do you comprehend what has happened here?” he asked Karigan.
Karigan drew her eyebrows together as she trudged through the water after him, remembering all the dead up above. “I think I have a sense of it.”
Telagioth halted before the slab. “Truly?” He gestured toward it.
It was not unlike other funerary slabs she had seen. It was inscribed with pictographs and incomprehensible runes, but unlike the others, it lacked Westrion’s image. Broken, rusted chains lay in pieces across its surface. Manacles. She began to understand.
“This was not so much a tomb,” she said, “but a prison.”
“Yes.”
“The wards . . . ” she murmured. The wards above had been meant to keep “something” in, just as she had surmised when she and Ty found the clearing. Had it been only yesterday afternoon? It seemed like years ago. A prison would explain many things—the covered entrance, the seals Telagioth spoke of, the absence of Westrion’s image, and the chains.
“The folly of your people,” Telagioth said, “released a great evil back into the lands.”
Karigan looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”
“Your encampment diminished the wardings of the tomb.”
“Those wards were already dying.”
“Yes, but they might have held for at least a time longer, and the tragedy averted.”
Karigan found it hard to believe the delegation alone could have brought such disaster upon itself. She closed her eyes remembering a sensation or force traveling through the forest just before the cairn ruptured: Varadgrim, Varadgrim, Varadgrim . . . Had this been the power that ignited the clearing and enabled the wraith’s escape? She was uncertain for her sense of it was more that it had been a calling of some sort. Perhaps a calling that had awakened the wraith. If so, who—or what—had been doing the calling?
“The wards were not maintained, as the D’Yer Wall has not been,” Telagioth said. “Your people believed they would be maintained in perpetuity, but strength, knowledge, and magic faded over the generations, and so did memory. The discontinuity of mortal lives endangers the world.”
So many emotions entangled Karigan, though dulled by shock and exhaustion, and the Eletian had sparked another in her: anger. The wave hovered above her, threatening to crush her with its full fury lest she lose her grip.
“Certainly the Eletians would have done better,” Karigan said. “Yet evidently they did not take responsibility.”
Telagioth did not react to the anger in her voice. Instead his fair features drooped into sadness. “It is true, but we were a broken and defeated people after the Long War. We had not the strength, except to succor our own wounds. I remember. Even now as your kind prospers and spreads its influence, we work to recover.”
Karigan hugged herself, not sure if it was against the chill or his words.
“The break in the D’Yer Wall has stirred powers on both sides of the wall, Galadheon. Our own time of tranquility and rest is over, and this you must tell your king. The warning is before us.” He gestured at the abandoned funerary slab and broken chains. “This creature that escaped, it was once a man. A man given an unnatural, unending existence by his master in exchange for his allegiance and his soul. I faced one such as he in battle long ago. And now he has found his way back into the world, as will others. Dark powers are awakening.”