Baleful Signs (Dagger of the World Book 3) Read online

  Terak didn’t wait around to see how many he had managed to kill. He ran forward as the conglomerate creature attempted to regain its form.

  The elf almost thought that he had managed to scare it off, as he had easily run forward twenty leaping strides before he heard its buzzing, furious roar. Animal instinct made him cast a glance over his shoulder.

  The mother-form had remade itself. Although it was much smaller than it had been and was leaving a trail of falling imp-bodies behind it like some grisly smoke, it was still twice the size of Terak. It pursued him between the trees with a renewed anger.

  The elf sprinted, with a stitch racing up his side like a line of tight fire.

  I can’t keep this up for much farther!

  Terak’s feet started to stumble, catching on the roots that snaked everywhere on the forest floor.

  Ssss.

  The sound of the aggregate beast was so close as to be almost at his shoulder. Terak didn’t dare to look around this time, as he imagined seeing the horde of imp-things crashing into his face, stabbing and clawing with their tiny, insectile legs.

  But then, suddenly, the sound started to die away from behind him. Had he outrun it, then? Terak didn’t pause but kept charging forward in a gritted-teeth panic, to see a dim glow through the trees ahead. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than where he was now. He ran with the last of the breath inside his chest.

  The sound of the buzzing and hissing drew back, growing fainter and fainter.

  The forest opened up around him, the pulsing light of the crystal-rock veins subsiding to a dull glow once more. He found that the glow that he was running toward was a lake of eerie blue, edged by trees and rocks.

  The hissing had finally stopped. Terak slowed, his feet aching as he stumbled to the boulder at the water’s edge to lean against it, looking back the way he had come.

  The distant cloud of the imp-things was now no more than a blurry haze in the gloom of the Crystal Forest, and it grew fainter and quieter with every passing moment.

  I must have passed out of that thing’s territory, whatever it was . . . he thought to himself as he heaved ragged breaths, gradually controlling the pain in his side and allowing his weary body to crouch to the floor.

  The water looked more tempting than any other time he had ever been thirsty, but Terak stopped himself from drinking.

  Take nothing from the Aesther–everything has a price! Mother Istarion had warned him. He wondered if that extended to water as well.

  The lake itself appeared tranquil, and a fine silvered mist played just above the waters. Terak could see the indistinct glow of the crystal-veined trees on the far side. It was farther than he had thought it would be.

  “I guess I’ll have to go around,” he thought, looking right and left to choose the most appealing way. He still hadn’t seen any sign of the yellow flowers of the Demiene anywhere. He had no idea where in this strange habitat they could be.

  But Reticula could be dying right now, he thought grimly, before correcting himself, Reticula is dying right now. The poison of the Estreek was working its way through her body at a steady rate, and the last time that he had seen her, she had already lost consciousness.

  How much healing had the Mordhuk’s saliva given her? Terak didn’t know the answer. How long does she have left? Again, no answer.

  All he could do was press on as quickly as possible.

  And hope that Mother Istarion hears me when I call to return. Terak felt the weight of the curious shell against his breast pocket, nodded to himself, and chose the righthand side of the lake edge.

  There was a low whistle. Something emerged through the mists, skimming the water as smooth as a whisper. And it was heading straight for him.

  15

  The Ferryman

  It was a boat, of sorts. Terak stepped back from the edge of the lake but the boat did not waiver in its speed or approach. If he could call it a boat.

  The craft appeared to be a vast, upturned leaf made of a sturdy greenish substance. Its surface looked solid, crisscrossed with leafy ribs. And at its back stood a figure in a long, dark gray robe that reached from the nape of the neck completely to whatever passed as the thing’s feet. In two pale, white-fingered hands, it held a pole of white wood, which it gracefully and almost silently punted from one side of the leaf-raft to the other. It never once altered its dead-eye direction.

  But the strangest thing about the entire apparition was the creature’s head, which appeared to be a skull.

  Not a human or elf skull, though. Terak shivered in horror. It was the bleached skull of something like a deer or a horse. Terak had seen their long and fractured head cavities before on the slopes of the Tartaruk mountains. This creature’s snout was as long as a horse’s, but on its head, there was a set of bracketing antlers, flaring out on either side.

  Terak was too surprised to feel any fear toward this thing. Already, the entire realm of the Aesther felt like a dream, or a nightmare, at least. It was only the pain of the recent stings and bites that made him know that this was in any way real.

  But the Enclave novitiate, spy, and assassin still gripped his short sword a little tighter as he waited for the boat to make landfall.

  The leaf-craft did so with a soft hiss and splash of water against the slabs of rock. At last, the creature moved. Its head inclined slowly toward the elf’s, and from the shadows of its bone-maw came a croaking whistle:

  “Cross.”

  Terak looked at the thing, and the boat, and the water. He was, quite frankly, more inclined to pass by the water’s edge and see if he could circumnavigate the forest lake that way. With another glance behind him, he realized he had no idea whether he would wander back into the imp-cloud’s territory again. Or something worse, he thought.

  “At least you don’t look as if you want to kill me . . .” Terak muttered to himself, turning back for the ferry-creature to cock its head to one side once more.

  “Cross.” It said again, in its same whistling hiss of bone.

  “Okay, okay.” Terak wasn’t so gullible as to sheath his sword and kept it at his side as he very gradually, very slowly, stepped into the leaf-boat.

  But the ferry-creature didn’t move to strike off with the pole. It peered intently at the much smaller elf inside its craft with its black holes for eyes.

  “Payment,” it said, and Terak froze, wondering if this had been a terrible idea after all.

  “I have nothing to give,” Terak said simply. He could feel the weight of the Call-shell in his breast pocket, but he wasn’t about to give up his only way of getting home. And of the malicious powders and tools that were secreted about his person, he was loath to give any of those up either. Not when he was in a landscape that was so alien and strange.

  “Payment,” the ferry-beast repeated, a little more urgently this time.

  “I told you, I haven’t got anything to give,” Terak said. “Look, I’ll just have to go around the long way—” He moved to step out of the boat, but that required taking his elvish eyes off of the thing for a split second, to gauge where to step—

  And in that split second, one of the ferry-beast’s hands had reached out from the pole it carried, its white fingers moving calmly but also speedily.

  “Hey!” Terak saw the movement out of the corner of his eye at the last possible moment and raised the short sword, but it was already too late. The elf felt a brief, cold touch as the ferry-beast pressed one tip of a long finger on Terak’s temple, and the payment was taken.

  The elf had thought that the ferry-beast would want some sort of payment in kind, or at least some object of value from him. But it turned out that the currency of the Aesther was not the same riches and baubles of the Midhara at all.

  Terak was suddenly thrust into memories that he had forgotten were ever his in the first place—

  Terak looked out at the world through younger eyes. The forms and shapes around him were hazy and indistinct, edged with a heavy blur as if thi
s version of Terak hadn’t even worked out how to use his eyes yet.

  But an elf’s eyes are sensitive, far more accurate than any human’s, even when young.

  Terak was looking up at a sky that was black. No stars and no moon could be seen. Instead the air was thick with the drone of a rainstorm, growing stronger by the second. This younger Terak was cold, annoyed, and tired.

  “His name is Terak!” shouted a voice. Terak tried to move to see who it was—

  Only he knew who it was already, didn’t he?

  The elf could hardly move, and he fought against something—the constricting and surrounding wrap of blankets. He managed to pull and punch out at the fabrics that swaddled him, dragging them to one side to see—

  Mother. He knew her as soon as he saw her, even though he couldn’t quite remember her. But his mind and his heart had different ways of remembering, didn’t they? And they informed him what he needed to know.

  Her face was pale and indistinct at this distance, but Terak knew that her skin was a milky white. He knew that her hair was as dark as his and that she had always sung to him like a lark.

  But the woman, his mother, was sobbing as another form reached out to pull on her shoulder, urging her away from where Terak lay. Taking her away. Terak could see the indistinct shape of another straight-backed elf, a man who also had long black hair.

  Terak’s young eyes were fragile and untrained still, but for a brief heartbeat they focused as they took in the shape of the elf’s face, the aquiline features, the sharp eyes and proud chin . . .

  It was Lord Alathaer, Terak knew in an instant. He knew this immediately and completely with his present, mature mind looking back on his juvenile experiences.

  “Huh.” He heard a rough grunt as the elves disappeared into the murk of the rainstorm. The gruff voice hadn’t come from Alathaer however, but from the person who held him.

  Human, Terak’s senses told him, even before he could say why or how he knew.

  “Well, now,” the figure who held him said in a weary and resigned voice. It was a voice that was younger and less cracked with age than the one that Terak knew, but he recognized it all the same. Father Jacques. This was a younger version of Father Jacques, and he was holding him swaddled to his chest, having clearly just taken him from his mother.

  “It’s going to be hard on you in there,” the younger Father murmured. Terak felt the man’s mountainous shoulders shrug as he wheeled his horse around with a whistle and a click of his tongue. “But I guess you’ll toughen up, kid,” he heard him say, as the memory started to fade, to be replaced by another . . .

  “You are certain that this is the right babe?” said a voice. Again, it was a woman’s voice, and one that the present-day Terak recognized. The speaker hadn’t changed one bit.

  Terak was still young, still an elvish toddler perhaps, as he was being held in Father Jacques arms. Terak got the sense that some time must have separated the first memory from this one. He was now no longer cold but warm, and he was no longer hungry either.

  Later that night? The next day? The older Terak wondered. Whichever it was, he was now blinking open his eyes to see the black stone walls of the Enclave all around him, lit by guttering candlelight. It shone in a small room that the Father and the woman were in—one of the many out-of-the-way cubbyholes or chanting nooks that the Black Keep had to offer its novitiates and acolytes.

  Even though the now-older Terak knew that everyone in Midhara had some latency for magic, he had never stopped to wonder before why the Enclave was so rigorous about not using it. The Second Family of Everdell Forest had appeared ready to use floating lights at every juncture, and Mother Istarion had wrapped herself in fields of magic like clothes. But Terak realized now that the humans of the Black Keep had always and routinely, used candles and chefs and wood fires and ropes and pulleys, Terak would have wondered why, had the memory not continued . . .

  “I know,” Father Jacques returned, and his voice was serious. “Believe me, Magister, no mother—not even an elvish one—would give up their babe willingly for any other reason.”

  “Still, we cannot take chances.” The woman shape moved forward. Terak saw the almost-bald head and dark, shadowed eyes of the Magister Inedi looking down at him. Just like her voice, her face hadn’t changed at all.

  The Magister produced a hand, curled around a small object, which she lowered slowly toward Terak’s chest. The much younger Terak saw the gleam of pearly opalescence from inside the Magister’s gloves—it was ochullax.

  But wait—I got tested before? Terak was confused. He felt a wave of nausea roll through the center of his chest, and he heard his younger self start to cry at the strange sensation.

  There was a distant crack, and the ochullax orb was now a lifeless, matte gray with a line of corruption running all the way through it.

  “I told you,” Father Jacques muttered. The face and hand of Magister Inedi disappeared as blankets were eased over his chest, and the heavy, gauntleted hands of the Chief External rocked him gently to ease his sobs.

  “He is a null,” Terak heard Magister Inedi say from somewhere behind him. He thought that for the first time in his life, he was hearing her sound pleased. “He is our null,” she added, as the memory or dream started to tatter and fade around the edges . . .

  Wait—this can’t be! Terak’s thoughts were racing. He had gotten tested by the Chief Arcanum at the appropriate age and time, on Testing Day alongside the other acolytes of the Enclave. It was then that the Enclave had discovered that he was a null. It was there that the Chief Arcanum had appeared to swear a lifelong vendetta against him . . .

  If Magister Inedi knew all along, then why force me to go through the training and the Testing? Terak thought, until the next realization hit him:

  It had sounded like the Magister Inedi had wanted him to be a null. That he had, in fact, been brought to the Black Keep because he was a null . . .

  “Delicious.” Terak blinked his eyes and shook his head, to hear the voice of the ferry-beast speaking in its ghoulish whistling whisper. The antlered skull even pressed its long, pale, and otherwise normal-looking fingers to the edges of its bone jaw, as if tasting the edges of the memory there.

  It hadn’t eaten the memory entirely though, had it? Terak wondered. Rather, it seemed to have brought it out of some dark, shadowy corner of his consciousness, to where it now sat, resplendent and bare at the forefront of his mind.

  “Is that what you do? Taste secrets?” Terak breathed at the ferry-beast, but the antlered and robed thing did not answer at all. It merely lifted the long, white pole and pushed the leaf-craft out from the rocky edge of the lake, turning it silently and expertly toward the deeper waters of the center.

  “Can you find other memories about me? Other secrets?” Terak asked, his heart in his chest as he thumped to a seat in the bottom of the leaf-craft. Although the boat appeared thin, it barely wobbled at all. “Please,” Terak asked. “I have to know why they wanted me.”

  “Cross, payment. Delicious,” The ferry-beast shrugged, not even turning its head to regard its passenger.

  “That is how this works, isn’t it?” Terak realized. The ferry-beast wouldn’t take requests. It would only act according to what it did here, on this lake, in this part of the Aesther.

  Like everything has a role or a duty. Terak thought of the distant young Lord Falan Brecha, trying to prepare the north for the opening of the Blood Gate. He had been ridden by honor and duty, too . . .

  But as they approached the halfway mark across the lake, the silvered mists everywhere, Terak thought that it didn’t seem like any honor or duty of the human courts at all. Not even the strict obligations and responsibilities of the Enclave and their Path of Corrections.

  The aggregate swarm-beast brought forth by the tree warning lights, Terak thought. The moss-tortoises brought to hunger by the imps. And now this ferry-beast, breaking into action at his mere arrival at the lake.

  If everything h
ad a role and a function here, the elf thought, then their actions were triggered by his arrival or a change in their environment.

  And it was at this point, when Terak and the unlikely ferry-beast had reached precisely half-way across the lake that there was a sound from the waters. Like a splash of something hitting its tranquil surface—or bursting from beneath it . . .

  16

  The Kelpoi

  The water was disturbed, and Terak moved to the side of the leaf-craft as the ferry-beast made an alarmed croaking sound.

  “This isn’t a trap,” Terak murmured, holding his short sword ready at his side.

  With movements that were as silent as they were skillful, the ferry-beast quickly darted the pole to one side and then the other of the leaf craft, turning it around to face the disturbance. Terak really didn’t like the way that the creature appeared concerned by the sound. If something as strange and as powerful as that is worried—

  Terak was in the middle of this thought when there was another splash, this time on the other side of their raft. Terak spun around, just in time to see the ripples in the water spreading outwards and water splashing back in place.

  “It went underneath us!” Terak rushed to the other side of the leaf-craft, earning a warning croak from the ferry-beast as the boat rocked alarmingly.

  Then something hit their boat with an echoing thump from underneath.

  “Hsss!” The ferry-beast plunged his pole into the lake to steady them. This part was deeper than Terak had thought, as the ferry-beast had to lean right over to hit the bottom. Terak was thrown to the edge, only his quick elvish reflexes allowing him to catch the boat and stop himself from tumbling over.